Nic’s blog
I write about building businesses, failing and building a life, not a legacy.
Wordpress 2.3 uses Google blogsearch not Technorati
I find this extremely interesting and a bit confusing as a user. Technorati is out, Google is inPrevious version of Wordpress have made us of Technorati to track incoming links to your blog in the admin panel. Now it seems that with a new version of WP comes a change to Google.I am quite relieved about this move as I feel that Technorati has recently lost some weight in the market and is not being taken very seriously in the online market. While I cannot say that Google is any better but their extended reputation does hold them in good stead in my eyes.I just need to work out how Google Blogsearch relates to my links and what it all means. But it is nice to see a change and to know that the WP guys are listening to their users and interacting with us with every upgrade.
Who's going to Sexpo?
I am!!It started yesterday but work restraints have prevented me from going as of yet. If you are going and see me there... hide, ignore me and act like we've never met!! OK, just kidding, buy me something funky I'm sure you'll be able to find something there.For those of you who don't know what Sexpo is:
This hugely successful mix of entertainment and exhibitors, running in Australia for over 10 years has attracted more than 1,5 million visitors! Sexuality exhibitions become the most popular exhibitions around the world, in America, Europe, Australia and Singapore, now its time for SEXPO South Africa!
And this is what is going down:• Adult entertainment & venues• Adult products & services• Aromatherapy• Bachelor & Bachelorette party Organisers• Beauty Therapy• Bedding• Body piercing & tattooing• Car sound, security and accessories• Cellular products and services• Clairvoyants & tarot readings• Cosmetics• Fashion• Financial Services• Glamour photography & artistry• Gymnasiums & sports equipment• Hair and skin care• Health & fitness information, products & services• Internet Services & Providers• Jewellery• Leather wear & products• Leisure equipment• Lingerie & swimwear• Luxury Vehicle sales and hire• Magazines & publications• Massage & meditation• Party and events organisers• Romantic restaurants• Spa baths• Travel agencies and tour operators• Wine sampling and salesAnd finally the main attractions according to the website:• Browse and shop around the huge range of exhibitor stands;• Check out the curated Art Gallery;• Pick up a few new tricks at the SEXPO workshops;• Watch out for the crazy Penisaurus;• Be entertained by the best of local and international performers.I am dead keen and will be there in all my glory (whatever glory that might be is up for debate at this point). But nonetheless I shall be attending sometime over the weekend so keep and eye out.For more info visit the SEXPO website.
What is going on in SA politics - it's all too much
Is it just me or does everyone else feel like there is a conspiracy waiting to happen here in SA?Deputy heald ministers getting fired, Scorpions being reprimanded, NPA, SAPS, Selebi, Pikoli, holy shit what the fuck is going on?Have all the politicians lost the plot? Have they all got Herpes that has moved to the brain and is skewing thier ability to make sensical, informed choices? Has Mbeki lost his nut?Is it not worth at least investigating or probing the allegations that Selebi might possibly be involved with dodgy people. Or is that like saying Vegetables can't cure Aids and nor can a shower? Do you see what I mean? Veggies and watre as a cure for Aids. COME ON.I'm tired of this and last night I honestly had one of those moments that people sometimes have. I think that there was one like it in United States Of Leland when Leland, the main character, feels like the suffering of the world is too much and a mentally handicapped boy is the embodiment of the pain that the world is feeling. Leland then kills the little boy and feels a catharsis afterwards.I had that moment last night. Where I felt like things were too much, too overwhelming, too big, too serious and just too much for anyone to fix. Do you have those days too? Or is it just me?
