I finally got a good nights sleep!!

Nope, they’re not replacement day-glow nipples! they’re a set of comfortable silicone ear plugs that fit nice and deep in your ear to drown out external noise. I finally had a proper sleep without being woken up by the over sensitive car alarm or the too-fast drivers who scrape their under carriage when they speed over the speed bumps outside my window.

Cheap as chips (and better for your ears)

I got 10 pairs for less than a fiver and because they’re reusable, I think they’ll last a long time! (a lot longer than sticking chips in your ears anyway)

They have a small plastic rod inside which help to insert them in your ear, which you have to do with two hands.. one hand that reaches around the back of your head to pull your lobe and the other inserts the plug. You can remove the rod if you want, I just pulled it out a bit and left it in while I slept.

It’s like being dead

Seriously, I thought I was dead it was so quiet! My missus has to stay up later than me some nights and normally ends up going into another room that’s cold just so she can do some accounts but no more! Once I have these little blighters in my ears, she can watch TV, count coins or talk on the phone and I’m fast asleep just a metre or so away.

I’m so much happier in the morning if I’ve had a good sleep.

PacktPublishing sent me a shiny new publication called WordPress MU 2.8. It’s one of their “beginners guide” series which means it takes you step by step from noob to hero on the subject. I’ve read a few of their other books and they’ve always been a good read and source of new information.

WordPress Mu or WPMu is already familiar to me after creating ComLuv.com to run using it so I was looking forward to receiving this book to see if there were some things I had missed. Oh yeah, I missed a lot!

If you’re looking to build a WordPress based site that also has the option of allowing your own readers to create their own blogs then you need to look at WPMu. Not only is it the same platform that wordpress.com uses for their millions of blogs, it’s also expandable to be a social network in it’s own right. It does this with the buddypress and bbpress plugins. This book shows you how to use them all.

In the beginning

Like all beginner books, the first part deals with the introduction and installation chapters. In other books, this is just a page or two but with PacktPub books, you get the full deal. Step by step with pictures and alternative methods. Even right down to setting up Apache to work with subdomains which is going to save you a lot of trouble hunting around forums for answers.

Expansion

After you learn how to set up your site and modify it’s appearance, you’ll want to know what plugins and features can be added. The middle section of the book takes you through different options like buddypress, bbpress (forums) and other useful additions that will make your site stand out from the rest.

As with other beginners guide books, the author works with a case study site and as you progress through the chapters adding more things, you will be able to follow on with your own local install and compare results. This makes it a lot more interactive to learn and with the pop quizzes and “what just happened” reviews, you’ll really prepare yourself for your project.

More than words..

As well as covering the technical details for installing, maintaining and optimizing your site, the author also goes into the real life way of creating and running a blog/social network hub. Things like monetizing your site or ways to increase traffic are given a whole chapter and will really help the new webmaster get to grips with their site.

thinking Mu?

If you’re just considering looking into WPMu or you run more than one wordpress blog and want to consolidate them all to one site then you should buy yourself this book. It’ll give you enough information so that you can try it out without worrying about having to bring in outside help. You can view the books contents page and read more about it here :

WordPress MU 2.8 Beginners Guide

There’s no video this week because BT who, in their gargantuan corporate way have managed to create a cluster f*** out of my moving house service. And there’s no broadband for another 2 weeks.

“yes Mr. Bailey, we’ll disconnect your old service on the 21st and connect your new service on the 22nd and let you know when you’re connected”

LIARS!

I phoned up on the 22nd hoping to hear the news that the new number and all is ready so I can go ahead and arrange the broadband with o2 but, oh noooo, not so. I got told that the connection got delayed. The disconnection, however, did not get delayed. That went right ahead, so now I have no connection.

BRITISH TELECOM CAN GO SUCK EGGS

Why do I get a well spoken Scottish lass when I arrange a new line but any problems get transferred to an Indian call center?

This is a wonderful talk by Elizabeth Gilbert of “Eat Pray Love” #1 best seller fame. She talks about genius and a different way of looking at it (or, an older way of looking at it). I can’t tell you how nice it was to hear someone else explain something I’ve felt myself. How you get your genius or how an idea/poem/story/invention et al come to you.

For me, it’s code. Or more accurately, algorithms. I’m not a coding genius, far from it! but, I can see a picture of what needs to be done for a particular idea. It’s just a case of finding the right syntax to fit the slots together.

My code comes to me and waits patiently in the corner. Sometimes for days, just poking me gently now and then until I get distracted by something. Then it seeps into my head. From then on, all time stands still and music is made. Sure, I can’t play all the instruments well and my composition may be basic but, a genie comes to play in my head and we always have painful fun learning enough new code so I can get it out of my head before I go crazy.

Watch the video, you’ll know what I’m talking about. All people that create things will understand what she goes on about. olé olé

plus, she sounds really clever, I like her much and I think we should have dinner one day.

I’ve managed to get some major bookends done for some projects I have on the go and I’m really looking forward to being able to code for fun again now that I have stabbed the various work monkeys on my back!

