johnmryan dot com

Just a quick note

John — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:49:29 +0000

Just a quick note, to say I am back from Malaysia. I’ve obviously not been blogging much, but feel free to follow me on Twitter.

You might be interested in the comments on my boards.ie post some time back approaching 40 comments now!

Malaysia

John — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 23:22:06 +0000

I hope to tweet (@johnmryan) my adventures in Malaysia, technology pending, so you can hopefully enjoy the trip with me!

Me in Malaysia (Kelantan) in 2007

I am off to Malaysia on Saturday, and I cannot wait. It is my first holiday this year, and my third time in Malaysia. Last year I travelled around to Thailand and Singapore. This year I hope to explore more of Malaysia, via rail and road. I will be meeting up with my Malay friends there (who lived here until the recession), so it should be an all round fun trip.

If anyone has been around Malaysia, feel free to let me know of any interesting places to visit via my twitter or comment below.

I am excited to have a (what I think is) a good camera this time to take some good shots. Last time I used my first generation iPhone for some awfully disappointing shots. I am realising now that you cannot capture the moment with any old camera.

I hope to also tweet, where possible (wifi/iphone pending) my trip, so that should be interesting if it works out.

I’m from Limerick video

John — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 17:16:15 +0000

C64 Commodore 64 iphone app – the return!

John — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 13:35:47 +0000

I must say I get very nostalgic from time to time. And thanks to the iPhone I can now go back to the wonderful days when I used to hook up a white keyboard to my television set. Yes the commodore 64 is back, iPhone style.

I am going to install this app a little later. As far as I can tell the app, which was originally rejected by apple’s approval process, allows for in app game purchases.

However it does come with some build in games, four to be exact! If you are interested, I know I am – Link here (iTunes link)

Key Features

Original Commodore 64 game graphics
- Original SID sound
- Auto-save, to continue exactly where you left off
- Realistic joystick and beautifully crafted C64 keyboard
- Portrait and Landscape play
- Vertical and Fullscreen gaming (auto rotate for iPod users)
- and much more…

Video

Wordpress self hosted blogs attack warning!

John — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 00:30:43 +0000

Two of my friends emailed me this morning, asking if I had heard of attacks on old versions of wordpress. And yes, I have heard thanks to the wonder that is Twitter. I normally don’t blog at weekends but this is important.

Based on what the wordpress experts are saying here is what you need to do.

Upgrade wordpress to version 2.8.4. Do this now, and come back to read the rest later. This is serious you MUST UPGRADE.

If you are not sure what version you are using, you probably need to upgrade now! You can usually see a warning telling you your version is out of date. Or scroll to the bottom of the admin screen and you will see the version number.

If you are scared upgrading will damage your plugins or theme, then sorry! But if you are hacked, and there is a number of WP hacking going on, you have been warned!

It is essential that you upgrade.

As always backup wordpress. And please tweet this warning. I now hand you over to the experts for a full explanation.

Right now there is a worm making its way around old, unpatched versions of WordPress. This particular worm, like many before it, is clever: it registers a user, uses a security bug (fixed earlier in the year) to allow evaluated code to be executed through the permalink structure, makes itself an admin, then uses JavaScript to hide itself when you look at users page, attempts to clean up after itself, then goes quiet so you never notice while it inserts hidden spam and malware into your old posts.

Read the rest

Blog post inspiration – Solve a problem!

John — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 13:00:22 +0000

Walking through the Green in Dublin city on Monday morning, I was wondering where people get their ideas for writing their blog posts.

For me when I am trying to solve a problem with my wordpress blog, get some widget working, formatting a post, I go searching for the answer. For the genre I write in usually in my blogs, inspiration comes in the form of solving a problem! Because if you can answer a question, or even ask one, you have your inspiration for your post already.

There is nothing more satisfying than figuring out how something works! Sharing that information in your blog can be so helpful to others and also satisfy the human need to share information. I have often found a blog post that answered a simple question, while I was looking everywhere for the answer.

Of course blogging is not only about answering a question, it is about sharing ideas and views as well.

But solving a problem is always a good topic to write about, it always makes me more interested in writing blog posts. I created this chart for myself as a guide for my blog topics I write in this manner.

Answer a question

For topics I write in this manner I find the following makes for a more interesting post, if you are trying to write about a question you answered, you solved a problem.

The question

You have a question that you need answered.
The question must be your question – Of course you can answer any question, but I find if you are passionate about solving the problem that passion is reflected in your post!
If you cannot solve the problem you can take your blog post in a different direction. You can ask your blog community to help, or try to solve yourself and blog the results.

The answer

You have researched the problem and solved it.
You have tested the results.

