WordPress For iPhone
July 23, 2008 | Leave a Comment
The WordPress iPhone application has been released. It seems to work well. It supports the following features:
- basic blogging
- tagging
- categories
- password protecting posts
- adding images from phone or camera
- local drafts
A couple of significant restrictions:
- no rich text editing
- can’t add an image to a post adding an image to a post automatically puts it at the end
- no landscape mode
Tags: blog, blogging, iphone, wordpress
Jason Brightman Design
July 22, 2007 | 1 Comment
One of the more interesting/exciting things I was exposed to while at WordCamp 2007 was the design work of Jason Brightman. His designs are bending what would be expected out of WordPress for look and feel. Frankly they look more professional.
As I think about my next theme (I know I’m overdue), I hope to take some lessons from this.
Tags: brightman, design, jason brightman, redesign, theme, wordcamp, wordcamp 2007, wordpress
Arrival at WordCamp 2007
July 21, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Casey, Matt, and I are all at WordCamp 2007 this weekend in San Francisco, CA.
For the moment I’m most excited about hearing John C. Dvorak speak in person. I’ve been paying attention to what he says about tech since 1997 on ZDTV when I was first getting interested in technology. Now I tune in weekly to hear him on TWiT.
This is also my first time in San Francisco, so I’m hoping to get a chance to check out a bunch of the city too.
Tags: ca, california, john c dvorak, san Francisco, twit, wordcamp, wordpress, zdtv
New Improved Bsuite! Or Not…
July 24, 2006 | 5 Comments
Casey released bsuite b2v6 today. This is a fantastic plugin for WordPress which does a lot of heavy lifting and can help to better leverage the long tail of your content. Frankly I wouldn’t run WordPress without it. This bug fix release clears up a lot of little nagging problems, including some substantial performance improvements. Best of all is the “Top Movers” section that will show you stories that are performing better than they usually do. This is an indicator of stories that have somehow become hot.
OK, now for the downside, at least from my perspective… Over the last pile of months running Bsuite I had rolled a few of my own modifications and enhancements. I’ve started rolling these back in, it’s a work in progress. You can grab my slightly modified version with this functionality added back in, I’m affectionately calling it bsuite b2v6z. The ‘z’ on the end indicates you are running my tweaked version. As Casey rolls out new versions I’ll try to stay on top of things and release this derivative work out to the happy masses! With each release, hopefully I can continue to get Casey to roll in some of my changes.
For anyone wondering why I’d bother doing this, well…
1) I’m not the kind of guy who runs anything “baseline”
2) Casey can be slow about new releases so I might as well do it then worry about convincing him later
3) It is GPL’d so I can!
Tags: bsuite, casey bisson, plugin, wordpress
FeedBurner
May 18, 2006 | 5 Comments
Reading an article about Blog optimization yesterday (I lost the link…), I was pointed at a service called FeedBurner. Basically you install a plugin that takes over managing your RSS feed. So, you’re thinking, “I have an RSS feed, it works, who cares?” Well I thought the same thing and this is what sparked my curiosity.
It turns out FeedBurner rocks!
Before I go to far into why I love this service, first let me say, it is a breeze to install and enable. So, not trying it out is just plain lazy. If you don’t like it, come back and tell me why in the comments, but anyway, it’s easy to install so have at it.
The first of the two main features I like is getting statistics on who’s reading and clicking through to my stuff from feeds. The graphs are pretty and I now have an idea about readership through readers.
The second is the cool stuff they can add to the bottom of articles in feeds. Open up your reader and look at my feed. Along the bottom are some links like “Add a Comment”, “Email This”, “Digg This!”, etc. You can have FeedBurner add all kinds of sweet stuff to your articles, these are called FeedFlares.
My final comment on the service is that the overall style of the interface they use is awesome. Their help text is personable and entertaining while pointing useful things out and giving great help.
Tags: aggregate, blog, blogging, feed, feed burner, feedburner, feedflare, plugin, rss, wordpress
Great Stats
March 23, 2006 | 1 Comment
It turns out I love stats. I’m sometimes amazed at how many different statistics I poke at on a regular basis.
Inside of Wordpress I use the phenomenal bsuite. Basically this keeps track of my individual story reads, incoming search terms, as well as tagging my posts and building related story references at the bottom of each post. If you run Wordpress, get bsuite, it rules.
There are more general web like stats that are often needed. For example, user browser, screen resolution, country of origin, time of day traffic, broken links, adword conversion, etc. These things are all handled superbly by Google Analytics.
Sometimes however, I want to compare my overall stance with other blogs on the net. For this I (like most) turn to Technorati. They do a great job of ranking known blogs on the internet both in general and based on certain tags or keywords. It’s good to know where you stand, but even better to have others to compare against.
Finally, my favorite site of all: Alexa. Alexa is an Amazon property which ranks the top few million websites. For the top 100,000, they provide detailed traffic analysis and graphs. While working for a major internet company, I became very familiar with Alexa as a daily tool to measure our success against our competition. Especially in internet advertising, traffic is important.
Ken recently pointed me at Pub Sub as another site to check out stats on my blog, but overall I find many of the numbers here questionable. Compare some blogs you are familiar with and I think you’ll see my complaints clearly.
If anyone has any other great stats packages or web services they know and follow, let me know. I’m always looking to feed this strange addiction.
Tags: advertising, adwords, alexa, blog, blogging, bsuite, google, google analytics, internet advertising, plugin, plugins, pubsub, statistics, technorati, web, web development, web statistics, wordpress
See More Dick
March 21, 2006 | 17 Comments
Dick Hardt recently published a video of his newest presentation titled “Who is the Dick on your site?” This video is from his talk at ETech and was apparently the first time he gave it. Therefore, it lacked a lot of the polish of his previous talk on Identity 2.0.
He talks about a pile of technologies like OpenID and Passport explaining with great graphics how many of these work, and then basically tries to sell us on sxore. I’ve yet to dig deeply an truly try sxore out, but intend on doing so within the week. For now, I setup my account there and have installed the Wordpress plugin. Check back for more on that later.
Update/Warning: If you are running a recent version of bsuite with database driven tags (currently in private alpha release), do not install sxore. Something is incompatible in the installer and will cause all your tags to be deleted.
Tags: bsuite, Dick Hardt, identity, identity management, identity20, openid, passport, sxip, sxore, wordpress