Digitalquill

Just one hour ago I posted a blog post about work I have done today on the shed. My post talked about the product I have used for this which is Coroline corrugated bitumen roofing.

I use the Google Bot Bling plugin for WordPress which tells you when Google has visited your site and emails you a log of what was indexed. I noticed this email and saw that my latest post had been indexed so I tried a search in google for ‘Coroline corrugated bitumen’ and this site came 5th in the search engine results page (SERPS)

I have been asked by many people how I managed to post a blog post on Friday when I was at a Wedding of a friend (Congratulations to Lian and Bobby!) Well the fact of the matter is that although the post was published on Friday it could have been written at any time.I generally use the Scheduled posts facility in WordPress to publish the posts when I want them to be published which is not necessarily when I write them.

Why would I not want to publish when I write them? Well for various reasons, generally I will write a whole bunch of posts in one go and then schedule them to be published over the coming days to ensure that there is a constant feed of content to the live site, rather than a big chunk and then nothing for weeks followed by a big chunk again.

Having a constant stream of regularly posted content is better for Search Engines (SEO) especially for Google. There is a chance that Google would see a mass of published content as being SPAM rather than being genuine content if it did not fit within the pattern of posting for that site.

You will have noticed that I have started adding small images to each post, this is to add a little bit of interest to the site. The images themselves do not usually add a great deal to the post, but they do give a little eye candy.

Images are also very useful for search engines, Google indexes images and a great deal of traffic can be obtained from images search traffic, and also alt tags and images names are all used by the Google index.

I have been using WordPress 3.0 for a little while now, mainly to test that the plugins I have developed still work in this new version. I am please to say that I have had very few problems.

I thought that I would give my first view of WordPress 3.0.

What is different in this version?

1. Custom Post Types
2. New Default Theme
3. Custom Background Support
4. Specific Templates for Authors
5. New Users Tutorial
6. Custom Woo Navigation added to the core
7. Merge of WordPress and the now defunct WordPress MU
8. Security Improvements with automatic creation of Security Keys

There are many other improvements, but these are mainly within the code and in the technical development of the software rather than up-front features.

The Install

WordPress can now be installed as a multi-site system very much like WordPress MU used to. I have yet to try this but will be investigating those features very soon as I use WordPress for many sites and it would be perfect if I can simply have one install to run them all rather than having to go through the process time and time again.

The normal WordPress install is very similar to the WordPress 2.x installs where it creates the configuration file, asking you for the username and password for the database and the database name. The main difference that I found was that it no-longer gives you a randomly generated admin password, but asks you to enter your password.

I think this is much better as it cuts out one step in the WordPress setup process, you no-longer have to go into the admin area and change the password to something sensible that you can remember. It does of course have the password strength indicator to ensure that you are not using a password of 1234!

The install still asks you for a name for your blog, but frustratingly does not ask you to change the Tag line. If this were added to the install process it would streamline the install even more. In my view if it added permalink settings as well this would be perfect and would mean that it is ready to go after the install rather than having to modify settings. I suppose the problem with this is that it would make the install process more cluttered but I would rather have that and know that once the install was finished WordPress was configured how I wanted it rather than having to go through the settings.

The WordPress install now checks the version of MySQL and PHP on the server. I always thought that this was something that it would do and it never occurred to me that it would not so this is very good news and long overdue. It is something that I have had in my plugins for some time now, checking to make sure that the server supports their requirements. This seems a basic thing that should have been introduced from the beginning of WordPress.

The WordPress Admin Interface

At first glance the WordPress admin interface looks very much the same. The theme has been updated a little, indeed the admin area is supposed to be easier to theme.

Updates: A large number of the changes included are the ability to do bulk updates, both WordPress plugins and themes now have the ability to have bulk updates, and the updates for WordPress its self have now moved onto the Dashboard.

Interestingly during the time it has taken since I installed WordPress 3.0 (2 hours ago) there has been an update, so I have gone through the update process to update WordPress to the latest nightly build and the process is exactly the same as the 2.9x automatically upgrade feature.

