Archive for the ‘Blog Tips’ Category

Posted on December 21, 2009 - by John

What’s new in wordpress 2.9

There is a lot of under the hood changes, but some interesting changes to the media components, such as an build in image editor!

Global undo/”trash” feature, which means that if you accidentally delete a post or comment you can bring it back from the grave (i.e., the Trash). This also eliminates those annoying “are you sure” messages we used to have on every delete.

Built-in image editor allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images to show them who’s boss. This is the first wave of our many planned media-handling improvements.

Batch plugin update and compatibility checking, which means you can update 10 plugins at once, versus having to do multiple clicks for each one, and we’re using the new compatibility data from the plugins directory to give you a better idea of whether your plugins are compatible with new releases of WordPress. This should take the fear and hassle out of upgrading.

Easier video embeds that allow you to just paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code, with Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv (and more in the next release).

Video

Posted on December 18, 2009 - by John

The Future of News – Mark Little

Mark Little (needs no introduction to Irish people), is about to leave RTE, talks about the future of news, and the role of social networking, a very well presented piece, worth a full watch.

Mark Little, Presenter of RTE”s Prime Time and a former RTE Washington correspondent, will give a lecture on the future of News Media, to the IIEA’s Digital Future Group.  Mr Little recently announced his decision to take a year’s leave from RTE to set up his own global online news service. LINK & video below

Posted on December 9, 2009 - by John

Buy & Sell FOR FREE- Beat the recession

With everyone feeling blue, here is a shameless plug for a new website I am working on. It’s a buy and sell website, currently for free you can place your own advert and sell some of your stuff, in exchange for some dosh (or do a trade) to buy nice Christmas presents for yourself or your loved ones. Or go shopping if you fancy some of the stuff on there!

I suggest using it to sell all those unwanted Christmas “gifts”.

How to place an ad

1. Click on the ‘Place an Ad’ button and complete the form. Remembering to include as much information as possible.

• Choose a category for your ad.
• Choose a title for your ad.
• Insert price.
• Location where the item is, it is important to note that this will create a google map for your ad which will pin point the location of the item on the map.
• Description of your item

• Complete your contact details, include phone number if your want this published on the ad.
• Add an image – Including an image can increase the possibility of selling the item.
• If your would like to make your ad stand out select ‘Featured Listing’, this costs an extra 2 euro.

2. Once you have completed the form, click on submit ad.
3. You will then be prompted to click on the paypal button to submit payment, all our ads only cost 1 euro and will stay active on our website for 90 days!
4. If you have made a mistake, you can edit the ad by clicking on the ‘Manage my Ad’ link.
5. If you are unsure send an email to hello@chest.ie

Posted on September 6, 2009 - by John

Wordpress self hosted blogs attack warning!

Two of my friends emailed me this morning, asking if I had heard of attacks on old versions of wordpress. And yes, I have heard thanks to the wonder that is Twitter. I normally don’t blog at weekends but this is important.

Based on what the wordpress experts are saying here is what you need to do.

Upgrade wordpress to version 2.8.4. Do this now, and come back to read the rest later. This is serious you MUST UPGRADE.

If you are not sure what version you are using, you probably need to upgrade now! You can usually see a warning telling you your version is out of date. Or scroll to the bottom of the admin screen and you will see the version number.

If you are scared upgrading will damage your plugins or theme, then sorry! But if you are hacked, and there is a number of WP hacking going on, you have been warned!

It is essential that you upgrade.

As always backup wordpress. And please tweet this warning. I now hand you over to the experts for a full explanation.

Right now there is a worm making its way around old, unpatched versions of WordPress. This particular worm, like many before it, is clever: it registers a user, uses a security bug (fixed earlier in the year) to allow evaluated code to be executed through the permalink structure, makes itself an admin, then uses JavaScript to hide itself when you look at users page, attempts to clean up after itself, then goes quiet so you never notice while it inserts hidden spam and malware into your old posts.

Read the rest

Posted on September 4, 2009 - by John

Blog post inspiration – Solve a problem!

Walking through the Green in Dublin city on Monday morning, I was wondering where people get their ideas for writing their blog posts.

For me when I am trying to solve a problem with my wordpress blog, get some widget working, formatting a post, I go searching for the answer. For the genre I write in usually in my blogs, inspiration comes in the form of solving a problem! Because if you can answer a question, or even ask one, you have your inspiration for your post already.

There is nothing more satisfying than figuring out how something works! Sharing that information in your blog can be so helpful to others and also satisfy the human need to share information. I have often found a blog post that answered a simple question, while I was looking everywhere for the answer.

Of course blogging is not only about answering a question, it is about sharing ideas and views as well.

But solving a problem is always a good topic to write about, it always makes me more interested in writing blog posts.  I created this chart for myself as a guide for my blog topics I write in this manner.

For topics I write in this manner I find the following makes for a more interesting post, if you are trying to write about a question you answered, you solved a problem.

The question

• You have a question that you need answered.
• The question must be your question – Of course you can answer any question, but I find if you are passionate about solving the problem that passion is reflected in your post!
• If you cannot solve the problem you can take your blog post in a different direction. You can ask your blog community to help, or try to solve yourself and blog the results.

The answer

• You have researched the problem and solved it.
• You have tested the results.

Creating the post

• Write about your results.
• If you found the solution great, if not still blog and share with your community promoting interaction within your blog.

Just one of my ways for writing a particular type of post, feel free to share yours! How do you find inspiration for your blog posts?

Posted on September 2, 2009 - by John

RSS feed tweeks to enhance reader experience & promote traffic to your website!

