Tag Archives: wordpress

DIGTD.com is running WordPress 2.7

Just a quick post to test out the posting functionality of WordPress 2.7 which I upgraded this blog to earlier today.

All seems in order, had a sight issue with some of the plugins not getting re activated after my upgrade.

I am very impressed with the new WordPress interface. I think this is probably the biggest cosmetic update that I have ever seen to WordPress and I am going to enjoy learning all the cool ways of using it in the most productive way.

For those of you who are interested, I performed the upgrade from 2.6.3 to 2.7 using the WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin. All went really smooth and worked fine.

If you find anything that is broken or does not work as expected, please let me know.

StumbleUpon – The Second Northern Bloggers Meetup

Well, I have just arrived home from the second Northern UK Bloggers Meetup. After the success of the first meetup, I could not wait to see what else I could learn from the second, and also what people I would meet.

As before, the event was organised by Jamie Harrop and the main speaker for the evening was Tim Nash, who presented a fascinating talk about StumbleUpon. Now, I have not really used StumbleUpon, apart from playing with a paid campaign for one of my other sites at the beginning of this year and it was great to hear Tim, who obviously knows one heck of a lot about StumbleUpon, share a few of his secrets with us. I have already signed up for StumbleUpon and added the toolbar to my installation of Firefox, so let’s see if I can put his great advice to use.

Follow this link to get to Tim’s post that contains his presentation slides and also some more great tips about StumbleUpon

Apart from the usual faces from the last event, there was a couple of new faces in the meetup. One of these was Mike Little from Zed1.com. Mike was one of the founding developers of WordPress and I found out when I got home that I have a book in my bookcase that he wrote about Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress.

I also met and chatted with Al Carlton from Self Made Minds, as well as other blogs. Al seemed like a very knowledgeable and well connected chat that I hope to network with further at future events.

Karyn from Miss Thrifty was also a newcomer to this event. Great to see some women at what is usually a male dominated event.

Well, cannot wait till the next one and I am going now to play with StumbleUpon and also watch some Ryder Cup!

One last thing, Stumbles on this post are most appreciated 😉

Woopra – Track Your Web Site Visitors in Real Time Better than Google Analytics

Woopra Web Analytics
At the Bloggers Meet-up I attended on Friday I had the chance to get a beta invite code for Woopra.

Woopra is a Web Site Analytics program similar in operation to Google Analytics. These type of Analytics differ from the log based Analytics Apps such as AWStats that is provided with most hosting accounts. The reason these differ is that these rely upon Javascript code on each page in order for the Analytics program to work.

In order to start using Woopra, you have to register for an account at the Woopra website. You can then add your websites to your account. If you have a beta invite code, your sites are enabled immediately. If not, you have to wait until they release some more codes and approve your site. I am unaware how long this takes at present.

Once your site is approved, you need to start using the tracking Javascript. There is a WordPress plugin that you enable and then enter the Website ID into the Plugin Configuration Screen, that is found on your WordPress Dashboard. If your site is not WordPress, you need to manually enter the Javascript shown on your Woopra Account just before the tag. I use a PHP Include for the footer for one of my non WordPress sites so this was very easy for me.

To view the Woopra Analytics, you either use the Woopra website, which shows limited information but the best way to view the stats is with the downloadable client. This client is available now for Windows and Mac. The Mac version has just been updated and works now without needing the latest 64bit only Java Runtime.

You enter your Woopra details into the client and it stars receiving stats for your account in real time.

Now, the killer use of Woopra is the real time alerting. You can see visitors as they come to your site in real time, along with information such as the referrer and also what page they are currently on. I have to date not used any tool that comes even close to what is offered by Woopra. You can also interact with the users by opening up a MSN Messenger type window in their browser. This seems like a really powerful tool for sales based companies to track web site usage and attempt to interact with the potential customer in real time as you can see how the visitor came to the site.

I have enabled Woopra on three sites. One is WordPress, one is hand cranked PHP and the other used RapidWeaver. I have got it working fine on all three with no fuss whatsoever.

Below is a screenshot showing a map of the world that shows which nation your visitors are coming from.

Woopra Web Analytics

The screenshot below shows one of the many representations of data. This case for referrers.

Woopra Web Analytics

I know a lot of fellow bloggers and webmasters read this blog. If you have not yet tried Woopra, what are you waiting for. I think this is the best analytics tool I have used and cannot wait to see how it develops in the future.

