HeadsetOptions Web Design, SEO, WordPress, Etcetra

Are you an Obama fan? Here’s a free download that you would love. This is a eBook version of a paper back that sells for $30. They are giving this book away to promote their print edition, the download is a PDF which is approximately 7MB, so be patient while it downloads.

The “Smear Campaign” has started. No we are not talking about the US presidential race, we are talking CMS! Have you visited Planet WordPress lately? For a new comer, it will look more like a Movable Type blog than WordPress, and if that were not enough, the MT folks can’t seem to keep their egos in their pants and try endlessly to add fuel to the fire.

For the sake of history, here’s how the events unfolded.
First there was Movable Type
For what it is worth, Movable Type is responsible for the popularity of WordPress. The licensing debacle of MT resulted in defectors opting …

British Prime Minister’s #10 blog is apparently not honoring the copyright agreement of the theme developer, in spite of the Creative Commons licensing. Theme copyright infringements are a serious issue that many non-themers overlook, mostly because it conveniently services their purpose. The old theme viewer was plagued with this issue that eventually led to creation of a new admin monitored repository. With the growing popularity of WordPress, this issue left unaddressed will only lead to more such goof ups or worse, blatant rip-offs, which will eventually lead to a decline in free quality themes.

Here’s a fluid bubble chart of the Olympic medal count, the coolest online map ever. Move the scale on the top to get a feel of how powerful this flash powered application really is.

One interesting note in the geopolitical context is how in 1980, USSR, the eastern block, Cuba and all the communist governments dominated the show (in the absence of US), but China, which we believe was strongly influenced by USSR, did not medal at all.

As for this year, the larger dots are mostly represented by developed nations, with only a few exceptions.

Two stats caught my attention this afternoon, according to Matt, WordPress page views apparently grew from 1.5 billion to 6.5 billion/month. That is billion with a B. At almost the same time, according to IBM’s X-Force 2008 Trend Statistics, WordPress, as a blog platform is the 9th most vulnerable application vendor. Go figure.

Have you noticed lately that certain keywords you traditionally scored high in Google are no longer driving traffic your way? Chances are that you lost the spot on Google SERP. Since the changes that started late July and continued into early August, most all web sites that relied on Google SERP have in one way or the other been affected. Case in point, we are no longer ranked for the keyword “Web Design”, it has been replaced by sites like About.com, WikiPedia.org, forums and directories, all of who basically provide no web design service, instead merely provide the definition of the same. Less than half the SE results are for actual providers of web design …

According to one news report, microbiologist Bruce Ivins carried out the deadly Anthrax attacks against “select” Senators who differed from Ivins pro-life ideology. “Killing” someone because they are not pro-life! Does that even make sense? If you cared so much about the life of an unborn child, shouldn’t you be a little more considerate towards fully developed adults? Oh, the irony is, Ivins killed himself.

Mirror sites of “Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers” or ICANN, the organization that is responsible for assigning unique addresses so computers know where to find each other, was cracked by Turkish hackers. Within hours from the first crack, the organizations WordPress v2.5.1 powered blog was compromised. Although I believe version 2.3 was the worst, vulnerability issues are not strictly limited to any one version or blogging platform. So the only way to keep you site safe is by checking on it regularly for changes outside of what you authorize and keeping a good backup of your site!

Aligned for WordPress theme is available for download at WP Pro! I will support this theme on that site.

We broke the 800px barrier this evening when we switched to Aligned- a theme originally designed by Thomas - The Undersigned for the Habari Project. We ported over the theme to WordPress to skin our own site. This nifty grid based theme is in beta and as you may notice, it can use a bit more styling to handle the various forms we have on this site and of course the IE bugs. We also went to a center aligned design, which was long over due as most visitors did …

I will be experimenting with partial feeds for the rest of this month. The splogger issues with my content is not yet resolved. I know switching to partial feed is going ass backwards and will inconvenience those who read my blogs on readers, but bear with me while I figure a work around.