I wrote a guest post over at Famous Bloggers on why we decided to toss out OpenX, what we chose and why. It’s broken down into easy-to-digest lists of pros and cons. Enjoy!

First a word about the Head First series. It is a new approach to technical books (at least so far) that O’Reilly is championing. Head First aim to help you learn the material by keeping your brain interested and focused on the material with the use of visual, eye-catching and unexpected graphical aids [see example below], a conversational style that includes an appeal to your emotions, and activities to get both sides of your brain engaged.

I have obviously not done full justice to the reasoning and encourage you to check out the full explanation. In my non-scientific observations, I did find that I spent more time reading and thinking about the material without my mind wandering, and this despite my already deep knowledge of the subject.

But let’s talk about the subject matter itself – WordPress. This book is aimed at anyone with at least a basic knowledge of HTML & CSS, and running a website, and covers the self-hosted version of WordPress, not the one that’s hosted by WordPress at WordPress.com.

Head First WordPress starts naturally enough with installing WP and writing your first post. It quickly gets into how to modify your theme so your blog doesn’t look the boring default, treating WP as a CMS (content management system) and making it play nice for the search engines, not to mention the practically infinite power that are plugins.

I was relieved to see a full chapter on security, and while I did not completely agree with author Jeff Siarto’s recommendations, they are very good recommendations. Computer security is hardly black and white, but more of an opinion and experiential driven art. If you are concerned about security, and you should be, do your research and/or consult an expert.

The penultimate chapter deals with performance and ways to ‘speed up’ WordPress, a welcome and important topic. If your blog starts pulling in a decent audience, you’ll either need to implement some of these measures or get bigger more expensive hosting. Again, here is an example of there being many more times the number of potential solutions than are laid out here. For example, the WP Super Cache plugin is recommended, but the W3 Total Cache plugin is also highly another viable option.

The last 10 pages are devoted to 10 topics that could not be covered in greater depth without making the book twice as long. This was a nice addition that helps to point out how big the WordPress universe is, and that you should not use any single book as your bible, no matter how large it is.

If you are contemplating the jump to WordPress, or have just dipped your toes into the water, Head First WordPress is a solid book that will give you a nice foundation. Also, if the rest of the Head First books are anything like this one, then I’m going to be looking at those first the next time I’m in the market to learn something.

(Disclaimer: Untethered Dreams received a complimentary review copy of this product.)

I narrowed it down to 2: Flashpaste Lite and Ditto, which is an open source project. I decided on Ditto as it was much more powerful than Flashpaste and more customizable, particularly with keyboard shortcuts to quickly paste pre-canned chunks of text.

I noticed some other folks on the Web not caring for Ditto because of its complexity, but hey, the more complex it is, then the better the chance that it’ll do what you want. I’m of the school that believes that power is accompanied by complexity. Take the time up front to learn the tool and you’ll be rewarded by many hours of improved efficiency.

References:

• Travis Illig’s blog post on finding a clipboard mgmt program
• Download.com’s Clipboard Software section

Other Possible Apps that I considered:

• clipmon32
• WinClipper
• Clipomatic

If you’re running a blog, that is based on WordPress for example, then you can use the power of Google search on your site. While Google has decent documentation for how to do this generally, there don’t have specific docs on how to do this on a blog. Canadian blogger Maki who runs Dosh Dosh has put together a pretty thorough tutorial with screenshots that walks you through the process.

About the only thing we would emphasize some more in his tutorial is embedding the search box code in your site. This is the code that creates the search box and button.

You may also be interested in the Google Custom Search WordPress plugin. It redirects all searches to GCS and automatically creates a new search results page in WP. Our advice is to take the time to learn about GCS and create everything yourself. It doesn’t take more than a few hours. The plugin is nice, but doesn’t allow for easy customization.

We ended up picking IntenseDebate, which by the way is made by the same company (Automattic) that produces WordPress. We won’t go into all the reasons why we picked ID, because your reasons will end up being different from ours and it’ll be worth the time to research them properly and understand what they can do.

Instead, here are some useful references that we used to help us decide. Good luck.

1. IntenseDebate vs Disqus
2. Intense Debate vs Disqus: Why I Nearly Switched
3. BackType’s Co-opetition with Disqus, IntenseDebate

And if those aren’t enough to help you decide, then you can hit up Google to find additional discussions. How apt.

Google recently decided to share that love a bit, and now sites further down in the listings will also get Sitelinks if they are so deserving. They won’t get the full treatement, but at least they’ll get a line with up to 4 such links.

So far, Google does not describe exactly how those links are auto-generated, but you can block some of those links via Google’s Webmaster Tools.

