Archive for the ‘Blog Tips’ Category

Posted on July 1, 2009 - by John

Wordpress advertising plugin – OIO Publisher

If anyone is interested in a really great advertising system which can be fully integrated with wordpress, or used on its own, will handle payments and would like it for a discounted price. Read on…

I have been offered 8 USD off the retail price for OIO Publisher for anyone who wishes to use it.I have used OIO Publisher before on my Mobile Phone blog, with success, and I got a good few advertisers using it, it has a paypal module so it can also manage payments.

I wrote some info on this product below:

OIP Publisher allows you to organise and manage all your advertising requirements from one central location. If you use wordpress, great, you can manage OIO Publisher from the admin panel. If you do not use wordpress, it also works as a stand alone product!

Why use it?

You can sell ad space on your blog or website using OIO Publisher or even use it to manage digital sales. The process of selling ad space, inserting the adverts, and processing the payments is all managed by OIO Publisher.

Visitors to your website can place adverts directly on your website or blog using OIO Publisher, make a payment and their advert can go live instantly, or if you prefer you can approve them first!

You can use as many ad sizes as you wish, and it even works with google AdSense! Got more than one website? No problem, you can use this across all your websites.

If you have not sold any ad space, you can configure OIO Publisher to instead show a banner until the space is ready to be sold.

The most recent edition of OIO Publisher also has a built in theme system. This means your customers get a nice designed system in which to purchase adverts and make payments on the OIO system.

Sorry, I have been unable to find a down side to OIO Publisher, managing your own ad system gets rid of the middle man, meaning the profits are all yours. The price is not bad at all at 47 USD, I can also offer a 8 USD discount to johnmryan.com readers for the month of July 2009.

If you are interested in OIO Publisher click here, and if it is still July 2009, please use the following discount code! Quote “RAINMAN-JOHNRYAN” for your discount.

OIO PUBLISHER

install OIOpublisher as a Wordpress plugin or a standalone platform

sell all forms of text ads, banner ads, and paid reviews

custom purchases also allow you to sell digital products

display ads on any website you like using php or javascript

installation is simple using the web installer, no more manual file uploading

entirely automated, all ad purchases and expiration’s handled automatically

click and impression tracking, plus weekly ad reports emailed to advertisers

If you want to use this offer click here

Please note the discount is only valid for the month of July 2009

Posted on June 24, 2009 - by John

Dear Wordpress – Thank you!

I remember a good few months back an Irish blogger wrote about an Irish airline and a glitch he found on their website, some of the comments in relation to this particular post on his website were discovered to be from the Irish airline staff themselves and they had – shall we say some negative comments to make.

What shocked me most about this incident was one of these comments criticised the blogger for using the wordpress blogging platform which was running his website, using some phrasing along the lines that it was amateurish.

Perhaps it is an irrelevant comment by a person who was making the comment out of anger and ignorance, but I thought to myself, name something better? Seriously! Describe to me blog management software that is flexible, adoptable, user friendly – used by millions from the likes of myself to British billionaires and Prime Ministers, and did I mention that all this is FREE!

Thank you – wordpress people, for bringing information to millions of people and providing the authors of this information with a wonderful platform for doing this!

Despite my wonderful words of gratitude in the above statement, I decided to shoot myself in the foot and try another platform. Mostly so I had a relevant basis of comparison for this post, and because I am geeky like that, ok the geeky thing was the main reason…

Having installed Movable Type blogging platform last week on my server, which I did also use 5-6 years ago and had terrible problems with rebuilding posts and such, I found myself lost – back to wordpress it was. I came at it with an open mind, but could not find any reason to switch platforms, for me it offered no wow factor which would make me interested in using it.

I am not going to make this a post about which platform is better – of course this is a huge can of worms and a preference for the individual, but rather I am going to briefly outline why wordpress is the blogging platform of choice for so many people!

From the one click install technique, (and yes I know you need to set up the SQL database and config file first, but after you ace that – you’re well on the way), to easy to install plugins and themes, your blog is ready for its content. So perfect for any beginner who wants a self hosted solution.

To boil all the features down into one short paragraph, you can make wordpress into your own baby.

The design and features you can use are endless, and the amount of people on hand that offer their services when you can’t figure it out is endless* (* sometimes at a price – like anything else), the amount of free designs and plugins to extend functionality that is on offer is so great you really don’t have to splash out on often expensive designs if you don’t want to or cant afford it. I wrote a post outlining some great plugins which compliment your installation greatly, you can find it here. Having mentioned support I being to think of a somewhat negative point, there has to be one, right?

Support! Wordpress should offer a support package, which would undoubtedly be in great demand. I understand wordpress does offer premium services on there hosted wordpress.com site, but for self hosted blogs paid support would be great.

To have someone on hand when something goes wrong, or when you have been trying to get something right for hours and it is just not working. Wordpress does offer support forums, which are of course not the same as dedicated support, don’t get me wrong there are some great people on wordpress willing to help, but a paid support service, would mean dedicated and fast responses where required.

Wordpress is easy to use, and it continues to evolve with the internet into a simple but extendable blogging platform. Dear Wordpress – Thank you!

Posted on April 7, 2009 - by John

Twitter – Show me the money!

Internet reports are giving word recently that Twitter is in  “late stage talks” with Google over a proposed acquisition. It won’t be the first time Google has purchased something which is dominating the internet in recent years, such as YouTube. And interestingly enough like YouTube, Twitter, is also a service which has yet to produce any real monetisation strategy .

