Today I Killed RSS

Today I killed RSS, well for me at least.

Death of Google Reader

I've always been a fan of the RSS reader, Google reader was my reader of choice, I've used it for years. It was always the first thing I went to in the morning to read up on the news that happened the day before, star the article that I want to read and remove the ones I don't. Then I would go through all the articles and spend an hour or two reading everything. I would do this everyday, I would spend a couple of hours each day reading articles from some of my favourite blogs.

But some of the articles I wouldn't even want to read but would read them just because they were from a blog which I liked. This would waste hours of my week reading articles that I didn't need to read.
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Web Development With Sublime Text 2

I've recently just changed my IDE for web development from Eclipse to Sublime Text 2 and thought I'll write a post about why I made the switch and what I like so much about Sublime Text 2.

What Is Sublime Text 2?

Sublime Text 2 in it's simplest form is a lightweight text editor. Everything about it was built for speed, which makes sublime one of the quickest and easiest text editors to use. Along with this speed sublime text 2 has 1000s of additional open source plugins, with a massive community of developers contributing to new plugins.

Sublime Text 2 can be used for multiple languages from web development to software development. I'm just using Sublime for web development so I'm going be talking about how easy it is to use for PHP development.

We all know about IDE's and how they make it easy for development, well sublime can do everything they can do, so what makes it different?

Go To Anything Panel

command
Sublime has a feature called go to anything, this is just a panel which allows you to search for files, methods, variables and go to certain lines. It uses fuzzy searching which makes it extremely easy to find anything in your web application.

You can access the Go To Anything panel by using the keyboard shortcode Ctrl + p, this will open a textbox at the top of the screen. As you type into this textbox Sublime will search for all files for the file name you type in. This makes it so quick to find the file you are looking for, you don't need to know the folder structure of application just the name of the file.
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WordPress 3.5 Elvin Is Released

Today WordPress has released it's next big version...Wordpress 3.5 is on the shelves and ready to be downloaded!

After the most popular version of WordPress 3.4, 3.5 has a lot to live up to and I'm sure all the work that has gone into further improvements to WordPress have paid off.

WordPress 3.4 was downloaded more than 28 million times, there used to be a download counter on WordPress.org. This counter has now been reset and is counting the amount of downloads for version 3.5, at the time of writing this has already reached 100,000+ downloads on the first day of release.

WordPress 3.5

What's new with 3.5?

WordPress 3.5 has been named Elvin after the drummer Elvin Jones.

Here is a quick video that goes over some of the newest features you will find on 3.5.


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WordPress Hosting Thanksgiving Offer

A couple month's ago I was looking for a new hosting company for Paulund, it was a long search comparing some of best hosting companies available. I eventually decided on WPEngine, one of the most expensive companies on the list but for a very good reason.

WPEngine

WPEngine is a WordPress hosting company which specialise in WordPress hosting, they will only host WordPress driven websites. When you talk about WPEngine you are talking about the best money can buy WordPress hosting, but this premium WordPress hosting service does come at a price. There starting package is only $30 a month but you are only limited to 25,000 visitors a month, after this you need to upgrade to their middle package which jumps to $100 a month for WordPress hosting, for this you are limited to 100,000 visitors a month.

To start with I thought this price was too much for WordPress hosting but after seeing what you get for this price I had to try it out.

So what do you get for your money?

For $100 a month you can host up to 10 sites with a limit of 100,000 visitors a month.

There are 3 big advantages to hosting on WPEngine:

  • Speed - They are the fastest WordPress hosting company
  • Security - WPEngine helps manage your WordPress install to ensure it is always secure.
  • Support - All employees of WPEngine are WordPress experts to get the best out of your WordPress site. Support is answer extremely quick, if you have a problem I always get an answer within 30 minutes of sending the support ticket.

Thanksgiving Offer November 22nd - November 26th

WPEngine-Logo-300x125

If you sign up for a new WPEngine account during these 4 days with the voucher code blackcyber you will get $25 off your first 3 months of hosting, this means you will get these 3 months hosting for $4 a month.

