Book yourself on the Web Content Strategy Training Course, starts 1 November 2011.

I was reading London Calling by Barry Miles. This chronicles the creative pull of London for bohemians in the second half of the twentieth century.

An old friend suggested I read Patti Smith’s Just Kids, her memoir of her time with Robert Mapplethorpe. 5 seconds later I was reading it on my Kindle.

Bohemia: NYC and London

Just Kids: the pull of New York for Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe.

London Calling: the pull of London, my old home town, for counter-culture and underground artists, musicians and writers from around the world.

Bohemia. Art. Struggle. Both books looked at exciting eras of cultural and political upheaval.

Parallel reading 1962-1978

When I reached 1962 in each book I decided to be aware of the year and switch between the two books. I was in London for 5 pages then in New York. I couldn’t wait to see how they related to each other.

Patti, Warhol, CBGBs, Punk, William Burroughs were featured in both. I noticed that in both places the early seventies were really the sixties: for example the drugs, challenging the authorities politically and artistically.

The end x 2

But then the come-down from finishing two poetic, optimistic and uplifting books. I’m looking for some more parallel reading challenges.

I have just started an inspirational book about overcoming creative blocks: Uncertainty – Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance by Jonathan Fields. But I’m looking for a companion. Any suggestions?

The Press then

In a corridor leading to their meeting rooms they have a fascinating display showing their printing technology from the very beginning to about 20 years ago.

These beautiful machines got me thinking about my journey to web publishing and how much things really have changed.

I remember using some of these amazing machines during my graphic design degree at Chelsea in the late 80s.

I had forgotten how fiddly they were to set up and use. And how long the process took!

WordPress now

Printing technology has come a long way since the 80s, and web publishing has come a long way since I made my first site in 1995. My favourite way of making websites at the moment is WordPress. I’ll let you into some of my secrets on the course I run for the Publishing Training Centre in London.

Come to my London WordPress course to discover just how easy web publishing can be! A few places are left for the course on 22 September.

Here’s what I cover:

WordPress basics:

• What is WordPress? WordPress.com vs WordPress.org
• How to set up a self-hosted WordPress site or blog

Configuring WordPress:

• Getting the ‘settings’ right
• Making WordPress behave like a website or blog

Content

• Drafts and publishing
• Adding and editing content in pages and posts
• Adding ‘media’: images, PDFs, Word documents, video and audio
• Adding links

Blogging essentials

• Writing a blog post
• Managing posts
• Understanding tags and categories
• Managing comments and fighting comment spam

Customising WordPress

• The most useful plugins
• Sidebars, widgets and badges
• Where to find themes, free and premium
• The pitfalls of free themes
• Making WordPress search engine friendly

WordPress administration

• Best practices for upgrading WordPress
• Managing WordPress users, permission levels and log-ins
• Managing files
• The WordPress dashboard
• Measuring your site’s traffic with Google Analytics
• Importing and exporting data
• Backups and protecting WordPress.

Hope to see you there!

WOW Plugins

Michael Kimb Jones was another great speaker (and he’s a great designer). He was shocked at how many plugins we use for each of our sites. Here’s his list of WOW plugins plus a few from me.

1. Gravity forms. Use it, love it. Most of the audience put their hands up that they use this.
2. Buddy Press. Lots of folks again. Haven’t used this. Forum plugin.
3. BBPress. Forum plugin. My developer installed this one for me a while back (but the non-plugin version so not as easy to use as current version apparently).
4. Disqus. Again, big response. Relaively spam-resistant comment form system. Premium version has analytics. Not used.
5. WordPress SEO by Yoast. Not used. My themes which are based on Thesis and Hybrid have SEO built-in.
6. Google XML Sitemaps. Automatically makes SEO-friendly XML sitemap. Not the same as a Site map on your website. Use it, love it.
7. WP SuperCache – Kimb uses. Speeds up complex sites.
8. WP Total Cache – lots of recommends
9. MarketPress – sell things.
10. Jigoshop – sell things, mobile-friendly
11. WP e-Commerce - sell things
12. Jetpack – 8 plugins in one.
13. Pages Tree View – shows just top level pages in Dashboard. Click to see children. Useful if your site has over 50 static pages (as many of mine do). Also drag and drop your new page into a section. Will investigate this one.
14. CollabPress – project management plugin. Assign tasks to people.
15. Contact Form 7 - Easy to use Contact form system. But puts code in all pages. Use this one.
16. Easy Table Creator – create tables directly in WP. No need to import from Word or Dreamweaver. Lovely. Will use.
17. Custom Post Type UI – create new taxonomies and post types with no php knowledge. Can export code to your own theme.
18. EG Attachments – can select documents like PDFs easily. Will use.
19. Front End Editor – clients can change their site text without going via the scary dashboard. It looks like they can even edit text widgets! OMG this one is awesome.
20. Regenerate thumbnails – will change all thumbnails to a new size (say if you’ve changed themes).
21. Widgets on pages – Add new widgets to pages using shortcodes. Clever. May use.
22. WordPress Reset - gets rid of all customisations inc posts and pages.
23. I suggested Widget Logic, which Kimb also uses. It enables you to load only certain widgets on certain pages without using php – just very simple WP conditional logic.
24. Another suggestion from the audience was Fold Page Lists. Will have to check out this one. I think it shows children of a page in the navigation.
25. I would have suggested Simple Site Navigation. But it is not needed now we have lovely WP menus.
26. Login Lockdown – lock out those who get their password wrong more than 3 times. Should have mentioned this one.

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.

I’m a strange mixture of designer, writer, editor, IA, project manager and techie. A while ago I discovered that what I’ve actually been doing for the last 14 years by combining all these is ‘content strategy’. I noticed a gap and now Publishing Training Centre have filled it with my new course.

Whether you are re-launching, starting from scratch or wrestling with an unruly site, this course is a foundation for you to develop your content strategy and integrate it effectively within your organisation.

We’ll look at the tools, processes and approaches that can help you take charge of planning content creation, delivery and governance so that your website content can deliver real value for your organisation and meaningful experiences for your website visitors.

Book Content strategy for the web online.

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.