photo credit: kevindooley

Find a Tenuous Link

There’s usually some way you can link your topic to the Olympics, even if it takes some imagination.  If you write about technology, why not cover the tech used in the Olympics, either as part of the sport or as part of the coverage.  You could also write about getting the best home kit to enjoy the Olympics at home or emulate the athletes in the comfort of your reader’s home gym.  If you look hard enough, you can usually find a link to anything, given the size and complexity of the modern day Olympics.  And when you do find something, try and put an interesting twist on it, a new angle that may not have been covered elsewhere.  Gizmodo recently posted an article about the technology used in Olympic fencing, which is a great example of this tactic.  Remember, you want to get some Olympics related keywords and topics into your post to pull in the traffic.

Use Topical Metaphors

You can take advantage of the fact that the Olympics are featuring so heavily on websites and on TV by echoing some of the terminology used.  So instead of saying something is the best in its class, say it won the Gold Medal!  You want any good will the reader is feeling for the Olympics to bleed over onto your blog.

Use Your Skills, and Focus Them

This is probably the most effective way of exploiting the Olympics.  If you usually offer something through your blog, for sale or for free, you can begin to tailor them to the Olympics.  For example, if you write Photoshop tutorials, do a tutorial on how to create an Olympics poster.  If you give away free website themes, why not do an Olympics theme.

It’s worth pointing out that these tips can be applied to any popular event.  So consider the upcoming US Presidential Elections for example.  Do you do anything on your blog to take advantage of popular events?

•    Site Search: If you’re concerned about users leaving your site through Websearch, you can now you can choose to provide just site search so users can find all the information they’re looking for on your site. We also recommend that you host the search results on your own pages so your users won’t leave your site when they perform a search.
•    Vertical Search: You can also allow your users to search across multiple sites – this could be a network of sites that you own or other related sites that you think your users might find useful. Examples of vertical searches include computer forums, travel
blogs, or political sites you endorse.

Emphasis mine.

Interesting, no?  I’m now wondering, out loud, how long it will be before sites start allowing advertisers to have their sites included in search results?

Just consider, for a moment, what this means.  Instead of allowing advertisers to place ads next to search results for your sites, they can get their pages to appear side-by-side with yours.  And what’s more, the results can be hosted on your site (or at least appear so) and take whatever format you like.  This will have two effects that will increase click-through on the ads.

1. Firstly, as the page will appear as a search result, ad blindness won’t be an issue.
2. Secondly, the other site’s pages will appear next to yours in the search results.  Not only does this give them highly targeted traffic (I can’t think of any way to get more targeted traffic than this) but it also implies trustworthiness and endorsement.  It’s unlikely users will know they are leaving your site.

As you can probably tell, this could become a very powerful marketing tool.  What’s also clear is that this wil have to be treated with the up most respect and care.  Allow the wrong site into your search results, and you could push visitors away in their droves.

One of the benefits of this direct search result marketing is that you can give your visitors added benefit.  If they search your site for something that isn’t there, they may very well find whatever they seek on one of your advertisers sites.  The potential downside is that your site never appears in the search results because your advertisers are better optimised in the eyes of Google.  It’s all a trade-off.

So what do you think?  Is this something you’d consider for your site?

At this point, it’s important to note that I primarily go to the WordPress Codex as a theme developer, so as far as I’m concerned, its success will be judged on how well it helps me find the information I’m looking for. This is mostly template tags. Essentially, I approach the codex in one of two ways. I’m either trying to do something so I’m looking for a template tag to do it – or – I have a template tag and I want to tweak it’s implementation (i.e. I want to see what parameters I can pass to it, and what the outcome will be). Two different approaches, but the outcome should be the same. I should end up at the page relating to the template tag. Unfortunately, finding content in the Codex is hit and miss, to say the least.

Let’s use an example. I’ve been exploring the use of post excerpts for category pages as a way to reduce duplicate content, something Google isn’t keen on by all accounts. I know the template tag for excerpts, “the_excerpt“, but I wanted to see what else I could do with it. So I searched for “the_excerpt”. You would expect, quite reasonably, that the template tag page for the_excerpt would come out on top. it doesn’t. In fact, it doesn’t even appear on the first page. This isn’t an isolated problem either. A search for a whole host of template tags simply doesn’t return the expected results.

