Archive for June, 2009

26 Jun 2009

the day michael jackson died

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Posted in Work | 5 Comments

Michael Jackson died late yesterday evening (GMT), 25th June. RIP. I’m gutted.

I’m by no means a hardcore / fanatical fan but i had booked a trip to London to see him perform at one of his 50 sell out concert dates in London starting next month.

Michael Jackson 1958-2009 RIP
Creative Commons License photo credit: Dallas1200am

I’ll still be going to London because i’ve flights, tickets for other events and accommodation all booked and paid for but there’s gonna be one massive hole now in the trip and there’s nothing i can do about it…

Saturday evening, July 18th 2009 is not gonna be the same for me… (night i had tickets for).

I had always prepared / accepted that he might not be able to perform but death was never one of the thoughts that had crossed my mind. I’m sure there’s always gonna be conspiracy theories from now on about how he faked his own death (with 50 concerts and millions of $ at stake) but the world has lost it’s modern day Elvis Pressley, JFK, Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana etc…

Michael Jackson – the popstar – was probably the greatest musician of all time and you can have nothing but respect for the man for that reason alone. This is one of those horrible days where somebody you don’t know dies yet you feel like it’s a friend or family member.

I’ll get over it and get on with life and so will other people… but for his family & kids in particular, time will probably stand still today, tomorrow and for the forseeable future.

YouTube Preview Image
25 Jun 2009

I’m now a flickr pro user

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Posted in Work | 4 Comments

For the past few days, flickr had been reminding me about how i’d uploaded almost 200 images. Once you upload more than that, you lose the ability to view and control old images (you can only view your most recent 200).

Rossmore Park, Monaghan

Flickr Pro Membership is $25/year and removes those restrictions plus it gives you other little perks like tracking statistics and unlimited ‘sets’ (photo albums).

Because i now use flickr almost exclusively to host images for this blog (like the one above), they save me bandwidth plus offer a great service. The are some really cool flickr desktop and mobile tools not to mention wordpress plugins. Flickr is the king of image storage online and it’s one of the few online services i’m happy to pay for.

flickr pro user

At $25, i thought it was worth it – actually, i’d probably pay more for it but *shhh* don’t tell flickr that ;-)

So now that i have unlimited uploads, i’ll be using the hell out of it and uploading literally hundreds of images i have here stored offline on my phone & PC’s. My flickr account can then act as a nice backup too for all my images.

You guys can expect loads more pictures and i also hope to add a creative commons license to them all so that other people can use them too provided they give me credit.

It’ll be a slow painful process though – organizing images offline is one thing… doing it online is a much slower process simply due to the fact they all have to be uploaded and tagged, described etc…

However it will be worth it. It encourages me to take pictures and it also gives you people a better insight in to my life which is ultimately one of the main goals of this blog.

24 Jun 2009

10 under rated wordpress plugins

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Posted in Work | 6 Comments

WordPress is hands down, the best content management system in the world. It’s open source, it’s got a huge community of developers and theme designers and there are plugins out there that can do just about anything. Here are just 10 of my favourite under-rated plugins that transform wordpress in to much more than just a blogging platform…

1. Google Analytics Dashboard

analytics

Fancy having google analytics integrated within your wordpress dashboard? Thought so. At a glance you can see analytics data once you login to your admin panel.

Download Plugin | Plugin Website

2. Flutter

flutter

It’s basically a CMS within a CMS and adds a whole range of cool features to wordpress like ‘in place’ editing (think flickr) & custom write panels (for quick posting or idiot proof posting if you’re building sites for clients!).

Download Plugin | Plugin Website

3. Adminimize

adminize

Adminize allows you to hide menu’s within the admin panel. So let’s say you’re building a site for someone with ZERO web experience. Hide all the ‘settings’ and ‘plugins’ menus and crap like that – just leave them with ‘add new post’ so that even the most clueless person will figure out how to add content – they only have one option :mrgreen:

Download Plugin | Plugin Website

4. wp-db manager

db

Speaking from experience, it’s very important your database is backed up and optimized as much as possible. If you install billions of plugins like me and then ditch them after 2 seconds, most of them leave their crap behind in your database and the average user doesn’t realise it. This plugin allows you to repair and optimize your database with a few clicks. It’s a bit like running some sort of cleaning software on a PC – the first time you run it, expect a massive boost in performance afterwards… from then on, run it regularly just to keep your house in order.

Download Plugin | Plugin Website

5. Exec-PHP

execphp

This little gem has saved me on many occassions. Want to put something in a sidebar quickly? Fire in your php in to this widget and it’ll do it for you.

