Thoughts on buying and selling houses – part one
Moving house in a recession isn’t easy unless you’re at the bottom of a chain, and have a decent deposit to buy somewhere. And the lack of first-time buyers is exactly what’s hampering the UK housing market right now. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: housing
Writing a WordPress theme from scratch
I recently completed a relaunch of The Beatles Bible – putting together a theme from scratch and styling the css myself, and I thought I’d write a brief update on my findings. Read the rest of this entry »
Sense Of Doubt – David Bowie
Sense Of Doubt was one of the instrumental tracks on David Bowie’s album “Heroes”. Here’s a rarely-seen video:
Tags: david bowie
One year on…
Oh my. I began this blog to note down some thoughts as I developed the Beatles Bible website. I thought it would be helpful – to me, and anyone else who happened to search for relevant terms – to keep a record of findings in case they came up elsewhere. Read the rest of this entry »
Residual earning is far better than fixed-fee work
I have a day job producing websites for a UK broadcaster. It’s decent enough work, and I could be doing far worse things with my life. But lately I’ve been thinking about the traditional job model in the UK (and elsewhere), and whether the convention of working until you retire is particularly effective or healthy. I suspect not. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: making money
Enabling Dreamhost site stats in WordPress
If you have a Dreamhost account and host your WordPress site with them, you may not be able to see your site stats by DH’s standard www.yourname.com/stats url. Here’s a little guide to getting them to work, as it’s not immediately obvious without a bit of digging around. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: .htaccess, dreamhost, wordpress
Ten WordPress plugins I cannot live without
One of the best things about WordPress, like Firefox, is that there are developers all around the world making plugins to increase its functionality. As with Firefox, some are good, others less so.
What your site needs depends on your particular requirements – if you have no interest in podcasting, for example, you won’t need me to recommend you a plugin for it (although for some reason WP comes bundled with one anyway).
These are the plugins I install every time I launch a new site, no matter what its remit or scope. They help with security, troubleshooting, speed and SEO, and should take about half an hour to get up and running. In no particular order, they are: Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: wordpress
Why WordPress curly quotes are bad for your site’s health
The correct term for these is ’smart quotes’. Which is odd, as there’s not a great deal that’s smart about them. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: smart quotes, wordpress
Choosing and registering a domain name
What’s in a name? Quite a bit, as it happens.
While many of the “users” of this ’site’ come via a search engine, enough times I’ve had to verbally tell people the name of it. It helps if it has a domain name that’s memorable, easy to spell, and is unlikely to be confused with another. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: domain names
Buying a hosting plan
To get a website up and running you need two things: a domain name and a webhost to upload your pages to. Oh, and some good ideas. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: dreamhost