All posts in Blogging

Google Friend Connect get more personal

by Chris M on November 4, 2009 in Blogging, Internet, Networking with No comments

Google Friend Connect is growing and it’s getting more personalised, take a watch..

Jump over to friend connect by clicking here.

Careful when you steal web content

by Chris M on November 4, 2009 in Blogging, Internet with 10 Comments

Earlier today, DChetty spotted another website hotlinking to images on his website. Naturally, this is not only theft in certain cases, but it’s also frowned upon by the web industry, as each time the image is loaded, bandwidth and CPU power is pulled from the original sources server.

Here’s the website with the Idols image, stolen from DChetty:

image1

Anyway, I saw this and quickly tweeted DChetty telling him to change the image on his side and that’s exactly what he did, take a look:

image2

PWNED!!!

Recent Comments on blogs becoming null and void

by Chris M on November 4, 2009 in Blogging, Networking with 17 Comments

There was a time when it was very important to have a list of recent comments on your blog, almost like a place people could see interaction, but as the Internet and Social Media has progressed, I now feel that showing Recent Comments is no longer important.

Several reasons why I have removed mine:

  • Most people who read blogs know you can leave comments.
  • People arriving at a blog usually arrive on the single.php page, which shows the comment form.
  • Plugins like subscribe to comments lock people into those pages.
  • Real estate space – recent comments take up a lot of space, this could be better used for something else and reduce clutter.
  • Bigger blogs use caching systems, so recent comments aren’t always up to date anyway.
  • Display how many comments have been made on a post, is enough of a hint that conversation is happening.

Those are just a few reasons that came to mind very quickly.

What is your opinion?

Twitter blogging for more organic traffic #twitter

by Chris M on November 3, 2009 in Blogging, Code, My Life, Networking with 2 Comments

As an avid blogger for the last, roughly, 10 years of my life, I’m naturally incredibly loyal to blogging over micro-blogging, as I view the two as being completely different.

Any passionate blogger who seeks traffic will know that you can’t just stick to blogging and ignore the other platforms such as Twitter, to name just one. Because of this, Twitter plugins have been created for WordPress blogs, which allow WordPress authors to have their posts published to their Twitter account or a seperate Twitter account – Personally I go with a seperate account, so I don’t flood my personal account with blog posts.

Now, this is obviously a great way to integrate the two platforms, but there’s one step further, which can work a dream and that’s to include a #hashtag in your post’s title, for example:

How to index your site with Google #SEO

What this does, combined with the Twitter plugins, is send your new blog post out as a tweet to your followers, but it also sends your tweet (post) into a #hashtag stream, which naturally encourages “organic” traffic from completely new sources.

I’ve tested it a few times and what I can say is that if you select your #hashtags correctly, you can attract a lot of new traffic. Now, for those of you who are developers or having programming skills, you’ll be able to take this one step further by avoiding the permalink from including the hashtag and potentially damaging your SEO, therefore only the tweet has the hastag attached, this would work with a custom field, or even better, you could use the post’s category as the hashtag – you’re starting to see the value aren’t you? Another step further and you could have your category RSS feeds sending out to twitter streams with #hashtags, now that’s when things get far more interesting and your traffic will boost, I gaurentee it!

Anyway, I did it, it worked and I wanted to share it with you.

Enjoy!

Pssst – Did you read my thoughts on Twitter Lists?

Sneaky trick to see your tweets in your WordPress Dashboard

by Chris M on October 28, 2009 in Blogging, Networking with No comments

Whilst writing some code for WordPress, I noticed a little trick that I felt I should share with you, because it’s quite handy.

Log into your WordPress Dashboard and look for the WordPress Development Feed located on the right..

step-1

Notice that when you hover over it with your mouse that the “Configure” link appears at the top right, give this a click and you’ll be presented with something that looks like this..

step-2

What we want to do here is set it up to cater for your Twitter feed, which you can get on your twitter page..

step-3

Right click on the feed and copy the link, this you will then place into the settings (A). Next, fill in a name for this (B) and finally choose how many tweets you would like to see (C). You should now have something along the lines of this..

step-4

Click the Submit button once you’re happy with your settings and you’ll be taken back to the normal Dashboard, where you will now be able to see your tweets..

step-5

A quick and easy trick, which could be really useful :)

Follow me on Twitter by clicking here and I’ll share more Twitter tips and tricks!

WordPress Image Widget

by Chris M on October 28, 2009 in Blogging with No comments

Permalinks for WordPress on a Windows Server

by Chris M on October 27, 2009 in Blogging, Code with 6 Comments

When it comes to WordPress and permalinks, Linux servers are usually a piece of cake to work with, but when it comes to Windows servers, permalinks can become a pain in the butt.

Let’s have a look..