So that covers searching for a specific template tag. But what if you want to figure out how to do something? Well a search for “display post excerpt” turns up similarly useless results. So the WordPress Codex search fails, fairly miserably, at both tasks I would use it for. The strange thing about this is that WordPress outsourced the search functionality to Yahoo. They proudly display this fact at the bottom of the useless search results.

Work Arounds

It’s unfortunate that the search is so bad you have to use work arounds, but unfortunately that’s the situation I find myself in. By far the quickest way to find the page relating to a template tag, such as the_excerpt, is to go to the template tags page. From here you can find pretty much all the template tags you need. The other work around is to use Google and the “site” operator. Just prepend your query with “site:codex.wordpress.org” and Google will search just the WordPress Codex. While even this can be a bit hit and miss, it much more accurate and useful than the default Yahoo search.

Does anyone else have this problem?

The blog is all about blogging. It’s called Blog, the magazine. From now on I’ll be using it to post my ideas, guides and tutorials on blogging. I’d definitely recommend you check it out.

The Theme

About that theme I mentioned earlier. It’s by far the most complicated theme I’ve ever written, and it does things I don’t believe are currently being done with WordPress anywhere else. The main concept of the site is that it’s a magazine. Therefore, everything goes into an issue, and then the issue is release along with all the constituent parts. It’s like a real-world magazine. I shan’t go into my reasons for taking this approach here.

You’ve probably guessed that I decided to go with WordPress for the blog. It’s my platform of choice and I didn’t really consider anything else. The problem is, WordPress is built to publish a constant flow of information, not the batch releases I wanted. I also wanted each issue to have a unique image, a front page if you will, which was associated with the issue, not any post.

I decided pretty early on that each issue will be a WordPress category. I’ve been having some taxonomy conflicts since tagging was introduced, so I thought it was a safe bet to use categories in this structural way and tags for classifying content based on subject matter. The next thing to decide was how I would publish each issue. I didn’t really want to rely on myself having to post several articles at the same time, I wanted a mechanism to release issues. So I decided that each issue will have a featured post, one that has higher precedence over the other. It’s the headline story for that issue. So I wrote the front page of the theme to pick up the first featured post, and then populate the rest of the front page with posts from the same issue (read: category). So the release mechanism goes that the issue will be published when the featured article gets published. For those wondering, I just used a custom field to denote the featured articles.

Some Limitations

There are some limitations to this approach. Firstly, publishing essentially means putting the newest content on the front page. I can publish, in the traditional WordPress sense of the word, articles from any issue and they will appear on the site and in the RSS feed. The only place they don’t appear is on the front page. It is, however, very difficult to get to the content unless it’s been published to the front page at some point.

The other limitation is to do with the front page image. The image is located using the name of the current category (read: issue), so if I happen to type it wrong, or inconsistently, it will cause problems. I’ve also had to build in a mechanism to take images with different overall colour schemes. For example, white text won’t work on a predominantly light image. So there are various title images available (selected through the Theme Options page) as well as the option to show no image at all (as is the case with issue 1, as the image already contains the blog’s name).

There are other areas of the template that differ from most other WordPress templates. For example, there are numerous places images can be placed on each post that fall outside of the normal post area. I’ll be writing about some of the more technical aspects of developing the theme at a later date.

I hope this post gives you an insight into the complexity of the theme I developed for the site. You can read an introduction post right here. let me know if you like or dislike the new blog, or if you want to contribute!

Photo Dropper

Quite why it took this long for someone to come up with this idea, I don’t know, but I’m so glad it’s finally happened. Photo Dropper is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to search for Creative Commons licensed images on flickr and then very quickly add them to your blog along with the correct attribution. It’s really very slick. I’ve added an image at the end of the post as an example.

