Sunday, January 22, 2012

How To Make Your Own Automatic Baby Rocker From A Baby Bjorn Bouncer And A Maxi-Cosi Car Seat



There are no decent automatic baby rockers on the market. For example, the Robopax Baby Rocker that we tried out is functional in principle, but in practice, did not deliver enough of a rocking motion to soothe our 2-month old baby Benjamin.

The Baby Bjorn Balance Bouncer was sold to us as a way for a baby to self soothe themselves. It requires tiny amounts of force to create a large bouncing motion which babies love. However, young babies tend not to be able to propel themselves and so young baby Benjamin always seems to need an extra push. Unfortunately for me, it's meant that for many sleepless nights, I've been reduced to a glorified baby rocker, gently nudging the Baby Bjorn Bouncer and rocking him at all hours of the night whilst slowly losing my sanity. (Other sleep depriving attachment parenting techniques include holding him in a sling and sleeping on my tummy).

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Blogger Mobile Theme and IntenseDebate Integration

The new Blogger mobile theme does a much better job formatting content onto mobile devices
Can IntenseDebate be integrated with Blogger mobile theme? In a word, no.

In 2011, Blogger implemented a fantastic new mobile theme template. However, this new theme does not provide support for third party comment systems. Blogger's own native commenting system is really poor as it does not allow very basic comment features such as threading or Facebook login. Most serious Blogger users will turn to the two most popular third party comment systems, Disqus and IntenseDebate, for these additional features. However, under the default Blogger mobile theme setting, the mobile theme will not display the Disqus or IntenseDebate; only native comments will show up.