Here’s my notes, mainly for myself so I can keep track of all the things I learned and people I thought were truly inspirational.

Even before the first plenary session I got a tip from Jean over a scolding coffee (I didn’t get her card – grrr, get in touch Jean) that www.tsohost.co.uk do fast reliable web hosting for WP. Will follow that up as I’m not happy with Zen or Heart at the moment.

First plenary session

40 million downloads of WP since last WordCamp.

Blogging is growing up, more group blogging.

WordPress growing up, Big IT now see it as a proper platform. But often those who use it don’t make the most of it as they are inexperienced! ie no caching strategy on some government WP sites.

Some complex installs were mentioned:

• Dept of Transport
• Telegraph (blogs and communities),
• I’m a scientist (13 custom plugins, 45 php files, live chat)
• Chicago Tribune (uses multisite, 90 local sites)
• University of Nottingham (blogs)
• British Airways
• KPMG
• Nandos
• Barclays

Kieran O’shea: Legacy to latest

Kieran wrote the Calendar plugin.

Legacy is fine if you don’t need the features of the latest version.

Kieran went though the pitfalls of upgrading and what to watch out for:

• deprecated functions
• you’ll need to first switch to classic theme
• then manually port across changed code
• phantom features: new WP features that your old theme doesn’t support eg menus

To debug in config put (‘WP_DEBUG’, ‘true’) may have the syntax wrong here

He went through what to do about plugins that used db tables rather than the shiny new ‘custom posts’ and how to write a script that will turn them into custom posts instead. This bit was for the plugin developers, there were over 20 superstar plugin developers in the audience.

He gave some sound advice that developers should keep the migration script separate from the plugin.

Kieran has written a superb donation plugin using custom fields.

WordPress and mobile

Loved this session. Rachel McCollin looked at the available options when you want to make a WP site mobile-friendly.

First check your analytics: do people view your site on a mobile?  What OS? Old Blackberry , iOS, Android?

Different content for mobile?

• Do users have different objectives for mobile? They are in a different situation – on the move.
• They need information (possibly different information) quickly
• They need to get at some things immediately eg contact details
• Low bandwidth considerations

Choices:

• Mobile themes: quick easy reliable, tested, web and mobile look the same, less individual, quick and dirty. Todd Halfpenny (in the audience) customised 2010 to be ‘responsive’ ie shift size when viewed on a small screen. Also mentioned smoochi? Carrington, Mobius, Jigoshop for ecommerce.
• Plugins: quick, easy, reliable, tested, less control, one size fits all, only takes the content, no widgets and media. eg WPTouch – can tweak paid-for version to be branded (I asked: why doesn’t Stephen Fry’s designer do this?), WordPress mobile pack, BuddyPress mobile. 3rd party slooshing out eg Mobilise. We weren’t sure about this option!
• @media queries: in css. Retain elements of existing design, templated, can add, remove or change position of content. We debated whether removing content such as a graphical slideshow means that the content is downloaded to mobiles but not shown. Not reliable on old Blackberries. Can make the most of WP’s new menus system to show a drop-down menu on mobiles.
• Theme switcher: switch themes depending on device. Mobile uses different theme templates. I’m going to investigate this one. Build a completely separate theme that doesn’t even attempt to pull in the content that’s not appropriate for mobile. (ie not loading then hiding). Look more like apps. But 2 themes to maintain. eg WP Tap, WPTouch. Telegraph blogs and The AA use this method. Less complex content, bigger links (for sausage fingers).
• an app-like experience.

Some CSS useful for mobile themes or @media queries:

• Display: none
• width: 100%
• img {max-width: 100%; float:none)

How to test:

• On friends’ mobiles?
• Resize your browser
• Download Android and iPhone SDK
• Android virtual machine
• Safari – agent detect
• Firefox – change user agent
• Use Opera
• Adobe Device Central
• Nokia – can rent a virtual handset
• We agreed none of these are as good as actually using the device with ‘sausage fingers’

View Rachel’s slideshare for the full presentation.

Why change your username to something other than ‘admin’?

