WordPress 3.1 review: first look

Thursday, February 24th, 2011

WordPress 3.1 has just been unveiled, with the usual mix of immediately useful changes to the interface and structural improvements that give more options to theme builders.

The first thing you’ll notice on upgrading your site is the Admin Bar at the top, bringing standalone WordPress installations in line with those hosted on WordPress.org. The Admin Bar provides quick access to regularly used functions to any logged-in user with appropriate permissions. Initial reactions to this have been mixed but I like it.

I create sites for clients, many of whom want to update their site themselves and the bar provides a much more obvious and easy to use method to create new posts and pages. The feature can be disabled in your profile if you really don’t like it, but I suspect the next minor update will include an option to disable it globally.

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5 free keyword tools for blog writing ideas

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

Search engines rank your site based on the relevance of the content. They do this by examining the site pages and comparing them to the search phrase typed in by the searcher. They then examine how many inbound links the most relevant page on the website has and, crucially, the quality of those links. In Search Engine Optimisation as in life, quality trumps quantity every time.

At the heart of it all is good content that will attract links to the site and, ultimately, buyers. Each blog entry or page should be about one keyword or keyphrase. But how do you come up with these keywords and, therefore, the blog entries? I’m in the process of optimising my candle-making blog and one of the challenges is knowing what to write about.

Most people will be familiar with the Google Adwords Keyword tool but there are many other ways of finding inspiration. Here are five of my favourites:

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Looking forward to WordPress 3

Monday, March 29th, 2010

WordPress 3 has been slated for release in May and, although this version won’t be an entirely new animal there are a couple of significant changes I’m looking forward to.

Firstly, the MU (multi-user) version is being merged into the mainstream product. WordPress MU enables a single installation to power multiple sites, assuming these sites use the same plugins. MU is the technology behind WordPress.com and is ideally suited to single organisations that want to allow users/members/staff to have their own blogs. The roadmap is clear: soon there will be only one. (more…)

Will Microsoft put bloggers back in their box after IE scare?

Wednesday, December 17th, 2008

The new-found hole in Internet Explorer has certainly sparked a mainstream media storm. My security-expert colleague, Darien Graham-Smith, has been getting more media exposure than the X-Factor winner over the past couple of days, culminating in an appearance on BBC News last night. Meanwhile, I fielded a last-minute call from that veritable hot-house of technical gossip – the Chris Evans show on Radio 2.

The widespread coverage of the IE flaw will be doing Microsoft no favours at a time when it’s struggling to fend off the emerging Google Chrome and the enduringly popular Firefox. Even worse, the pain was entirely self-inflicted.

News of the hole broke on Microsoft’s own Malware Protection Center blog, and while you have to admire the company’s candour, you can’t help but wonder if the bloggers inadvertently spun the threat for more than it was actually worth. 

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