Bargain!

All you have to do is click the link below, signup with a new account and use the voucher code blackcyber.

Voucher Code: blackcyber

For 3 months of hosting for $4 a month

Sign Up For $4 A Month Hosting

Explaining The Different HTTP Status Codes

HTTP

When a URL is requested by the client to a server the server will return the resource and a HTTP Status code. The status code will let the client know different information about the request, if it was success, if it failed or if the resource has moved.

Here is a list of all the HTTP codes and what they mean.

  • 100's are informational codes
  • 200's are success codes
  • 300's are redirection codes
  • 400's are client error codes
  • 500's are server error codes

100 - Continue

This code means that the request header has been received and that the request body can continue to be sent.

101 - Switch protocols

This code means that the server has asked for the client to switch protocols.

102 - Processing

This code means that the server is processing the request from the client.
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Life After The Google Penguin Update

If you own a website or work on a website then you may of heard about all the changes that has taken place in the Google algorithm over the last couple of weeks.

I don't normally post about SEO changes on here but I feel that the latest Google Penguin update is a big game changer to SEO and thought I had to find out more about it.

The month of April 2012 the SEO game changed, people trying to play with the Google SEO results have finally been shot down the rankings. People who rely on black hat link build techniques have been shot down, some from page 1 in Google to page 6-7+. Who goes to page 6 in Google? No one.

These websites have seen a massive amount of traffic loss, some websites losing up to 80% of Google traffic, this can be thousands of visitors a day...thousands.

Most of these businesses that rely on this traffic for them to function correct, there are companies going out of business all because of this update.

So...what do you think of the new Google Penguin update?

April Google Updates

Before we get into the Google Penguin update I think it's important to say that this update is different to the Google panda updates which have been taken place over the past year. The purpose of Panda is to return the highest quality content, this works with penguin to bring back the best results for your keyword.

There was a silent Google panda update on the 19th of April which cost some people about 30% of organic traffic from Google.

Google Penguin update was released on the 24th April which cost people the remaining 50% of organic traffic.

There is an easy way to check if you have been affected by one or both of these updates, just look at your Google analytics page and put in a date range of the start of April to the start of May. With this range you can see what your results were before and after the update. If your search engine traffic stayed the same on the 20th April then you were not affected by the Panda 3.5 update, but if you lost traffic on the 25th April then you were affected by the Penguin update.

Google Penguin

google-penguin
First of all the name...Google are calling all their updates after black and white animals and will probably end up with a white animal to show white hat techniques win.
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How To Verify Author Ownership Of Your Content

Google have recently started to include Author Google profiles inside the Search Engine results. This feature also allows people to add you to their circles directly from the search results page.

Author Information

To see how this looks in the search result pages view some of these sample searches:

The benefits of having your author profile on the search results is that if people are familiar with your content and see your author profile within the search results they are more likely to click your article in the results.
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How to Design a Stunning Website with Wix

With 78% of the U.S. population on the internet and a growth rate of over 150% per year, websites are becoming more important than a physical presence for many businesses and service providers. Your website is more than a stake in internet real-estate - it is often an internet user's first impression of you and your business, a powerful vehicle for marketing and the perfect platform for sales.

Of course, creating your own custom website can be a daunting task if you have no coding knowledge or design training. A huge variety of website templates and DIY services exist to get you up and running, but the level of quality, expertise and customization really varies. There are hundreds of designers too, but it can cost more than a thousand dollars to build a completely custom website from the ground-up.

Fortunately, there is Wix. Their incredibly popular website builder features a drag-and-drop interface for creating amazing, interactive websites. It provides a large selection of trendy layouts, graphics, fonts and widgets which you can add to your design with the click of a button. Below, I'll show you how to get started with this fantastic tool to build your own custom website that is both stylish and highly functional. You'll learn how to customize elements using Color, Effects, Animations and Behaviors, and I'll show you a unique technique for creating interactive images to help promote products, services or pages of your site.

Preview of Final Results

website builder demo site by vail
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