MatBennett.com

 OK, admittedly I’m only 2 days in to re-assessing Wordpress (plus a painful week of porting - thank the bigbang that I never posted more in the past), but I am seriously struggling to stay open minded.  Wordpress is undoubtedly the industry leader in blogging packages, and I am determined to work out why, but boy to they do their best to hide the reasoning.

“Issues” that are already making themselves painfully obvious even at this early stage: Read more »

In order to get this site up and running again I decided to scrap the custom blog/CMS system and just go with an off-the-shelf package.  It would have been nice to have stuck it out with the bespoke system, but it was clear that I had time to either work on the system OR write content, but not both.  As producing a blog with no posts was pretty pointless (not to mention the fact that this is exactly what I seemed to have been doing for the last year anyway!), I decided just to follow the crowd and reach for Wordpress.

Why Wordpress?

That might sounds like a daft question, but I have previously described Wordpress as “utter shit” quite publicly, so maybe the question isn’t so daft.

Read more »

Doesn’t time fly eh?  It’s been a week short of a full year since I last put a post up on this site.  The combination of having a very busy year, needing to get my priorities straight, and buggering up the website some-what interrupted the flow of posts for a while, but now I am back.

So what have I been up to over the last year? 

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Decided to re-skin this site today as I was getting bored by the grey style that I previously had. Turned out to be quite a good test of the CMS system that I have put behind it as well, as the reskinning took just over 45minutes from start to finish including doing up the graphics.

I’m using a boat picture that I took the other week as the header at the moment. No great reason for this other than it was one of the few images that fitted the top of the page quite well. Might change it periodically.

There are still a few bits to tidy up, but it looks better than it did before. It’s amazing what you can find to do when you are trying to put off decorating your home!

I’ve added a couple of extra features to the site today. The most obvious is “talkback” - a way of letting people add their comments to any item or photo posted on the site.

The other is automatic referrer information. At the moment this is just limited to listing the top referrers to the site and the most recent referrers to the site, but it will also soon do the same on an item by item basis.

I look forward to reading a few comments from you soon.

Things have been busy of late, but I finally got around to throwing some more content up on this site today.

I had a lot of photos kicking around that I had promised to share with various people, so I have uploaded these. I’ve backdated everything to whenever the pictures were taken so things might seem to be in a strange order.

I was also hoping to get time to add comment functionality to the images and items, but time is moving on and I still have a huge list of chores to do. This is on the way though.

OK, I know that this is old hat, but the entry about the Matt Cutts Blog made me think of it again, and I thought it worth noting here.

Google-guy Says is simply a site that notes when a particular user posts on the Webmaster World and Search Engine Watch forums. Not all that interesting unless you bare in mind that Google-guy, as the name suggests works at Google.

I’m not a huge fan of either forum as the signal to noise ratio is generally way off, but there is good information on both if you care to dig. Some of the best of it comes from Google-guy, which obviously makes Google-guy says a useful tool.

There now appears to be at least 2 sites running under the same name, both of which appear useful. I’ve therefore linked to both below:

http://www.markcarey.com/googleguy-says/
http://googleguy.zorgloob.com/

I’ve recently noticed a growing number of “mainstream” sites utilising trackbacks on their pages. Even CNN’s all powerful news.com now has a slightly messy trackback / pingback system in place.

Not sure of the history of trackback and pingback, but both systems are heavily utilised by bloggers as a way of providing related links to a topic. The basic principal of both systems is that that one information site links to another through an article and let’s the target site know that the link is in place. The target site’s automated system then recognises this link and provides a link back.

Considering how difficult it now is to get a good relevant link, utilising trackback / pingback methods could well now be the easiest way to get links in to an information based site. I’m not talking about spamming every trackback page you can find (although I am sure that a lot of people are doing this), but instead deliberately searching for relevant articles to provide as further information sources.

I’ve only really used either method as part of out of the box news/blogging systems, but can’t imagine it would be too difficult to put a standalone module together - which is exactly what I intend to do. I’ll probably experiment with it here on this site at some point then roll it out on to relevant work projects.

It seems that yet another version of this site is now underway - (yeah I know… so many designs, so little content). I seem to have an ever growing collection of digital junk without a permenant home so I thought it about time I put together a system to house it.

When complete, this new version of matbennett.com is part CMS, part blog, part file storage and part photo gallery. For now though it is just part done.

I’m not a huge fan of blogging, as the vast majority seem to have little new to say. Good ones though can be great.

I haven’t yet read enough of Matt Cutts’ blog to decide whether it will be one of the rare good ones or not yet, but at first glance it could be interesting. What immediately made Matt’s blog stand out for the crowd is the fact that he works for Google.

I’d love to know what his employers think of the blog and how much of it he has pass committee before it hit the pages. Certainly what I have read so far is not ground breaking, but does put an interesting human face on the inhabitants of the (in)famous Googleplex. I’m sure that SEO engineers around the world are adding it to their RSS readers at a huge pace, something that Matt himself must be very aware of as he decides what to include.

Anyway, it’s here to remind me to take an occassional look. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/