communication revolution
We live in an age where technology binds all, where we are in a constant state of communication.
We are in contact with everyone around us, we receive news and updates on happenings around us in a myriad of different ways, through mobile devices, laptops, pc’s, cell phones.
We are never anywhere without some device or communication tool which allows us to keep in touch. Facebook status updates and twitter allow us to let the world know what we are up to.
Back in the day ICQ was “THE” IM client, then along came yahoo, aim, msn, jabber, googletalk and then someone once showed me pidgin – an IM client that allowed you to plug into msn, aim and yahoo all at the same time.
To be honest I was not very impressed – then more recently shebee told me about digsby
I was expecting something like pidgin but after installing it and playing about I realized that it was far more than JUST a multi IM client.
Digsby also plugs directly into twitter, facebook, facebook chat, Myspace and any imap or pop mail as well as MSN messenger, Aim, , Yahoo, Jabber and ICQ.
The actual chat client is 1 interface with the ability to tab additional chat sessions with other people, even across different protocols and networks.
Much like outlook’s mail notification that pops up with a small window at the bottom of your monitor (you can choose which corner of your monitor you want it to pop up in) with a preview, you get a popup of notifications from facebook feeds, twitter, email, etc etc
Digsby also allows file transfers, its skinnable and has many various options to tweak.
You can voice chat, video chat or text chat.
It works on Mac OS, Windows or Linux.
The other cool thing about it is that you can have a widget on your website or blog that plugs straight into digsby and allows visitors to your blog to chat directly to you if you’re online.
I was going to try it but then thought of how insanely not productive I would be if I spent the day chatting to people I didn’t know.
There’s also a facebook widget which allowspeople who visit your profile to say howzit to you.
To say that I am impressed with Digsby would be incorrect, I am more than impressed with it and I reckon that this is the future of communication.
All they need to do is get a mobile application working and hook up skype into the mix and thats all you will ever need.
Give it a try and let me know what you think.
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.
Getting some Google love – UPDATED
One of the main reasons why I decided to start (yet another) blog was to document my SEO travels and share some of the information which I have learnt as a Search enthusiast.
I do need to point out though that this blog is not a vanilla version of WordPress and has been tweaked up to the max with a number of SEO plugins and a few tricks that I have learnt about WordPress and SEO. Not to mention that I bugged Colin to toss out the original theme and use a totally css and xhtml optimized theme that supports widgets so that I could work my magic.
2 Weeks after this blog was launched I am definitely feeling the Google Love.
So far 28 pages 36 pages have been indexed.
The following terms and keywords are showing up highly in rankings even though this blog should be in the sandbox.
They might dissapear though if I get sandboxed but in the mean time the following terms are doing me justice.
googlebot web2
wordpress vs habari
paul de sousa
27 dinner (less than a day old, I’m loving it)
googlebot frequency
and a few other arb ones which are just plain weird like
accidents on 27 may 2007
In essence this blog is getting crawled as though it were a PageRank 9 which for me and the company, is a great thing.
Ray asked me this morning if I would SEO up his blog to get the same love and I’ll have to either con him into buying me lunch or getting my boss to let me do SEO on the media blogs as a fixed project as well (WHICH IS WHAT I WANT TO BE DOING PEOPLE, IT’S WHAT I AM GOOD AT – HELLO!!)
Reinvigorate is showing me a few more keywords and terms that seem to be ranking
Unknown Soldier Tome
highest googlebot visits – Comes up 1st on Google
and
web2.0 (helluva sort after keyword) comes up in the Top10 in South Africa – I’m nearly done dominating the local scene, next stop : The World! 
invalid css part deux
I went in search of a few plugins to do a few things which submit or vote stories on my blog on various social bookmarking services and sites.
Frankly to go and set up each one individually would be a right pain so I opted for trying out notable but saw that sociable was far easier to implement. Simply activate the plugin and bob’s your uncle, whereas notable requires that you edit your template and add some code in the loop area and I wasn’t in the mood to fiddle with Colin’s template.
So I installed Sociable but guess what ?
W3C CSS Validator Results for http://blogs.thetimes.co.za/desousa/
Sorry! We found the following errors
URI : http://blogs.thetimes.co.za/desousa/wp-content/plugins/sociable/sociable.css
-sigh-
Do you have ANY idea how irritating that is?
So now I am forced to go and fiddle with the template while I try to get Notable to work and I have a very sneaky suspiscion that it might work just fine because there are no css files and xhtml is easier to sort out than CSS.
More’s the pity about Sociable though because Muti are punting a hacked version of Sociable which is also not css compliant which is available over here. The fact that there is a “Mutified” version is awsome but sadly, not compliant 
Rafiq, if you get this, please be a champion and sort that css out and re-release that sucker, it would be awesome!
Why am I validating your code?
I am trying to put together a list of at least the best 50 wordpress plugins which I will publish pretty soon, and am trying to load them on this blog and write about each one, but I keep getting sideswiped with plugins that have badly formed CSS.
I’m no CSS guru, so trying to rewrite the CSS and some of the code is not only time consuming, it’s especially annoying.
It’s pretty pointless to have a blog about Search Engine Optimization that doesn’t validate as transitional xhtml or css so I am forced to exclude these rogue plugins until such time that the authors validate their own css or until I find the time to do it myself (chances of that are pretty slim)
The importance of valid code is paramount to not only SEO but Americans have to ensure that their site is valid from an accessibility point of view.
Validation from an SEO point of view is also important because apparently, Google likes valid code although I might be prone not to trust the source when it’s a blog that does not use URL rewriting. But I am going to push the standards issue. Adhere to the standards, it’s pretty easy to try and follow that rule.
I think that the majority of the lay blogger people around the world wouldn’t know or understand the first thing about valid css or even understand the importance of it and would probably land up using plugins that will break their site’s validation without even realising it.
I have, on so many occassions, come across blogs that proudly display valid css and valid xhtml badges but are so far from valid that it’s scary.
The theme started out as being valid but due to the laziness (yes laziness) of plugin authors they end up not being valid.
And unfortunately it’s not only plugin writers that make this common mistake of not validating their code correctly, even widgets, social bookmarking, url tracking and other services are guilty of the same thing.
Amatomu.com’s tracking code is supplied as non compliant.
<!– Start AMATOMU.COM code–>
<script src=”http://www.amatomu.com/embed.php?cid=62fee887894247125a072027412a111c0e8a0709″></script>
<!– End AMATOMU.COM code –>
It’s missing the type=”text/javascript” line without which invalidates your site, so my suggestion is if youre an Amatomu user, ensure that you update your tracking code correctly.
It should be:
 <!– Start AMATOMU.COM code–>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://www.amatomu.com/embed.php?cid=62fee887894247125a072027412a111c0e8a0709″></script>
<!– End AMATOMU.COM code –>