Picnik Upgrade

In the previous post about blogging with images I also mentioned Picnik. It’s the best online image editor out there. Picnik has decided to release its full feature set, previously only available to paid customers, for free to everyone. This really is a great idea. Of course Picnik is now ad supported, and if you’re a complete ad hater, you can still pay the £13 a year to get rid of them. Either way it’s a great deal for the user.
Features you now get include more fonts, borders, shapes and effects along with the full set of touch up tools. It’s really nice and now you have excuse not to try it out.
Photo Dropper Example

photo credit: Chris (archi3d)

This time, however, I wanted to push myself a bit further.  When I set the goals for the redesign, I know I would have to learn some new techniques, and break away from my own WordPress comfort zone.  In the process I found just how versatile WordPress can be.  And I learnt allot, so much in fact, that I thought I’d share it with you.  So in this post I’ll cover three of the goals I set myself for the redesign, and how I achieved them in WordPress.

Separate Home Page

Believe it or not, this domain has been around for a long time.  The blog, however, is less than a year old.  As the blog has developed, and the purpose of the site changes, I found myself not utilising the root of the site as best as I could.  In fact, I was touting services I could no longer perform.  So with that in mind I set out to better use the root of the domain, and integrating it into the blog.

This is a technique that’s being used be an increasing number of bloggers.  It provides some great opportunities for diversifying the site while still remaining consistent with look, feel and features.  The key to this is having the pages outside of the blog directory, in the case of this site anything sitting outside of the oakinnovations.co.uk/blog directory, act as if they are inside the blog.  WordPress makes this incredibly easy.

You have to do two things.  Firstly, you have to include a file from the WordPress directory.  This ensures all the WordPress functions that are used within a theme are accessible and available.  Secondly, you have to call the WordPress theme header (get_header).  The code to so this is below:

<?php
define('WP_USE_THEMES', false);
require('Path/to/wp-blog-header.php');
?>
<?php get_header(); ?>

As you can see, WordPress does all the heavy lifting.  With this code in your page you can use all the WordPress functions as you would in any other template file, such as your single.php file. It really is that simple.

Links and Pages Together

I can see the logical separation between Links (or Blogroll as WordPress calls it) and Pages.  But for this theme I wanted them to exist together, i wanted them to be seamless.  So looking across the top of this theme you’ll see links to pages, and links to external sites.  This is mostly to facilitate the fact that I will be adding pages to the site that will lie outside of the normal WordPress structure (see above), which would cause difficulties for readers if they were separate from the WordPress pages.

There’s no real trick or magic to this, it’s just about working with that WordPress gives you.  Essentially you have to call the “wp_list_pages” and “wp_list_bookmarks” functions with the right parameters, and then wrapping it in appropriate HTML.  This is the code I used:

<ul id="pagesList">
          <!-- List static pages, WP Pages and WP Links/Bookmarks/Blogroll -->
          <li><a href="http://www.oakinnovations.co.uk/">Home</a></li>
          <li><a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>">Blog</a></li>
          <?php wp_list_pages('title_li='); ?>
          <?php wp_list_bookmarks('categorize=0&title_li='); ?>
</ul><!-- pagesList -->

What happens here is, I start an un-ordered list and add two items, one for the site root and one for the blog homepage.  Then I use the “wp_list_pages” function to print out a list of links to pages, when calling this function I pass a parameter which prevents WordPress from adding a title to the list, allowing it to be incorporated into an already opened list.  Likewise I call the wp_list_bookmarks” function and tell that to output without a title and also tell it not to arrange the links into categories.  I then close the un-ordered list.  Job done, and it works a treat.

Alternate Post Styles

The last technique I used was to change the style of posts based on the number of other posts on the page.  This is most evident on the Blog’s Homepage.  In order to reduce duplicate content, increase click through rates but still provide quick access to content, I decided to only show excerpts of posts on this page.  The one exception to this is the latest post, which is displayed in full.

To do this you really have to dig in to “The Loop“.  That mysterious beast which seems to control everything in WordPress.  The Loop is quite simple really.  All it does it cycle through all the available posts for that page and provide data for each in turn.  So for a single page it will only provide one post, for the homepage it will display how ever many you defined in your dashboard (default is 10).  My approach to this is quite simple.  The first challenge to overcome is knowing which iteration of The Loop you are currently on.  So I set a “count” variable and increment it at the end of each loop.  Then, within the loop itself, I add conditions to ensure that different processing is performed for different iterations.  The basic code goes like this:

<?php

$count = '0';

if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post();

if ($count == '0') {

//  Do Something for the first post

} else {

//  Do something for the subsequent posts

}

$count++;

endwhile; else: ?>
<p><?php _e('Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.'); ?></p>
<?php endif; ?>

And that’s the base of The Loop I use on the blog homepage.  By using this count method it’s possible to do a whole bunch of different things, and enter into increasingly complex variations of The Loop.

