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.
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.
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.
I think it looks fantastic! Well done all. See my photographs →
Note: See bottom of this post for updates.
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… →
Update: 
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.
Here’s a fun trick I learned last night while creating a WordPress theme, and also works for WordPress.com blogs like this one.
Learn how to customise your own ‘Read more…’ text after the jump! →
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:
From Neo Mammalian Studios:
Our sarcastic tribute to those infographic designers who insist on doing it wrong…repeatedly and unashamedly.
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.
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
It has been brought to my attention that this blog was given a rather flattering write-up in the September issue of Cardiff Life magazine! I’ve copied the text below, adding in the links to the relevant pages for any Cardiff Life readers who want to specifically check out something mentioned:
Blog: halfblog.net
Run by Geoff Rogers, the content is brilliantly varied, ranging from stuff about Cardiff Design Festival to the musings of American futurist Buckminster Fuller. And there’s a fantastic series of posts taken from his old ChromaFeed.tv blog, which has clips from interesting short films, animations and such-like (check out the No Robots clip), together with erudite thoughts and comments.
Sarah Mia’s blog Falling Forward is also featured, and Neil Cocker gets a whole half-page on his Cardiff Start initiative.
My thanks to Cardiff Life for the plug!
This 1926 film of Cardiff restored by the BFI also shows Cardiff University students dressed up for charity during Rag Week. Continue reading
Vi Hart is a ‘professional mathemusician’ and YouTuber, currently employed by Kahn Academy. She makes brilliant animated ‘mathematical doodle’ videos that have become extremely popular.
The two videos that interested me the most however aren’t about mathematics, but about YouTube. In the first Vi explains (with a great deal of recursion) how she makes her videos: her process, production tricks and equipment used. All in her usual fun style.
In the second video she tackles why she makes her videos, and reads passages that have inspired her from anthropologist Edmund Snow Carpenter’s “They Became What They Beheld” (1970) and explains how those ideas relate to YouTube today.
In a third video, another young YouTuber has made a more conventional behind the scenes feature and interview with Vi.
Ah, the Tory brain. Never mind the super-rich, it’s paying plumbers cash-in-hand that’s truly immoral. This week we’re all being called lazy.
Whenever I read one of these Tory stories — which seems to be about every week — I’m always reminded of Buckminster Fuller, who had this to say about the ‘value’ of hard work:
We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.
— Buckminster Fuller, New York Magazine, 1930
A man well ahead of his time, and ours.
For the eighth Cardiff Design Festival this October, Plastik Magazine are looking for writers, designers, illustrators and photographers to make a magazine in a day.
Watch this in fullscreen!
A time-lapse made from photographs taken from aboard the ISS. Could use a little stabilisation in some shots, but still — pretty incredible.
See also: Long exposure photographs from the International Space Station
Today I was surprised and amused to see a pet sheep being taken for a walk along the Taff in north Cardiff.
Nick is perfectly happy to be petted (though he’s a bit smelly) and seemed to be completely unfazed by dogs. He is 22 stone though, so it’s probably the dogs that need to be worried.
This gorgeous and surreal animation is the fourth in the Bendito Machine series.
Bendito Machine IV – Fuel the Machines, by Jossie Malis
Now Jossie is running a Kickstarter campaign to continue the series and make a computer game.
This story begins six years ago when I, tired from all the global cretinism, decided to create a universal fable about human conflicts and enigmatic mystifying eyes that watch everything. After some months devoted to materializing this idea, the short film Bendito Machine premiered at festivals all over the world, receiving support that exceeded all my expectations. What I originally envisioned as a therapy to channel all that accumulated displeasure, turned out to be (thanks to the friendly welcome of the Internet world) the seed of an uncommon animation series which has occupied quite a sizeable part of my last six years.
The National Assembly are running a photo competition titled Democracy in action in Wales. Rosemary Butler AM (chair of the judging panel) said when the competition was announced that it was a unique opportunity for the Assembly to illustrate that democracy in Wales was not something that was confined to politicians in Cardiff Bay. Continue reading
On August 6, 2012 the Curiosity rover will attempt a completely automated landing in Gale Crater on Mars. Curiosity is about five times larger than Spirit or Opportunity, so it can’t just deploy a huge beach-ball and bounce to safety — instead it needs to pull off a much more precise (and dramatic!) landing.
Challenges of Getting to Mars: Curiosity’s Seven Minutes of Terror
Team members at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory share the challenges of the Curiosity Mars rover’s final minutes to landing on the surface of Mars.
That video is all the more impressive when you have a mental image of exactly how large the Mars Science Laboratory is:
Actual size
Zombie Apocalypse Now In A Minute is a Cardiff-set webcomic documenting the rise of the undead in Wales. Inspired by Shaun of the Dead and the feel of a post-match Cardiff, the story follows the adventures of Keith, an overweight, sarcastic bartender who attempts to hide out in the castle.
The webcomic is the work of Jamie McGowan who himself runs a bar in Cardiff, which has no doubt provided him with plenty of inspiration. The artwork is stylish and imaginative, and captures Cardiff perfectly.
halfblog.net 
