All posts in Blogging

Ablogalypse

by Chris M on April 16, 2012 in Blogging with 2 Comments

Interesting..

WordPress is dominating the market

by Chris M on April 11, 2012 in Blogging, Wordpress Themes with 4 Comments

Over the years WordPress has become one of the leading content management systems, to think back to days where people questioned its ability to be more than a blogging platform only leads me to a good chuckle. I’ve played with so many content management systems, from Drupal to Expression Engine to Joomla to even some smaller ones, I can honestly say that WordPress has it all.

WordPress powers over 70 million blogs on the Internet, if you want to look at the activity, WordPress has an awesome stats page with a global activity map and more over here. A more impressive statistic is that WordPress powers 49% of the top blogs on Technorati’s list.

Take a look at this:

Pretty darn impressive for a “blogging platform” if you ask me.

On a side note: iMod ran for several years on a custom CMS that I wrote myself, also powered by PHP and MySQL, but I finally went over to the dark side and the three things that have kept me plugged into WordPress are:

  1. Community Support
  2. Security Updates
  3. Plugins

Just those three things alone make WordPress an incredible platform.

Are you using WordPress? What is your favourite feature?

Live Streaming WordPress Plugin

by Chris M on March 25, 2012 in Blogging, Sport, Wordpress Themes with No comments

I was involved in the conceptualization and building of a new WordPress plugin called WP Live Stream. It’s a very straight forward plugin, but has a lot to offer for those of you who live attending events and live streaming without wanting to clog your Twitter stream, or for those of you who just like keeping your visitors on your blog.

You download the plugin, activate it and place a widget in your sidebar – that’s it.

The plugin allows you to configure all the colours and so forth to ensure that it fits in with your blog, and there are tools to include the live stream on a page rather than a widget, just in case you want to keep everything in one place. On top of this, you can authenticate against Twitter and send out a tweet when you start live streaming, just so your Twitter followers know that you’re about to get going.

I’ve positioned WP Live Stream at the top of my sidebar as you can see and have received some good feedback from readers thus far. Not everyone’s plugged into Twitter all the time, but more importantly, most people on Twitter follow a number of people and therefore it’s tricky trying to just follow one persons tweets when you might also want to see other people’s tweets.

You can download the plugin by click here, there’s no sign up, no catches, just right-click save as style.

Twitter acquires Posterous

by Chris M on March 13, 2012 in Blogging, Internet, Networking with No comments

Big news hit the web just moments ago when Posterous announced that it has been acquired by Twitter.

See, Twitter being a short message service hasn’t allowed it to allow its users just that little bit more, but with Posterous, it’ll have a way of giving that little bit more. Now, of course, this is my opinion and all, but I’m pretty sure it’s the direction they’re going in.

Posterous has been running for 4 years and has built a really big following, so the real thing about this is whether the users are happy or not. I headed over to the official Posterous post (Twitter announced the same post on their website) and read some of the comments, they’re mixed, but there are definitely a large number of people who would have preferred the service to stay how it is. Then again, that’s always the case when one big company acquires another, we’ve seen it a million times, so I’m giving this movement the benefit of the doubt and look forward to seeing what happens.

I’d love to know what Twitter paid, for those of you who don’t know, Posterous raised $10.1mil in two rounds of funding and has used that to get 15 million monthly users.

Why do you think Twitter bought Posterous? Do you think we’ll see the fail whale a lot more now?

Blogger in prison being released, yay Dante!

by Chris M on January 15, 2012 in Blogging, Internet, World News with No comments

I blogged about a guy who was caught with drugs being imprisoned for over 600 days at the beginning of last year. I knew the guy through Reddit and because I am close to those who built the website for him so he could carry on blogging from prison whilst he served his sentence.

I’ve read every single post he’s written whilst he’s been locked up and it’s been like web reality TV to an extent, but obviously far more serious and quite sad to be honest. I’ve found myself sitting at the computer wondering how difficult it would be and as silly as it might sound, I feel that I’m a more honest man thanks to Dante’s eye opening posts.

I’ve got some good news though (I say good because I’ve known him and I never felt he deserved what he got), check this out:

In less than a week, I’ll walk out the door of Sheridan Federal Prison and begin serving the tail end of my time at a halfway house in Los Angeles, California.

My grasp of the English language is not adequate enough to properly describe the range of emotion that comes with the thought of me finally finishing the last leg of this journey I’m on. But it’s like I’ve been lost at sea, and finally see a hairline of land creeping over the horizon.

I’m almost home.

That’s right! He’s being released from prison!