I hope you found this post usefull.  I’m currently working on a new design that builds upon some of these techniques, extending them quite a bit.

Domain Name

Domain names have become a valuable commodity.  The good ones are disappearing fast, so get in there quick.  In fact, it’s very unlikely you’ll get your first choice, so you may have to be creative.  There are essentially two approaches you can take when searching for domains.  The first is to go for a domain that is Keyword Rich.  This means picking a domain name which contains words, terms or phrases that relate directly to your market.  This will aid you in search results and establishing yourself as an authority.  The second approach is to pick a brandable domain, something that is catchy and memorable.  Of course, there’s no reason you can’t do both.

Hosting

Out of the top 100 blogs how many use the hosted blogging services such as blogger or WordPress.com?  Maybe 10?  Less probably.  You will find that the vast majority of blogs, popular ones at least, are hosted independently.  There are numerous benefits to doing this, the main one being the amount of control it gives you.  For WordPress blogs specifically, this translates to changing themes, plugins and even editing the WordPress code itself.  You are also not tying your host and your platform together.  This separation is crucial should you ever wish to change either.

One benefit I’ve found with professionally hosted sites is that you get much better support than you would usually.  If you have a problem, drop them an email or a phonecall and generally you will get a quick, helpfull response.  There is usually a wealth of documentation available, guiding you through all the techie bits.

Theme/Branding

Having a great theme is one of the things that can really push a good blog into the upper echelons of the blogosphere.  Take a look at the best blogs out there, none use a freely available, or default, theme.  Fortunately there are many designers out there who are either willing to work on, or even specialise in, blog themes.  There are also pre-packaged premium themes out there, such as the Premium News Theme.  If you are hiring a designer or purchasing a premium theme, make sure you have a list of requirements, and don’t let anyone else change it.  Then, when you are evaluating prototypes/premium themes, constantly refer back to your requirements and check which ones are met.  By focusing on what you need you reduce the risk of being seduced by some of the exceptionally pretty themes out there.

The other point worth noting is that “paid for” doesn’t necessarily mean you have to pay somone.  It’s just as valid to invest your own time into something like designing a theme as it is to pay an outsider.  Providing you have the ability to produce an equally viable output.

Extras

There are a few other services and products you can pick up if you’re serious about your blogging.  I don’t think they are truly essential, so I’ve just listed them.  Instead, these are some things that may work for you, and if they do, they will be well worth the money.

• flickr – The king of image hosts.  If you take a lot of pictures or screenshots, then it may be beneficial to you (and your bandwidth bill) to pay for a premium flickr pro account and host your images with them.
• Stock Photos – There are numerous stock photo websites out there, some offer  subscription model.  This means that you pay a monthly or yearly fee and can use as many pictures as you want or need.  You can also pay on a per-image basis.  Using photos can really bring your blog to life.
• Advertising – While you can promote your blog for free, very little works as well as pure, straight up, paid for advertising.  Fortunately, you don’t have to pay a fortune.
• Blogging Software – Personally, I find it hard to consistently use a blogging tool to post content.  For some reason I keep coming back to the WordPress inline editor.  Yes, the same one everyone else hates.  If you are someone who favours offline working, something like Ecto or MarsEdit may work for you.
• Image Editing software – Depending on how many images you work with, it may be worth looking at something like Photoshop or Pixelmator. Or even the pro version of my favourite online image editor, Picnik.

I’m sure there are other paid-for tools out there that other bloggers swear by, but for me the three above are absolutely essential.  What’s on your list?

Photo by Jenn_Jenn.

The Advantages of Google Docs for Blog Posts

While Google Docs doesn’t, on the face of it, appear to offer much more editing functionality than the standard WordPress Rich Text Editor, it actually does alot more. Along with the standard formatting options, and the ability to edit the raw HTML (which is hugely important), you also get the advanced document management features that Google Docs provides.

