FiddyP

Am I asleep dreaming I am awake?

Neo.. wake up

I’ve been working bloody hard for the past 13 weeks on something that still isn’t even close to being finished. It’s invaded my brain so much that even whilst on holiday, every time I closed my eyes I would wake up in a sweat thinking about it.

Seriously, almost every time I fall asleep I dream about it. Even my ever faithful friend – the afternoon nap has been compromised!

The Value of Giving

That’s it, that’s the mistress my missus has become increasingly jealous over. Mrs. VoG has been driving me crazy or filling me with joy over the past few months as I try and get her to play nice with amember and pap4 (two other saucy code maidens that I’m bending to my will(y))

Click the image to see if it’s ready, if it’s not just enter your details in the form and you’ll be notified when it is. Be prepared!, this has been a mammoth task to put together and will be a brand new way to do things.. oops, I nearly let the cat out of the bag.. you’ll just have to wait and see, I’m still under a non-disclosure agreement until it’s launch time.

Tens of thousands of lines

Nope, I’m not talking about a night out with Keith Moon from The Rolling Stones! .. I’m talking about the reason this will be so good , why it’s gonna blow everyone away and also why I’m going slightly doo-lally every time I close my eyes. It’s because I’ve written over 10,000 lines of code in custom plugins, modifications and additions to existing plugins.

I’ve needed to do this because even though we’ve spent thousands of dollars on commercial scripts and 3rd party engines, they just weren’t designed to do what we wanted to do. Close, but not quite and the ‘not quite’ bit has required hours and hours and hours of discussions over skype, conference calls, sketches and ultimately hundreds and hundreds of hours at my keyboard.

BIG PROJECTS SUCK ARE COOL

Haha! it’s been a duplicitous wench of a project so far, I’ve never sworn so much at inanimate objects. I’ve torn my hair out, freaked up/down/sideways and out until , as one of the partners, Mark says, “I’ve spent all my freak”

But, it’s also been hugely fun and satisfying to venture into unknown realms of WordPress, affiliate systems, membership packages, payment gateways and PayPal IPN scripts.

I’ve learned new things about WordPress that I never knew existed, things have gone in my head that can be used forever more on a metric tonne of future ‘what if?’ projects that I’m just gagging to get started on (yes, I really am a sucker for punishment!).

This is most definitely the biggest coding project I’ve ever worked on and as much as it is painful, it’s also fun. I’m really hoping that we can get to the open the doors stage soon because, if I don’t start seeing some action and if I can’t stop saying ,”not yet” when my missus asks if it’s ready then I might just get chucked out onto the street and honestly folks, without her, no tappy tappy code monkey.

Stick with me boyshz and galshz

Stick around, keep checking in and coming back to find out more because this is one huge momma of a site and well, it’ll rock the online business / hobby / charity / social and WordPress world. If you’ve ever had a business or a website or both, you’ll see the Value of Giving on day 1.

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