Survivor's dead goat
I wasn't fortunate enough to see Survivor SA last night but apparently a goat was "murdered" and left for the tribe to eat. Shock flipping horror, a goat died.Now on the radio this morning two people called in to a show shocked and appalled that they were "forced" to see a dead goat. Note, they did not actually see the goat's throat slit, they saw it after the event, dead.Why I am blogging about this is because vegetarians piss me off. There are various types of vegetarians that I can classify in my mind. For the purposes of this post I am only going to be talking about 2: Political vegetarians and Food vegetarians.Political vegetarians are making a stand. They don't eat meat because animals are creatures too and they aren't shy to let you know that you are a pig, a dog, an animal, a brute and more for eating meat of any kind.While a Food vegetarian simply does not enjoy eating meat and prefers vegetable. I like this type of vegetarian, I know some, intimately and they are lovely people.Do you know why they are lovely people? Because they aren't force feeding me their political bullshit about not eating animals being right. Food vegetarians love to eat, they love to cook for you and love vegetables. I now love vegetables and cooking thanks to a vegetarian of the Food kind.But on the radio today the two idiots who called in were definitely Political Vegetarians. They were insistent that showing a dead goat on TV was wrong. Let me ask them a question: Do you watch the news on TV? If you do, why aren't you violently against reading watching and hearing about murder, rape and other violent crimes against HUMAN BEINGS. Do you switch of the TV?On that point, NO ONE is forcing anyone to watch Survivor and the dead frikkin' goat. If you don't want to watch anything like that then change the channel, it's easy and it's called self regulation. If you don't want to self regulate yourself it means that you just want to be political and make a point.And finally, the two people on the radio (the Political veggies) insisted that "did not like having it pushed down their throat" when the goat was on TV with its throat slit. How is that pushing anything on anyone? Let's flip the situation around shall we, what if the tribe was forced to only eat vegetables? Would these vegetarians feel that us meat eaters were having their beliefs forced down our throats? Methinks not.It's always different in someone else's shoes, but some political vegetarians are fast becoming like staunch christians who bible bash. Not fun for anyone.
Full or partial RSS feeds - Follow up
This is a fairly tough post to be writing because I really don't have any conclusive answers to the questions I posed and thoughts I put forward in my first post about RSS feeds.After I blogged about full vs partial feeds I decided to make my feeds partial. The only response I have had has been bad. Two people have emailed me saying that they are close to unsubscribing to my feed cause the feeds were partial. This, in theory, is enough to make me revert back to full feeds.Justin and I were chatting about this issue further and we both believe that SA bloggers need to start creating RSS subscribers as a point. Instead of simply blogging and rambling on, we should start doing whatever we can as bloggers to get the number of RSS subscribers up on our blogs. This will assist in creating hits for your blog irrespective of whether you use full or partial feeds.One of the biggest issues that has been raised with me is that people using RSS do so because they don't have time to read every blog they wish to at the blog itself. This makes sense to me actually. By offering partial feeds for about two weeks now, all I have really done is piss off RSS users.Justin then had a great point, he liked one of the posts on my blog - links to WP themems. He clicked through to my site and was then sent to the theme. He wanted to comment on my post but had already clicked 3 times to somewhere else and was over it. If I had full RSS feeds he could've clicked through to my post and the link site and seen bot and commented on both with far greater ease. Good point.I may have received a visit from Justin, but I missed out on his comment. Which is worth more to you as an author?So my conclusion is Full posts in RSS are far better for me and my audience. So back to full posts it is. As of now.
Wordpress v2.3 - Tags, Posts and more
Last night with the gracious assistance of one Hartman, I upgraded SA Rocks to Wordpress v2.3.To be honest, this process is not simple for an ignoramus such as myself. It involves database backups, theme backups (which I neglected to do) and plugin deactivation. Sounds pretty easy, but when your entire blogs history is dependant on your capabilities you start to doubt those capabilities.But nevertheless I went forward with the upgrade. I was going to install Ultimate Tag Warrior to handle all my tagging on the various posts, but alas I was disuaded because the new WP has built in tagging capabilities.So here is my immediate impression of the new WP upgrade:1. Posts are easier to manage in the admin section. You can search by status, date, author, category or simply enter a search term. This I love.2. Built in tagging. This is a brilliant update that has been made. I love tagging and this makes it doable right there in your post editor.3. Plugin updates. These have become automated. Now before you get all happy about that, it simply means that you are automatically told when a new update is available for your installed plugins. This might not seem like a great improvement, but wow what a time-saver.I am having some issues with the tagging process on SA Rocks. For some reason when I publish a post with tags, the tags don't actually click through to anything buy an error page. Does anyone have any advice?Then the next stupid thing that I hastily screwed up was my categories. WP v2.3 offers you the ability to make your categories, tags. I wasn't 100% sure what this meant, and hell, I'm still not sure. But what I do know is that out of my carefully crafted 40 or so categories, I am now only left with about 6 (4 of which I recreated) after "converting" them to tags.Now that they are tags, can someone tell me what the hell that means for my blogging?That's my only major gripe with the upgrade. Otherwise I had a good guide through the process and happy with the results.A word of advice: Ensure that you back up EVERYTHING that you want to keep as is on your current blog before upgrading. I didn't save a copy of my most recent updates on the SA Rocks theme and I had to do some of them over. Not fun.