Real Simple Syndication (RSS) allows site owners to automatically syndicate their content to readers in an easy to read format. For the reader this is content delivered to their inbox or reader! In many instances this is a reverse of roles, the content is coming to the reader, not the reader to the content.

The idea of this post is to explore the different tweeks  and additions you can make to your RSS feed to improve the overall RSS experience for your readers and drive traffic through promoting your content.

Firstly I would recommend allowing readers access to the full content of your posts in their feed reader. I have found that only publishing extracts and requiring readers to actually visit your blog to view the full posts, causes readers to become annoyed. I know the idea is to generate traffic to your website, but remember it is better to have a subscriber than not. Observers have noted the type of people who subscribe to RSS feeds generally tend to be those who know their field. Be honered there reading your content! Allowing them to read the full content of your posts, promotes them to become more interested in you and what you have to say.

Someone to watch over me

Pretty much everyone uses Feedburner, and recently it was taken over by Google.  I use it to manage my RSS feed. With feedburner I can see how many readers I have  as well as getting a break down of what system they use to read my updates and also offer readers the ability to subscribe to my blog updates via e-mail. You can see all this in operation on my site right now!

I would recommend activating FeedFlare in your feedburner account which will allow you to build in interactive features to the feed. This means you can show your users how many people have commented on your post, thus generating some traffic back to your blog to read these comments.

Note:In order to use feedburner you also need the feedburner plugin for your wordpress blog (if your using wordpress).

This plugin makes it easy to redirect 100% of traffic for your feeds to a FeedBurner feed you have created. FeedBurner can then track all of your feed subscriber traffic and usage and apply a variety of features you choose to improve and enhance your original wordPress feed.

Related Posts Plugin

This is a wonderful addition to your website, if you don’t have the related posts plugin already give it a try. Not only does it supply related posts for your blog content, but it also does so for RSS feeds. This falls back into what I was talking about earlier, regarding giving away ‘free content’ or full posts. By adding related posts to your feeds your readers can now find assicated articles which are linked back to your website.

Polls

Polls are a wonderful form of interaction between the author and the reader, in regards to the feed, it once again promts visitors from the feed to your website, so that they too can vote in your poll.

Video

I am going to throw in this line about video, but it is a little redundant today. Previously most RSS readers did not support video players, so RSS subscribers had to visit your website to actually watch the video. However these days, readers do support this. Just a quick point really!

Widgets

With modern browsers it is easy to subscribe to a feed by clicking on the usually built in RSS icon, safari has one beside the URL bar. However there is no harm in popping an RSS icon into your sidebar, as I have done in a prominent place on my website. You can also show off how popular you are by placing a FeedCount badge on your widget.

These are just a few tips I can share with you based on my experience on  RSS feed tweeks. Please do share your views of RSS feeds, and any suggestions you may have for enhancing reader experience & promote traffic to your website!

Posted on September 1, 2009 - by John

TextLinkAds Review – Make money with links!

Back about – it must be two years ago now, I ran a successful celebrity website. One of the main money makers on this website was ‘text link ads‘. When I launched the website, I was actively seeking a way to monetise it. I did not want to just use a few Google adsense ads, putting all your eggs in the same basket is not a great idea, we all know this!

So I decided to create an account with text link ads. I placed the code on the site under favourite links, and I sort of forgot about it.

In the mean time I was working hard on SEO, getting quality links, and of course most importantly the content. I had completely forgotten about the code. Soon after I got a few links submitted to advertise on my site. Months later I had all ten spots filled every month. Not bad for a celebrity website!

What are text link ads?
It really is as simple as it sounds. A text link; using a keyword – linking to the advertiser’s website.

Why use them?
They are used by advertisers because not only do they get traffic to their website, but they also get SEO kisses from search engines. You, the publisher will love this because it is a hassle free income generator, which is non- intrusive to your visitors and is a nice break from flashing advertisements!

There is one down side to this however, text-link-ads take 50% off the top. So if you are selling at 50USD you end up with 25. This does sound pretty high. But you must also consider how difficult to find these advertisers by yourself! Additionally new websites and websites with low amounts of traffic may find it difficult to enter the program. But there is an affiliate program which accepts new websites.

A tip for if you get signed up, don’t hide away the script which displays the text links the best place I found was in the sidebar, people have paid you for advertisement placement so you need to respect that. Shoving their ads to the bottom of the screen may not result in further adverts placed by them!

If you are interested in text link ads you can sign up . Do you use text link ads? If so feel free to comment below and let us know your experience with them.

Posted on August 25, 2009 - by John

One quarter of all tweets generated by bots!

It turns out that 24% of all tweets are not generated by people, but rather by bots! But not to worry, these are not all spam bots. You might even be using a ‘bot’ yourself! You know, those wonderful tools that allow you to send out a tweet when you post to your blog. That is a bot.

I have no problem with these updates; part of twitter is exploring the internet using shared information. A report conducted by sysomos.com had a number of findings, most interestingly:

We found that 32% of all tweets made by the most active Twitter users were generated by machine bots that posted more than 150 tweets/day. The actual percentage of machine-generated tweets among the most active users is probably higher than 32% because there many bots that update less than 150 times/day.

The report also outlines who tweets the most. There is a few of what you would expect such as @foxnews (no comment), @nytimes. An more interestingly @alyssa_milano!

Do you use a tweet bot to send out your blog updates? I know I do! The full report here makes for some interesting reading, sadly Ireland does not make the list of Twitter’s 5% of most active users.