A common way of hacking WordPress blogs and sites is for the hackers to guess that you’ve used the default username: admin. If you have, then all they need to do is try a million-odd passwords and they are in and ready to insert all their spammy links to sites selling handbags and via*ra.

How to do it

1. create a new ‘admin’ user with a username other than ‘admin’, something unguessable, preferably not your name or your blog name
2. give the new user a strong password
3. log out
4. sign in with your new unguessable username and new strong password
5. delete the OLD admin username
6. assign all the posts and pages from the OLD username to the NEW username
7. go back and edit the new username. Scroll down to ‘Display name publicly as’ and select who the posts will be assigned to, so that it isn’t the username (still hackable!), but instead your name.

That’s it. Come to my WordPress Basics course for more.

A couple I’ve made

Website traffic plummets when 301 redirects are turned off

This is from one of my clients Google Analytics stats. 301 redirects can take a reader from a friendly short url such as www.website.com/word – that they might type into their browser after seeing an advert in a newspaper – to something far more complex like www.website.com/english/html/subject/page.asp?123.

The public search for disease common names

Google Trends is one of my favourite visualisation tools. This shows how many more people search on Google for swine flu (the blue line) rather than the scientific H1N1 (red line). See Google Trends and try it out for yourself.

From the web

Newsmap: Google News stories

I like the macro and micro view of news stories and the way you can customise it by changing the url. This is business, national and technology news for the uk: http://newsmap.jp/#/b,n,t/uk/view/

Healthmap: collating disease outbreaks

RSS feeds from trusted health news sites combined with a Google map to show current disease outbreaks.

Smartmoney Market Map: the US markets

Quickly see which company stock prices are rising and falling in the US markets by sector: both at the macro and micro-level.

Visual Thesaurus: swim through synonyms

So much easier to use than the printed version. I have the CD, but I use the web version.

• Tell stories about what your brand means to people.
• Give people useful content. This is known as ‘marketing with meaning’.
• Connect people to the things they care about.
• Build a ‘social FAQ’. Take the top 10 questions that people have about your company and answer those methodically across the social web with content. All kinds of content: podcasts, webinars, video blog posts and of course text.
• Give readers what they want.
• Respond to negative comments: say thank-you, say sorry and finally say what you’ll do about it.

Come on my Harnessing Social Media Course to find out more.

However, the tools are pretty amazing. Here, I’ve embedded a Facebook Livestream app I just created. You can comment on this post by signing into your Facebook account.

He talked about his new book ‘Zero History’ and about writing science fiction and writing in general. William is my favourite source of quotes when teaching. “The future is here, its just not evenly distributed” being one of my favourites when I teach social media. And of course he invented the term ‘cyberspace‘.

Some quotes from the event:

On his latest 3 books:
“a decade long pinhole exposure”.

For aspiring writers:
“write all the time”.

On China:
“there is not enough novelty [for me to be interested in China]“.

On Japan:
“I’m a happy consumer of things from Japan”.

On being told that one audience member had highlighted a passage in his latest book on his Kindle, and then found that three other people had also highlighted this passage, William said:
“Is it possible to turn that feature off? I hate it when people write in books”.

On getting older and the future:
“I find everything increasingly interesting. When I’m older I think I’ll just gape at everything”.
“I want to know how future people see us. We have no self-knowledge”.

I’m just a little way through Zero History, looking forward to lots of traveling whilst training so I can finish it.

As soon as you start typing your query, search results are shown to you right away (even before you press the ‘Enter’ or ‘Search’ button). As you type, the search results change based on whatever you have typed so far. Google tries to be smart and presents you search results based on your search string, location, previous searches and many other parameters.

Here’s Google on Instant Search:

But what should our reaction be – as web writers?

Well here’s my thoughts:

It could be that people will settle for shorter generic searches since Google will start to show useful results straight away.

SEO competition will get even more intense – readers may be even less likely to go below the fold or go to page 2 of the results.

Niche, long-tail searches could be even more frequent as users are almost encouraged to lengthen their search queries as they see that this will show better results.