Custom Posts and Taxonomies: The introduction and improvement of custom posts and custom taxonomies will add much more functionality to WordPress and a huge amount of scope for building more advanced applications based on the WordPress Framework. I have not fully got my head round what is possible with these, but I intend to in the near future and I will try and post mu findings here.

Search Engines blocked Message: A very small but useful thing that I have noticed, as the install of WordPress 3.0 I have done is just a test install I noticed the box on the install which says allow search engines to see my blog, I now have a message in the top bar of the admin interface “Search Engines Blocked” a useful reminder, especially for me as I use many test installs of WordPress and am paranoid about domains or IP addresses being blocked for spamming when I am testing new scripts on those WordPress installs.

Revision interface: The interface that allows you to compare the revisions of a post within WordPress has been updated, the fact of the matter is that I did not know that this interface even existed, and when I compare the 2.9.2 and the WordPress 3.0 interfaces I can not see any difference, but this is defiantly a feature I will be using in the future.

Menu Management: WordPress 3.0 now has the Woo Navigation features integrated as core. This allows you to manage the menus on your WordPress via a drag and drop interface. It also means that you can make up custom menus that include both pages and categories, a very useful feature especially if you are using WordPress as a framework for a CMS or e-commerce site.

There are many other features and the list of new features for developers is apparently endless. I must get time to read the whole list and see what it means for WordPress developers and how I can use them to improve my WordPress Plugins.

Will I be upgrading?

Simple answer is yes, of course I will upgrade, the more detailed answer would be that I will upgrade my WordPress installs that have a blog on them such as this one, Earning From Affiliates and On the Allotment first. I will then start to move onto the other sites that use WordPress as a framework for e-commerce or affiliate sites. However, I want to investigate the multi site facilities before I do that to see if it is an easy task to move over to a single install of WordPress to manage all my sites.

Whats next?

You will have noted several times in this post that I have seen areas that I need to gen up on. Custom Posts and Custom Taxonomies specifically look like an area that will be of use to me in my WordPress Datafeed Import and WordPress Amazon Import Plugins. I have a load of work to do playing with these new features to discover what I can do, look out in the near future for exciting new features for my plugins.

The initial development on my new wordpress plugin ‘WordPress Advertiser’ that allows you to manage the process of selling and displaying adverts on your WordPress blog, has been finished.

I am looking for WordPress blog owners who are interested in the new plugin  to contact me. I need some people to try the beta copy of the plugin on their blogs and give it a test in a real life environment, to see how well it works and give me some feedback.

I have done a great deal of testing on the plugin in both wordpress 2.9.2 and wordpress 3.0.

I am in the process of writing the help files for it, when those help files are written I will send anyone who contacts me a copy, and then when I release the finished version of the plugin I will send you an updated copy.

Please post here if you are willing to help, along with the blog that you will be able to test it on.

I am also writing a new website for the WordPress advertiser plugin, this will be up and online by the end of the week, it will give you more details about what the plugin actually does and its features and functions.

I am in the process of creating another WordPress plugin. I am in the very early stages of the development process so I will not say too much about the details of the plugin, however, I believe that it will be revolutionary for bloggers who wish to sell advertising space on their blogs in that it fully automates the process. It will use paypal to create subscriptions and manage the display and rotation of adverts.

I am hoping that it will allow non-technical bloggers to be able to manage and sell advertising space on their blogs without the need to employ web developers to create themes or add in advertising.

I also intend to write it in such a way that the owner of the blog can in addition to selling advertising space, use it to show affiliate adverts and control what is shown and when.

There are some plugins available that do some of what I am planning, but I have been looking for one that is all singing and all dancing, that will manage the process from start to finish without needing the blogger to continually monitor or provide administration for their advertising slots.

As I am already in the WordPress plugin market, I decided that I would make an attempt to design a plugin that meets all of my needs, as with all these projects as soon as I had the specification written I have had many more ideas and features that I would like to see, however I will get the base software written on which I can build over time.