The real winners from this will be authors on multi-author blogs. Not only can you work collaboratively on posts, but you can implement a rudimentary work-flow for authorising posts before publishing them. The easy way to do this is to allow a group to work on a set of documents and then only give the publishing rights to one of them, the editor as it were. This idea can be taken a step further if you use Google Apps for Your Domain. This provides a central location for all the authors, which can be augmented with posting schedules and tasks through Google Calendar and real time collaboration with Google Chat.

One of the other advantages of Google Docs is the increased space you get to write in when compared to the WordPress editor. It’s also a much nicer experience. Much like I enjoy the iPhone interface, I enjoy using Google Docs. The consummate way it handles multiple documents by multiple authors is especially impressive.

Some Drawbacks

There are some draw backs to this way of writing. Firstly, you don’t get as much control over your posts as WordPress allows. For example, you can add categories but not tags, and you can’t schedule a post to appear in the future. You also don’t have the convenient access to your media library, so reusing things like images isn’t quite as easy as it could be. There are also some minor issues with the HTML it produces. Lot’s of inline styles, non-breaking spaces, line breaks and such like. If you tend to like clean code, you may want to spend some time cleaning it up before you post.

I think it’s important to put it into context though. Google Docs isn’t a dedicated blogging tool. Rather it’s a feature-rich web based word processor that happens t do blogging. And for something that’s essentially a side feature, it does a remarkable job by largely nailing the fundamentals of writing.

When thinking about using images more, there are two major things to consider. Firstly you have to find a relevant image, and then you have to process it so it fits in with your blog. The quicker you can perform these two tasks, the more productive you will be as a blogger. So clearly, if I was to achieve my goal, I’d need an efficient workflow for finding and processing images. This is what I came up with.

Ways to Find Images

Finding an image is not enough. You have to make sure you are not violating the rights of the copyright holder in using said image. The best way of doing this is to only search for images you know you have rights to use. There are two main methods of doing this. Firstly, you can buy the rights to use the image. Secondly, you can find images that are licensed in such a way that allows you to use them. Let’s take a look at each.

Buying Images is fairly easy. There are many, many sites out there that offer images for sale. Some have full usage and reseller rights available, some are more restrictive. One resource I tend to use quite a bit is Stock Xpert. They have a nice variety of photos available and a scalable pricing model which sees you pay more for higher resolution images. This suits me fine as images for blog posts don’t need to be big. So in almost every case I can get away with paying for the smallest size. The smallest sized images are 1 credit, which equates to $1 (or about 50p), so very affordable. Even better, you get five free credits when you sign up for an account, which is free.

Buying a photo is always a last resort. If I can, I’ll always use a free, and appropriately licensed, photo. It’s the licensing that complicates the process of finding photos. In general, copyright law prevents you from simply using Google Image Search to find an image and then post it on your blog. You need to find images that you are permitted to use. To do this safely you need to to be able to check the copyright restrictions on the image, and some sites make this easier than others.

When looking for images, I use three resources. Firstly, there’s flickr. The great thing about flickr is that you can narrow your search results based upon the Creative Commons license applied to the image. This can be done through the Advanced Search Page. The problem with flickr is that many of the pictures you will find on there aren’t really suitable for blog posts. They tend to be too “arty” or obscure. But on the plus side there is a vast quantity of photos available, so you will be sure to find something usable for almost any term. The next resource I check is Stock.xchng. A sister site of Stock Xpert, mentioned above, Stock.xchng has a huge amount of freely usable images available, many of which seem tailor made for blog posts. Be sure to check the restrictions on any photo before using it though. The last place I check can be a bit more hit and miss. Morgue File, named after the Morgue Files print publications keep, contains thousands of freely usable images, many of which are suitable for blog posts. There are, however, two problems with Morgue File. Firstly, if you want the high quality images, you need to download them in a zip file and then uncompress them. Which is a pain and adds an unnecessary extra step. Secondly, there are few results for some common searches, so don’t rely solely on Morgue File as a source of images.

Processing Images

Once you’ve found an image, there will be some things you need to do to it before it’s ready for your blog post. In general, these tasks fall into the following categories:

1. Cropping – making sure only things that need to be seen are seen
2. Resizing – making it fit into your blog’s theme
3. Annotating – text and other objects to add meaning to the image
4. Styling – for example making all images black and white, or with drop shadows, doing something so it follows the site’s theme

On rare occasion you may need to do a bit more, but providing you pick the right images as starting points, these steps should be all you need.

