Yearly Archives: 2012

Halfblog: 2012 in review

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WordPress fireworks WordPress.com has produced some cool-looking reports for users, summing up blog activity for 2012. It’s really just a pretty stats page, but it’s very well done with CSS animated fireworks, parallax effects and colourful graphics. You can see the complete report for halfblog.net here.

Here’s the summary it provided:

19,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform. This blog was viewed about 130,000 times in 2012. If it were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take about 7 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

In 2012, there were 133 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 657 posts. There were 306 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 91 MB. That’s about 6 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was September 24th with 754 views. The most popular post that day was Minimalistic iPhone 5 wallpapers.

Continue reading →

How to live with introverts

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An introvert Dr. Carmella’s Guide to the Introverted is a very astute webcomic by Schroeder Veidt.

Below the comic I’ve also embedded a TED talk by Susan Cain who talks about how extrovert behaviour has come to be considered the norm and how introverts can (often unknowingly) make self-negating choices in an effort to fit into society better.

Read ‘Dr. Carmella’s Guide to the Introverted’ →

How not to treat your customers online: Google bring sucky web experiences to life

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I really appreciate these hilarious videos made by Google Analytics. They’re a perfect illustration of how frustrating shopping online can be.

Online Checkout

With the holiday shopping season in full swing, it’s important to ensure your website and digital marketing is running on all cylinders. Your potential customers should be able to find what they need on the digital shelf as easily as in real life. Sadly, many sites leave visitors frustrated – losing potential customers. However, the advantage of your online storefront is that you can understand where you’re losing customers and work to improve your shopping experience.

Google Analytics in Real Life: What would your customer experience look like? – analytics.blogspot.ca

Watch the other two videos from this Google campaign →

Halfblog: Now AdFree

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I’ve finally decided to remove the ugly WordAds from this site, and upgraded to AdFree. I asked WordPress.com support about the possibility of spending the $30 I had accrued with WordAds on AdFree, knowing that they insist on paying out only when a user has accrued $100 of funds but reasoning that since I was spending money with them they might be able to make an exception. Nope:

Our finance department isn’t able to do it. One challenge is that our ad partners like Google Adsense don’t pay until a site has earned over $100. So if our finance department paid out accounts less than $100 we’d always be losing money on those.

I did appreciate the honest and frank answer though. Continue reading →

The best Google Webmaster videos

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Dear Matt Cutts I thought it might be useful to bring together ten of the most popular videos from Google’s Webmasters YouTube channel.

I’ve taken the liberty of filtering out the marketing videos and have just focused on the freely given SEO advice. Most of these feature Matt Cutts answering user-submitted questions or Maile Ohye giving general advice. These are pretty jargon-free and are clearly intended for webmasters without much working knowledge of SEO.

Learn what Google has to tell us about SEO →

Some very cool WordPress plugins

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This Wednesday is the next WordPress Users Wales meet-up, and the theme is something that every WordPress user loves to talk about:

Plugins!

Plugins are shiny toys to a WordPress geek. We love to play with them, share our favourites and learn about any new cool ones that will make our old blogs perform new tricks.

Now seemed like the perfect time to list some of my personal favourites. Most of these I have used, and the rest are on my list to try very soon.

There is also some opinionated advice near the end of the post on what kinds of plugins are best avoided.

Enough waffle, show me the list! →

Stylish cyclists of Cardiff, my contribution to #CardiffMakeaMag

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I’ve broken away early from efforts at the Cardiff School of Journalism to produce a cycling-themed magazine in a day for the Cardiff Arts Festival. You can monitor the progress of those who are still toiling away on Twitter by following the hashtag #cardiffmakeamag.

For my part, I teamed up with an aspiring magazine journalist called Lucinda who attempted to chase down cyclists who caught her eye. She would then quiz them on cycling in Cardiff while I took pictures. Typically I make great efforts to keep humans out of my pictures, so these aren’t exactly my best work. Still, it was nice to try something different.

Update: Here is the final spread as it appears in the magazine Off The Chain.

Cardiff Cycle Style

I think it looks fantastic! Well done all. See my photographs →

Wales Blog Awards 2010 and 2011: A call for information

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Note: See bottom of this post for updates.

Wales Blog Awards logo Last year I wrote about the blogs that were shortlisted for – and won – the Wales Blog Awards. I had an idea for a follow-up post this year that would give a more detailed analysis of the Welsh blogging scene. I would measure things like post frequency, average comments attracted per post, image use, age of blog, social media followers etc.

In addition, I wanted to go back and look at the blogs shortlisted for 2010 and 2011. This is when I noticed that much of the history of the Wales Blog Awards has already been deleted.

Do you have any record of this information? Please read on… →

Magazine in a Day – Cycling

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Update: Bicycle by Simon Child, from The Noun Project As I mentioned previously on this blog, I’ve signed up a photographer for a fun project called Content: A Magazine in a Day, which is going to be taking place at the School of Journalism this Saturday as a part of the Cardiff Design Festival.

Since then a loose theme has been announced: Cycling – a theme that is running through many of the Design Festival events.

I’ve no idea who I’ll be working with or what direction the magazine will take, and I assume that’s the idea. Personally, I just hope the rain takes a break as I’ll be making use of my bike.

Minimalistic iPhone 5 wallpapers

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I was asked on Twitter today if I would mind updating my minimal iPhone 4 wallpapers to the new iPhone 5 size. It turns out that I would not mind at all, so here they are:

Read the fun CC licence!

Upcoming Cardiff events: Cryptography, WordPress plug-ins and what you can’t say online

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These are just some of the cool and interesting things happening in Cardiff over the next few months. I’m not trying to be as comprehensive as I have been in previous events roundups. Check out Steve’s post at SEOno for more cool things happening this month.

CryptoParty Cardiff – 22nd September 2012

CryptoParty With our rights to privacy online being eroded away little by little every day, now is a great time to learn the basics of cryptography. CryptoParty is a free and independently run initiative to promote the use of encryption tools and other ways to stay safe and secure online. Continue reading →