Alister Cameron // Blogologist

Changing the world. One blog(ger) at a time.

Tag: Coding

Sandbox Theming Tricks: Pure CSS Asides

As you probably know, I’m a fan of Sandbox, the semantically rich Wordpress theme for hard-core theme designers. Honestly, I don’t know why theme designers would want to work off anything else… it just rocks.
So for my latest example of the cool “Pure CSS” funkiness you can accomplish with Sandbox, I draw your attention to these asides [...]

Wordpress comment spam: my simple way to stop (most of) it before it happens

I am now averaging over 100 spam emails every day in my Akismet spam trap. So, thank you Akismet.
But being a conscientious kind of guy, I want to make sure a “false positive” hasn’t got quarantined, so I like to go through the spam comments before deleting them, just to be sure.
As your blog grows [...]

New design, new network, new title, new underwear!

I got to bed at 5am this morning. But I put my head on my pillow knowing I had accomplished what I set out to achieve: a new site design which I can be proud to call my own… not a Wordpress theme by someone else.
I’ll quickly summarise all the new stuff that’s going on [...]

Facelift in progress… sorry about the mess!

I have been bunkered down for the last 96 hours or so, completely obsessed with a new design for my blog.
At first I wasn’t making much progress, but then things started to flow and, well… it’s been pretty full-on since Saturday. In the next few hours I’m going to start the migration from my development [...]

XML-RPC for blog comments: why the heck not?!

Fairly regularly in the blogosphere you hear people complaining about how few people reading their blog go the next step and leave a comment. I recall that last year, Darren Rowse posted his “10 Techniques to Get More Comments on Your Blog“, linking to a Jakob Nielsen study that found that…
In most online communities, 90% [...]

Advanced Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Wordpress

I spent a few hours over the weekend further optimizing my blog for the search engines. This stuff is fairly advanced, so please don’t be dismayed if you don’t follow it all. Ask your clarifying questions in the comments and I’ll answer them. Now, I don’t want to suggest that I have done all that [...]

Salesletter techniques that suck: JavaScript date/timer hacks

I am not a fan of the long-form salesletter, although my company works with clients who love it, and for good reason: it is proven to work… it makes things sell.
And there are the standard array of tricks and techniques that people use on these salesletters… you know the kind: highlighting everywhere, endless bullet lists, [...]

ScobleSearch: one-click targeted searching of Robert Scoble’s RSS feeds

If the mythology is accurate, you can’t keep up with Robert Scoble’s reading and blogging habits. The quickest look in to what Robert has been reading — although an incomplete look at that — is his Link Roll over at Google Reader. Now, that’s not his blog, that’s just an aggregator of interesting blog posts [...]

2000 Bloggers: a portable milliondollarhomepage?

Tino had some (serious) spare time on his hands and created the 2000 Bloggers portable online photo wall (my name for it).
He put my face in at number 20, which is at least likely to pay off for me with some more click-thrus than Jeremy Zawodny who’s a few hundred faces down… but then, there’s [...]

How to get your Adsense account deleted fast

Don’t try this at home kids…
One spammy technique to massively increase your Adsense clicks is to arrange thumbnail pictures to the left of a vertical run of Adsense ads, so that at a quick glance the Adsense ads appear (are assumed) to be explanatory text accompanying each image.
Make the images eye candy for horny, time-wasting [...]