I strongly believe that WordPress is a platform that can be used for many applications, not least blogging for which it is intended. Regular readers will know that I use wordpress as a basis for many of my sites, especially affiliates  sites using my other two wordpress plugins, Datafeed Import plugn for WordPress and Amazon Import Pluign for wordpress. 

The improvements that are set to be released with version 3.0 of WordPress will improve the already sophisticated platform making it more and more versatile for many more applications, making it more of a content management system (CMS) as well as a blogging platform.

This new plugin will extend my range of plugins to people who are not affiliate marketers but still want to be able to sell advertising space on their sites as well as affiliate bloggers who wish to add affiliate adverts.

I have bought two domain names and will be creating a website for the plugin at wordpressadvertiser.com (and .co.uk). I will add more information there when I get closer to having a product that I can release, and will post more blog posts here where there are more updates.

One of the reasons I have been quite on this blog (and on Earning From Affiliates) is that I have started yet another blog.

On The Allotment blog is a blog about all the activity on my new allotment plot. I have taken the tack of using it to record everything that happens on the plot.

To do this I intend it to be very visual, rather than having lots of words in the blogs, so this weekend I produced my first ever video blogs. I really went to town and produced three in one weekend. Go over to On The Allotment and have a look to see what you think.

I used YouTube and created a channel specifically for the blog. It was very simple to do, I have  Sony HD camera, and was able to upload the files directly from the camera to YouTube in HD format.

Ideally what I need to do is find some software that will allow me to edit those files. I was able to do some simply trimming and joining of the clips using the camera but I really want to do a better job with things like audio balance and putting intro clips and copyright notices onto the clips.

You may also be interested to have a look at Earning From Affiliates where I have just posted a blog post about the marketing of this new blog and how the posting of the Video Blogs and the use of YouTube has had a positive impact on the numbers of hits to the blog.

Having been on the council allotment waiting list for 8 months now (I know exactly when it was because we decided to go for one when Eva was born) I have acquired a plot of land that has been gardened as an allotment for many, many years.

The Owner of this land is now poorly and can not attend to the allotment and knowing that we are looking for one has offered it to us for the same price as the council allotment rent.

This is ideal for me, the land is tucked away and is therefore very private. I have lived in this area for 20 years, passing the location of the land almost every day and I did not know it was there! This is great as it will mean that as Eva grows up, she can join us on the allotment and even have a plot of her own.

We want to make sure that Eva know what vegetables are and where they come from and not just those orange things you get from Sainsburys. Also we want to be able to provide good veg that we know the origins of, not that we are paranoid about pesticides, but if we are in control of what we grow then we know what we are eating.

I would not say that I was an expert gardener, in my previous property I had a veg garden and I used to get some good results from what I planted, however I was always hampered by the size of that plot.

This new allotment will certainty be a learning curve, the soil is perfect and allot of the hard work of preparing the ground has already been done as it has been in use for many years.

I have bought yet another domain name to add to my collection, OnTheAllotment.co.uk. I will be setting up a blog on the domain and I will blog about my progress on the allotment with the hope that I can post as I learn, what worked what did not, and perhaps even keep a record of produce year on year.

It is the perfect timeof year to get hold of the land as int he next couple of weeks is when the season starts to kick off.

I have been adding a number of recipes on this blog, and looking at the stats they have been getting a fairly high proportion of the search engine traffic to this site. I am therefore considering setting up a site specifically for my recipes and cooking posts.

Perhaps you dear readers might give your opinions on this. Should I move the recipies off onto a separate site or should they remain here?

I am laid in nice deep bath, soaking my aching muscles after a hard morning clearing gardens and garages at a rental property. Hopefully Monday will see it going onto the market and we will again have a tenant in the property very soon.

I wonder where other people blog from. I usually blog in my office at home, sometimes sat in front of the TV, but I don’t see why with today’s technology why one needs to be limited. I do have an Orange Mobile broadband dongle which I use quite often when I am out and about.

I was recently searching for domain names,  someone suggested ontheblog.com a play on words… unfortunately it i taken, although there is no site there.

I wonder where the stranges place anyone has blogged from is. Post a comment if you have any strange blogging habbits!