Download Plugin | Plugin Website

6. Insights

insights

This blog now contains almost 1400 blog posts. I’m constantly quoting myself and linking back to past articles, so if i had to manually crawl through the blog page by page to find the article i’m looking for i’d quickly crack up. Insights allows you to search and find post urls, images etc… from within your dashboard. Very handy for those larger blogs and lazy people ;-)

Download Plugin | Plugin Website

7. Photodropper

photodropper

How cool would it be if you could google an image, rip it and use it as your own? Unfortunately we can’t do that :-( but we can use photodropper which allows us to search for creative commons images to use on our blog. Simply write a post, search for a picture and insert the one you fancy. Photodropper automatically adds a little link back to the creator. It saves bandwidth, saves you’re ass from getting hit with copyright infringement notices and it’s pretty quick and easy to use too.

Download Plugin | Plugin Website

8. My Page Order

order

WordPress can be pretty crappy in areas as well, don’t get me wrong. A great example would be their ‘page order’ system. Quite simply, it sucks. Luckily, some kind hearted developer came up with a nice drag and drop solution called ‘my page order’ which does page ordering like it should be done ;-)

Download Plugin | Plugin Website

9. wp-ecommerce

shop

Want a shopping cart feature? Wait, come back, close those os commerce and zen cart links…. wordpress can do the job too. wp-ecommerce plugin is a beautiful shopping cart plugin which has tonnes of features and because it uses wordpress that makes it cool :mrcool:

Download Plugin | Plugin Website

10. Private WordPress

login

Again, this should be standard in wordpress – it allows you to restrict access to your site to just admins or users or whoever you want. Let’s say you’re launching a new site and don’t want anyone to see it. Just enable this plugin and everyone else will be sent to the login page. The plugin also allows you to add a custom message to the login page.

Download Plugin | Plugin Website

23 Jun 2009

blog goals for next 6 months

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It’s pretty clear this blog is once again going to smash it’s own records in 2009.

From Jan 1st 2009 up until yesterday, smemon.com has had over 65,000 unique visits & 82,000 pageviews in 2009 (less than 6 months in).

2009

In 2008 (over 12 months) smemon.com received just over 80,000 unique visits and 127,000 pageviews.

2008

The blog ended 2008 with 125 feedburner subscribers. It’s now up to 300+ thanks largely to a change feedburner made a few days ago.

feedc

So stats are always on the rise. Traffic is averaging over 360 unique visits / day now which is incredible really for a small personal blog.

Anyway, i never just sit back and admire… i’m eager to get past the 100,000 unique visitor mark as quickly as possible and i’m also setting myself a target of 500 feedburner subscribers by the end of the year which means i need to get 200 from somewhere over the next 6 months.

Basically, it means i have to start producing better content and more lists, more personal stuff etc… there is no danger of me slacking off or getting fed up – the last day i didn’t publish a post was April 15th. Since, then i’ve blogged for 69 consecutive days and i’m setting myself another challenge of blogging daily for the rest of 2009.

It will require ‘cheating’ by scheduling the odd post here and there (for example when i’m in london next month) but 99% of my posts are written & published ‘live’.

So by the end of 2009, i want smemon.com to record;

  • over 130,000 unique visits.
  • over 500 feedburner subscribers.
  • completed 260 days of consecutive blogging.

If i manage all that, i’ll be extremely happy and proud of 2009′s performance. It will move this blog in to another league all together… i’ll go in to 2010 owning one of the largest personal blogs in the country.

Yesterday i made some minor but essential changes to the blog and i’ll continue to make changes when i feel they’re needed. It is important though that i continue to set goals and targets for this blog and remind myself of them in posts like this.

22 Jun 2009

improvements made to the blog

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I said yesterday i’d be spending most of my day today going through this blog and getting things done. That’s exactly what i’ve been doing. Here’s a list of the changes i’ve made;

  • New 468 x 60 banner ad
  • New ‘design‘ page
  • Updated advertise page
  • Dropped 10 unused tables from database
  • Optimized database
  • Changed paged order / sub page order
  • Updated all plugins to latest versions
  • Reduced xhtml errors on homepage from 29 to 18 (a lot are cause by essential plugins)
  • Links / CSS / colours more consistent
  • Added pagination to homepage
  • Added a lifestream feature to footer
  • New ‘popular posts’ section in sidebar
  • Updated 404 error page which now displays error + a list of popular posts
  • Added Google analytics within admin dashboard

The major noticeable changes are obviously the new banner ad slot at the top of the page and the new ‘popular posts’ section in the sidebar. Neither of these were particularly easy to get right – it took me hours to get them both working properly with wordpress 2.8 and integrated with this blog’s theme.

-1 plugins para actualizar
Creative Commons License photo credit: Milleiroâ„¢

The ‘popular posts’ section is powered by the ‘popularity contest‘ plugin and the new banner ad is powered by ‘oio publisher‘ (along with my regular button ads on the sidebar). I also came up with the design for the current banner ad slot which i’m pretty proud of :smile:

So in general, lots of changes, lots of improvements and most of them good. This site has grown from day 1 and this year traffic will be hitting 6 figures (unique visits) for the first time ever. It’s a good time for me right now and it’s a good time for smemon.com but i’m not happy to stand still… there will be more growth.

I’ll be blogging about stats tomorrow but in the mean time, let me know what you think about all of the above changes and if you’d like to see any more…

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