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Letting you know about recent updates

4th July 2012 6 Replies Christopher Roberts

As the loyal readers among you may have noticed, there has been a lack of posting in the last week or so, but don’t worry, this trend shall soon be halted, as there are many new and exciting posts written, planned and on the way very soon.

This article is just to keep you in the loop and let you know what is going on.

Usually, I will endeavour to keep people up to date with updates to the blog via our social channels, specifically Facebook and Twitter. I feel the blog is a place for content, whilst notifying you about updating the ‘frills’ that are the design and functionality updates should be the place of social media.

Social Media Updates

Let me start by letting you know how our social side is currently evolving. A few months ago, Facebook stopped feed compatibility, meaning that if you liked us on Facebook, you no longer got updates regarding new posts. Now however I have linked Twitter to Facebook, so every tweet @tecbloggers tweets is also posted on our Facebook page.

UPDATE: We now tweet under the username @TechBloggers.

This means that you can now receive updates of new posts via your Facebook feed.

Some tweeters like to spam you with content every five minutes, likewise, update Facebook statuses practically all the time. I don’t believe in this, and only post/tweet an update should it be something you may want to know. Updates like small site improvements/issues and interesting content are the sort of thing we use our social media channels for.

Occasionally if I find, or someone brings to my attention something interesting that I think is worth sharing to the community, but doesn’t warrant a post, then it may get shared via social media. Don’t worry about getting spammed if you subscribe, we will only be posting stuff you probably want to know about.

I have also recently added a cover photo to our Facebook page, as it was looking a little bland. I didn’t have any great ideas, but I think it works for now 🙂 If you have any suggestions, by all means leave them in the comments below.

Technology Bloggers Facebook cover photo.

In future, I don’t plan on writing as many of these sort of posts, as I feel it is better to keep you informed via social media, of updates as and when they occur.

If you don’t want to miss out on future update news, subscribe now!

Follow @TecBloggers

In other news…

Top Writers

For a long time now we have had a top commenters widget at the bottom of every page, however the observant among you may have noticed the appearance of a new widget: a top writers list.

I came across the plugin whilst searching for something else, and thought it was a good idea. This is a community blog, so if we highlight the top commenters, why should writers not be recognised too? Well now they are 🙂

The top commenters list excludes administrators and resets every month, the top writers list doesn’t.

Design Updates

Technology Bloggers design is constantly being updated and tweaked. I believe that continuous improvement is important. Most of my time is spent writing and replying to comments, however I do dedicate some time to improving other areas of the site.

One recent update is the removal of the social icons from the sidebar, and the addition of a new set of social buttons to the header. I felt that this area needed a bit more colour, and the buttons bring just that!

More Speed!

A few weeks ago I posted on our social channels:

“Just moved servers in order to speed up the blog 🙂
Do you notice a difference?”

We encountered a few problems, however they were soon sorted out, leading me to later post:

“A few hiccups later, Technology Bloggers is fully functioning and faster than ever!”

The blogs response time was sometimes really quite slow (usually higher than 2000 miliseconds!). I moved the blog to a different server and the response time is now around a quarter of what it was, currently around the 550 ms mark.

That is one reason you may have noticed the blog loading faster, another is because of the relentless efforts that I have been putting into slimming things down and reducing load times.

Google’s Page Speed tools have been very useful, enabling me to see where the site lags, and what can be done to improve it. I think there may be an article on the way soon with more detail on Page Speed, and how I have and am still using the tools to speed up the blog. Watch this space.

Jonny

For a while now, Thursday here on the blog seems to have been Jonny’s day, with him posting a regular feature on a Thursday for more than ten weeks now.

The day is not a dedicated day to the writings of Mr Hankins, however at the moment, I feel it is good that the regular feature is on a fixed day, as it gives consistency. His articles are very popular, and it is a delight every Thursday looking to see what new and innovative topic he has chosen to cover.

Jonny has been busy travelling of late, meaning that last week he was unable to post. Don’t worry though, he already has an article written and lined up for us for tomorrow 🙂

Competition

Just a quick note about a competition I plan on launching next Monday. Technology Bloggers has teamed up with two other blogs, and hopefully will soon be launching a competition in which anyone bar the three prize donors can enter for a chance to win one of three $50 USD prizes in a $150 competition!

UPDATE: This will now launch on Tuesday.

Until Next Time

That’s about it from me now, so remember, if you want to keep up to date, be sure to subscribe to our social profiles, and stay tuned to the blog to see our exciting future unfold…

What are your thoughts on the recent PageRank update?

9th May 2012 7 Replies Christopher Roberts

Google’s head of Google webspam, Matt Cutts (a Google employee and guru on everything search) is always telling webmasters not to obsess too much about PageRank. I would agree, it is not always that accurate, (give or take 1 rank either way) probably because it is not publicly updated that frequently – it is always updating, results are just not released regularly to the public.

At the end of the day, PageRank is just a lovely green (or maybe a not so lovely white) bar that a page is given. It doesn’t necessarily correlate to how a site is performing in the SERPs, and doesn’t guarantee good rankings.

