I Heart WordPress

By Chris | December 12, 2008

Welcome back!

I’ve been publishing online since 2003, and have experimented with just about every content management system and blog engine available. WordPress is not only the easiest to use, it has an incredible support community, and it is completely free. This is open source software nirvana. I’ve been playing with the WordPress 2.7 betas on my own system for the past few weeks, and have been excited aboout its release so that I could use it on my live sites. The development team has really outdone themselves with the new administrative layout. The new back-end is much easier to use, which is saying something because the previous releases were already pretty danged easy to work with.

Hats off to the WordPress team, and keep it up.

7
| 7 Comments | Posted in blogging, prattle, tools | Tagged , , , | Edit

The Way of the Web

By Chris | November 11, 2008

The web has been in a state of transition since it began. Remember the first site that you saw, with Times New Roman text and recangular images? We’ve come a long way since then. Broadband and wifi brought a huge leap forward in web technology because sites loaded faster and we were no longer tied to our desks. Then AJAX changed the way we interact with information on the web. Blogs, social networking and social media sites made the web more fun and more useful. Now we want web access on our phones, too.

Over the past several months a new trend has been emerging. The technology changed more than a year ago and the way that we use the web has been catching up. I’m just getting my head around it now, and holy cow is it cool. I’m still grappling with these concepts so please forgive me if this post is a bit janky. I’ll cover some broad trends and then give a couple of concrete examples.

Read More »

1
| 1 Comment | Posted in industry, social, tools, trends | Tagged , , , , | Edit

Zemanta Review

By Chris | October 2, 2008
A tag cloud with terms related to Web 2.

Image via Wikipedia

Have you heard of Zemanta? No its not a drug, although that’s what I originally thought, too. Zemanta is a tool that recommends links, tags, images and related articles as you type a blog entry. I found out about it a few weeks ago, and was intrigued enough that I installed the Firefox plug-in right away. Three blog entries later and I’m sold, I love it.

What It Does
As you type in a blog entry, Zemanta looks through your text for keywords, if it recognizes one, it surfs the web for links, images, tags and articles that are related, and displays them next to your entry. If you agree that these articles are relevant to your post, just click the appropriate button and Zemanta adds the link (or image) to your post.

Read More »

10
| 10 Comments | Posted in blogging, industry, seo, social, tools | Tagged , , , , , , | Edit

How I Find Blogging Ideas

By Chris | September 20, 2008

I think blogs are awesome. Anyone with a computer can reach the world, long distance friends can keep up with one another, businesses can interact with the community at large, communities can form and capture the attention of politicians, the possibilities are almost endless. Blogs were one of the first means of social media, and they’re still growing. I work as a search engine optimization consultant, and I make a point of discussing a blog with each of my clients, because they open up opportunities to make a website more useful to the visitors that they’re trying to reach. One question comes up every time. What will we write about?

Read More »

11
| 11 Comments | Posted in blogging, social | Tagged , , | Edit

Famous Twitterers

By Chris | September 13, 2008
Twitter Meta Moo! too far?
Image by Josh Russell via Flickr

Within the past 3 or 4 months I have become increasingly addicted to Twitter. I didn’t get it at first, because if you aren’t following anyone, and don’t have any followers, then it isn’t very interesting. But the more people you connect with, the more fun it becomes. Now Twitter is one of my favorite spots on the web.

About a month ago I came across the profile of Henry Rollins, then John Cleese. This morning I decided to see what other celebrities have embraced Microblogging. I believe that these are the real profiles of these individuals. I’ll update this list if I come across any more. If you know of others, or find out that any of these are fake, please post comments.
Edited March 24, 2009.

Enjoy.

6
| 6 Comments | Posted in prattle, social | Tagged , , | Edit