Considering this limited set of requirements, there really is no need to use something like Photoshop or GIMP just to process images for your blog posts. Instead, it’s much more efficient to use a tool that has a feature set closer to your actual requirements. So what can you use? What meets these needs?

The first option is the one I end up using the most. It’s an online image editing application called Picnik, and I absolutely love it. It can do everything I listed above right in your browser. There’s nothing to install and the basic functionality, which may very well be all you need, is completely free. To understand just how usefull this service is, it’s worth just running through my main blog image workflow. Firstly, I search the resources listed above for a good starting image. When I’ve found it, I use the Picnik FireFox plugin to select the “Edit in Picnik” option from the right click menu (right-click on any image on any webpage). From there a new tab opens with the image already loaded into it. Once loaded there are all sorts of things I can do to the image, including resizing, cropping, rotating, colour adjustments, adding images and shapes, adding pre-defined effects and adding text. It’s incredibly easy to use and has been nothing short of a revelation. There’s a screenshot of Picnik in action below.

As demonstrated by the workflow above, I tend to use Picnik to process photos that are already on the web. When I want to take a screenshot of something, I always use the excellent Skitch (beta invites available). Once again, it has a limited feature set yet does everything I need it to do. It is also incredibly sleek and very easy to use. Talking of easy to use, if I simply need to resize an image, Quicksilver’s “Scale” command is about as quick and easy as it gets.

Polaroid picture from Lisa Scheer.

Branding and Design

As you may have noticed, this blog has been very recently redesigned.  I posted in a fair bit of detail about what changed and why at the time. To summarise, I had two main goals with the redesign.  Firstly, I wanted this blog to be more brandable and more recognisable.  Secondly, I wanted the blog to be easier to read, both for humans and search engines.  I’m a firm believer that design is an iterative process, so once there’s enough data and statistics available, I’ll tweak the design until it feels, and calculates, right.

Quality of Posts

Seeing as this blog has always been a hobby, almost a play thing, I’ve often neglected some basics of blogging.  From this point onwards (in fact, I’ve been attempting it for the past couple of weeks) I’m going to blog with a more professional attitude.  This doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll lose my casual style, more that I’ll start doing things I should have been doing all along.  Namely, proof reading posts in more detail and peppering posts with images.

Number of Posts

I’ve been incredibly inconsistent over the last year when it comes to post frequency.  Some weeks I’d push double figures.  Other times, I could easily go a fortnight without posting at all.  My aim is to hit a steady 3 – 5 posts a week on this blog.  There are other blogs I run and write for that will require more or less, but I think I have enough interesting content in me to sustain 3 – 5 posts a week here.

Community Involvement

This is something I’ve been thinking about from two angles.  Firstly, I need to get more involved with the communities I write about.  Most noteably Blogging, WordPress, Apple and Usability.  The other side of the coin is that I need to get more of you involved with this blog.  I’ve got some ideas on that front, so look for them in the upcoming months.

I’d also like to get some guest posters for this blog, so if you write on any of the subjects covered here and would like to be involved, drop me a line.  I’d be happy to give you promotion and/or return the favour.

Other Projects and Focus

I think one of the problems with this blog is it’s lack of focus.  I have fairly broad interests and I tend to just write about them when the feeling takes me.  My plan, and this won’t happen immediately, is to launch some of the projects I’ve had baking, providing a bit more focus to the blog and me in general.

Goals

I feel it’s important to set some SMART objectives.  For those of you who haven’t spoken to an IT manager in the last couple of years, SMART objectives should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound.  So, my six-month objectives are:

1. Have 1000 Subscribers
2. Break into Clear Profit (Currently, costs are comfortably covered, but that’s about it)
3. Have at least one guest blogger a fortnight
4. Average a minimum of 3 posts a week

I’ll keep you informed on the progress against my goals.

It’s probably worth pointing out that these are goals for this blog.  I have seperate goals for myself in general, both for my online presence and my offline presence and for my other blogs.

Have you set yourself goals for 2008?  Are you a great blogger?  A good one?  What do you think the key is to becoming great?