Spring Cleaning – Feedback wanted

Was thinking of having a revamp of the blog

I’ve been using the current template for quite a while now and while i think it’s very geeky cool it’s quite heavy, not to everyone’s taste and isn’t 100% user friendly

If you consume this site via RSS feeds you probably have no idea what I’m talking about!

If you do read the blog could you give me some feedback about the theme please?

Should I leave it as it is or try something fresh?

If I make changes what would you like to see?

Thanks in advance!

Upping Sticks

I mentioned recently I’d been planning some changes around here

I wanted to do this on the two year blog-anniversary as it seemed a cool thing to do but it hasn’t worked out that way so I’m doing it today (it’s just a coincidence it’s Halloween)

I’m moving my blog and hosting it myself

When I first started the blog I had no idea where it would be going to, if I’d stick at it or even if anyone would read it!

WordPress.com was great for this is at meant I could get up and running and it wouldn’t cost me a penny. If I decided it wasn’t for me then I could just walk away and that would be that

However, two years on it’s more than just something I dabble in. Even when I’m on one of my quiet periods I still think a lot about my blog.

Obviously the free WordPress services comes with some limitations. You are limited in the plugin’s and themes you can work with, your own advertising is a no-no (not that I’m planning on having any!). In a nutshell the creative control of how your site works is taken away from you.

The upside however is that I don’t have to worry about the admin side of things. Backups, security patching, server performance, uptime, etc, etc

I’ve had the andyparkes.co.uk domain name for ages now (redirected to the wordpress site) so that wasn’t an issue. I already pay for hosting due to other sites I have so the only decision I had to make was over which software to use

Making a move is something I’ve been agonising over for a while and I heavily tested blogengine.net which I was pretty impressed with. It’s written in ASP .NET, is open source and is very easy to work with. My only issue was when I had a problem importing my old posts across. If it hadn’t been for that I’d have jumped at it I think

But I’ve been so used to using WordPress for so long I couldn’t turn away from it!

Another reason for not doing this sooner was that I was worried about broken links and the fact that since the site has been around so long that certain posts were turning up toward the top of Google searches (do a search for netmeeting and vista on the UK site) which also gave me nice ego boosting stat graphs

But in the end I thought – screw it.

The new home for this blog can be found at

www.andyparkes.co.uk/blog

Please update any feeds you may have and if you visit the site itself excuse the dust while I try to figure out which themes, plugins, etc I’m happy with

I’ll cross post for a little while until I’m happy all is well and then parkey.wordpress.com will remain as an archive. I need to keep that WordPress account open anyway so I can use askimet and the stats plugin’s so I don’t plan on deleting the site

If you’ve read my blog over the last two years I’d like to say thanks. I’ve had an awful lot of things happen that would have just bypassed me if I hadn’t started rambling here two years ago. If you have any feedback (or you think I’m an arse!) please drop me an email or a comment

Now we just need to get someone else on a proper blogging platform

The power of the Internet hype

While not giving you the power of the stats a self hosted blog would afford, the stats that WordPress.com provide are generally good enough for me

I get to know which posts are more popular than others and see how site visitors come across my page

The page views numbers also help give me an ego boost when I need it

The numbers are usually pretty predictable. I get fewer visits at a weekend with each weekday having similar figures so I get a nice curvy line

However, I was shocked when I saw this graph last week

WTF?! Best day ever!

At the top of that spike I got more visit’s on that single day than I usually get for an entire week!

What caused it? This post I made about Google Chrome towards the back end of last week. On that particular day that single post alone got about THREE times the amount of visits the entire blog does on an average day.

According to the stats it’s down to the fact that I linked to a post on the official Gmail site (who obviously get a hell of a lot more visitors than my humble blog does!)

At the bottom of their post was a “blogs that link here” section and I must have got a lot of click through’s!

Another side effect of this meant I was at the top of the WordPress “Top Growing blogs” and “Top Posts” lists for a short while which doesn’t mean a lot but made me happy for a hour

Just goes to show what a bit of hype can do!

Needless to say my “Andy is stupid and has infected his own computer with a virus though it’s a worm if you want to be picky and has let everyone on Facebook know including a whole host of fellow IT pros who will probably ridicule him at tonight’s users group meeting” post didn’t quite get the same amount of visits…it did get more comments though

Preview Your WordPress Theme

Just opened my WordPress dashboard to see a new feature annoucement

Theme Preview - “You can now preview any WordPress.com theme from your blog’s Presentation admin screen just by clicking on the theme’s thumbnail. Your blog will load on the fly using the new theme without actually activating that theme for realies. Even better, you can click around most anywhere in your blog to see how your posts, pages, categories and everything else look.”

Super!

I’m not great when it comes to presentation so i’m happy using built-in themes. I’ve never changes from the first theme i picked for fear of screwing things up..now i can experient to my hearts content without hurting my poor little blog