However, I can’t get my blogger commentluv sorted until js-kit get their script fully updated. Sometimes it works on js-kit and sometimes it don’t. Sorry to all you google bloggers out there using commentluv but until js-kit have settled into their final script, every change I make is only temporary. Please be patient until they have a final stable comments script and then I can make commentluv work on their system consistently.

***Update***
Apparently there was a minor bug in the blogger Commentluv script that didn’t close the </a> tag in the comment which prevented the comments from synchronizing. That has been fixed.

If you are having issues with commentluv not showing then please visit your js-kit settings page and enable the expand “leave a comment” so your page shows the form instead of the user having to click the link to show it.

Another company to update their comment system is Typepad. Their new comment system that allows you to track comments is unfortunately, incompatible with the typepad version of Commentluv. This is due to them not loading the comment form until after the rest of the page has loaded which means commentluv can’t see it when it loads.

I’ll have to figure out some way of pausing the script load until after the comment form appears.

Another monkey on my back was an old project that got canned because a company I was being outsourced from didn’t pay their bills! Luckily, the restaurant owner managed to contact me and I was able (after much hassle) to transfer their site to my own server and update the database to work properly.

Mazza Indian Restaurant & Lounge is located in Kettering, Northamptonshire and is a very fine Indian restaurant indeed! The décor is awesome, food is incredible and the service is quick. (not to mention they have a fantastic website)

Click to visit Mazza Indian Restaurant in Kettering

I have updated the Newtown Santa Run 2009 site with some added oomph! and added a new domain name so it is up to date.
The Newtown Santa Run is going for the world record in 2009 and will be taking applications all year from people all over the planet to participate in the world record breaking attempt in Powys, Wales.

Visit the Newtown Santa Run 2009 website today and find out how to become part of history.

The nice folks at PacktPub sent me a pretty good book called “WordPress For Business Bloggers” by Paul Thewlis. I’ve been reading it for a couple of weeks and it turned out to be an excellent read.

Who is it for?

It makes it clear in the beginning of the book that you should at least be familiar with WordPress as a blogging platform. It doesn’t expect you to know any HTML or PHP skills, just a working knowledge of the WP interface for adding posts and pages, activating plugins and general use.

The book says it is aimed at anyone running or starting a business blog using WordPress. It can be for PR, marketing, profit or driving traffic. Whatever you use it for, if it’s for a business then this book is for you.

My own addition to this is that it will be perfect for someone who runs their own personal blog and is used to people asking them blogging questions. Why? because with this book, you could move from doing minor updates to personal blogs to heading up a business blog for your workplace or local businesses. You will see why below…

The Plan

One of the things that really impressed me with this book was how Paul gives good examples of specifics, what makes a great blog is the first question covered in the book. It doesn’t try to explain from the beginning what a blog is which would take a whole book but instead, it gives an example of different blogs that are aimed at;

• Increasing sales
• Adding value
• A dialog with your customers
• Raising awareness
• Showing expertise
• Customer Service
• Public relations
• Driving Traffic

The first chapter will give you an excellent summary of what you will learn from reading the rest of the book including, monetization, promotion and statistics.

The Case Study

This is where the real value of the book comes into play. So many “how to blog” books and blogs don’t go into specifics. They go on about how you should do this and that but not exactly how to go about doing this and that!.

The WordPress for business bloggers book has it’s own case study site to take you from planning (including strategic goals, tactical goals and implementation) all the way through from Chapter 3 – Designing your blog, how to install to your local machine so you can develop a blog before it goes live to blog design principles, layout, typography, colors.

Images, video and content are all covered in chapters 4 and 5. I was really impressed by the content of these chapters, every sub heading had a gold mine of information associated with it and was able to cover a large amount of the whole blogging for business idea without getting too wordy or cluttered with random information. It’s quite clear that Paul knows an awful lot about blogging and WordPress!

Through each chapter you get to work on the case study and see it grow as you complete each chapter and learn how each new bit of information gets applied to a real blog.

Why would you buy it?

Far from being just for business bloggers, I think this book would be an excellent resource for anyone wanting to know a bit more about blogging. All the information and guidelines would be applicable to any new blog.

You could even use this book as a self study course, work through each chapter and follow the case study and by the end, you will not only know how to make a full site but, you will know why you put headings here, how you should respond to comments, what to do with SEO and how to apply it and much more.

The case study site is quite simple and will give you a good ‘heads up’ on how to add and remove items from an existing theme so you could adapt a regular theme to word specifically for your business.
The code is available to download from the packtpub website.

If you’re working for your company and they don’t have a blog, just the information in Chapter 1 and 2 about mapping out a strategic plan and how to implement solutions would arm you with enough ‘know-how’ to talk your boss into getting your company into blogging. And wouldn’t it be nice if you knew just how to start?

Click here for WordPress For Business Bloggers

Get ANY book from PacktPub for FREE

Being the nice folks that they are, Packtpub has offered up 2 books from their vast collection as ebook downloads. My first packtpub book was an ebook and from it, I learned all that I needed to know about wordpress design so I really recommend that you enter this contest!

