JaredQuinn.info is celebrating it’s first birthday, and what a way to celebrate!! We’ve just started clocking an average of 300 unique visitors a day, peaking at 996 unique visitors a couple of days ago.

What’s in store for the coming year?

Lots of the same, more themes for WordPress, IceWM, XMMS, gkrellm.. more plugins. Video related info is coming soon, as it’s what i’ve been tinkering with lots lately. Kate’s been busy with POVray, so we should see some scenes and samples of that coming soon too!

Direct payments are now accepted from leading credit cards as I have upgraded my PayPal account to a business account. This means that customers no longer require a paypal account to make payments to me.

I have now allowed all visitors to post comments without the need to register first. If this is abused I will remove it, however I am hoping to get better feedback from customers and users of my themes and plugins without them needing to go through the extra step of having to register first.

Feel free to comment…

Please bare with me while I re-organise the categories on this site.

In an attempt to make the categories more logical and useful, I have began a full reorganisation of the structure, and categories that posts appear in. You can find the full list of the Categories under “Browse Posts/by Category”. As part of the re-org I have split the previous Browse Posts page into three seperate pages, the primary “Browse Posts” page will now show the most recent posts from all categories, however this can be filtered by digging deeper into the ‘by xxx’ pages under “Browse Posts”.

If you have any comments or suggestions on how I can improve the navigation and browseability of the information on this site, please do not hesitate to either contact me or comment here.

In other site news, I have now upgraded WordPress to version 2.0.4, which fixes around 50 (small) bugs in WordPress, and enhanced it’s security even further. I urge all WordPress users to make this very simple upgrade (especially if its done from an existing 2.0x install).

This site has been down over the last couple of days due to an oversight on my part which caused it to be shutdown by the company I lease the server from. Unfortunatly it took a couple of days to resolve the issue, but thanks to their support department it is now back up and fully functional. Additional measures for redundancy have now been added, including several additional DNS servers and a backup MX server.

This site has now been upgraded to WordPress 2.0.3, a little further behind release than I’d normally like to be, but things have been so busy lately I haven’t had a chance to do it. This release is primarilly a security update and I’d personally advise all my clients to upgrade as soon as possible.

I am available to do upgrades if you run into any issues with your upgrade or would like it done for you, please don’t hesitaste to contact me.

I’ve made a few other changes to the site during the process which will make future updating easier, mainly to do with the paths WordPress was installed into and some customisations i’ve made. If you notice any issues on this site, please contact me also.

Giving up extra real-estate on a page over to ads is a hard choice to do. A balance needs to be acheived between the space used for advertising and the user experience. You want ads to get noticed by visitors (so they click), but you don’t want the experience to feel like they are sitting through 15 minutes of ads to watch 5 minutes of quality television (dispite how well it works for commercial tv networks).

The layout and design are important to keep things asthetically pleasing for the visitor, however making ads stand out enough to be clicked on is also important as far as adsense revenue goes.

I’ve added an extra AdSense block to the foot of single posts on this site, to see if they get noticed.

Currently my banner ads across the top of the page, which take up very little real-estate, blend in well with the rest of the site and do not get in the way are the most popular ads to click on at this site. The little google ad bar down the right hand side under the contact details and paypal link are probably placed very badly, because they never get noticed, or if they do rarely get clicked on.

So I’m trying an ad block below the content before the comments when viewing a single post (not on search results or semi-static pages). I only want to keep 2 ad blocks on the site in total, as I really am against bombarding the users with ads, but unless the advertising is actually getting some attention i’ll continue to tweak it until it does, as without it getting attention I would rather not have it at all.

I’ll post again on this topic in a couple of weeks and let you know the results of my adsense experiment.

For sometime now i’ve been meaning to investigate Christine Davis‘ plugin “Ultimate Tag Warrior” for wordpress. The main reason for this is the benefits¹ that can be acheived by participating in things like technorati.com.

The main concept of things like technorati is that by tagging and searching using tags more acurate searches with more reliable results can be found, instead of relying on plain language search string matches through content that may or may not be relevant. You can be pretty sure an article tagged with seo is going to be about search engine optimization, while one that is tagged as audio probably won’t be. This kind of search is particularly more useful when searching blog content, and more inline with the way a network of blogs works then the “conventional web”.

Installing the “Ultimate Tag Warrior” was mildly straight forward, there is plenty of info out there that helped to solve a few of the problems that popped up. I still have on problem with re-writing URLs so that I can have my “tag” archive pages appear under jaredquinn.info/tags/sometag instead of jaredquinn.info/index.php?tag=sometag - but I’ll get this fixed up soon.

If you do need assistance installing UTW, you can try these sites:

• Jarrod Trainque’s “Turning Wordpress into a tag based blogging app”
• Lorelle VanFossen’s UTW Info

If you need assistance with a UTW installation, I am available, Contact Me and we’ll discuss your requirements.

Whats Changed at jaredquinn.info?

The “Blog Archive” page has been renamed to “Browse Archive”, and now lists the Tag Cloud (or balloon) at the top, the Date Archive list and the Category Archive list. These may one day be seperated into seperate pages, when or if it becomes required.

Each previous post has been tagged with some relative tags, this will help eventually when I am able to claim this blog at technorati.com, which I have been unable to do as yet.

Wrap Up…

Again, there is no point attempting to drive additional traffic to a site unless there is useful content for people, firstly no one is going to point links at useless content, and unless the content is relevant, useful and fresh, you may as well have a static page that gets updated once a year and not a blog. At least that is my theory on it.

Upgrading WordPress to version 2.0.2 is highly recommended to resolve several bug and security related issues.

The upgrade went very smoothly, just replacing the WP files with ones from the latest tarball from the WordPress website.

Please contact me if any assistance is required in upgrading to WordPress 2.0.2.

The latest bugfix upgrade from WordPress is out which fixes some of the minor (because there wasn’t any major) niggles some people had with the Christmas release of 2.0, so the dev team brings us all WordPress 2.0.1.

This site has been upgraded to WordPress 2.0.1, and if anyone is experiencing issues with 2.0, especially memory issues (which I have noticed had started appearing in the last few days) I encourage you to upgrade. If you need commercial/professional assistance upgrading feel free to contact me.