Realizing the limitations, I brought the code back to my personal development machine which happens to be a Mac. This decision works from a engineering standpoint, but the code was not available to my padna, I could not easily access the code from outside my house and now the company must rely that I make backups of the code.

To address the concerns of backups and remove access to the files by myself and my padna, I wrote a quick little script with rsync. Rsync is an open source utility the provides quick incremental file transfer and is available under the GNU General Public License. Rsync typically comes packaged on most linux distros and OS X had it pre-installed.

In order to treat my development machine as the master for the syncing relationship and the QA server as a slave, the following conditions must be met:

1. File modified or created on the Development machine will be modified or created on the QA Server;
2. Files should be deleted on the QA Server that are no longer on the Development machine;
3. If a file has been modified on the QA Server, the modified file will be synced back to my Development machine.

With that in mind, here’s the script:


#!/bin/bash

logfile=”/path/to/backup.log”

src=”/path/to/development/machines/directory”
dest=”user@fqdn:/path/to/QA/directory”
opt=”-azu –delete -v –exclude ‘._.DS_Store’”

echo”" >> $logfile; echo “Backup: iMac->QA” >> $logfile

rsync $opt “$src” “$dest” >> $logfile

src=”user@fqdn:/path/to/QA/directory”
dest=”/path/to/development/machines/directory”
opt=”-az –exclude ‘._.DS_Store’”

echo”" >> $logfile; echo “Backup: QA->iMac” >> $logfile

rsync $opt “$src” “$dest” >> $logfile
The variables that need to be modified include the logfile, src, dest and opt (src, dest, and opt in two places). The logfile is the path and filename for where all output will be stored during the rsync. The first src is the path on the development machine that needs to be synced while the dest includes the username, fully qualified domain name and path to the destination directory on the QA Server. Finally, the first opt variable should include the options required to sync files from the development machine to the QA Server. In this case, a represents archive, z represents compressed, –delete represents deleting files in the destination that are no longer in the source, and the exclude statement stops the syncing of a Mac specific filename.

The second set of variables for src and dest are basically the exact opposite of the first set. The src in the second case changes to the QA Server while the dest is the development machine. The second opt should not include the –delete command.

While the script performs transfers incrementally and the script and process are simple, I’d suggest performing a trial run with just a couple of small files as the first sync could saturate your network connection.

Technorati Tags: rsync, sync, linux

There are actually quite a few Twitter WP plugins available now, and we’ve been testing out some of them. If you do a Google search for “WordPress Twitter plugin“, you will get in excess of 800,000 results. [BTW, some of the results include some useful pages that summarize and recommend some of the other Twitter-related WP plugins.]

But let’s get back to what we were looking for: basically a plugin that publishes to Twitter whenever a new post is published to your blog without any intervention. We tested 3 until we found one that works. First up was Alex King’s Twitter Tools. Normally, Alex makes fantastic WP plugins, and we even use some. However, we found that Twitter Tools, while having a host of features did not perform the function we wanted it to.

Next up was Twitter Updater. We found multiple variants on this one as the original author stopped updating it. However, it had a bug that caused it double-tweet. Show-stopper in our books.

Third time’s a charm. We found WordTwit which so far (knock on wood) has been working as claimed. It’s also the simplest so far: Twitter username/pw and the format you want the tweet in. Perfect.

This has not stopped such folks like ourselves from checking our Alexa rankings constantly. There is an almost drug-like addiction to constantly knowing pieces of info like Alexa rankings, # of pageviews, income earned via Google ads and/or affiliate clickthroughs. But whether or not that’s a good idea is the topic for another article!

Meantime, Alexa hasn’t admitted that they were flawed in any way, but the bottom line is that you can look forward to results that will be closer to the real truth.

via Techcrunch.

Try not to get carried away with trying to implement all of your ideas at once. Pick the best one and focus on it for at least 3 to 6 months if not longer. If you’re doing this on the side, it will take at least that long for it to pick up steam and for you to wrap your mind around what you’re doing.
We could show you the more than 50 pages of notes and ideas that we have in our Wiki (excellent tool by the way which I’ll discuss some more below). While it’s easy to become excited with each new idea that you come up with. Stay focused on your main idea. This doesn’t mean you can’t change gears. We’ve all heard the tales of how, say, eBay got started. But if you do decide to change gears, then you need to jettison the old idea and focus on the new one.

Good luck!

Re: the Wiki. We highly recommend you either use an online wiki or download and install any of the dozens of open source ones out there. A wiki is particularly easy and useful environment for you to take notes and keep track of what you’re doing, and is even more useful when you’re more than just a 1-man shop. We use and love TikiWiki as it is a very powerful CMS system that will let us expand our info management capabilities as we grow.