Clearing Out The Spam
Every morning, I spend a minute or so emptying the spam from this blog. Today it was all about acne. I’m sure that this complaint doesn’t bother, the people who read my posts.
It looks like from the pattern, that it has been added manually. So as I delete it all, it must be the world’s most unrewarding job. And probably worst paid too!
I should say, though that the spam filter in WordPress finds it all and quarantines it. So emptying it, is just two clicks and it doesn’t really matter, if I don’t do it that often.
You Wouldn’t Want To Mess With Mary
I was alerted to this blog post by The Times this morning.
It’s all sensible advice and we need more Marys to come forward to give the crooks a good kicking.
Ed Milliband Ignores The Internet
According to one of my favourite columnists, Sathnam Sangera, Small Brain wants to introduce new media rules. But what is he going to do about the increasing power of the Internet? Probably nothing! Although many would like all Internet-connected computers to have a government spy system in them! As Sathnam says, in a few years time, there won’t be too many journalists.
But let’s hope there are lots of entertaining columnists and bloggers.
How To Organise a Company
I found this article on the WordPress site.
It just shows how blogging is more than just an expression of one person’s vanity, but a complete philosophy for the management of a company and its web presense. I won’t say site, as that is so out-of-date and constricting.
The Blog Based Small Business
This blog is absolutely standard WordPress. all I pay for is a small amount of extra storage and the use of VideoPress to put my videos in the blog. I think I pay about thirty dollars a year.
This blog is in effect a complete web site, with a contact form, searching and all the things you’d expect from a professional website. It also doesn’t have adverts or other things that will annoy my readers.
It differs in one way to a professional website, in that updating it just needs a small amount of form filling in a web browser. The difficulty is about the same as sending an e-mail.
So could you run a small business on a blog such as this?
I’ll use the example of a lady who does small repairs and alterations to clothes and household furnishings. There used to be and probably still is, someone like that in Cambridge market a couple of days a week and C got her to shorten and alter clothes for her. I was taught to do all this by my mother, but don’t think I could manage it now, with my hands.
Such a business could work well off the back of a blog. Say she repaired an expensive evening dress for someone in Dulwich, she might post a picture of the repair, with a brief description in the blog.
As Google knows everything immediately from WordPress, someone searching for evening dress mending, Dulwich, may well find the blog.
Gradually, as the blog expands you’ll get more hits and from the statistics, you can find out how your visitors got there.
So the blog does your market research in addition to getting your customers.
WordPress’s New Method of Entering Links.
This how WordPress describes it.
With our sexy new internal linking feature, you can now enter any URL to create a link just like you used to, OR you can search your existing posts and pages right there in the link popup. A combination of pre-loading, autocomplete, and some ajaxy goodness make the new link creation tool a joy to use (and man, that popup is so much faster!). We hope this addition spurs you to make more connections between pieces of content on your site, which will make it easier for your visitors to find more related content from you. One more time, all together now: Yay! (Right?)
But I don’t like it, as to make it work, I seem to have to swap to HTML rather than Visual mode.
I have just set up my mobile phone, so that it can post to Twitter. If you want to follow me on this, my user name is VagueShot.
Another Annoying Keystroke
When I blog, I use a lot of shrieks, as my father would have called them! Or exclamation marks as you would call them!
But if I hit Control-!, I get everything reformatted large. Is this a WordPress or Windows shortcut?
It is so infuriating! Especially as when I hit Control-Z to correct my mistake, I lose everything I have typed.
My typing seems to be getting better though, but it would be nice to have the new keyboard driver.
Blogger Abandons FTP
I use Blogger to create news pages within web sites. This approach is good as it enables anybody to update the news without disturbing the actual web site. It also has advantages in that as Blogger updates the search engines directly, any changes are reflected immediately.
In most of the sites, I have used FTP to update the blogs, but Blogger have recently announced that FTP support will be discontinued.
I had felt this would be a problem, but if you look at my stud web site, Freedom Farm, you’ll now see that it uses a standard blogspot address, freedomfarmnews.blogspot.com.
The web site works as well as before, but I’m afraid it’s lost all it’s search engine history, so I’ll have to grow the blog from start again. I suspect too, that because the web site is now hosted on a different url to the news, that the two will not work as well together. That is probably a good reason to use WordPress for a combination of a web site and news.
But if you want still keep to Blogger, there wasn’t too many problems.
- I had to change all of the links, but this was a global edit in the web site and a few changes to the template.
- By default you get the Blogger NavBar, which is annoying in a web site. However there is a patch to put in the template to remove it. The details are here.
But otherwise it was painless.
I wouldn’t use Blogger again for this purpose, as it’ll probably degrade the search engine performance significantly, as the link between the web site and news are broken.
Adding my Posts to your Web Site
I have no problem with people putting up my posts on their web sites provided they acknowledge who wrote it all in the first place. I said as much in Electronic Plagiarism and Copyright Infringement.
Recently though, I’ve had a request about putting a link to a series of posts on my pages. It was the Cambridge Busway, of which I write about fairly often, as I think it is a wonderful example of how not to manage a project. It is well over budget on costs, very late on finish time and short on the important small details. That link is given below.
https://anonw.wordpress.com/tag/cambridge-busway/
Click it and you’ll see all my posts on the busway.
So how would you add a link like this to your web site?
- Go to the front page of this blog. Click here to do that!
- Click the tag you want from the tag cloud.
- Capture the URL from your browser and paste it into your web site.
It’s a bit technical, but once you’ve got the hang of it, it’s like swimming or cycling. You never forget.
Unless of course it’s swimming, which I can’t do!
The Anonymous Widower 