Google search rank penalties
Did you know that paid text link ads can sink your Google rank through a penalty imposed by the search engine giant? I didn't but David Airey found out first hand recently.His Google refferals dropped from 30% to 6% thanks to a penalty implemented by Google.The problem?Airey started to sell advertising on his site without adding the rel=â€nofollow†to hyperlink adverts. This is apparently not such a good idea as Google frowns upon this in a big way. Advertising is allowed but the rel=â€nofollow†is essential.Revenue via advertising is allowed by Google but the company is very clear about what is allowed and what is not:
Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:* Adding a rel=â€nofollow†attribute to the ‘a href’ tag* Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file
Airey has some great links on his post that will help to explain the problem and give you solutions. Money is still able to be made, but make sure you aren't destroying hard work on the SEO of your blog for a few hundred bucks.I am interested to know if this sort of "law" applies to javascript adverts or any other kind of advertising on a website? Anyone have any answers? Maybe The Unknown Soldier has some answers?
Grahamstown review
I am sitting in the P.E. Airport waiting for my flight to board so I thought it might be a good time to reflect on the Captivate Conference that I attended in Grahamstown over the long weekend.First of all, Captivate is a national student media conference - or at least that's what it's meant to be. It was more of a student media conference for the less apathetic students. Apathy was a widely discussed topic over the weekend. Almost every speaker was approached by the student newspapers present and asked how to deal with student apathy regarding media and issues that the papers cover in their reporting.My presentation was on Saturday just after lunch and just before Carly and Gregor's Times presentation. It worked out really well in my opinion. I opened up nicely for them and touched on issues that they went in to more depth about. Unfortunately I wont be uploading the presentation on to this blog because there are some parts of the presentation that are not quite for public consumption just yet. FM Campus is relaunching its website in the next month or so and I want to do it with a bang, so the presentation can't really be shown yet.I spoke about the state of the media as I have come to know it as a young media practitioner in a big media organisation. I basically explained to the delegates that life can be very, very good as a journalist in SA and there is lots of opportunity for students moving in the media industry.Carly and Gregor presented a fun take on multimedia content at The Times and brought up issues surrounding multimedia production for students at university. Their use of The Simpsons made their presentation very accessible to students and the delegates present.Then on Sunday (with a massive headache and super-fantastic hangover) Gregor, Carly and I held a "Talkshop" (nice phrase) around convergence. This was possibly the most rewarding and interactive part of the conference. We were able to interact with people who have skills in media production but have know idea how to converge the various media options available to them. Many of the editors present had never thought of linking their print with online and blogs and vice versa on all fronts. For the three of us presenting this was very scary.We did our best to try and provide them with viable options to produce their own multimedia content for students on a student level. One of the newspapers - The Oppipress - seems to have a better grip on the whole concept than some of the others present but I think that through the Talkshop we were able to make them all realise that a cellphone camera or digital camera can make for a great tool to produce multimedia content on a very basic level.In general I must admit that I am saddened with the apathy of students in the media production market at a university level. I understand that many of them are under-funded and couldn't make the trip but many of the invited newspapers were simply not interested in attending. I can say for certain that they will be the ones falling behind very soon.Present campuses were UJ, NMMU, Rhodes, UKZN and TUKS. Those are five campuses out of a definite 12 that have student media on their campuses. Very sad. If you want to talk about apathy as a student media producer one thing is for sure, you cannot promote apathy.I think I will be posting another post about the state of Grahamstown Bed and Breakfasts. I had some pretty bad experiences at the BnB I stayed at. But nonetheless a worthwhile trip down in terms of education, experience and networking for all parties concerned.Thanks go out to the Captivate organising committee.
A South African's experience in the British Army in Iraq
This is some of the most emotive multimedia that I have ever seen. I was meant to blog about this piece when it was released on The Times, but got sidetracked.Astounding. It is refreshing to see things in Iraq from the perspective of a South African and not an American or Iraqi.See for yourself:The Times caption:
A tour in Iraq that ended in tragedy. WARNING: VIEWER DISCRETION ADVISED!
Brought to you by: The Times MultimediaThis video was a dramatic and effective part of Carly and Gregor's presentation at the Captivate conference.
Captivate conference here I come
This long weekend is going to be a great one. I am getting out of Joburg which is phenomenal.Grahamstown is my second home as many of you readers will know. I went to Rhodes and loved it, I still love it in fact, but going back after you have graduated can be an odd experience. But I am looking forward to it nonetheless.I will be doing a presentation at the conference. I like to make waves, we all know that. I don't think that this will be too overboard but I am sure that many people will disagree with me. Those will be the people who have misinterpreted me.Hopefully the conference will be successful and there will be a reason to live blog it. If it isn't then I wont be live blogging but will be blogging from the big Gspot and maybe even the pat and rarrot, I mean rat and parrot. Wow I'm not even there yet and I think I'm pissed.I'll catch you all on the flip flop, Oh and for more blogging from Captivate I think you might be able to check out Groogle and Ritz.
