A word with Woodward
Posted by: Owen on Friday, 6th Jul, 2007
It’s refreshing to see the local corporates starting to get in touch with modern technology and using the Internet more and more. The local ferry company Steam Packet has been pushing their online presence for some time now, encouraging people to book online whenever they can (though I don’t believe there’s any cost savings passed [...]
WordPress 2.2
Posted by: Owen on Wednesday, 16th May, 2007
A new version of WordPress has been released. It has over 200 fixes and new features, so it’s bund to be awesome! I needed to upload this to my site, however had forgotten my FTP password. So I logged into my cPanel web hosting and promptly created a new account. This allowed me to go [...]
To WordPress or not to WordPress
Posted by: Owen on Tuesday, 15th May, 2007
Ian Fernando just asked a question on V7N as to whethr to go for WordPress or not. His questions are specifically about? extensibility, customization and spam. Here’s what I responded:
Easy to manipulate: WordPress has an extensible API that has allows 3rd party developers to write plugins for it. There’s a wealth of plugins out [...]
Hitting a SPAM milesteone
Posted by: Owen on Wednesday, 9th May, 2007
This blog has hit an important milestone which gives a good indication of how much it’s grown and how popular it has become. Since I upgraded it to WordPress a couple of months ago, it has received a grand total of 10,000 spam comment. Well, it’s probably received more while I’ve been typing this, but [...]
Cleaning up the blog
Posted by: Owen on Friday, 4th May, 2007
I’ve been looking at reasons why my blog has dropped from a PR5 to a PR4 and one of the reasons I’m suspecting is the number of broken/spammy links that my old blog had. I was running dasBlog back then and had a serious amount of trackback spam. I’ve been ignoring it since I switched [...]
The i-Follow Movement
Posted by: Owen on Thursday, 12th Apr, 2007
I had already mentioned in the I love comments (I hate spam) post that I’m implementing plugin that removes Wordpress’ NoFollow tags called DoFollow. The reason behind this is that I think people’s comments contribute to the building conversations in the blogosphere and Search Engines should be following these links as relevant pieces of information. [...]
Press Release: DVDPlay New Movies Widget
Posted by: Owen on Wednesday, 11th Apr, 2007
Interesting Press Release by DVDPlay who are using a competition to promote a brand-spanking new widget to try and attract new customers to their website. The incentive? Run the wiget for the next couple of months and you’re in a chance to win an Apple iPhone or a Nintendo Wii. Personally I think it clashes [...]
Drive traffic with Email Marketing
Posted by: Owen on Wednesday, 14th Feb, 2007
If you run a blog or a website, then you’ll know that traffic to your site is the lifeblood that your project needs. Without visitors it’s a bit of a moot point building a site, and visitors help contribute material and ideas that improve your projects. However, driving traffic is also one of the hardest [...]
PayPerPost Update
Posted by: Owen on Friday, 9th Feb, 2007
I’ve been looking through my PayPerPost stats and I’ve just realised that I’ve made almost $1,500! Amazing isn’t it.
For those of you who have never come across them, they’re the market leader in blog advertising, providing a marketplace for advertisers and bloggers to meet and help each other out. They’ve also recently rolled out a [...]
Pulling traffic to your blog
Posted by: Owen on Wednesday, 7th Feb, 2007
I came across a good post today on NorthxEast - Net Business Blog called: 7 Novel Ways to get Traffic to your Blog. Here’s what the author suggests are good ideas:
Buy traffic from StumbleUpon
Get Design Blogged
Press Releases and Announcements
Get Blogged or Reviewed
Produce a clever free service and get it noticed
Run a competition
Make it worthwhile for [...]
Blog coming along nicely
Posted by: Owen on Tuesday, 30th Jan, 2007
Wow, I’ve just realised that I’ve exceeded the 100 post mark. When I started the blog, on the 5th Jan, I knew that switching to WordPress would make blogging so much easier for me, and it has. This blog software is a joy to use. I can post easily, edit easily, change the blog style [...]
WordPress 2.1 breaks Link Library
Posted by: Owen on Tuesday, 23rd Jan, 2007
Installing WordPress 2.1 worked fine in most cases, however it has broken one of the plugins I use on the site. The plugin is called Link Library and makes use of a depracated function called $wpdb->linkcategories. Actually it’s a depractated table in the database. WordPress 2.1 uses the same category table for links and posts. [...]
Migrated to WordPress 2.1
Posted by: Owen on Tuesday, 23rd Jan, 2007
A new version of WordPress hit the streets yesterday, and I’ve taken the opportunity to upgrade to the shiny, brand-spanking-new version. Upgrade was a doddle and takes the following steps:
back up everything
deactivate all your plugins
overwrite your installation
run the upgrade script
reactivate all your plugins
Worked straight away, no scares, no worries.
So what’s new in this version. [...]
Vote for me on SpicyPage
Posted by: Owen on Monday, 22nd Jan, 2007
I’ve just added my blog to SpicyPage, another social network aimed at sharing blogs and websites around the web. Here’s the blurb:
Spicypage lets you post, comment on, vote on, share your favorite sites or blogs with your friends and others like you. Discover and bookmark the new and the best sites & blogs out there, [...]
Top 10 sins of Blog Usabilty
Posted by: Owen on Tuesday, 16th Jan, 2007
Good article on SiteProNews titled Top 10 Sins of Blog Usability. It goes into some details about the 10 worst things you can do to impact your site usability (negatively that is). Here are the headline points:
Sending mixed messages
Making it hard to subscribe
Inconsistent posts
No contact info
Not moderating comments
Excessive advertising
Not linking to posts
Dark background, light text
No [...]
