Posted by Richard on Oct 20, 2009 in
Social Media After a quick review of the WordPress plugins available for Twitter (and there are a lot!) I finally plumped for bird-feeder. I only want a lightweight plugin that pushes my blog posts out to twitter using the title as the text. Something that bird-feeder is designed to do and that’s it. I looked at tweetsuite and tweetmyblog but the first seems to be overkill at the moment and the second feels a bit too self-congratulatory and a bit like you’re talking to yourself too much … give me time – I might change my mind once I get going.
Although new to Twitter, it seems to me a way to get news out to people and to link to more in-depth articles. Having it the other way round would certainly drive traffic to a blog due to the number of links being generated but is it some kind of new link-spam? I’m not sure. Maybe I’m in the minority here but it feels a bit like that. That said, it would be worth experimenting to see the effect – one month without and one month with and see if there’s much difference.
Tags: bird-feeder, Twitter, Wordpress
Posted by Richard on Oct 20, 2009 in
Technology Magento is a great piece of kit and is taking the e-commerce world by storm. However, unless you have a good understanding of object-oriented programming and are familiar with extended classes you’re going to struggle a little. At the moment I’m redesigning a client’s site to incorporate an intial splitter page as the home page that then allows them to pass through to the catalogue proper or to the blog.
However, the way I chose to do this was to copy the html source from the home page and redo the html and css manually. However, I’m sure there must be better ways of doing this, such as using includes on particular features. The problem is that the only method I could think of was using an iframe, something I didn’t want to do for reasons that go without saying
As it stands the only drawback is that changes to the Magento catalogue navigation will mean the need to update the static html in the new home page. This is a bit of a bind but isn’t too problematic as the links are permanent. It’s only really when a new section is added that the page will need to be added.
It’s a relatively simple solution without needing to get into Magento code. I’m sure it could be done in a sweeter way but this seems to be the least complicated way and one that fits with the client’s budget.
Tags: Magento, method, website, Wordpress
Posted by Richard on Oct 18, 2009 in
Technology If you want to join in the testing of WordPress 2.9 then sign up at http://wordpress.org/development/2009/10/getting-involved-with-the-2-9-beta-testing/. You’ll need to use a beta tester plugin on a test version of your site. They’re looking to release at the end of October.
Tags: Software, Wordpress