How is Technology Bloggers so successful?

18 Replies Christopher Roberts

A few weeks ago I wrote about what we as a community had achieved in the first two weeks of Technology Bloggers life. At the time it was stuff like 4 authors, 85 comments, bla bla bla…


At the bottom of the article I wrote

How on earth have we achieved this?

As a member of the admin team, I have done a few things which I believe have massively increased the traffic, encouraged people to comment, and attracted guest authors.

What are those things? Well, that’s another post! I hope to ‘revile all’ in the very near future, so stay tuned!

So now the time has come for me to reveal all! Well… all that I know 🙂

Technology Bloggers SuccessEvery Monday from now, I hope to start a whole series of articles, explaining in detail what I did and how that helped Technology Bloggers become so popular in such a short space of time.

The articles are going to based around these core points:

  • History and reputation
  • Promotion
  • Benefits – A two way system
  • Competition
  • Subscription options
  • Learn from the best

Interested in what I did to really kick this blog off? Stay tuned faithful readers and all will be made public very shortly!

Hopefully this can be a great way to brighten up your Monday mornings, with some great information which you could use to improve your own blog!

Be sure to tune in on Monday the 13th (two months after we launched) to find out how and why Technology Bloggers has been so successful!

The technology army

8 Replies Christopher Roberts

Want to do your bit for your country? Join the forces and fight for your freedom? Many people do.

However, wouldn’t it be so much better if you could do it from a comfy chair, in a climate controlled building, with tea and biscuits on hand?

The front line

When you think of the front line, you usually think of solders in action, often in hostile, dangerous conditions. However in our new ‘cyber’ world, the front line is more the back offices. More and more, the threats to our security are not physical, but cyber.

This is why the UK government have set up Cyber Security Challenge UK. Cyber Security Challenge UK is a project that hopes to encourage individuals into the security industry.

The logo of Cyber Security Challenge UKIn the future it is likely that our wars are not going to be as defined as country versus country, but rather hackers versus data owners. This means that anti-virus firms, and the military will need to work very hard to keep our country safe.

Imagine what would happen if the banking system got hacked. Everyone’s theoretical money could potentially be wiped, and we would have no clue who owned what. Imagine a leading brand had a virus infect their entire internal network.

Cyber threats are becoming more and more real, and more and more scary.

If you think that you could be up to the challenge to become a ‘security champion’ head over to cybersecuritychallenge.org.uk and have a go at their challenges.


The challenges are a series of online games and competitions to test your cyber security abilities, to see if you could train to become a defender of computers.

If you are successful, you may be offered a job or funded through training, so it’s worth a try – you never know, you may discover some hidden potential!

Could you work for an anti-virus firm or the government to protect people against cyber crime/attacks?

How to show more screen options in WordPress

15 Replies Christopher Roberts

I have noticed that most of the other authors on this blog have failed to write a short excerpt for their article. It’s usually really easy and takes seconds to think of a short phrase to sum up, or entice people into reading your article.

When Marc (from the 360 Blog) wrote his most recent article, I emailed him to ask him why he never filled in the excerpt field, as he is now eligible to apply for author status, but that requires each article to have an excerpt.

Marc emailed back and told me

“You mentioned that you would like a short excerpt written, but there wasn’t a place to do that.”

Out came my thinking cap!

I then realised that when I had started Technology Bloggers, when creating a new post, the excerpt field wasn’t showing ether. The trackback field didn’t show, nor did the discussion field etc.


Do you have problems with

  • Excerpt field not showing when creating a new WordPress post
  • Trackback field not showing when creating a new WordPress post
  • Discussion field not showing when creating a new WordPress post
  • As well as other custom fields not showing

well if so I have your solution!

Screen Options.

The 'Screen Options' button in the WordPress admin consoleYou see at the top right of the admin console there is your name, log out etc. well just below that you should see a tab that says help, and next to that a tab that says ‘Screen Options’.

Click ‘Screen Options’ and it will pull the tab down to revile loads of new fields which you can choose to show or not.

The WordPress 'Screen Options' for creating a post in the admin consoleLike to work light? You may just want the publish box and the article writing area. Prefer to go into detail? Tick/check the ‘Categories’, ‘Post Tags’, ‘Custom Fields’, ‘Send Trackbacks’ etc. boxes for a more advanced view!


Under ‘Screen Options’ you also have the option or changing the screen layout. You can decide how many columns your dashboard uses, to display your selected widgets. On the homepage of the dashboard you can split it down in 1,2,3 or even 4 (if you have a very wide screen) columns. On posts pages you can choose to split the view down to two columns, or just the one.

Ever asked yourself ‘how can I show more comments in the WordPress admin console?’, if so, ‘Screen Options’ could help here too. Just click it and you can show as many or as few comments as you like. I have it set so that the WordPress comments page shows 50 comments per page, although I sometimes change it 🙂

Good luck bloggers with using WordPress the way you like it!