I went to WordPress London meetup number #7 last night, hosted by Headshift at their office near Shad Thames, along the south bank of the Thames, east of Tower Bridge. Nice to have something on the East side for once, although south of the river, I wouldn’t normally mention the general location but for Londoners, having different travel options is essential and I was pleased to be able to exit the Transport For London system at a zone 2 tube station, Bermondsey. WordPress London is not really a mainly social gathering like some of the bloggers meetups, it’s a business learning event and last night there were three sections, each packed with fast moving presentations full of detail, actionable insights and deeply understood data. First up, a round up of news from the world of WordPress from Chris Adams of Headshift with a peek at the new drag and drop file upload interface for WordPress 3.3, out very soon. There was also a heads up for the ManageWP service launched this month, a service which I use myself and would also heartily recommend for anybody who maintains more than one self-hosted WordPress installation, in fact it’s brilliant if you have dozens or more. WordPress London Meetup Then David Bain delivered a comprehensive briefing about SEO for WordPress, including an outline of a hub and spoke structure for content based on using pages for the main parts of a site, supported by posts All based around keyword targeting, which, while possibly on it’s way to becoming somewhat old-school, is after all what search engine optimisation is all about. One or two plugin tips to be followed up there. Finally, Keith Devon a WordPress developer explained how and why to use WordPress Custom Post Types. Custom post types are not types of posts at all, but other types of content alongside of posts or pages. The example given was that of a real estate property rental site, for which the element “Property” needed to be a thing of itself, with it’s own display template in the theme, neither a post nor a page but with it’s own “add Property” section within the dashboard. This gave me some great ideas for how I might have designed one or two of my existing sites much better had the concept been around a few years ago. Keith showed us how to implement custom post types by dropping in chunks of code into functions.php “because it’s easier” but discussion from the audience suggests that using specialised plugins for the purpose may be the way to go if you want to be able to keep your site up to date with new software releases. Time for some brief discussions and an optional visit to a Samuel Smiths pub afterwards, so I walked back along the south bank and over London Bridge back to dry land. Hashtag: #WPLDN Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogWordPress London #7
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
WordPress London #7
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/11/18/wordpress-london-7
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- Keith Devon
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November 18 2011, 2:31am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
London Bloggers – Heather Cowper
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/09/02/london-bloggers-%E2%80%93-heather-cowper
London Bloggers Meetup last night featured a talk by Heather Cowper from Heather and Her Travels about travel blogging in general, and in particular How travel bloggers make money from their blogs.
An interesting and thorough presentation, but the thing that intrigued me was the makeup of the attendees at this long established London Bloggers meetup. Very few reconisable faces amongst the eighty odd people there at The Long Acre, and if you got the chance to talk to anybody, for the most part they turned out not to be bloggers at all but people from corporate marketing departments and even one so called “blogging consultant” who doesn’t blog and never did! Have the real bloggers left the building, content to post their valuable unique content into Facebook Twitter and Google Plus (or just reshare others) or is it just because it’s August, the silly season?
Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogLondon Bloggers – Heather Cowper
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- London bloggers
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September 2 2011, 4:53pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
London Bloggers – Heather Cowper
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/08/24/london-bloggers-heather-cowper
London Bloggers Meetup last night featured a talk by Heather Cowper from Heather and Her Travels about travel blogging in general, and in particular How travel bloggers make money from their blogs.An interesting and thorough presentation, but the thing that intrigued me was the makeup of the attendees at this long established London Bloggers meetup. Very few reconisable faces amongst the eighty odd people there at The Long Acre, and if you got the chance to talk to anybody, for the most part they turned out not to be bloggers at all but people from corporate marketing departments and even one so called “blogging consultant” who doesn’t blog and never did!Have the real bloggers left the building, content to post their valuable unique content into Facebook Twitter and Google Plus (or just reshare others) or is it just because it’s August, the silly season? Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogLondon Bloggers – Heather CowperRelated posts:London BloggersLondon Bloggers new venue, competition and pubsLondon Bloggers presentations
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- London
- bloggers
- marketing
- blog
- London bloggers
- presentation
- blogging
- blogger
- blogs
- bloggers make money
- cowper
- heather
- Heather Cowper
- silly season
August 24 2011, 4:52am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Weather Photography Competition
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2010/08/04/weather-photography-competition
I've just heard about the British weather photographer of the year competition and decided to enter myself. This provided me with a nice opportunity to look back through my photographs of the summer on Flickr to see if I could find something appropriate. I browsed through my pictures of rain and a few summer seaside scenes and then lost a bit of confidence. I have pictures of light, pictures of scenes affected by weather but nothing I could really call specifically "weather photography". My thoughts turned to extreme weather – tornadoes, floods, ice storms etc but I don't seem to have witnessed many of those recently, not with a handy camera ready anyway. Then it occurred to me I was being far too literal in my interpretation of the competition requirements:
…to find the best amateur photographer of the British elements. Judged by top professionals and experts in the field of photography and weather, 12 finalists will be chosen for the flair, technique and originality they use in capturing British weather.
I've got it down to two photographs that might fit the bill here, the first is a picture of sunlight shining through gaps in the clouds over the sea near the Worms Head, Gower, South Wales. If you click through and look at the large or original sized photo I think it looks quite stunning, and it was quite an unusual weather pattern to observe for me, even if it might happen in such places more regularly than I imagine.
The second picture I'm considering is one of the dried up lake bed during an extended period of drought.
The patterns made by the drying out process in the mud make interesting shapes, and this one looks a bit like a map of Australia, a country where drought is a more familiar problem than southern Britain.
Whichever I decide, (suggestions?) or maybe I can submit both, you can have a chance to vote for me if you feel like it there, but probably more likely and preferable anyway, would be to enter one of your own weather photographs in which case do please leave your link in the comments below.
Disclaimers:
British Weather Photographer of the Year competition is sponsored by Lloyds TSB
This is an evaluation Sponsored Post. Share hosted by Wikio
Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogWeather Photography Competition
Related posts:How to Photograph a Ghost
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August 4 2010, 6:17am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Wordpress Developer Required for Small Coding Job
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2009/11/03/wordpress-developer-required-for-small-coding-job
Are there any good coders out there with an hour or two spare? I think I’m going to need a WordPress developer of some sort to help me try out an idea I’ve had for better navigation within some of my blogs. To begin with it’s probably just a chunk of code to create a single loop inside a template file, but if it works well there’s a good possibility to turn it into a handy plugin that would be helpful only to certain types of blogs. WordPress developer required So where do I go from here? I could go onto one of the rent a coder type sites and ask for a quote I suppose but I thought I’d start by putting this down on my blog so I can refer to it within my networks. If you think you might be interested in discussing my requirements and starting very soon then do please get in touch.
Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogWordpress Developer Required for Small Coding Job
Related posts:Wordpress 2.7 and the Redirection Plugin
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November 3 2009, 10:11am | Comments »
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