Archive for the 'blog' Category

Three top WordPress themes

Posted by: Owen on Friday, 4th Jul, 2008

One of the great things about Wordpress is the ability to change the look and feel of your blog just by selecting a different theme. And there are a wealth of theme out there for you to try. Here are three which I think are just great:

Rainbow Garden Theme: I have a couple of friends [...]

What’s your best blog post worth?

Posted by: Owen on Wednesday, 25th Jun, 2008

How would you like $200 for a blog post? Well, if you enter it into the Work Connexions $200 competition and you could be laughing all the way to the bank. Here’s the blurb
Work Connexions is offering $200 dollars for your best blog post. All you have to do is to go to www.workconnexions.com and [...]

Feel the difference?

Posted by: Owen on Monday, 9th Jun, 2008

Have you noticed that this website now seems quicker than it ever was? Well, the reason is that I’ve moved it to my new host, tubu.net and everything is now flying!
I didn’t need to do any market research to find out that the main concern my readers had with my website was the slow loading [...]

In case you’re wondering, I haven’t gone anywhere

Posted by: Owen on Wednesday, 4th Jun, 2008

Sorry for the brief outage, but I haven’t really gone anywhere. I have my final MBA exams this week, so have been a bit too stressed to update all my blogs.
I’ve still have some time to post a couple of entries down at MBA Geek and AskOwen, so if you know where to look, you’d [...]

Heaps of praise for WP-Cache

Posted by: Owen on Tuesday, 6th May, 2008

I’ve been using WP-Cache for a few days now and I’m impressed with the difference it’s making. I’m on a shared service here, so I don’t really have access to server stats for load analysis, but just the fact that the user experience browsing my site has improved so much is just awesome!
Before my experience, [...]

Time to tweak the Honeypot

Posted by: Owen on Thursday, 1st May, 2008

Well, I took advantage of the fact that I had nowhere to go for my break today and spent some time optimising this blog. You’ll notice it’s much zippier now and that’s thanks to some caching I’ve added. Here are some new plugins I’m using:

Bad Behaviour: Deny automated spambots access to your PHP-based Web site.
Google [...]

Viagra, free sex and other animals

Posted by: Owen on Wednesday, 30th Apr, 2008

I’ve hit another threshold on my spam count on this blog, with an excess of 80,000 spam comment having been captured by Akismet. It’s pretty spectacular how efficient that plugin in with really only a couple of spam comments a fortnight getting through it’s defenses. And it’s quite easy to spot keywords like viagra sticking [...]

Upgrade to WordPress 2.5.1 - Now!

Posted by: Owen on Friday, 25th Apr, 2008

Just upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.5.1 as I’ve only just spotted that it’s available. Probably the most important feature is a security fix that is pretty ugly:
An attacker, who is able to register a specially crafted username on a Wordpress 2.5 installation, is able to generate authentication cookies for other chosen accounts. This vulnerability [...]

Video Comment? Not for me thanks!

Posted by: Owen on Friday, 25th Apr, 2008

You may have noticed that some blogs around the Web, particularly TechCrunch have? added a? video commenting service provided by Seesmic who have recently come to market with this novel service. While I quite like the technology behind it, I’m not convinced video comments work for this medium. Any my concerns are also voiced by [...]

Time for the big move

Posted by: Owen on Saturday, 19th Apr, 2008

Ok .. it’s time for the big move! I’ve already imported all my dasBlog posts to WordPress (bringing my total posts to around 1800 posts dating back from June 2003! Now the time has come to turn OFF dasBlog and hope all my traffic switches over to the new blog.
In order to help this I’ll [...]

Imported dasBlog Posts

Posted by: Owen on Friday, 18th Apr, 2008

I’ve finally got round to importing my old blog posts from my old dasBlog blog. I’ve had my old blog running in .Net alongside this blog running in PHP ever since I switched to WordPress. However the time has come for me to switch dasBlog off and consolidate everything on WordPress.
The process wasn’t straightforward as [...]

Do you validate?

Posted by: Owen on Tuesday, 15th Apr, 2008

A friend pointed out that my blog doesn’t pass the W3C validation test, so I popped down to take a look and sure enough I had 222 failures. I’ve sorted out a lot of them, but now I’ve hit a bunch of errors caused by 3rd party widgets I’m running on the site.
So, the question [...]

New Twitter Widget

Posted by: Owen on Sunday, 13th Apr, 2008

I’ve added a new section to my sidebar that shows the most recent Tweets that my friends and I have Twittered. I don’t know if you’re into this whole micro-blogging thing, but this new widget should have get more people dragged in, as they see all the fun we’re having
You’ll notice a whole [...]

10 Ways to Improve Blog Traffic

Posted by: Owen on Saturday, 12th Apr, 2008

Great post down at ProBlogger with some great tips on how you can improve traffic to your blog. Here they are in a nutshell:

Create link clusters within your blog
Rework HTML title tags of trafficked posts
Invite your readers to connect with you on StumbleUpon and Facebook
Save your best posts for the best times of the week
Edit [...]

Upgraded to WordPress 2.5

Posted by: Owen on Friday, 4th Apr, 2008

I’ve just pushed this blog up to WordPress 2.5. I’ve already rolled it out onto a number of other blogs and have had absolutely no problems. I’ve reactivated all plugins, but if you find any problems, just let me know.
There’s some amazing stuff in this drop. Here are some of the new enhancements:

Cleaner, faster, less [...]