Northern UK Bloggers Meet-Up

Northern UK Bloggers
On Friday night I attended the first UK bloggers meet-up that was held in the Old Broadcasting House in Leeds City Centre.

The event was organised by Jamie Harrop and Chris Garrett. The aim of the event was to bring together local bloggers who were interested in organising some regular meet-ups and all day events similar to the WordCamp and BarCamp events.

For this first meeting, Jamie Harrop did a presentation about the new Analytics Tool, Woopra. Jamie gave out some Woopra Beta Invite codes in the meeting and I downloaded and installed Woopra for this blog and I must admit that I am very impressed with it so thanks to Jamie for a great presentation.

We then had an around the table where attendees got the chance to tell the others about their blogs. Here is a list of some of the blogs that the attendees to the meet-up had created:

3DogsBark – Personal blog of Andy Mitchel, the creator of GTD Inbox
Chrisg.com – Chris Garretts blog about Blogging and New Media
Gaj-it.com – UK Gadget News and Reviews
JamieHarrop.com – Personal blog about many aspects of life
RubyInside.com – Blog about Ruby and the Rails environment
SuperCarDrives.com – Blog about driving Super Cars
TimNash.co.uk – Personal SEO blog from Tim Nash
Travel-Rants.com – Travel blog covering all aspects of Travel
TheHodge.co.uk – Dominic Hodgson’s personal blog
Zath.co.uk – Tech and Games Blog

I heard about the meeting from the power of social networking. It was via a Twitter post that I heard about the mailing list and then the organising of the event was done through Facebook and mailing lists.

It was a great evening and I look forward to the next meeting which is hopefully going to be an all day affair.

Thank You – 2015 RSS Readers and Counting

On the 25th of January 2008,. I wrote a little note thanking all my readers as I had just hit the 1000 RSS subscriber mark.

Well, I am happy to say that I am now over the 2000 RSS subscriber mark, peaking at 2061 RSS Subscribers.

2000 RSS Readers

I guess 3000 is the next goal. It has taken me 7 months to go from 1000 to 2000. With an increase in posts and a slight widening of the subject matter I have set a goal to ready 3000 by the start of 2009. Fingers crossed that I do it. Just need to spend more time writing about the cool little time saving and productivity hacks that I utilize in order to fit everything into my very hectic life.

Again, thanks to all my readers and I hope you enjoy and get some benefit from my work.

WordPress iPhone App

Just a quick post as I am writing this blog post from my Hotel room in Winchester as I am working away for a while with a client.

The cool thing is that I am writing this using the brand new WordPress App for the iPhone.

The App allows you to add multiple blogs and view, edit, and write new posts.

This will be great for me to write little Twitted type snippets to my blogs although adding images and links may prove hard with no copy and paste yet on the iPhone.

Well, I am going to start my day now. Have a good one!

Upgraded to WordPress 2.5

After waiting a couple of weeks to see if there are any issues, I have today upgraded to WordPress 2.5. I must admit that I am liking the new interface and I am going to spend some time looking into the new features and functionality offered by version 2.5.

Hopefully, I will not inherit any problems so please let me know if you find any.

Also, thanks to all who added me on Facebook and Twitter. Got quite a few of you now on both applications and I am looking forward to interacting with you all in the future.

Shiny New Theme – Illacrimo from Design Disease

Well,

Short of paying $1400 for a fantastic Unique Theme from Unique Blog Designs, as done by ShoeMoney, John Chow, and Kieron, I have changed my theme to the Illacrimo Theme from Design Disease.

I spent some time looking around the web for Themes for this blog and was quite surprised how many exist, and also how many of these are quite bad. A lot of the themes require quite a bit of work to get them looking something like.

When the finances permit, I will go for a more unique theme and brand for this site. One alternative I have found to Unique Blog Designs is a service from the UK called PSD2HTML. These guys take a PSD design file and create standards compliant CSS and HTML code. One option they offer is to create a WordPress theme based upon your design. So, you can get a PSD design done the way you like it, and then these guys create you a WordPress template for around $300. Sounds cool and I would love to hear from anybody who has used these.

I would love to hear any comments you have about my new theme and if it works OK with your browsers. I have tested it in most and apart from a problem with the WordPress MORE tag, all seems fine.