Gareth Cliff reads this blog...
I am sure of it. I was listening to his show this morning on 5FM and what is he talking about? No, not this blog, but it may as well have been.He was talking about Chris Crocker, Britney and Seth Green, in just about the same order as I blogged about it a few days ago.I mean honestly, I hate it when "big media" comes on to a blog, likes the content and reproduces it without any linklove. Seriously who hasn't heard of linklove?OK, I am probably way off mark here, but Gareth, if you are reading this blog please leave a comment and tell me. And in future, reference your source!
Vincent Maher for IT personality of the year
I just noticed that ITWeb is holding their IT personality of the year awards. And you'll never guess who has made the shortlist of ten. That's right, the blogosphere's very own Vincent Maher.If you look closely you'll see a very, very cheesy photo of the man himself in the nominee's list.But in spite of this he could possibly be the stangest and most likeable character on that list.The ITWeb has classified the criteria for an IT personality as:
A person who has been successful in building a highly-respected IT organisation or business.A person who has made a major contribution to the IT profession over a number of years.A person who has made a significant technical or academic contribution to the IT industry.An IT professional who has aided the development needs of the community.
Now I know that many of us bloggers out there have felt the impact of Mr. Maher's developments in recent times. Sites like Amatomu, Amagama and Thoughtleader have been at the forefront of online development lately. Maher is behind them all.It looks to me that he is the only serious blogger on the list but the competition is tight. He is fighting CEOs, MDs, OpenSource pundits and others so he might just need our support.The complete list is:Hamilton Ratshefola, CEO of Cornastone ConsultingJames Grcic, MD, Computer Storage Services AfricaMelusi Zwane, MD of Melusi Training & DevelopmentMirriam Zwane, co-owner and director of Praxis ComputingDr Ntsika Msimang, head of the Meraka Institute's Open Source Centre, SowetoPhuthuma Nhleko, CEO, MTN GroupPfungwa Serima, MD of Microsoft South AfricaStephen Smith, founder of the Papillon FoundationVincent Maher, strategist, Mail & Guardian OnlineViola Manuel, executive director of the Cape IT Initiative (CITI)The entire process works as follows:
Out of dozens of nominations received from ITWeb readers and members of the Computer Society of SA, the judges have short-listed 10 candidates, all of whom have made outstanding achievements in their careers and significant contributions to the South African IT industry.Based on the criteria and public votes, the judges will now select five finalists. These five will be announced on ITWeb by Friday 5 October.
Niche websites - Deputy Dog
We have all heard the "blogging elite" in the world talk about niche blogs and their effectiveness. I have rarely found a blog that sparks my interest in the "niche" category but this one has.
Deputy Dog has no "about" section so I am going to make one up. The site focuses on phenomenal things. Let me be more specific. The author actively seeks incredible photos, stories and videos of amazing phenomena such as double story winding bridges, planes almost crashing in to one another and many posts such as "The world first...".It's kind of a "World first, biggest, oldest, largest etc etc etc" blog. Which I find fascinating. You can't take everything (or anything) on the blog as gospel but I can read this sort of stuff for hours. Much like that old show Ripley's believe it or not on TV, this blog really makes me want to click back in to the archives.Do yourself a favour and read the blog now.
The mumps have gone viral
YEs, believe it or not (but you should) I have spread mumps to the third person in my circle. Three flipping people! Thank goodness only one of them was a guy but unfortunately he's my best mate so he's pretty pissed off with me. Not good.The worst part about mumps spreading is that when you have recovered approximately 14 days after contracting the virus, only then do others start to emerge with the symptoms. It's not fun let me tell you. Receiving a call to tell you that you have given a mate mumps, a work colleague mumps or your cousin mumps, they all suck.To anyone else who I might have infected: I AM SORRY!!!!! Please don't make me feel more guilty than I already do.Lastly: If you have seen me in the last month and don't have symptoms yet, you're probably safe.
Seth Green says leave Britney freak alone
I couldn't help but follow up on my Britney freak post with Seth Green's parody for The Soup. Seth, pure brilliance, especially his shameless plug at the end of the video.First read this post then watch THESE VIDEO... then watch the one below: