kdmurray.blog

The crossroads of life and tech

Tag Archives: blog

The Future of Short Order Code

The future of Short Order code is very much up in the air right now. With a baby on the way in the near future and what seems like no time to work on things for the podcast already There’s a good chance that there won’t be another episode of Short Order code for at least another few months.

I have been considering using the SOC blog as more of a blog and posting all of my programming related posts there and leaving this one as more of a general blog. I have some posts coming soon for programming related things and I’m trying to figure out what makes more sense: posting them here where they’ll get a few more eyeballs, or posting them on SOC where the site is all about programming — albeit a programming podcast that hasn’t seen an episode since late 2009.

In short, the future is muddy. Hopefully I’ll be able to shed some more light on things as the next month or two roll on.

Twitter: The Anti-Blog

My name is @kdmurray, and I’m a Twitter addict.

There’s no question that we each only have so many hours in a week to do our online business. I’ve got a pretty rich net-life too with the blog, the AGP, Twitter, MSN, gTalk, the myriad blogs that I read and the endless stream of podcasts I have pouring into my iPod touch every morning. So since April was my busiest month of Twittering EVER (by 72%) it would stand to reason that it was a dismal month for the blog.

But I’ve really missed blogging. May is going to be a bit of a catch up month, I’ve got the last four posts from the BlackBerry Flip series, as well as my I’ve-been-writing-it-forever post “Mac vs. PC” (sans @hodgman). I am also hard at work on content for the new podcast. I’ve got the first few episodes in various states of pre-production, and I’m hoping to release the first show on Canada Day.

All this means that I’m going to be much less visible on Twitter for the next while until I’m able to achieve some sort of balance. I’ve met lots of cool and interesting folks on Twitter the past few months, and met some of them in person at the NHL Tweetups that were held during the Canucks playoff run this year. I’m not abandoning Twitter, just bringing things back to reality a bit.

WordPress 2.7 Release Candidate 1

After what has seemed a rather lengthy wait, WordPress 2.7 has graduated from the Beta phase to RC1. The new release of WordPress has a completely redesigned admin section bringing back some features that went away in 2.5, and adding to the party a brand new dashboard which makes the platform that much more useful.

I’ve just run the 2.7 update myself tonight (I swore I’d wait until the full release before putting it on the main blog… but I couldn’t wait anymore) and I’m really liking the changes so far. The fact that I can quickly look at the dashboard and see comment stats, recent everything and pen a draft all at the same time is great.

So far everything looks good, though I did have to deactivate a couple of plugins to make things work as expected.  TinyMCE Advanced was causing some CSS issues (I could fix it I’m sure but… meh).  In addition I had a plugin to replace the category box in the sidebar when posting which isn’t required anymore with 2.7.

Stay tuned here for more of the pros, cons and otherwise of the newest member of the WordPress family.

PageRank Experiment Update

Well the one week deadline to try and get the site ranked in Google has come and gone, and not to anyone’s surprise the site still doesn’t carry a PageRank.  But, not to fear, I’ll be continuing to write content for the site reviewing everything from software to hardware in hopes of landing the odd paid gig some time in the future.

If you’re interested in some background you can check out the original post I wrote explaining the experiment.  The key lesson with all of this however is that Content is King (or at very least a Duke) and you need to respect that above pretty much all else if you ever expect to get ranked.

The One Week PageRank Experiment

I’ve decided to start a little experiment.  Over the next 7 days, I’m going to try to get a new wordpress blog on a new domain from a PageRank of 0, to at least a PageRank of 1.  If I can get this done, I’ll renew the domain.  If not, I’ll probably let it lapse.

It’s a pretty simple proposition really, I’ll put together what I know about SEO with regular posts to the site.  Hopefully between now and next Friday night I’ll be able to get the site on Google‘s radar.

What are my chances?  No idea, but you can check out the post explaining the Google – WordPress experiment on the new site at kickjoey.com.