Recent My Views

  • The Mystery of SEO

    by maceman

    Way back in December 2007 I posted SEO is it a Con purely and simply because I had no understanding about SEO,I had just started this site and when investigating SEO it just seemed a big con.

    Well the better part of 12 months later have my views changed .Not really ,this site is for fun and hopefully helps one or two people along the way,but I can understand now why SEO is important to the business community.Its pretty simple really get noticed and people will generally buy from you,get trusted and they almost certainly will. 

    I suppose the real difficulty is the amount of sites that promise to get your site rated number one and all that sort of blurb I mean who can you trust.

    And then you have to consider the Search Engines themselves ,what are the rules to get rated is it just good content etc.it seems to me they could change their rating criteria just to ensure that their profits are not harmed.

    SEO confuses me so I generally ignore it and if someone finds this site from Google and then uses one of the affiliate links to buy something I am happy,actually very happy because it does not happen that often.

    If you are interested in the SEO mystery this site should help you unravel it and just maybe it will make more sense to you then it does to me.

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    Filed in: My Views on September 19th, 2008

  • Affiliate Links

    by maceman

    So does loading your site with Affiliate links really pay dividends.

    I suspect given that my conversion rate is pretty low that there is some reluctance on the visitor to accept that there is nothing dodgy going on when they click on a link that takes them to a totally different site.

    If you consider that I posted about a TV from Play that I purchased (and I really did buy it) it got loads of views and clicks to Plays site yet not one sale.I wonder how many visitors went on to Play and purchased directly.

    I think there might be some view that sites like this make massive amounts of money through using Affiliate links,and I am sure there are sites that do,unfortunately this is not one of them.

    Anyway the aim of this site as never been to make me a vast fortune its just a bit of fun that every now and then generates a bit of cash that hopefully covers the hosting costs of the site.

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    Filed in: My Views on September 16th, 2008

  • AdRotate by Arnan De Gans

    by maceman

    I have installed the plugin AdRotate by Arnan De Gans on this site and on www.ipod2go.co.uk .

    This Wordpress plugin will allow

    Add and manage the code from the dashboard and show a random banner, or multiple, on your site. The plugin supports groups for banners allowing you to tie certain banners to different areas of the website. Easy management from the dashboard allows you to quickly oversee, add and edit banner code. Previewing of banners when editing them. 

    The author as provided the following features

    • Show random banners
    • Put random banners in pages or posts
    • Activate or de-activate banners at will
    • Edit/update banners
    • Preview banners on edit
    • Per banner/function to set a specific banner or keep it random
    • Multiple groups per banner location
    • Works with Google Ads
    • Easy in use
    • Integrates with WordPress dashboard, yet allows you to completely style to your own need

    I have not noticed any issues as yet so fingers crossed that the managing of the in post adverts will become a lot easier.

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    Filed in: My Views on August 7th, 2008

  • WordPress 2.6

    by maceman

    So the latest version of Wordpress is here.I am waiting a few weeks before I upgrade this Shifter site just to ensure there are no major bugs.

    From the Wordpress team
    I’m happy to announce that version 2.6 of WordPress.org is now available, almost a month ahead schedule. Version 2.6 “Tyner,” named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5.

    Here’s a more textual overview of what’s hawt in 2.6:

    Post Revisions: Wiki-like tracking of edits

    With the power of modern computers, it’s silly that we still use save and editing metaphors from the time when the most common method of storage was floppy disks. WordPress has always respected the importance of your writing with auto-save, and now we’re taking that to another level by allowing you to view who made what changes when to any post or page through a super-easy interface, much like Wikipedia or a version control system.

    Differences between two versions of posts.

    This is handy on any blog in case you make a mistake and want to go back to an older version of a post, and it’s super handy for multi-author blogs where you can see every change tracked by person.

    Press This!: Post from wherever you are on the web

    A few months ago on my blog we started a conversation about the posting bookmarklet in WordPress and which systems we should look to for inspiration, like Flock, FriendFeed, Facebook, Tumblr, and Delicious. From these suggestions and the Quick Post plugin by Josh Kenzer, we developed a Press This bookmark you can add to your toolbar that provides a fast and smart popup to do posts to your WordPress blog:

    Screenshot of Press This interface.

    For example, if you click “Press This” from a Youtube page it’ll magically extract the video embed code, and if you do it from a Flickr page it’ll make it easy for you to put the image in your post. On my blog I’ve been experimenting with using different categories and the in_category() function — such as video, quote, aside, et cetera — to create a more tumblelog-like format.

    Shift Gears: Turbo-speed your blogging

    Gears is an open source browser extension project started by Google that developers like us can use to give you features we wouldn’t normally be able to. There are a lot of things we can do with Gears in the future, but in this release we’ve stuck to using what’s called a “Local Server” to cache or keep a copy of commonly-used Javascript and CSS files on your computer, which can speed up the loading of some pages by several seconds (they just pop right up!). You can install Gears for Firefox or Internet Explorer, with support for Safari and Opera pending. WordPress works just fine without it, you just get a little extra juice when you have it installed.

    Theme Previews: See it before your audience does

    Now when you select a theme it pops up a window that shows the theme live with all your content, instead of immediately making it active on your site. This is great for just test driving themes before making a switch over publicly, and it is also helpful when you are developing a theme and need to test it but don’t want everybody to see your ongoing mistakes development.

    Here are some of the smaller features and improvements in 2.6:

    • Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
    • Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
    • Bulk management of plugins.
    • A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
    • Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
    • Plugin update notification bubble.
    • Customizable default avatars.
    • You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
    • Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
    • Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
    • You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
    • Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.
    • Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
    • You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
    • A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
    • Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.
    • Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.

    Developer Notes

    WordPress.org had over 75 people contributing code to WordPress 2.6. In addition to the core commit team we had contributions from Dion Hulse, Austin Matzko, Otto42, Benedict Eastaugh, and pishmishy. AaronCampbell and Marco Zehe provided more than a few patches. Back among the top code contributors is Jacob Santos. Alex Concha continues to have WordPress’ back. Joining bug reporting and gardening elite are hakre, Simon Wheatley, mtekk, and Matty Rob. Finally, congratulations to our Peter Westwood on your recent wedding! I’m also proud to announce we’re adding a new core committer to the team: Andrew Ozz (azaozz) has been a huge help to the core team this year, particularly around TinyMCE and making the WYSIWYG something that works for you, not against you.

    Because of the new capabilities to make WordPress a clean SVN checkout, plugin and theme authors should do their best to handle forms and posts through WP rather than trying to post to their files directly, here’s a quick Codex article about how to do it using our forward-compatible APIs.

    Upgrading

    2.6 is pretty much identical to 2.5 from a plugin and theme compatibility point of view, so upgrades from 2.5 should be pretty painless. The 2.5 branch will no longer be maintain so everyone is encouraged to upgrade. Our standard 3-step upgrade instructions apply to this release. There were at least 1,984,047 downloads of the 2.5 series, the fastest growing release we’ve ever had, and I think all of those people will find 2.6 adds a level of polish that really makes WP a pleasure to use every day. (At least I do. :))

    Easter Egg

    There have been rumors and allegations that there was a so-called “easter egg” added to 2.6 early in its development. These rumors and allegations are completely false!

    P.S. If you’re a fan of WordPress, consider joining our fan page on Facebook.

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    Filed in: My Views on July 19th, 2008

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