Social Browser
flock logo
The number of social networks out there are increasing every day. Trying to keep up would take a good amount of organisation. It’s the norm that us as users will sign up to the site “that’s in” and after looking about and getting use to the new car smell the initial idea can eventually wear off.
Off the top of my head I know I have an account over at You Tube, Flickr, Facebook, Digg and Stumbleupon. There are many ways to keep up to date with these sites. It could be using a rss feed that you’ve added to your reader or your online presence, netvibes. This is where I introduce Flock. The Flock browser is powered by Mozilla and is aimed at the social side of the web.
Flock is focused on fundamentally evolving the browser, bringing a refreshing new approach to how people use and participate on the web and simplifying social and web-based applications by bringing them one step closer to the user and integrating them directly into the browser.
* source flock.com
Once installed it’s so easy to add all the relevant information so the browser can go away and work its magic. If you like your social networks then this browser could make it easier to compile a daily list of changes, additions and updates. What you waiting for, check out Flock.com
Firefox 3 breaks world record
Last week I posted about FireFox 3 and to help set a new world record. After a couple of days the figures were confirmed and it’s official Firefox 3 breaks Mozilla browser download record. Figures show that 1.6 million downloads took place in the first five hours.
Congratulations to all the took place. Recent browser figures show that FireFox now has a 39% hold over I.E 7 which sits at 26% and I.E 6 at 27%.
Source: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
Help set a world record: Firefox 3
Today FireFox 3 is being released of which spreadfirefox is trying to set a new world record for “most software downloads in 24 hours”. If you want to be part of this new world record it’s simple, just download it from the official page.
Entrecard – First Month
It’s been a month already since I put entrecard on my site. I thought I would start with minimum effort and see what entrecard can give to the site without me having to put time in.
Within the month I have dropped about 350 cards which really isn’t alot considering the upper limit a day is 300. I am still using a default entrecard design aswell which in all seriousness isn’t that nice.
As for other blogs on my entrecard I am getting about 4 a week. Think this has something to do with the fact my blog costs only 8 or 16 ec a day.
Where do I go from here? This week I am going to focus on the design of my entrecard while looking into sites that I personally find interesting that I want to drop on.
Once the above is complete then I will start dropping to the limit allowed and taking note of traffic.
What puts me off as a reader
I read a variety of blogs and forums every week and I would like to focus on a topic that puts me right off, spelling and grammer.
People who blog should always have some sort of quality control. This checklist would involve making sure no mistakes were found, something like the following?
- Check the title has no spelling or grammer mistakes.
- Can the title be expanded on?
- Does the context of the post read right?
- Is the context of the post free from spelling mistakes?
- Is the post structure right in relation to H1 – H5?
- Could an image be used instead of trying to explain something?
What annoys me is that if i start reading an article and such basics aren’t met then I’ll just stop. This is a shame as I have no doubt that the authors who are writing these articles know what they’re talking about but when it comes to the even the basics, it’s a big put off.
Mistakes happen, could be down to being tired, writing in a rush or even having a short attention span. I myself tend to drift off when writing a long post. If I notice myself drifting off I tend to save the post in draft mode and come back to it at a later time. This results in the post having my full attention and being able to go through my checklist before going live.
If you blog be sure to set yourself some standards, step back from it, pretend you’re a reader not an author. Doing this may help not to deter people like myself.
So I joined Entrecard
Yesterday I signed up to entrecard. For anyone not familar with
Entrecard is an easy way to network with other blog owners;
The whole point of this system is that you place a widget somewhere on your blog whereby other bloggers on the network come along and “drop” you. This drop adds 1 credit to you and also the dropper receives 1 credit. As more and more bloggers come along and drop on you the more your blog is worth.
When I say worth I mean part of the widget is used to advertise other blogs. If somone wants to advertise on your widget then they would do it through the campaign section within the entrecard dashboard. The amount of credits is dictated by the amount of drops and the popularity of people wanting to advertise on your blog. For more information check out the entrecard blog.
When you signup you put yourself into a category your site matches. This way other blogs on the same level as you can apply to advertise and can read your blog. Another part of the signup is uploading an image that you can use on your entrecard. Currently I am using one of the basic ones but have found a nice little source of pre-made ones: http://www.romelo.com/2008/04/07/generic-cards-for-entrecard-members/
I’m hesitant to use them though as I am not sure if the images are from Romelo’s own collection or if these have been taken from somewhere else where permission is needed. I tried to post on his post but got an ajax error about not being able to post. I managed to comment on the page and kindly enough Melo posted a comment below confirming that the images can be used. Fantastic. If you click on the above link and get a 404 it’s due to Melo updating it with more templates to use, so check back at a later date.
One of the reasons I joined was to generate some traffic and to read some blogs that I would never normally read or find. Already I have discovered some interesting reads of which I plan on sharing my thoughts 
Whoop so I found a theme..
I started hunting through the many many wordpress themes and finally I found one that I think I can build on
The core of it I think is ideal but I would like to add a bit flare here and there so expect things to slowly change over the duration. Respect going out to WP Remix for the theme WP Premium.
WATCH THIS SPACE 
Let the theme hunt begin
I am not saying I dislike the current theme but it’s just not what I want for the website. There are thousands of wordpress themes out there and over the next couple of days I tend to find one that will suit my needs.
What are my needs? I want a theme that’s bright, fresh and attractive. I want to entice readers into hanging around, read a post, and even subscribe to my feed. I read an article over at Jason Boom’s website that outlines “stop signs” and it’s something that’s stuck with me ever since. I don’t mind playing about with a theme but having a foundation to start from is always a good start.
If you have seen or use a theme you think meets the above then please get in touch or better still leave a comment.
Wordpress plugins – Initial Upload
I have started to upload the 1st batch of wordpress plugins. This includes:
- google-sitemap-generator
- all-in-one-seopack
- socialble
- cforms
- backupwordpress
- commentluv
The plugins were fairly simple to setup however I will be re-visiting the all-in-one-seopack as this needs some thought. cforms looks very nice but will require some preperation before i activate it. I always like to make sure that I have some kind of backup strategy in case something should go wrong. Last but not lease I have enabled commentluv as I see it as a thank you for commenting
If you use a plugin you think is worth mentioning please comment below.
Permalink structure
In my previous post I outlined a partial roadmap of which I plan to follow into building this blog up. One small thing I over looked was permalink structure.
For anyone not familar with permalink:
Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. * http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks
The default for wordpress is http://www.simon-says-online.com/?p=123 where 123 is the post id. I think this looks very boring and for SEO it’s not friendly at all. With most blogging platforms it’s possible to change this, and in wordpress it’s very easy to accomplish. What we’re looking for it found within Dashboard >> Settings >> Permalinks. Within this admin section you’re presented with four options
- default
- day and name
- month and name
- numeric
- custom
I had a url structure in mind which meant that I would have to go custom “/%category%/%postname%/”. If you look at the url of this post you will see that it’s “/wordpress/permalink-structure”. There are many possibilities of which this link can help you achieve your desired structure, Using Permalinks – Wordpress Codex.
If you’ve not thought about your url structure before, well now is the time. It’s not very difficult to change and can help increase exposure.
