I found myself bouncing around the tracks. A lot of my time was spent in “developer” sessions covering topics like best practices for designing and creating plugins, implementing the plugin signup experience and mastering custom post types (a session given by Atlanta local Mike Schinkel). Although I have to give major props to the “HTML5 – Hell Yea!” session conducted by another local, J. Cornelius. All in all it was just fantastic.

The camp left me inspired and re-energized.

With my head full of WordCamp and WordPress related thoughts, it’s pretty clear my website, in its current state, is not living up to its potential. It’s failing as an example of what a good WordPress website can look like. It’s failing in its job of showcasing my work portfolio. It’s failing as a tool that should be encouraging me to blog more often. It’s just failing all around.

Unfortunately, there’s only so much time in the day, only so much time to do everything I want to and *need* to do. WordPress themeing, WordPress plugin coding, language optimization with WordPress, social media integration, speaking instead of creating and most excitingly, moving forward with HTML5 in all my projects. So many thoughts, so many directions, oh so much to do.

So it’s time for a change, a new direction. I’m excited and I can’t wait to see where I end up. You should stick around for the ride.

Wood Sign - One Step At A Time at Art.com

Have you made and broken your New Year’s resolutions already? (I’ve already broken a few so don’t be ashamed to raise your hand… You’re not alone!) Now that you’ve gotten the guilt out of the way, you should get down to business and make some new 2012 goals for your online business presence. Here are a few to start you off:

Goal 1 – Update your Website Regularly

Your website won’t work for you if you don’t update it regularly. Think about it… would you keep coming back to a website if it wasn’t updated with new content or product listings? Position yourself as an expert (even if you aren’t one) by making regular updates to your website:

Action Items For You

• Decide on a schedule for adding new content or products. I recommend twice a month to start out with.
• Collect ideas for your blog. You can write about the latest news in your industry, new product ideas, partnerships with other companies, etc…
• Update the copyright date, address, phone number, portfolio, customer testimonials.

Goal 2 –  Stop using Flash on your Website

Adobe has officially stopped developing Flash, so in a few years it will have gone the way of the dinosaur. Instead, focus on HTML5, the new star of the web:

Action Items For You

• Do a search for “HTML5 examples” to get ideas on what can be done with it.
• Contact me to discuss alternatives to any Flash you currently have on your website.

Goal 3 –  Make your website Mobile Friendly

With so many smartphones coming out on the market, many people visit websites using devices like the iPad, iPhone, Android and Blackberry, to name the most popular. If your website is image heavy and/or it doesn’t have a mobile version available, the display may not translate nicely to a mobile device.

Action Item For You

• Contact me for a mobile compatibility assessment of your website.

Goal 4. Use Newsletters to Stay in Touch with Customers

Having trouble getting visitors to your website or keeping your client base updated with the latest on your site. Then you should reconsider using newsletters. Newsletters are a widely accepted tool for social media and are easily incorporated into your website.

Action Items For You

• Add a newsletter signup for to your website.
• Create a regular schedule of mailing for the newsletter.
• As with your blog, collect tidbits and ideas to share with your newsletter readers.

Goal 5. Schedule Time for Marketing

Your business and your website cannot grow if you don’t schedule time every week for marketing. Make some time on your calendar to write a blog post, schedule future tweets or attend a networking event.

Action Item For You

• Mark out that time on your calendar and treat it like an appointment!

You should see by now that websites and businesses are not a “build it and they will come” idea. Just like everything else, they take a little work to make them work. The 5 goals above are a good starting point for you to reap the benefits of the website you built.

Does anyone else have any suggestions for the goal list?

I’m really like those hamsters in their commercials. (Shame I’m not so crazy about the car itself.)

Oh, and this commercial is so much funnier after you see the original LMFAO video:

Hope you’re all having a great Labor Day!

Google Chrome finally has a fix… sort of… for printing PayPal shipping labels. For those of us who have had to go to another browser just to get those labels printed, this is a big step closer to label printing nirvana.

The Problem
When printing labels with PayPal, a Chrome window would pop up with the sad face background. Now, the window pops up with the sample label displayed. Once printed, the “OK” or “Cancel” confirmation window appears, but blocks the printing of the actual label appearing in a new background tab behind the pop up confirmation window.

The Workaround
If you click the “Ok” button, PayPal assumes the label printed and moves on with its next step. If you click “Cancel”, PayPal sends you back to the label window and closes the Print Preview window it opened with the label. BUT if you click the “X” button on the window itself, the pop up window closes and the Print Preview page remains open so you can print the actual label!