Problem/Summary

With WordPress installations or many other CMS Applications you might have links that look like any of the following:

http://www.imod.co.za/?id=2

or

http://www.imod.co.za/index.php/my-life/

Resolution

What needs to be done is to create a httpd.ini file which uses ISAPI Rewrite to reformat your URLs nicely so they will look like:

http://www.imod.co.za/my-life

This is what the httpd.ini code should look like:

[ISAPI_Rewrite]

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /
RewriteCond ${REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond ${REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
# For special WordPress folders (e.g. theme, admin, etc.)
RewriteRule /wp-(.*) /wp-$1 [L]

# For all WordPress pages
RewriteRule ^/$ /index.php [L]
RewriteRule /(.*) /index.php/$1 [L]

That’s it – much like an .htaccess file, create the httpd.ini file, paste the above code into it, save it and upload it to your server.

via Web Africa

WordPress 2.8.5 released

by Chris M on October 21, 2009 in Blogging with No comments

WordPress 2.8.4 has served us well and now it’s time for a minor upgrade to the latest release.

According to the WordPress blog, the headline changes are:

  • A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen.
  • Removal of areas within the code where php code in variables was evaluated.
  • Switched the file upload functionality to be whitelisted for all users including Admins.
  • Retiring of the two importers of Tag data from old plugins.

As most of you know, recently WordPress suffered from a terrible exploit and a large number of websites were taken down. Since then, a new plugin called WordPress Exploit Scanner has been released, it searches the files on your website, and the posts and comments tables of your database for anything suspicious. It also examines your list of active plugins for unusual filenames.

Click here to learn about upgrading WordPress manually.

Technorati’s State of the Blogsphere 2009

by Chris M on October 18, 2009 in Blogging, Guru's, Industry News with No comments

Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra showed some of the highlights from their annual State of the Blogosphere report at BlogWorld in Las Vegas.

Key points Jalichandra brought up – What’s the no. 1 success metric for a professional blogger? What do successful bloggers have in common? The data was taken from a survey of 2,900 bloggers, conducted by Penn, Schoen & Berland.

72% of bloggers are hobbyists, says Jalichandra, and blog for fun. They don’t make any income from blogging, and only half hope to someday. They blog simply to express themselves. Of professional bloggers, only 10% blog 40 or more hours per week.

2/3 of professional bloggers are male, and 60% are between 18 – 44 years old. 75% have college degrees, and 40% have graduate degrees. Half have household incomes of $75,000 or more. 17% of them say blogging is their primary source of income. A whopping 74% of bloggers use Twitter, v. 14% of the general population. Their no. 1 use of Twitter is to promote their blogs.

Here is the slideshow recapping what as spoken about and what statistics were gathered, it’s worth the look:

Technorati’s State Of The Blogosphere 2009

View more documents from Marco Derksen.

Monetizing WordPress Plugins

by on October 14, 2009 in Blogging, Code, Make Money with 2 Comments

A lot of you know me for writing posts about making money online or driving traffic, so after receiving several emails about not talking about monetization much anymore, I decided that I would put a post together on a topic, which I looked for and couldn’t find much information on – Monetizing plugins.

WordPress has provided a huge number of designers and developers with a means of generating a good revenue through the release of premium themes and what this has done is kill the market for those theme designers who used to design themes for free, with the pure intention of just acquiring the odd backlink and extra traffic. Having said that, the second part to what makes WordPress such a great open source framework is the abundance of Plugs.

I am aware that there are premium plugins available on the Internet, but they’re hardly as popular as premium themes and because the same thing hasn’t happened with plugins as it has with themes, there’s still huge potential for plugin developers whose interest is about traffic rather than the bottom line.

wordpress-plugin

With all that in mind, I have been spending some time thinking about monetizing plugins or at least getting an ROI from building a plugin and the various ways developing a plugin could be beneficial to the developer:

  1. Donations – Over time I’ve seen more and more plugins incorporating a donations button on the options panel, with the hopes that users might offer to donate money. Does this work? Well, I’m not too sure and my gut says that it’s probably not too lucrative; I have donated $5 once to a developer, but have used thousands of plugins without donating.
  2. Backlinks – Probably the most obvious method is to incorporate backlinks into the plugin to drive traffic to another website; This could be used to drive traffic to the actual plugin website, which might house adverts or something to that nature or it might drive traffic to a completely different website to create awareness or promote that website.
  3. Footer links – Upon activating a plugin, the plugin could add a footer link the the current theme on the website, which would then fuel (2) above; Another way would be to add a link to the blogroll on the website – I would suggest not having this automated, but rather asking the blogger if it’s OK by the means of a checkbox, for example.
  4. Automated Blog Post – I was chatting to Wogan about this topic and he suggested the ability for the plugin to automatically publish a blog post, which promotes the plugin. So, if the person using the plugin likes the plugin, they wouldn’t need to write a review, it would be automated.
  5. iFrame Adsense – Alex King, includes an iFrame in his plugin options panel, which has the source set to his website, so basically his website loads inside the iFrame, which is a great way to market a website. You could adapt such an approach to include Adsense or any other advert you would like to appear there – Be it CPC adverts, banners to promote another plugin or website, ect. One great thing about this is that you could control what the bloggers see, externally.

These are just some simple ideas, which came to mind and felt I would share.

Do you have anything to add to the list?

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