WordPress has become the de facto blogging platform: particularly for blogs that are to be self-hosted. On first installation, however, it’s like a blob of plasticine – formless and blank, waiting to be morphed into, er, Morph. Design is part of this, of course, and Wordpress benefits from tens of thousands of themes, most available for free which can then be customised by those to whom CSS manipulation is not a dark art.

However, if you are creating a blog as a traffic generator for your business or as a business itself, your time should be spent on attracting and engaging with your target audience rather than heavily editing the look and feel. You’ll find below ten tips for getting your blog noticed. It goes without saying (surely) that your blog posts must  be interesting, relevant, written by you (not harvested from an articles site) and targeted at your intended audience – no plugin or technique can rescue the terminally uninteresting from obscurity.

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It’s been ten glorious days since Steve Jobs announced the Apple iPad, enough time for us all to digest the idea behind what Apple promises to be a new type of computer. And I must admit that my own feelings about the device have changed in that time too.

I didn’t like the look of the iPad when I first saw it, and it didn’t help that Jobs made some easy-to-ridicule claims. How can you suggest that a slate PC, with only a software keyboard as standard, is the best type of product for email? Or that a platform that doesn’t support Flash is the best way to browse the internet?

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Recently, I’ve spent an unhealthy amount of time in the company of 3G dongles for our “Mobile Broadband Con” feature, which will be hitting the shelves on 11 February.

One of the aforementioned cons of mobile broadband is image compression – a process where the networks water down the images on websites to conserve bandwidth. The end result is that sites such as the BBC homepage look as if they’ve been dipped in the bath, and in my experience, the compression barely saves any time at all on page downloads.

Many networks allow you to switch the compression off if you wish. Virgin Media doesn’t, on the rather dubious premise that it’s helping customers stay within their data download limits.

However, there is a sneaky way to beat the Virgin image washout, which I accidentally stumbled across during my tests. Virgin piggybacks on the T-Mobile network, and if you download T-Mobile’s Web’n'Walk Accelerator software, you’ll find that it can be used to adjust the compression on Virgin, too.

Bye bye Infotec, at least in the UK.  The massive photocopier company has found it prudent to merge into the company that actually manufactures its copiers and multi-function devices – Ricoh.

If you search the web for drivers to use a networked copier as a printer then eventually you will find the page that summarises the results of the Infotec/Ricoh merger – a handy resource if you are looking at a room full of Infotec devices and you need (as I did) to update a machine’s printer driver. I like web pages like this: no flimflam, very concise and neatly divided up by topic.

My problem was remarkably simple: looking at an Infotec IS 2430 multifunction machine I couldn’t immediately translate the Infotec model number to a Ricoh one. Reading the tone of that terse and useful page, and realising there was a phone number right by the “downloads” URL, I figured that a call might help me to find the model number conversion table more quickly than a lot of Googling about. I often find that companies in mid or recent merger tend to leave websites not updated, so of course it’s sensible of the new improved Ricoh to include the phone number.

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Last week, I had to drive to Brussels. I took the overnight ferry by Stena Line from Harwich which plonked me into Hook of Holland at about 7am in the morning. Ideal for a fast sprint to Brussels, or so I thought. Thick fog everywhere, traffic queues everywhere, and Rotterdam was a mess.

Fortunately I had two TomTom GPS units with me. Firstly, is the trusty top of the range 940T with the live traffic update data facility. Plus I had the UK and European maps version of the TomTom software on my iPhone. I had also recently bought the new TomTom active car mount kit which has a GPS aerial unit within the mounting. So it was going to be interesting to try two versions of ostensibly the same thing.

Getting the iPhone into the mount wasn’t easy — it didn’t click in well, and felt stiff and awkward. But it worked out, and was soon mounted alongside the 940T.

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Back in the middle of January I blogged about the possibility that Nvidia’s latest round of GPUs, codenamed Fermi, might darken the door of the PC Pro Lab sometime in 2010, even though we’d been assured that the new chips would be ready for a graphics card Labs in December.

The blog attracted a fair few comments, mainly because I’d offered a prize: guess the date when we take delivery of Fermi cards, and I’ll send you some assorted gubbins from the deepest, darkest depths of the Labs.

Now, though, the competition seems to be heating up: Nvidia’s UK PR manager, Ben Berraondo, has revealed that the two first Fermi parts out of the door will be the GeForce GTX 470 and 480. We’re relieved to see that Nvidia hasn’t decided to tinker with its naming scheme again and, if the firm’s previous form is any sort of indicator, these will both be reasonably high-end parts.

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Twitter gets an awful lot of criticism as being a useless waste of time, but a friend just tweeted about something that I reckon is the most brilliant use of the technology ever: a tweeting oven called BakerTweet. Now confession first: this isn’t new. In fact, the BakerTweet was installed last year. But this is the first I’ve heard of it and it reminded me just how fantastic technology can be.

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Few things annoy me more than large companies whose web-based eshop indicates a level of stock which is, in reality, a total fiction. They don’t have the stock, it’s just there as a ruse to get you to hand over your credit card details and place the order with them.

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Google UK held an open evening for journalists last night, with the introduction of Chrome OS being its major theme. However, it also had four samples of the Google Nexus One for us attendees to play with – thus this first look review. Read more

In a few months I’m buying a flat. It’s not quite finished yet, but I’ve been inside it and I’ve seen the specs, all of which look impressive, except for one tiny problem. The block will have a communal Sky dish and connection points in every property, but I was told this week that cable won’t be an option.

This is bad. Very bad.

I’ve been with Virgin broadband in various properties for nearly four years now, and I’m genuinely despondent at the thought of switching to ADSL. Some of you will probably bring up traffic shaping, customer service and other less appealing aspects of Virgin’s offering, but I’m not listening. The blinkers have gone up and my opinion is set in stone: cable broadband just works, and I can’t live with anything less.

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