Links for 11 September 2009

• Blogging for Artists – An informal talk given to Shropshire Arts Network on September 8th 2009 by Pete Ashton
• Culture Wars | About Culture Wars – Culture Wars is the online review of the Institute of Ideas in London. We cover books, films, theatre, art and talk events, with a view to understanding how political and other ideas filter through the culture, and how the arts in turn influence politics and society more generally
• Welcome to verifiable.com – “Our goal is to develop a tool to help you communicate data more clearly, efficiently, and honestly. We want to make it easy and fun to produce gorgeous, verifiable visualizations and allow viewers to dig into your data and even build on your work to bring out richer, clearer, or just plain different conclusions”
• Monopoly City Streets – Live worldwide game of Monopoly using Google Maps as the game board. The goal is simple. Play to beat your friends and the world to become the richest property magnate in existence” Launching 9 Sept
• RSS in the Clouds « Blog « WordPress.com – “Today we turned on support for all 7.5 million blogs on WordPress.com something called RSS Cloud, which is basically a way for people to get push notification that your feed has updated”. Oh, now that is interesting
• Embeddable Google Document Viewer – A little known Google Docs feature will let you embed a PDF or .ppt on a website. One day we won’t have to faff around with arcane things like this
• Ning Apps – “Today you can choose from more than 90 Ning Apps, and that’s just the beginning. This number will continue to grow as developers here at Ning and around the world build additional Ning Apps tailored around your interests and passions”

Links for 25 August 2009

• Frontline Club – News: Broadsheet – Blog produces broadsheet. £15 a year sounds like a bargain
• Disney Takes Web Surfers to the Lab to See Which Ads Work – NYTimes.com – “To find out what ads work and why, Disney researchers developed an array of research tools, including goggle-based eye tracking, stereoscopic camera-based eye tracking and heart rate monitoring”
• Appfrica Labs | Investing in East African Innovators – Appfrica Labs is an investment company and software development firm that facilitates and incubates technology entrepreneurs in East Africa
• TubeMogul – Online video research and reports – “Given that we are tracking hundreds of millions of video streams, we would hate for all of that data to go to waste. That’s why we’re providing TubeMogul Industry Analysis based on macro-level trends we are seeing in the data. Check back frequently to view our growing list of reports”
• Divine – Convert PSD to Wordpress Themes – Free Photoshop Plugin – Divine creates websites from Photoshop to Wordpress promptly. Absolutely free
• Matt Cutts: Straight from Google – What You Need to Know « WordPress.tv – Matt Cutts from the Web Spam team at Google showcases the good and the bad of WordPress as seen through the eyes of Google, including basics on how Google search works and how you can boost your blog’s results in Google searches

My standard changes to a free Wordpress.com blog

Every time I set up a new wordpress.com blog I make the same changes before I even start thinking about writing a post.  The following is really just a crib sheet for myself, but someone may find it useful.

A couple of notes first:

• There’s no single ‘right way’ to set up a blog.  If you do things differently then great – who wants homogenity?
• This is for the free Wordpress.com, not the self-hosted version of WP
• I’m posting this in Nov 08.  Sorry if the layout and features have changed
• I’ve assumed that you’ve signed up and got yourself a blog

Ok, on with it…

Quick list of changes

• About page – update content and disallow comments and pings
• Delete ‘Hello World’ post
• Links – delete Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org and add a couple of my own (if relevant)
• Change blog tagline
• Add Stumbleupon, Delicious, Digg and Reddit icons to posts
• Free up comment publication
• Disable Snap Shots
• Hide ‘related links’
• Update profile details
• Choose a theme and some sidebar widgets

Making the changes

I’ve ordered this part as per the tabs at the top of the Wordpress dashboard, only I’ve gone right to left (NB – no need to change anything under ‘Comments’). There’s method to my madness though.

Users

• Click ‘Your Profile’ (just above where ‘Manage Users’ is in big letters)
• Enter your name (unless you want to be anonymous) and nickname.  Choose what you want your name to be displayed as (at the bottom of posts and in comments) from the drop down menu.
• Click on ‘Update Profile’ at the bottom of the page

Settings

• General – delete the existing tagline that says ‘Just another Wordpress blog’ and replace it with something more suitable (or just leave it blank)
• Reading – tick the boxes to add Stumbleupon, Delicious, Digg and Reddit icons to posts
• Discussion – untick the box that says ‘Comment author must have a previously approved comment’

Remember to click ‘Save Changes’ at the bottom of each page where you alter settings.

Design

Themes and widgets are really a matter of personal preference, although I’d always recommend getting rid of Snap Shots (the link previews that pop up when you hover a cursor over some anchor text) and ‘related posts’ (the rarely relevant list of posts on other wordpress.com blogs). They’re both irritating.

• Themes – scroll through and pick something you like.  Click on it to preview it and click ‘Activate theme’ in the top right of the preview window to, well, activate it.  The look of your blog will change straight away.
• Widgets – these will be dictated by personal preference and the particular aims of your blog.  As a basic layout I’d suggest (from top to bottom) Pages, Text (with a brief explanation of what the blog is about), Recent Comments (apparently placing this high up encourages commenting), Categories, Links and Search
• Extras – untick ‘Enable snap shots on this blog’, tick to ‘Hide related posts on this blog’

Manage

• Posts – tick the box next to ‘Hello World’ and click delete
• Pages – click on ‘About’ and change the text to something more relevant. Also scroll down, click on ‘Comments & Pings’ and untick both boxes to disallow them both
• Links, tick the boxes next to the two existing links to Wordpress websites and click delete.  Then click on ‘Add link’ to insert a link of your own

Write

• Pages – add any extra static pages that are needed
• Posts – finally, time to write that first post.

A WP plugin post. How lovely.

It’s a bit navel-gazing but, in answer to a request, here’s the list of plugins used on my blog.  Or at least hoarded just in case I need them one day.

• AdSense Manager
• Akismet
• All in One SEO Pack
• Audio Player
• cformsII – contact form
• FeedSmith
• flickrRSS
• Google Analytics
• Google XML Sitemaps
• InlineFeed
• My Page Order
• One Click Plugin Updater
• Postalicious
• Seesmic Wordpress plugin
• Sociable
• Twitter Tools
• Wordpress Automatic Upgrade
• Wordpress Database Backup
• Wordpress Reports
• WP-o-matic

I grabbed most of these by trawling through the most popular ones on wordpress.org and the rest have been recommended by various people over time.  I’ve also added a couple recently and thanks for that go to Paul Bradshaw for this tweet and his delicous taggings and also Joanna Geary for this recent blog post.

Are there any that I’ve missed that’ll reinvigorate my life and have me earning MILLIONS from the internet TODAY with NO EXTRA WORK?