WordPress in South Africa
I recently wrote to Matt telling him about our strategy using WordPress and he blogged about it on his blog.
I am quite amped about it although I am a bit sorry that I have neglected this blog for what seems to be forever.
I promise you that I had no intention of not blogging, but due to certain circumstances, I had to rearrange certain priorities.
However I am thinking that I may be back.
I’m planning on completely rewriting my SEO for WordPress and SEO in a nutshell articles.
I went off on a bit of a tangent to see how Search Engine friendly I could make a WordPress site and bought a domain specifically for that purpose, slapped on wordpress, tweaked the bejesus out of it, seo’d it up to the eyeballs, splashed it silly with content , ploughed plugins into it, linked to it from various sites to get the spiders to find it quickly and put it live.
Within a couple of days I was finding links to it on Google and Yahoo! and from January 1st to the 15th it has atracted more than 4000 UNIQUE visitors.
I’ll blog about that sometime too.
WordPress vs Habari
Since Google announced the developer release of its CMS blogging platform Habari (Swahili for ‘what’s in the news?’) I expected there to be a huge exodus of people over to Habari, but funny enough, the reception I expected was not to be. The release started out as being a well publicised event but then seemed to quiet down to an almost standstill.
Ok sure enough, the current release is still only a very alpha developer version (Which, by the way, I tried to install it but could not get past a “driver error” which seemed to break the install. A quick rm -rf habari/ sorted that problem out quick enough.) but I was still honestly expecting more. And so far, nothing.
The cvs team after a number of months only consists of a whopping 58 members. hmmm… updates to cvs releases have been less than 1 a month, if that.
Even The Habari project blog has 1 post on it, made back in February.
I don’t get it? Why would Google try and launch something like this and not support it, financially or through aggressive marketing. And one of Habari’s selling points is that it “implements the full suite of the Atom Publishing Protocol“. Excuse me, but aren’t more and more people moving away from Atom?
This is exactly the same as pumping effort and money into BetaMax 10 years after VHS dominated the market. (For the younger readers of this blog, BetaMax was a large video cassette format in the days before CD’s, DVD’s, Laserdiscs or MPeg4 when Michael Jackson was still black)
One of the most dissapointing things I came across was the knowledge that some WordPress plugin developers were moving away from WP and over to Habari.
After what I have learnt about Habari, I don’t think it will last and will sooner than later be abandoned.
I am firmly in the belief that WordPress is here to stay as one of the most popular platforms.
(This is NOT a paid for post)
WordPress 2.2 out now
WordPress 2.2 “Getz” has been released and is available for download from wordpress.org.
This release promises a great many bug fixes (over 200 or so they claim) as well as some new features, most notably Widget Intergration.
Previously widgets were available as a plugin but is now intergrated right into the core.
While this current theme I am using is not widget friendly, it soon will be as there are far too many cool goodies that are available as widgets to ignore them.
A journey of a thousand miles
Some wise man once said that a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step and this post is my first step.
My name is Paul De Sousa, I am a web 2.0 enthusiast and Search Engine Evangelist in search of knowledge, a deeper purpose, the meaning of life and of course some serious linkage and better rankings.
I have been known in the past to design processes for a number of web2.0 applications, although I am not a developer, I am an analyst, an ideas person. I find faults and provide new ideas and solutions.
I am employed by JohnCom and am grateful and honoured to be involved in the “The Times” project from a search engine perspective.
My involvement thus far has been more than just the SEO aspect, but general change control management of the current build as well as various documentation on where we would like to take The Time’s site.
Being a System Analyst for the group has allowed me to be involved in some seriously awesome projects, but The Time’s was a project that I was looking forward to for sometime and one that is not only right up my alley, but definitely a place that I feel I will shine. Do what you love, and love what you do.
I’ve had a number of blogs over the years so blogging is not new to me, I also helped design a number of ideas and processes for www.blogmad.net – a traffic exchange program for bloggers who are looking for new audiences, so blogging is not new to me. And neither is laziness, which is why I have had many blogs, but none that I have maintained for more than 2 years at a time.
So I have decided to run with this blog as a progress report on my journey with The Times project as well as any cool new things which I find and decide is good enough to share.
Enjoy, stay in touch and lets hold hands and share that link love!