Creating the post

Write about your results.
If you found the solution great, if not still blog and share with your community promoting interaction within your blog.

Just one of my ways for writing a particular type of post, feel free to share yours! How do you find inspiration for your blog posts?

RSS feed tweeks to enhance reader experience & promote traffic to your website!

John — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 14:00:42 +0000

Real Simple Syndication (RSS) allows site owners to automatically syndicate their content to readers in an easy to read format. For the reader this is content delivered to their inbox or reader! In many instances this is a reverse of roles, the content is coming to the reader, not the reader to the content.

The idea of this post is to explore the different tweeks and additions you can make to your RSS feed to improve the overall RSS experience for your readers and drive traffic through promoting your content.

Firstly I would recommend allowing readers access to the full content of your posts in their feed reader. I have found that only publishing extracts and requiring readers to actually visit your blog to view the full posts, causes readers to become annoyed. I know the idea is to generate traffic to your website, but remember it is better to have a subscriber than not. Observers have noted the type of people who subscribe to RSS feeds generally tend to be those who know their field. Be honered there reading your content! Allowing them to read the full content of your posts, promotes them to become more interested in you and what you have to say.

Someone to watch over me

RSS sandwich icon by GeekMom Heather

Pretty much everyone uses Feedburner, and recently it was taken over by Google. I use it to manage my RSS feed. With feedburner I can see how many readers I have as well as getting a break down of what system they use to read my updates and also offer readers the ability to subscribe to my blog updates via e-mail. You can see all this in operation on my site right now!

I would recommend activating FeedFlare in your feedburner account which will allow you to build in interactive features to the feed. This means you can show your users how many people have commented on your post, thus generating some traffic back to your blog to read these comments.

Note:In order to use feedburner you also need the feedburner plugin for your wordpress blog (if your using wordpress).

This plugin makes it easy to redirect 100% of traffic for your feeds to a FeedBurner feed you have created. FeedBurner can then track all of your feed subscriber traffic and usage and apply a variety of features you choose to improve and enhance your original wordPress feed.

Related Posts Plugin

This is a wonderful addition to your website, if you don’t have the related posts plugin already give it a try. Not only does it supply related posts for your blog content, but it also does so for RSS feeds. This falls back into what I was talking about earlier, regarding giving away ‘free content’ or full posts. By adding related posts to your feeds your readers can now find assicated articles which are linked back to your website.

Polls

Polls are a wonderful form of interaction between the author and the reader, in regards to the feed, it once again promts visitors from the feed to your website, so that they too can vote in your poll.

Video

I am going to throw in this line about video, but it is a little redundant today. Previously most RSS readers did not support video players, so RSS subscribers had to visit your website to actually watch the video. However these days, readers do support this. Just a quick point really!

Widgets

With modern browsers it is easy to subscribe to a feed by clicking on the usually built in RSS icon, safari has one beside the URL bar. However there is no harm in popping an RSS icon into your sidebar, as I have done in a prominent place on my website. You can also show off how popular you are by placing a FeedCount badge on your widget.

These are just a few tips I can share with you based on my experience on RSS feed tweeks. Please do share your views of RSS feeds, and any suggestions you may have for enhancing reader experience & promote traffic to your website!

TextLinkAds Review – Make money with links!

John — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 11:10:57 +0000

Back about – it must be two years ago now, I ran a successful celebrity website. One of the main money makers on this website was ‘text link ads‘. When I launched the website, I was actively seeking a way to monetise it. I did not want to just use a few Google adsense ads, putting all your eggs in the same basket is not a great idea, we all know this!

So I decided to create an account with text link ads. I placed the code on the site under favourite links, and I sort of forgot about it.

In the mean time I was working hard on SEO, getting quality links, and of course most importantly the content. I had completely forgotten about the code. Soon after I got a few links submitted to advertise on my site. Months later I had all ten spots filled every month. Not bad for a celebrity website!

What are text link ads?
It really is as simple as it sounds. A text link; using a keyword – linking to the advertiser’s website.

Why use them?
They are used by advertisers because not only do they get traffic to their website, but they also get SEO kisses from search engines. You, the publisher will love this because it is a hassle free income generator, which is non- intrusive to your visitors and is a nice break from flashing advertisements!

There is one down side to this however, text-link-ads take 50% off the top. So if you are selling at 50USD you end up with 25. This does sound pretty high. But you must also consider how difficult to find these advertisers by yourself! Additionally new websites and websites with low amounts of traffic may find it difficult to enter the program. But there is an affiliate program which accepts new websites.

A tip for if you get signed up, don’t hide away the script which displays the text links the best place I found was in the sidebar, people have paid you for advertisement placement so you need to respect that. Shoving their ads to the bottom of the screen may not result in further adverts placed by them!