That said, I am pleased for the blog, as our green increased a little, and white retreated back, as Technology Bloggers jumped from a 3 to a 4 🙂

Google say on their own website that PageRank represents:

“Google’s view of the importance of a webpage”

That is a direct quote from Google.

So basically, pages ranked 0/1 (in Google’s view) aren’t that special, there are loads out there, nothing makes them stand out. Pages with a PageRank 2 are more important, they are special, but not that special. The further up the scale you go, the more value your page is worth. You might have a high value homepage, but low internal pages, that is to be expected, as a lot of the algorithm is based on links.

One would assume that if you have serious traffic, you should be right at the top of the PageRank scale, as people find your page very useful, and therefore Google must think your page is important.

Google’s PageRank

Until very recently, Google.com has been a PageRank 10. It is the most visited site on the internet, by a long way. From what I understand, the site receives around 1,050,000,000 (1.05 billion) unique visitors a year. Facebook is second, with around 950,000,000 (0.95 billion) unique visitors a year – note not all those people have accounts.

Twitter gets just 220,000,000 visitors a year (0.22 billion). So why is it then that in the recent PageRank update, Google ranked its main homepage (Google.com) 9/10, it ranked Facebook 9/10, but it ranked Twitter 10/10. Twitter is one of around 10 sites on the net with a PageRank 10. Twitter is only the 8th most globally visited site on the web, whereas giants Google and Facebook are clear leaders.

The UN and the The U.S. Government’s Official Web Portal are two of the other few sites with a PageRank 10 on the web. Updates over the last year have seen a lot of PageRank 10’s loose their rankings. Why?

Larry Page and Sergey Brin - the founders of Google.

Is the web getting less ‘important’? What are your thoughts on this? I find it really interesting how Larry Page‘s (co-founder of Google) algorithm, which is used by Google, ranks Google less than top.

Talk to me 🙂

5 ideas that have become online money makers

21st April 2012 5 Replies Farshad

Hobbies have always been an inspiration for many successful people. While most of us attempt to pursue “safe careers” by going for occupations that may bring us monetary benefits, pretty often we lose sight of our hobbies in our busy lives.

However, with the internet boom many people can now change that. There are many success stories, from the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates who ruthlessly pursued their goals and didn’t follow the bandwagon. But in this article I am going to explore a few more down to earth examples.

What is to follow is a list of five e-businesses that started as a hobby or a small idea that brought immense success to their owners. While the below examples might not contain websites as famous as YouTube, Twitter or Facebook, they are examples that we can all relate to, and maybe borrow a few ideas from!

The Million Dollar Homepage

I still remember watching a report about the guy who set up The Million Dollar Homepage on the news (can’t remember if it was BBC or CNN). The founder of The Million Dollar Homepage (Alex Tew) sold pixels of his website for $1, to raise money for his University expense. The site was such a success that it turned out to become a website that is nothing more than several pixels of small ads. I hope by now you would understand what I meant when I said, “examples that we can all relate to”.

FindAGrave.Com

When it comes to novel ideas that made people money, this website takes the cake. It provides a service that I wouldn’t have comprehended, had I not learned about this website.

Find A Grave is a website that helps people locate the graves of a famous people. It turns out that Jim Tipton liked to visit the graves of famous personalities and used this idea to create a kind of search engine that helps people locate graves of famous people.

So if you have a hobby of visiting famous places or areas that can help, say vacationers, then you might be the next big success story.

PickyDomains

PickyDomains is another idea that got me scratching my head. The founder of the site was good at coming up with interesting names, so he started a crowdsourcing service that allowed people to seek help in finding interesting domain names and slogans.

The idea was to let a community of people provide novel names and not to rely on bots, which arguably lack imagination. If you have been looking for vacant domain names in a domain search engine, then you will know what I mean.

So if your friends, family and bots have failed you, then it might be time to seek advice from a community of people, who just like coming up with cool names and slogans.

Gawker Media

While the Gawker Media website itself is successful enough, it is worth pointing out that this media groups is perhaps the world’s most famous blogging network.

The reason I have included the Gawker example is because one thing that most of us can do easily is blogging (something I’m doing right now).

Gawker Media has the world’s most successful blogs ranging from Lifehacker, Gizmodo to many others. The Gawker network was started by Nick Denton who is a journalist and an entrepreneur. While he claims that blogging isn’t that profitable, he has still made millions from his successful line of blogs.

Amazon

I know I said there will be down to earth examples in this post, but I have to add this one. I have been following Amazon since I was a child and have seen the company grow beyond belief.

What started as an online book store was soon to become one of the first e-stores in the world. But it was not just a good idea that made Jeff Bezos the world most successful e-retailer, but the fact that he took risks when it mattered.

It is said that the company did not expect any profit for five years, which also made shareholders a bit edgy. Nonetheless, the internet gold rush paid off and Amazon, which diversified, became one of the most successful companies in the world.

The above mentioned examples are just a few of many success stories that made people successful because they dared to use their ideas to materialize them into something successful (even if someone enjoyed visiting graves).

The point is that it might not be too late for any of you try out something that may allow you to turn your abilities into something successful, and to let you in on a secret, I’m already trying out something myself, guess I don’t want to regret not trying my hands at the internet gold rush either.

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