See you on the other side, Dante.

Attention Bloggers: PAIA by 31st December 2011

by Chris M on December 20, 2011 in Blogging, Business with 7 Comments

Before I write this post I’d like to state that I’m not a lawyer nor an accountant, so what I write below is based on my research and my opinion thereof.

The Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) states that anyone who trades in any way needs to register for PAIA. People who do not register by the 31st of December 2011 could be fined up to R15,000 and face prison time of 2 years.

If you have a blog and you accept payment for advertising, you are going to need to register – you will need to complete your PAIA forms and link to them from the bottom of your website.

I was sent the following form from Shelf Company Warehouse – click here – which I had to complete and they submitted it for me. At this point I’m not sure if anyone can do this or if it’s only for clients of the Shelf Company Warehouse, but worst case scenario, you could still use the template to complete your PAIA and submit it yourself.

If you do some research, you’ll see that this isn’t a joke and that everyone should be making a big move to getting registered – I don’t want to see a case where a local blogger is made an example of!

I’ll be adding my PAIA docs to iMod shortly :)

Top 10 posts on iMod during 2011

by Chris M on December 9, 2011 in Blogging with 2 Comments

I saw Rafiq do a post on his top 10 posts of 2011 and decided to do one of my own, so here are the top ten most popular posts on iMod, based on read count, for the year of 2011:

  1. MXit on your Computer – MXit continues to be one of those keywords that gets thousands and thousands of searches.
  2. New Facebook Profile Page Preview – Hah, caught this one early, pwned the SERPs and chomped the traffic.
  3. South Africa iPhone 4 Pricelist – Ah yes, the long awaited for arrival of what turns out to be the best mobile device ever!
  4. South African Uncapped ADSL Options – Remember when all the ISPs went crazy and announced mad specials? I do!
  5. Locnville – Sun in my Pocket -  Legendary song by some locals.
  6. Awesome iPad Accessory – The iProp – Another fantastic gadget that caught people’s attention and went viral.
  7. No Tangle Interlocked Headphones – Just brilliant, and hugely popular.
  8. New Star Sign – Ophuchicus – Remember this?
  9. What does Waka Waka Mean – World Cup of course!
  10. Work from Home Nonsense – A tough year for all of us, prices are up, pressure at work is higher than ever, so many people looking for ways to earn money at home. This blog post has received several hundred comments this year.

Interestingly, each of these posts has received over 20,000 unique visits!

Inspired by eFrog Themes, Google and Nando’s

by Chris M on October 30, 2011 in Blogging, My Life with No comments

We all know that Google changes its logo on special occasions and eFrog Themes does the same, but only when Nando’s took over my logo for the day the other day for Nando’s Tangy Tomato (launch of their new flavour) did I think that perhaps I would try to do the same.

So, in light of it being halloween tomorrow I decided to change my logo to suite the occasion. I’m not much of a designer, so it doesn’t look amazing, but it’s for fun! eFrog Themes have already updated theirs, take a look here.

Here’s the one that Nando’s did for me if you missed it:

Pretty cool hey?

Anyway, just sharing that with you, and hopefully I’ll do it for my logo from now on :)

Create an iPhone app for your blog? [plugin]

by Chris M on October 20, 2011 in Blogging, Mobile with No comments

A good 6 months ago I spoke to a friend about building a plugin for WordPress that would convert your blog into an iPhone application; the premise was simple and the task wasn’t all that complicated, the problem was free time and unfortunately the idea never got legs.

Wiziapp is a new WordPress plugin that does exactly this, you download the plugin, create your app and publish to the app store, as simple as that.

The plugin isn’t free though, a personal account will set you back $19.90 per month and the enterprise plugin will set you back $49.90 per month, so you really need to know that people will download and use your app or it’s not really worth it.

You can download the plugin here: http://www.wiziapp.com/download

Introducing WordPress 3.3 and its 3 new features

by Chris M on October 11, 2011 in Blogging with 2 Comments

That’s right folks, WordPress announced today that they’ve moved past version 3.2 and have made a copy of 3.3 Beta 1 available to people who want to download, test and report bugs. The aim of the game is to release 3.3 by the end of November.

So obviously you’re wondering what’s new and so forth, so let me mention a couple things for you to ponder about if you’re not keen on downloading and giving it a go.

The admin bar that floats at the top has been improved, there’s a new media uploader and fly out admin menu’s are now available.

I downloaded and installed copy, here’s a screenshot I took of the three features:

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

Nice additions!

You can download a copy directly by clicking here.

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