Disclaimer
The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent anyone else's view in any way, including those of my employer.
© Copyright 2008
The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent anyone else's view in any way, including those of my employer.
© Copyright 2008
I’d heard from people that the WordPress upgrade process was ‘a pain’, so I resisted doing it for as long as I could, even though I knew I was leaving this site vulnerable to whatever exploits had already been identified. Last week I knew I had to bite the bullet and upgrade, so I set aside plenty of time and began the long arduous process, which I’ll outline for you here.
Yes, it really was that simple. In the space of 20 minutes I upgraded 4 blogs, each of which had started with a different version of WordPress, and each of which upgraded with no problems. So if you’re looking to upgrade your WordPress installation to the latest version (currently 2.5.1), make sure to do it with this plugin (which is actually recommended by WordPress as the way to go).
Yes, I know, I seem to put out more and more of these “it’s been a while since I posted” posts, so here we go again.
If you are a Facebook friend, and look at my status, you’ll already know that I managed to tear my calf muscle last week, and am currently on crutches, which is going to work really well for my trip to Miami this week – although if you’re going to be at the WOMMU conference, I should be easy to spot, so come over and say “Hi, can I carry your bag for you” 
I’ll actually be covering that conference for Search Marketing Gurus, so pop over there and you can find out what’s going on in the Sunshine State.
As usual, I’ve been doing my regular blogging for EndlessPlain, and unlike here, have posts ready to go through the end of May, so head over there and check out what I’m talking about, every Monday at 9am est.
…or Spreading myself around like a spready thing.
Despite what Anthony has to say on the topic of writing posts on other people’s blogs, I’ve been busy doing just that, here’s a list of those that I’ve made on other blogs this week that you may not be aware of… (and the last one is what this teaser was all about).
Don’t Panic, Plan for Disaster (my last regular article on the In-House column)
Google Adwords: Geotargeting Options
Well it’s definitely been an interesting year, full of changes both personally and professionally. 2007 was the year that I lost 40 lbs, ran my first 5k, my first 8k, my first 10k, my first 1/2 marathon, and my first and last marathon. I also moved companies, making the switch from the in-house local search world over to the nonprofit digital marketing agency side, back in May.
In May I also started writing a column for SearchEngineLand which was originally a ‘whenever the mood strikes you’ column, but by September had morphed into a 4 weekly piece. In June I started writing for the company blog – rbdrodeo.com – on all manner of Search Marketing topics, officially once a week, but since I don’t believe that there were 62 weeks between June 6th and today, I believe I may have done a bit more than that. Shortly after that I also started writing for SearchEngineGuide on a ‘whenever the mood strikes you’ basis on whatever topics I may want to write about that would be interesting to small business owners.
As you’ll know from reading this blog and / or from seeing me around, I’ve also been speaking on the conference circuit. this started in June with a presentation for the PRSA in New York, and a breakfast meeting for the DC chapter of the PRSA the next day. Work sent me over to London so that I could speak at the inaugural SMX – London event, swiftly followed by the Kelsey ILM show and SES Chicago.
So what’s on the plate for 2008? Well, the big change is that I’m no longer working for RedBoots, as the company has split into 2 new entities. As of tomorrow I will be an employee of Serengeti Communications, I’ll be in the same role, working with the same group of people, but it’s a really exciting time, as we have an ambitious growth plan for 2008 and beyond.
I’m going to continue to write for SearchEngineLand, and SearchEngineGuide (I’ll try to get you more Jen, I promise), but I won’t write for RBDRodeo any more… as we’ve also rebranded that site, so now I’ll be writing for EndlessPlain.com. As for this blog, I’m going to try to get this back into my rotation / get posts written and ready to run well in advance, so that there’s actually going to be something here for people to read. The reason that I want to do this, rather than just forward this blog to the company one is that I want to be able to say something that’s from me rather than from my company, when I need to.
As for speaking, if the conference organizers keep asking me back, I’ll keep showing up, it’s the only decent thing to do.
Oh, and I’m signed up for 2 1/2 marathons in the first 6 months of next year, we’ll see what happens beyond that…
Not a search related post, apart from the fact that I sent myself a document on search that I was working on in Word 2007 format, without having Word 2007 at home. If you’re unaware, the Office 2007 suite uses different technology that is not compatible with previous versions. Luckily Microsoft came up with a solution. All you have to do is download the docx converter, and your older Office applications can open up files created in 2007. So now I can read and write to my search document. Nice.
