These guys are soooo sick!!!
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Top 10 Biggest and Best Jumps Ever
Sunday, April 25th, 2010
Earth Day
Sunday, April 25th, 2010I realize that Earth Day was a few days ago, but this is a great Earth Day video that a friend sent me.
Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.
Google doesn’t hate me afterall
Saturday, March 6th, 2010There are two ways you can create a blog powered by WordPress — 1. WordPress.com a free, WordPress hosted, more limited installation, or; 2. WordPress.org a self hosted, more complicated, and more powerful installation. Both of them have their pros and cons and WordPress support oulines the difference as follows:
WordPress.com Benefits
- It’s free and much easier to setup
- Everything is taken care of: setup, upgrades, spam, backups, security, etc
- Your blog is on hundreds of servers, so it’s highly unlikely it will go down due to traffic
- Your posts are backed up automatically
- You get extra traffic from blogs of the day and tags
- You can find like-minded bloggers using tag and friend surfer
- Your login is secure (SSL) so no one can get into your account if you use wifi
WordPress.com Cons
- We provide 70+ themes (and adding more every day) which you can modify and edit the CSS, but you cannot run a custom theme*
- You can’t hack the PHP code behind your blog*
- You can’t upload plugins
WordPress.org Benefits
- Ability to upload themes
- Ability to upload plugins
- Great community
- Complete control to change code if you’re technically minded
WordPress.org Cons
- You need a good web host, which generally costs $7-12 a month, or thousands of dollars per month for a high traffic site
- Requires more technical knowledge to set up and run
- You’re responsible for stopping spam
- You have to handle backups
- You must upgrade the software manually when a new version comes out
- If you get a huge spike in traffic (like Digg or Slashdot) your site will probably go down unless you have a robust hosting setup
Why do I share all of this with you, you ask???
Well, I have hosted several sites on WordPress.com and one of my favorite features is that almost the second you publish a posting, search engines like Google and Yahoo index your post. Naturally, when I decided to switch josh.net from a Joomla powerd site to WordPress.org powered site I assumed that this great feature would follow. Wrong!
I began creating new entries in josh.net and it was taking DAYS for Google to index them. I checked robots.txt and nothing was procluding the search engines from indexing or crawling my pages. I checked my .htaccess. I check the update services feature of WordPress.org and my site was sending update through Ping-O-Matic. For the life of me, I could not figure out what was wrong.
Right about the time I was going to give up, I came across Joseph Scott’s blog and information on a plugin RSSCloud that he created for the self hosted WordPress.org sites. It turns out that this plugin is automatically installed and activated on all WordPress.com sites, but if you are running your own WordPress.org installation you need to install this yourself. If you are looking for more technical information I encourage you to check out Joseph’s blog.
Twitter – must read
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010I’m not new to Twitter, but have had a very hard time getting “into it”. I’ll tweet for a few days in a row and then I may not tweet again for weeks or months. This is definitely not a successful approach to Twitter. Last week I sat down for drinks with my buddy Chris Reimer, Social Media Expert, to discuss how he utilizes Twitter as a tool (he is very successful with it).
What I came away with is that Twitter is deceptively easy to use. Meaning, it seems very easy to use on the surface. Let me clarify, Twitter is not difficult to use, actually an idiot could USE it, but you need to know a few tips and tricks in order for you to understand how to UTILIZE Twitter. Whether you use it to keep up with friends or to market your brand to a worldwide audience I imagine your goal would be to get the most from it, right? What would be the point of complicating your life with another thing to check or mess with unless it will somehow make your life easier or provided some type of ROI.
Over good conversation and beers Chris was kind enough to share his secrets with me…not like he had a choice after those Guinnesses! Today he also wrote a blog post with some of those tips 7 Twitter tips. If you are a Twitter novis or pro, I would highly suggest you check out what ole’ boy has to say.
My WordPress theme
Monday, March 1st, 2010Eventually I plan on creating a very unique custom theme for Josh.net, but until that point in time I have decided to stick with the default theme that ships with WordPress for reasons I outline below.
I spent a lot of time looking through the gazillions of templates available through WordPress and had a very hard time finding one that I could respect for both its creativity and for being technically sound. Let’s face it, picking a theme for your blog is a very, very big decision. You want it to look nice, but you also need it to perform well behind the scenes (at least if you are hoping for search engine traffic). One might have great style, but when you analyze its compatibility with plugins or valid CSS it would fail. Just as you could find a template with great CSS and XHTML, but it would look like crap. So at the end of the day I decided that ‘default’ is super clean, nicely organized, easy to read AND it has valid XHTML, CSS, compatibility with many plugins and not to mention very SEO friendly. Also, since so many people use the template there is great advice in forums on how to customize and work with the template.
After I decided to stick with ‘default’ I wanted to understand more about who created it, and here is what I came up with…
Today WordPress ships with a standard template named ‘default’, but that was not always its name. When Michael Heilemann developed the theme he named it ‘Kubrick’ after his favorite director, Stanley Kubrick. On first brush I wondered what one had to do with the other, and then it hit me. When you come across a ‘Kubrick’ WP theme site you instantly know what the theme is, what platform the site runs on etc., in the same way that you would recognize a ‘Kubrick’ film at first glance. According to Mr. Heilemann’s website, ‘Kubrick’ was born in the summer of 2004.
In the coming months WordPress will be releasing WordPress Version 3.0. It will be very intersting to see what changes they make to the template.
Goodbye Olympics
Sunday, February 28th, 2010Canada, thank you for hosting a beautiful and exciting 21st Winter Olympic Games. It has been the most exciting games in memory and surly 16 wonder days that the world will never forget. Congratulations to the athletes, win or loose your sportsmanship is an example to people all over the world, and that makes you all winners. Let this remind the world that we can all live together in peace, regardless of geographic borders, religious beliefs or the color of our skin.
Let’s get it started
Saturday, February 27th, 2010Ok, so I removed my installation of Joomla and I am going to try WordPress for my blog now. Stay tuned.
CommentLuv
Thursday, May 6th, 2010I just installed CommentLuv on my site. According to it’s creators:
I’ll let you know how it goes. I am idsabling comments on this post, but you can comment on any of the other ones.
Tags: CommentLuv, WordPress
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