Could it be  be that a company like Google is seeking to control much of the popular content on the internet, regardless of a company’s future financial ability? Does  Google just like to have the most popular sites in its portfolio. Or is that too obvious a statement?

Twitter looks to me like a company which will prove hard to monetise, the only real possibility may be  a premium account model where people can have some bonus features for a fee of some sort. Such a model is in use by the Flick.com photo sharing site, owned by Yahoo and seems to be doing nicely.

What makes Twitter such an popular service is that  surfers are actively using it for a wide variety of reasons. There is the is the celebrity factor – Those interesting MTV (sorry that’s MTV ONE) celebrities on our screens – the Paris Hilton’s of the world all have accounts, and where these people go there will be a bunch of folks following them, sending Tweets to Paris and hoping that she – Paris Hilton herself will acknowledge their existence. There is the casual user who often  gives the cringely horrible updates which often includes  terrible tweets that track every moment from lunch updates to the trip to the toilet afterwards!

A more interesting part of Twitter which is tied into its popularity is that many organisations and groups are using the service to push updates and stay in contact with their users! That may be where Twitter can offer the  premium services. Interesting Twitter was the first with updates on the new Irish Budget, beating RTE and even blogs with the latest breaking news, from trivial comments on politicians clothes to more serious updates on the budget.

Posted on September 9, 2008 - by John

19 Great Wordpress Plugins – A List

One of the best things about wordpress is the ability to extend its functionality by adding plugins.  The idea of this post is to provide a point of reference, a list, of some of the greats - selecting some plugins from this list should help you find that elusive, desirable plugin that you’ve been looking for. But there’s more, I would very much like you to comment on this list with your own suggestions, and we can go beyond the 19 plugins listed below. (more…)

Posted on September 5, 2008 - by John

Irish Blogs refuse to upgrade their blog software

Image by by cd.harrison

I wrote previously about wordpress upgrades and some of the changes we might expect to see in the near future. Aside from nifty new tools and layout changes the most important point about upgrading is to secure your website against any discovered vulnerabilities in wordpress or indeed whatever blog software you use. (more…)

Posted on August 3, 2008 - by John

Wordpress 2.7 – Whats to come?

Photo owned by ShadowKris (cc)

With another successful version of wordpress out the door, the folks at wordpress HQ are already working on the next release. Indeed 2.6 saw many features included such as preview themes, plugin update notification… and so on. What can we expect to see in the next release?

Integrated subscribe to comments: Currently operating as a plugin it seems as though this popular comment tool has come to the attention of wordpress coders, the plugin may now be part of the wordpress core. Allowing e-mails to be send to people who comment on your blog (if they so choose of course), updating post subscribers when someone has added their comment to the post.

Keyboard shortcuts for comment moderation: This would seem to to be something similar to what Google has for their gmail service. For example press pressing the key ‘A’ would approve a comment.

One click install for plugin’s: Not sure how this would work exactly, but it would simplify the install process for plugin’s, and would possible be connected to the next feature.

Plugin Browser: The ability to browse wordpress.org plugin directory within the admin panel? Sorry I cant see any information on this, but it would be an excellent addition.

Theme Update API: Acts the same way as the plugin API in 2.6, this will let you know when there is an update for your themes available, and also maybe allow you to update with one click install.

Of course a few of these may not come until a later edition. But do keep an eye on the wordpress development crew for updates. You can view a list of suggested updates on the codex here.

Posted on July 21, 2008 - by John

UPDATED:Video: Wordpress on your iPhone

Posted on June 14, 2008 - by John

Windows Live Writer – Finally hope for desktop editors

If you are new to blogging you may not have yet used a desktop editor for editing and creating posts, a desktop editor will allow you to work offline if you choose, and comes with all the functions you need to create a full blog post, such as text formatting, image formatting, and so on. Then any good writer will allow you to upload and publish the entire post from your desktop, or if you prefer you can also save a local copy to your PC.

If you have have used a desktop editor previously, you will most probably have given up on them, as many editors do all sorts of funny things to the text formatting, meaning when you try to publish the post you find it contains a great deal of unnecessary formatting tags. However some advances have been made to sort out this messy formatting and there are now a few desktop editors that actually work very well. Windows live writer is one such tool.

There has been a lot of criticism in relation to windows software in the past, this aside, windows live writer is simple to use, smooth to operate, works for many different blog platforms and is expandable using Plug-ins.

The most interesting feature perhaps is the way text formatting is displayed on the editor, which is set to reflect the CSS font used in your blog, giving you a feel for the final output, this is done automatically, but can also be disabled. Additionally there is also a preview function which will show you how the post will look on your site, without actually taking the post live. In fact there are four views on this desktop editor:

• Normal – Excludes CSS and shows a standard output.
• Web Layout – Includes your blog CSS formatting, as defined by your theme.
• Web Preview – Displays what the post will look like on your blog.
• HTML -Displays the code behind the post.

Windows live writer feels like a premium editor which is surprisingly free. Although created as a complement to Windows Live Spaces, the functionality to edit posts and pages on other platforms are included. Wordpress, Typepad, Sharepoint are all supported, but I have only tested on wordpress.

The plug-ins feature allow you to expand the editor, although there is a limited number of these, popular plug-ins such as the ability to insert Flickr images are available.

For those who prefer to make a few changes to their post on their platform editor, the desktop editor even comes with a ‘post draft to blog and edit online’ feature, allowing you to make those additional changes if you publish!

Do you use a blog writer, or do you prefer to use your platforms editor from your web-browser? Please comment and share your views.