Voilà ! PayPal shipping labels printed from Chrome!

On July 4th, while we were all celebrating with fireworks and apple pie, the WordPress team released the latest edition of WordPress. Say hello to WordPress 3.2!

What can you expect with the new version update?

- A faster WordPress
- Refreshed dashboard design (very sleek, if I may say so myself)
- Distraction free writing or zen mode (It’s like WriteRoom for WordPress!)
- Speed improvements for software
- Retiring support for PHP4, older versions of MySQL, and legacy browsers like IE6

Interested in what else changed? Check out the WordPress Codex for the full details.

For all of you that have been fighting the push to use newer browsers, here is one more company kicking your butt into the future. With 3.2, WordPress is dropping support for Internet Explorer 6, a 10-years-old outdated browser that even Microsoft is leaving behind.

From now on, if you access your WordPress dashboard from an outdated browser, the software will let you know. Why? Because as web technology improves, so does WordPress and they build features to take advantage of those improvements. If you’re using an out-of-date browser, chances are you’re missing out.

If your browser is out-of-date, you’ll see a friendly orangey-yellow box in your dashboard letting you know a newer version is available (which you can dismiss, of course). If you’re using IE6, though, the box will be red, and your dashboard will not function properly.

So if you’re now in the market for a new browser, I suggest you give FireFox or Chrome a try!

That’s right! You read right… WordPress 3.2 is just around the corner. It also comes with big changes behind the scenes.

The minimum requirements to run WordPress have now changed. As of 3.2, you’ll need to be running PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0. Don’t know if you’re running those version? Check your webhost settings.

You’ll want to log in to your hosting account, and check to make sure you have at least PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0. Most major hosts already default to these or newer versions, but there are some exceptions.

If you don’t know how to log into your hosting account, you can find out if you’re ready for 3.2 with the Health Check plugin. In your dashboard, go to Plugins → Add New and search for “health check” (it should be the first result). Install it, activate it, and it will tell you if you need to update anything!

1616 -Vinyl Lettering – If you don’t know where you’re going,
you’ll end up somewhere else. by DesignDivasGallery on Etsy

Without a goal for your blog, you’ll find that you’re missing out on opportunities to really connect with your community of followers. Don’t have a community of followers, yet? No worries! Giving your blog a meaning and purpose tends to end that nasty dilemma.

What I can also tell you about not blogging is this:

1. If you don’t ask for comments, you won’t get comments.
2. If you post it, they won’t necessarily come.
3. If you don’t offer a chance to subscribe, most people won’t follow up on comments.
4. If you stop writing, they will stop coming.

With all these distractions, you can see that it’s easy to end up someplace else than you want to be with your blog. So how about you out there trying to get back on the blogging bandwagon… what have you learned while not blogging?

The Broken Chain by Mesho0o0o, on Flickr

With over 2700+ links on the site, I had no intentions of checking each and every one individually. After a quick plug-in search, I found Broken Link Checker for WordPress.

What Broken Link Checker did for my blog was priceless. Running through every single post on the site, it cataloged all the links, marked which ones were redirected automatically by WordPress and then listed all the broken links on the site. It also added CSS to the site that applied a strikethru style to all the broken links. I found that very helpful.

The most useful features of Broken Link Checker are all centralized in its Tool panel. From one location, you can get details on the link, view the post in which it’s used, edit or remove it. Finally, if you use the same link more than once, one edit from the Tool panel fixes all instances of that link!

When I started working on correcting all the broken links, I had over 400+ and was seriously not looking forward to how long it would take me to do that. However, with this plug-in, I quickly found myself completing my broken link project in just under 2 hours. You can imagine how happy I was about that.

How about you…do you have a plug-in that simplified a task for you? I’d love to hear about it!

If I wasn’t paying attention, how did I find out, you ask? I planned a sale on my jewelry website, only to find out it had been hacked. And so began my two month journey to remove/replace all the hacked code across my websites.

When I finally had a chance to start working on the jewelry website (because as is the plight of an independent contractor, clients come first always), I was able to migrate it from Textpattern to WordPress, but not without some trouble. The latest of which was fixing a discrepancy with post comment counts in WordPress.

I originally tried a few solutions, but myPHPAdmin was yelling at me… it didn’t like how the SQL was formatted for making the updates. Another quick search and I found this post: Reseting Post and Comment Count in WordPress by Ankur Banerjee. He wasn’t sure that it would function on everyone’s servers due to timeout settings, but it worked like a charm for me.