One year ago today, the first article on this site went live – location based geotargeting – since then there’s been another 164 posts that have gone up on this site. So, since this is the one year anniversary of this site, I thought I’d throw some stats up.
Top 3 posts (traffic):
Traffic Sources:
Top Referrers:
Top Keywords
Congratulations to both Bill Slawski and Li Evans on the official announcement today that they’ve both joined Christine Churchill over at KeyRelevance. The great news for both of them is that they’ll be working remotely, so Bill will be able to stay ‘by the sea’ in Delaware, and Li will be able to stalk watch her beloved Eagles. Congratulations also go out to Chris Boggs, who is moving from the Philly area to Ohio, to work for eMergent Marketing.
As for me, well I’ll be making some changes in the near future, but they’re all going to be blog related. The current title for this blog is “Local and In-House Search Marketing Topics”. Since I write about In-House for Search Engine Land, I haven’t really been doing much on In-House here. Funnily enough, a (non-personalized) search for – in house search marketing – has this blog third, with one of my SEL articles in first place. Yes, this site currently ranks above SEMPO for in-house search marketing, and they have a committee dedicated to it…
As for the local side of things, since I changed jobs 3 months ago, I haven’t been working with geotargeted campaigns as I had in the past, so without daily, or at least frequent exposure, it does become difficult to keep on top of a topic. Then there are the other writing commitments that are eating up my not so available time: I write on a little bit more than a weekly basis for RBDRodeo, and probably soon on a ‘more frequently than I was doing’ basis for SearchEngineGuide (I was bribed with a wonderful laptop bag), so I’m not quite sure where I’m going to go with this blog. In all likelihood I’ll continue to use it as a place where I can put a little of my personality in the posts, with posts that are either slightly off topic / don’t fit with the other blogs I write for, or posts that are fairly short and concise. Thinking about it more, you probably won’t notice much of a difference beyond the title change (when I get around to it), but still I thought I should mention it to the 18 29 subscribers (nice jump since the last time I checked Feedburner). 
If you’re interested in checking out my recent posts on the other blogs, here’s a list.
Search Engine Land
Search Engine Guide
RBDRodeo
What do the following have in common?
If you guessed that it’s a list of anchor text caught by the Akismet spam detector plugin for WordPress since I switched from blogger, then you’re absolutely right. Akismet has been great, it marked a few posts incorrectly, and I’ve had one bad one slip through, but since it was their first time posting, it was held for approval anyway. I feel so much happier about comments than I did on blogger. So much so, in fact, that I quietly opened up commenting a couple of weeks ago, so that you no longer need to register to post. As long as Akismet continues to do it’s job, I’m going to leave it open. So feel free to comment when you want to add to something, or just plain tell me I’m wrong.
I saw the other day that AndyHagans.com had been hacked, and thought nothing of it, until this morning. I went to show a picture of my daughter to a co-worker from my personal blog, when I noticed the following in the footer…
Of course, none of these were links that I’d placed on the blog. So I went into the template, and discovered a script tag that I hadn’t placed on the blog. Removing it removed the nefarious links.
So how did they do it? If they managed to guess my password, why did they only alter that one blog (I have multiple blogs on that account)? There’s no ftp for this blog, as it’s hosted on blogspot, so there’s no opportunity to hack it that way (as happened to Andy Hagan). Ah well, a change of passwords is in order, and I’ll see if that stops it from happening again.
So far, I like what I’m seeing with WordPress, the enhanced controls that you get with comments, the different plugins that I’ve played with, and the WYSIWYG sidebar widget tool make the change worthwhile. Now for the one issue that I’m having. My previous atom feed was located at /atom.xml, the new feed is at /feed/atom/. Should be a simple fix right? Put together a simple 301 redirect from one to the other? That’s what I’ve done, but Bloglines doesn’t seem to recognize it. Now it could just be that bloglines has a delay for rechecking for a feed when it’s encountered an issue, so I’m going to leave it for tonight, and see if it takes care of itself by the morning.
Why do I care about this? Well, I have 11 people subscribed to that particular feed through Bloglines, and since they’ve gone through trouble of adding it, I’d rather it be seamless for them.
More Options ...
Categories
Tag Cloud
Blog RSS
Comments RSS
Void « Default
Life 
Earth 
Wind 
Water 
Fire Light 
Previous Entries
Last 50 Posts
Back