Requirements

1. Visit the PacktPub website and browse their collection and leave a comment here with what book you would like to win.
   (link to the books page at packtpub if you like)
2. Write about this contest on your own blog and link to this post.
   (it doesn’t have to be a whole post, it can be included as part of a new post but mention “wordpress for business bloggers” or “packtpub” in the paragraph and link directly to this post)

Details
Contest will run until Jan 16th 2009.
Winners will be chosen by a magic script at Random.org
Please use an email address that you can be contacted on when you comment, this email address will be used to receive the ebook

WordPress Theme Design – Tessa Blakeley Silver
PacktPublishing
Price 35.99 USD (ebook $27.19)

I bought a book recently after seeing it mentioned in the WP dashboard news items, it’s called WordPress Theme Design by Tessa Blakeley Silver and although a lot of the information regarding the functions of wordpress can be found at the codex, the book gives you so much more like the process gone through to design a theme from scratch.

I do quite a lot of sites in wordpress now and find it much easier to provide a client with a website that can be updated so easily, a few plugins here and there and you can provide a website that does all and more that’s needed.

Usually I get a standard theme and cut it up a bit and change the css to give me my site, or create in photoshop and send off for wordpressing but lately due to some more custom design requests I’ve received and the always dependable mistakes that freelancers can make I have wanted to do the whole thing myself from scratch..

I’ve downloaded a tutorial before about WP theme design from small potato before it was taken over and that was pretty darn useful but was made a little while ago so it wasn’t 2.5 specific.

That’s why I like what Tessa has put her book, it takes you step by step through the process of creating a non-blog wordpress blog, from sketch to WP core code. It’s made a big difference to my initial prototyping of concept sites and has really opened my eyes to what you can do with a bit of manipulation of the wordpress template tags. I’m even working on a magazine style front page for here so I can have a featured post for contests that stays up while it’s open for entries as well as excerpts to the regular posts..

You can buy the book printed or get it as pdf for a bit cheaper (I printed mine out from pdf on someone elses printer lol!) at packet publishing

Packtpublishing is sending me a new book about WordPress For Business Bloggers , they’re offering a deal if you get both books together. Stay tuned for the review of the new book!

So I was checking out my performancing advert on Randa Clays’ post about Trying out Google Chrome and I thought I’d give it a go myself.

ummm, could it be any faster? I thought it was obviously taking the piss somewhere. How come my site can load this fast? For the past few months I have been getting quite frustrated with how my sites perform when I load them in Firefox, even so far as to break out IE and use that when I have a lot of posts to write!!

That got me thinking, I love Firefox and its awfully good plugins like the web developer and such, I use them like.every.day but, is it slowing down because of all these extras? the answer is yes, yes it is.

That also got me thinking, is it faster because it’s new? probably just like when you get a new install of Windows and it loads up in seconds and programs don’t take an age to show the splash page only to go back to ‘normal’ within a few weeks of using (or in my case, within a day of me installing all the developer suite stuff)

But fast right? that’s what everyone is saying and for the life of me I can’t believe how much faster my pages load, all my sites seem to appear as if they were on another tab, hell even Firefox lately has been taking longer to switch to a new tab than it does for this thing to load my page afresh!

But no plugins right? well, to be honest, the only plugins that I absolutely need are the web developer ones and while I was checking out my CommentLuv site to see if the AJAX works on the settings page I noticed it didn’t show the form box for changing the cache age… dammit, that’s why it works so well, it’s half arsed!! but, nope, it was entirely my own fault…

It turns out that Chrome has it’s own debugger and source viewer with bells and whistles, I needed to know how to use the debugging console and I found this post by Eric about Basic information on Chromes’ Debugger.

By using the breakpoint function I was able to step through the code and find out exactly where the problem was occurring. It turns out that I had (again) put <script type=javascript etc in a file I was calling as src=.

So, now I am converted to Chrome. It does all that I need and does it fast. You should try out Chrome Browser for yourself, it downloads and installs quite quickly and has some nice features that are done well enough to make them look simple

A friend has started an online store called Flaming Stock where you can buy gadgets and gifts at special prices due to the unique way in which he has set up the store.
He buys a bulk amount of a single item and only sells that product at a discount until stock runs out, doing it like this means he can offer something like the current item, a Wireless bathroom speaker system for a tidy 21.99 which includes postage (UK only)

I think it’s a pretty novel concept and said I’d give his site a mention here, take a look and you might find something cool at a bargain price!

Here I am looking at the new post screen on wordpress! yey. oh how I missed your light blue tones

It’s funny, I’ve been busier and had more work to do over the past weeks and months than ever before but I don’t feel as half as stressed as I used to. It must be the nice weather or I might be (shock!) getting used to the workload!

I took on a charity website job last week and completed the final touches this morning, it’s for the Newtown Santa Run in 2008 which is a record breaking gathering of people dressed as Santa who run a few miles to raise money for good causes. It’s held every year in Newtown, Powys and there’s oodles of prizes to be won and lots of money to raise for charity. Visit the Newtown Santa Run website and see what they get up to..

I promised to do a few links here and there to get it noticed so you might notice it popping up here or there until google indexes it properly…