If you are interested in text link ads you can sign up . Do you use text link ads? If so feel free to comment below and let us know your experience with them.

iPhone Apps for the serious iPhone addict!

John — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 18:59:17 +0000

In my usual style of listing the greats, here is a small list of great iPhone applications, I have slanted this a bit to include Irish applications, listing is not my preference just the way I did the list.

Eirtext Pro

I’m with O2 so I get 250 free text messages a month, that is nothing to be sneezed at.

The interface is simple, easy to use, and elegant. This app had some serious thought process involved in it’s development. There is support for Meteor, Three, Vodafone, O2 and other SMS systems including O2 UK.

You can save your text history, optional settings include: auto CC, vibration and rotation. A new feature which I find incredibly useful is “info while typing”. This displays the number of characters you have used, number of messages this SMS has used, and your remaining monthly allowance!

If you are interested in this application, I suggest you download the Pro version, which costs a very small amount of money, less than 3 euro I think, you will save a fortune on SMS messages. It is worth noting that you need a data plan in order to send messages, check with your operator, chances are you have one.

Facebook

I wrote this post some time ago, since then Facebook has released the latest version of their app, so I’ve done a re-write, so much has changed! With the new version, comes a host of tasty features and a new layout. You could really say that this is, in itself, a new application. The restrictiveness of the previous app is lifted. The main screen gives you a set of icons, namely:

News Feed
Profile
friends
Inbox, Chat, Requests
Events, Photos and Notes.

There is also a horizontal bar to alert you to new notifications, you can scroll to a second page, which allows you to bookmark your favourite pages, or profiles. I must say I do miss the bottom buttons which were on the previous version, they made navigation easier! This is not the applications fault but I really miss being able to use my facebook programs, in addition to the build in ones. Still it keeps you up to date!

Color (colour) Splash

Yield

I had heard about colour splash before, but I recently upgraded to the latest iPhone which has a much better camera, so I though I would give this one a try. If you like to take pictures with your iPhone, then you will love this one. I plan to use it for editing some great pictures on my next holiday to Asia. Colour splash allows you to convert an image to gray scale, but select part of that image to keep in colour. The usage is simple, using your finger you select what you want in colour. You can see an image I edited using colour splash above. This is great fun for playing around with. It would also make some interesting profile pictures for your Twitter, or Facebook account! It’s not free but it is low priced.

Sky News

Sky News has made a pretty great application. You can read the latest news, and watch the videos. With the usual sections, such as business, and showbiz, you can’t go wrong with his application. It is well laid out, easy to use, and as you would expect from Sky News is updated regularly! I myself have not had a simple crash, it seems to be a great useful application. I have not however tested it over 3G, as I have easy access to wifi. So with that in mind, I would imagine it uses a good bit of your iPhone data allowance, comment below and let me know if you use it on 3G!

TwitterFon
There is a hell of a lot of iPhone applications for Twitter out there. Many of my friends use TwitterFon so I tried it out and continue to use it today. Like the other iPhone apps above this one is easy to use. A screen for your friends timeline, @mentions, DM messages, and a search function. I believe there is also a paid version, in this version there are advertisements, but they are non intrusive. I have not used any other Twitter application so I really cannot compare this to them, however it is simple and does the job. Support for mentions and DM as push messages would be a super addition to this app!

My Bill for O2.ie customers
This is one for O2 customers. I would award this Irish iPhone app of the year. The O2 website can sometimes be a little slow. This applications makes it easy to see at a glance the balance on your account, the un-billed balance, the remaining minutes, messages webtexts and so on. With the recession and all it is nice to keep and eye on your spend!

Have I missed any interesting iPhone apps that you cannot live without? Comment below and let me know what they are, and ask how could I have missed them? If you give your own little review I will update this post.

Image Gallery

One quarter of all tweets generated by bots!

John — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 09:39:39 +0000

It turns out that 24% of all tweets are not generated by people, but rather by bots! But not to worry, these are not all spam bots. You might even be using a ‘bot’ yourself! You know, those wonderful tools that allow you to send out a tweet when you post to your blog. That is a bot.

I have no problem with these updates; part of twitter is exploring the internet using shared information. A report conducted by sysomos.com had a number of findings, most interestingly:

We found that 32% of all tweets made by the most active Twitter users were generated by machine bots that posted more than 150 tweets/day. The actual percentage of machine-generated tweets among the most active users is probably higher than 32% because there many bots that update less than 150 times/day.

The report also outlines who tweets the most. There is a few of what you would expect such as @foxnews (no comment), @nytimes. An more interestingly @alyssa_milano!

