Andys Website

Well Andys site isn’t here yet. But during my chats with him he’s gonna be building his own social bookmarking website. Having just tested Pligg out he seems to be well on his way to building a nice little niche website. You can find his current look at fashion @ cheapclothesrule.wordpress.com. His tongue in cheek opinions on cheap clothes are a good laugh (Rupert the Bear being featured in the Cheap Golf Chic post was pretty damn clever)

Gavins Website

Gav is going one step further and has decided to enter the hugely competitive – and lucrative I guess – golfing market. Selling golf clubs online. From what I’ve seen and heard should be finished in the next couple of weeks. Have a look @ GB Golf Gear to see how he’s getting on.

Other Stuff

On a related note I’m just finishing off the final touches to the Whisky Blog I run with Bill, from Spiderwriting. This should be online next week. After much feverish nights with only coffee as my friend I’ve worked out how to develop custom functions for WordPress so that we can start running a more magazine style – and professional – looking blog. I hope to have this done for the tail end of August. Oh and cheers to Colin for having helped enlighten me about the stuff that is possible in WordPress,

Alongside all this I’ve been reading some cool stuff about SNOWL for FireFox – not got it working yet. Also been messing about with Firefox personas (nice idea but my tabs keep vanishing (so get it fixed guys). Away from FireFox I was pleased to see that the guys over @ North South Media have moved into a new office -  and don’t forget the beer you promised me for putting that client onto you :p

L8rs

A blog is a blog is a blog is a blog… isn’t it?

The WordPress theme I saw which just blew my mind is really a simple concept.

Concept – What if I configured a WordPress theme to show my blog embedded in Google Maps?

Result – http://contolini.com/chris/

Holy Mother of all mashups Bat Man! It rocks – I don’t have anything that I could use this for (unfortunately) but I’ll be storing this little baby of an idea away for a rainy day. By the time I get round to messing with the idea it’ll be a ubiquitous WordPress Theme.

WordPress: That’s for Blogs not Websites

If you believe this your losing out on some of the great power that WordPress could be having on your site. I know of an ever growing band of webmasters, esp. website based affiliates, who are using the power of WordPress to make blogs look and act like websites. Magazine themes – think of offline publications powering their magazine sites in WordPress, they’d work so much better: RSS, pings, true communities growing, real conversation would be possible eqaily and quickly esp. if they used WordPress MU. Think the NME giving every journalist a blog, where the readers could get involved with setting the agenda – if the public gets what the public wants. You could use WordPress to do consumer testing like NikeID under the radar and test advertising positions amongst niche markets and more just by having a great magazine theme in WordPress. I’ve been using hacked versions of the Mimbio theme on some test sites lately and they’ve been doing really well at getting increased page views from users as opposed to the same site in a blog looking theme. Theme Playground has a nice little post on Magazine Themes for WordPress.

To Blogfinity and Beyond…

If you have any ideas for a WordPress Theme let us know in the comments below. I’m always looking for strange and crazy ideas to base WordPress based sites on in the future.

Up Smart Update Pinger Plugin for WordPress

The name’s a bit of a mouthful but this plugin is way cool. It replacesthe default ping stuff – due to some of the spamming that your default ping module could be doing in WordPress. By default WordPress pings everytime you update your blog – that includes edits etc – which to me could mean that I was pinging (with the same article) four five times in close sucession. The Up Smart Update Pinger only pings when you update.

But this is not the whole story. It also provides the ability to run a diagnostic test when you post that shows you where the error were in your pings. I’ve grabbed a quick screen shot of this from this site.

This is a great move forward for all bloggers. You can install it, activate it, write a post and see if the pings have worked. You can download this little darling of a ping checking plugin.

Where should your blog ping?

1. Pingomatic: In WordPress your blog is set up to ping Pingomatic by default. Pingomatic tell 16 sites (it can tell more if you have a podcast) that your blog has updated. These are:
   • Weblogs.com
   • FeedBurner
   • MyYahoo!
   • BlogRolling
   • We Blog Alot
   • Topic Exchange
   • Blo.gs
   • Syndic8
   • PubSub
   • Blog Street
   • IceRocket
   • Technorati
   • News Gator
   • BlogDigger
   • MoreOver
   • News Is Free

   Of this list Technorati has some nice bits and pieces so get over there and claim your blog. If your blog is not pinging automatically go over to Pingomatic and enter your details will do exactly the same thing as your blog should be.

2. Google: for once Google isnt the core place you should ping but its still hugely important and Google Blog Search can bring good traffic if you know what to target in it. In your Ping list put ‘http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2′. If again you’re not pinging you can request a URL and it’ll deliver the same results. Instructions for forming this page request can be found at http://www.google.com/help/blogsearch/pinging_API.html. Its at the bottom of the page under the heading “Setting up a REST client”. The important thing is that by pinging Google you’ll get GoogleBot to come and spider your site more quickly. North South Media did find an exception to this.
3. That’s it to be honest. The thirs place I think you should check out, if you are interested in getting your pings going and want to ping everywhere on the planet (and for some of you all the links this may generate could be too tempting to pass up) is to use the list over at Boyd Of Ayrshire. Its where I started my delving into pinging and some of the ping locations listed could be right for your niche blog.

If you know of any other websites that people should be pinging – either via the built in XML request built into WordPress or by URL let us know in the comments below.

What does the SezWho Plugin do?

The SezWho plugin for WordPress blogs allows you to rate each comment were they useful or were they not. The better commenters get a better rating over time. It also allows you as blog readers/contributors to rate the comments too. This should help me to get a grip on what kind of content everyone is actually interested in rather than just blogging about stuff that no one really cares about.

Download the SezWho Plugin

Download the plugin from the WordPress Plugin Archive.

I was going to make this blog a ‘dofollow’ blog – where every link and trackback is given a real link. However I tried this on a clients blog recently and the level of spam went through the roof – and they weren’t overly happy withbthe whole thing. As such I’ve decided to use the LinkLove plugin for WordPress – after 10 approved comments all your links will be made followable.

The LinkLove Plugin I’m using was mentioned EasyWordPress.com – and its available to download at All Passion Marketing.

Apparently the outgoing request file was about 2GB – ok so I do have other sites that weren’t pinging properly but they were still updating frequently in Technorati and similar places. Everywhere on the ping list is no doubt about to Blacklist me for being a spamming so and so (always nice).

Why were other blogs pinging and not this one?

The reason why the other blogs were pinging and this one wasn’t was because they were using FeedBurner for their feeds and these were thing using the Pingshot functionality.

So if your blog aint turning up in Technorati, Google blog search etc just rattle your feed into feedburner and let them do the work. Just remember to optimsie your feed for search engines, in your PRO account settings so that your links still pass link juice – as by default they use 302 redirects.

In the past couple of months I’ve not really had a chance to do much with Mercury Thread due to the work we’ve been doing. As a result we spent the downtime over Easter developing our own Internet Marketing Strategy. Through discussion with some of the UK’s leading lights in Link Development, Re-Branding, Social Marketing and some other nice new technologies we’ve been developing new strategies to help web based businesses increase not only traffic and sales but also long term stable businesses.

At the same time we’ve also developed a strong enough set of Affiliate websites to allow us to actually do work for ourselves! Yeah I know an Internet Marketer making money for themselves! Maybe a revoloution is afoot.