WordPress powers over 16% of the web, including this blog. WordPress founding developer, Matt Mullenweg is in Memphis this week for the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Contest. He and part of his development team stopped by Launchpad at Launch Memphis on Tuesday, 5/15/2012 for some Q and A.
Sometimes you just don’t have time to go looking for the latest post from your favorite blogs. If you are using an RSS reader, and you are like me, you probably have hundreds of posts to wade through to get to what you really want to read right then. I haven’t been a big advocate of blog mail subscriptions in the past, but one of the features of Wordpress’ Jetpack Plugin lets readers easily subscribe via email.
[caption id=”attachment_20570” align=”aligncenter” width=”490” caption=”Get new posts instantaneously in your email box by subscribing in the right column”]
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So, “big deal,” you might say, “I have always been able to subscribe to blogs by email. Yes but major handlers of post subscriptions like Feedburner usually only email post once a day, so by the time you get them they are old news - already made the rounds on Twitter, Facebook and the RSS readers. A Wordpress subscription (see illustration above and widget in the far right column of this page) emails you instantaneously every time the blog posts.
So if you enjoy the Joe Spake Weblog posts, subscribe by email in the right column.
It seems that those of us who are looking for the shiniest new technology objects seldom look back at the applications we have kicked to the curb. So it is with web browsers. I have been addicted to Google’s amazing Chrome browser for quite a while now. I browse in Firefox occasionally, but Internet Explorer? Didn’t everyone leave IE behind years ago? To be honest, I have only used IE for the proprietary Realtor tools that, for some reason, are written to perform only in IE. Otherwise, I doubt if I would have would fired it up except by accident.
The other day, I accidentally brought up the new version of my real estate site http://spake.com in IE, and I was appalled. A site that looked pretty clean in Chrome and Firefox, was distorted as a website Picasso might have designed when displayed in IE. (Too bad I didn’t get a screen shot) To my surprise, Google Analytics told me that 35.56% of my site visitors this year used a version of Internet Explorer. Time for panic! Over a third of the visitors to my business website, were getting unformatted, and partially unusable content. No wonder IE generated the highest bounce rates of any of the major browsers opening spake.com.
While I was waiting for the experts I had frantically texted and emailed to have a look, and during a break from reading everthing I could find on the web about how Wordpress interacts with IE, I found the problem in sidebar widget that had messed up a large portion of the style sheet. What a relief.
This post is not intended to be a slam of Internet Explorer - I love Microsoft. It’s just a reminder to those who have blogs or websites to take the precaution of checking them in other browsers. I feel embarrassed that I didn’t take care of this simple step. Hopefully I haven’t lost all that 35,56% of visitors forever.
The old saying “a picture’s worth 1000 words,” has held true through the ages, yet many small business don’t see the real value of publishing pictures of their products and services. Whether it’s a cleaning service, custom manufacturer, realtor, or provider of very specialized services, a picture of what you do, make or sell is almost always more appealing and memorable that a paragraph or more of descriptions.
[caption id=”attachment_19987” align=”alignleft” width=”300” caption=”Seeing what happens in a cotton gin is more interesting than reading about it”]
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Flickr is the best online photo management and sharing application; and it’s free. You can also upload videos and manage them in the same way as your photos. Google has a long way to go with their photo system to catch up, but that’ a topic for another post. I will leave it to you to explore Flickr’s simple interface. You may even want to upgrade to the PRO version as you become a heavy user. You can even make all your images private, and still use all the great Flickr management tools.
For me, Flickr’s best feature is Sharing. Not only can you share individual pictures, galleries or slide shows to the major social media platforms but you can post directly to your blog/website, directly from Flickr. Simply link to your favorite blogging platform, Blogger, Wordpress, etc. in the options, the locate a photo you want to add, and one click posts on the blog of your choice. I seldom have to do anything with my Memphis photoblog, except add keywords. Posts come straight from Flickr. Here’s an example photo post to this blog.
This quick screencast will give you an idea of how easy this process is.
Whether you are a business person or an individual proud of your photography, a photo blog is a very effective way to showcase your work and get your message out there in a visual medium; and Flickr makes the process a breeze.
Joe Spake is a Memphis Real Estate Broker, Consultant, Photographer, and Social Media Junkie
Contact Joe at joe@spake.com or voice or SMS at 901.214.5563