Do you use a tweet bot to send out your blog updates? I know I do! The full report here makes for some interesting reading, sadly Ireland does not make the list of Twitter’s 5% of most active users.

Boards.ie Are the moderators fair?

John — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 09:00:30 +0000

Being a moderator on any forum can be difficult – it is a hard job, but what about one of the most popular sites on the internet boards.ie.

I do think boards.ie is a wonderful site, one of the best in Ireland! This poll is to find out user views on the moderators. Feel free to take part, or not. You might ask why I am writing this? I noticed a few twitters with a big opinion on this, and I would like to see what people really think. I myself have a few issues with they way things are handled, but I do realise that these people give their time to this, and the site is a vault of information! It must be difficult to manage so many users.

Premium Wordpress themes – are they worth it?

John — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 10:52:59 +0000

When it comes to your blog - presentation is pretty important.

Updated: Poll added

People say not to judge a book by it’s cover, but we all do it conscious or otherwise! I like to think this is relevant, remember what people say about first impressions.
There are a number of popular blog authors on the internet who stick with the default theme of their chosen content management system. In my opinion it is important to be as unique in your website design as you are in your content, and ignoring design is an unfortunate oversight.

Getting a custom made theme is not cheap, in fact in can be very expensive, and if you don’t like the free themes out there not to worry. There is middle ground between custom themes and free themes.

You could go from a premium theme like I did.

Premium theme designers tend to give greater attention to detail to their premium designs than to their free designs and offer many great styles and layouts. Most of which you can customise with your own logo and tweak some of the colours and layout if you are CSS minded.

The theme will not be unique to just you, others can buy them, but there is not as many users as there is with the free themes, additionaly many of premium themes such as the woothemes.com allow you to change the style of the premium theme with a click of a button, add your own design elements and you are as unique as you can afford.

Advantages to having a premium design that reflects your tastes include:

Creates a unique blog identity.
Creates a visual link between your content and site design.
Allows additional customisation features, depending on requirements.
Does not have to be extravagant and can still reflect your content.
Support, unlike free themes – premium themes usually offer support and help documents.
Updates, as the content management systems such as wordpress updates, it may break things in the design, some themes keep up with this and offer theme updates.

I mentioned woothemes a moment ago and yes I love their themes, so much so that I use their design on this website and also on my humour website, as well as two others. Their themes are premium themes that you can also customise, using their build in options menu in wordpress.

The great thing about this is the themes come in different flavours, so if you select one theme you like you can select from a range of patterns and colours. They also have a few FREE themes if you don’t feel like opening your wallet, but in my opinion they are well with it.

Here is the theme I use on this website, which I immediately feel in love with when I first saw it.

Papercut Theme for Wordpress

Paper Cut by WooThemes

Papercut is a grungy news theme with beautiful alternating stylesheets, built-in widgets, and layout control via a hand crafted theme options page. It’s the perfect out-of-the-box solution to give your website a stylish new look. Irrespective of your preferred style; Papercut will have one you like.

Check out their other themes here. Remember if you don’t like Woothemes, there are other premium theme sites out there, google is your friend!

Take part in my poll

Not on Twitter, maybe you are out of the loop?

John — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 16:00:17 +0000

It really is amazing how the internet has evolved. For a while it just sat there being the internet. Now it is so much more than just a pile of information. It is social. Facebook, Twitter and bebo have connected long lost friends and so much more.

Twitter has become such an important information stream, that if you don’t keep an eye on it you can miss some interesting stuff, and have to wait another 20 seconds for it to appear on other websites!

Yes, many many times Twitter has the news before any of the blogs, and news sites. So if you want to be clued in keep an eye on Twitter.

Twitter

I suppose this is not surprising, everyone and their mother is twittering. But what brought my attention to this is that I asked someone, how they heard about a very unusual piece of news that the posted on the O2 forum. And the response is, it’s all over Twitter! In the ‘where have you been’ expression.

So there you have it another life lesson.

If you feel like following me on Twitter follow@johnmryan.

Also that piece of news I was referring to above can be followed here.

It’s time for us men to put our foot down

John — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 14:31:09 +0000

Letter to the RSA
Hi there,

I would like to let you know that I am sick to death of your sexist advertisements which state, that basically if a woman gets into a car with a man she is doomed. You may be able to prove that men have more accidents, but your advertisement is still sexist.

Imagine the same advertisement implicating women, the advertisement would not make it to the airwaves.

Please do not respond to me with stats. Stats do not excuse sexism.

Please do respond and let me know what gives you the right to publish/create sexist advertisements?

Regards,

John

P.S. I took the liberty of copying this from wikipedia

Sexism, a term coined in the mid-20th century,[1] refers to the belief or attitude that one gender or sex is inferior to, less competent, or less valuable than the other.