Is this another Google Wave or Google Buzz? We’ll have to see.

Here’s what Charlie Brooker has to say in his latest Guardian blog:

“It’s the internet on fast-forward, and it’s aggressive – like trying to order from a waiter who keeps finishing your sentences while ramming spoonfuls of what he thinks you want directly into your mouth, so you can’t even enjoy your blancmange without chewing a gobful of black pudding first.”

Post your thoughts in the comments.

ACF interview

In June 2010 I was featured in several interviews with grant-making trusts in the Association of Charitable Foundations Journal.

Here’s a great article on Tips for setting up a website (PDF) aimed at grantmaking trusts.

Groups are essential for keeping abreast of topics.

Here’s some worthwhile LinkedIn Groups for web writers to join:

Freelance Web Writers

Web Content

The Content Wrangler Community

Freelance Editing Network

Seasoned writing and editing pros

The National Union of Journalists

STET: Professional Copy Editors

LinkEds & writers

But which keywords are best?

There are 3 factors to consider when selecting key phrases and keywords:

• Relevance:
  Give each keyword a relevance score from low to high. Is this keyword right for your content? Test it with an actual search. One word may not pass the test but a phrase may be more relevant – combine keywords.
• Competition level:
  Very low to very high. Do some searches to assess your competition.
• Popularity:
  How often is that keyword actually searched for? Also known as ‘search volume’. Google’s Keyword Tool can help you out here.

And which are the most useful for you?

Usually those that strike a balance between popularity, relevance and competition:

• high popularity/ high competition/high relevance:
  If drawn into a fight the words should be extremely relevant. There’s no point putting your entire SEO efforts into trying to rank for ‘spanish villas’ unless you have a six figure sum to spend and this is extremely relevant for your page.
• high popularity/ low competition/ high relevance:
  The ideal candidates for your shortlist. Hard to come by. WordTracker calls the popularity vs competition ratio ‘KEI’ (Keyword Effectiveness Index). This is a score that can help you see quickly which phrases are searched for frequently but have little competition.
• low popularity/ low competition/ high relevance:
  Not many searches for this, but if people do search, your page may come up first. These will add up. Known as ‘the long tail’ of search or ‘niche’ keywords.

‘Long tail’ tips:

• Compare your niche markets and target readers – some may have more future potential or be more ‘you’ than others
• Use web analytics to keep an eye on how people are finding your site
• Include niche terms in your web copy.

For local niches:

• Know your geography and all the local place names, plus what local people call them
• Make sure you note landmarks and places of interest – include these in your copy
• Find local business directories and review sites – they’re invaluable for getting your pages noticed.

Match to web pages

Then match each phrase or keyword to a page on your site. This page shouldn’t usually be your home page. It should be relevant to your keywords, but doesn’t need to contain them now. Don’t make one page work too hard. Do you need to create new pages for particularly useful keyphrses?

Thanks to Stephanie for suggesting the topic of this article.

These last few months have seen me work on numerous site launches, email newsletters and courses for my clients.  I have never been busier. But there’s no denying that starting up is tricky when budgets are particularly tight for clients.

This is a round-up of some recent articles and forthcoming courses that look helpful, whether you’ve chosen to go freelance or are forced to be self-employed (in other words, have been made redundant).

Always full of insight, David Airey, has recently written on:
Becoming a self-employed graphic designer
The design pricing formula

Nick Usborne has written extensively on freelance web writing. Some recent excellent articles and sites from Nick:
New Path to Riches blog
Freelance Writing Success

NMK (New Media Knowledge) run courses on setting up a web business. This one on March 10 looks good:
Drumming up Business – sales tactics for the digital freelancer
And NMK have a case study: Building a Web Business from Scratch
Follow NMK on Twitter.

Freelance Advisor have an excellent free 32-page guide to download: Go Freelance 2010
Freelance Advisor also have a podcast series, February 2010 was on The Challenges of Working from Home.
Follow Freelance Advisor on Twitter.

If you have any tips then put them in the comments.