How about you out there porting from Textpattern to WordPress… What issues did you encounter that were not easily handled by the Textpattern importer plugin in WordPress?

Our Direction by B Tal, on Flickr

Last week I mentioned that I was guilty – I hadn’t spent enough time on this business blog. I also mentioned I wasn’t sure of the direction of the blog. Sadly, it’s been a week and I’m still not quite sure.

I guess I have this idea that a blog should be passionate. A blog should be focused. A blog should be such that you know your readers look forward to what you have to say. For me and this blog, I can’t say it’s ever been like that. I’ve just blogged to blog. I blogged because I thought it was what I had to do. I blogged because I wanted to showcase some of what I do. I blogged because I thought it would add revenue to my business. Past that, there was no other reason.

If you think about what I just said, really it was all about me talking to you… not with you. Doesn’t make much for wanting to come back and see what I have to say. A blog should really be about conversation, not a soapbox from which to preach.

Putting thought into the direction of this blog, I realized what I want from it is something totally different from what it’s been in the past. Tara Gentile just about says it best when she wrote:

“I want to have the ideas, the passion, and the drive that inspires people & moves them to action.”

I love that thought! That is exactly what I want out of this blog. I want to enjoy my blogging experience with the business and I want to feel like you, as a reader, enjoy what I have to say. I want to feel like what I share compels you to respond and that it brings value to your life.

Which leaves me wondering where that leaves us. Where do we go from here? As far as I’m concerned, my blog is only useful if it serves a purpose for you and for me. Maybe I should ask you something different…

What do you want to see on this blog?

cobweb by Redworm, on Flickr

Very guilty. You’re probably wondering about what. Well, the sad reality is I’m guilty about not updating this blog. I have cobwebs on this blog it’s been so long since I last updated it.

I’ve been blessed with plenty of work and for that I’m grateful. But as with many other things, it’s important to maintain priorities and this blog just hasn’t been one of them. I haven’t been taking this blog seriously and reading the  Five and a half signs you don’t take your business website seriously post on Be Awesome Online really brought that home for me.

Granted, only one of the points in the post really applies to me (point #3, if you’re curious), but it’s enough for me to want to get my butt in gear and start keeping you better informed about what is going on in the background here at YazminMedia. I also had a little nudge from the Are You Spending Enough Time On Your Own Website? post on Freelance Switch, enough to get me to write this post, even though I’m not sure of the direction of my blog.

But I’m thinking about it… and just wanted to let you know that I was still here and still doing plenty of work. So contact me if you’re looking for a developer.

We know that Textpattern relies heavily on sections. Traditionally, if you want to setup one section of your site as the blog, the RSS functionality for Textpattern will only add articles for that particular section. So what happens when you want to combine two or more sections into one RSS feed? Previously, you were out of luck…that is, until the aks_header plugin came along.

With this plugin, you can group sections into one feed. Exactly what I needed to do with the A Pretty Rock website, to allow feeding one RSS feed to NetworkedBlogs for its Facebook Fan page. It works great!

Want to learn how to do this yourself? Read this excellent article: Create and customize your own RSS feeds. It explains a method using the plugin aks_header to group and manage RSS feeds like ordinary Textpattern articles. Note that the Textpattern tag, “txp_article_custom”, permits the use of comma separated list of sections, which is how you get your feed to pull from more than one section.

Problem solved!

Here is the second one in the series of projects I’ve had on the backburner. If you’re looking for a Halloween costume, go check it out!

Work Completed: WordPress Website

Description: Best Star Trek Costumes is an affiliate website setup to market Star Trek costumes. In order to facilitate ease of updating, this website was created using WordPress as a content management system.

I don’t get very many opportunities to play around with personal projects, so I’m very glad to announce the completion of this website. If you’re looking for a Halloween costume, go check it out!

Work Completed: WordPress Website

Description: Best G.I. Joe Costumes is an affiliate website setup to market G.I Joe costumes. In order to facilitate ease of updating, this website was created using WordPress as a content management system.

Just finished a website for my church, Family By Faith Worship Center. It’s a Flash movie that defines what adoption means to them. Go check it out!

Work Completed: Flash Website

Description: Wanna Be Adopted is an additional website to announce the mission and vision of Family By Faith Worship Center. It is meant to catch the attention of visitors who will stay and watch the Flash message before moving on to the church’s main website. To keep visitors entertained while reading the message on adoption, a song from the music ministry leader, David Glenn, is incorporated into the Flash movie.