The wheels in motion...

Detail of main water wheel construction. Part of a fountain sculpture by Nelson artist/designer Lee Woodman

More to come...

Midnight Youth on stage at the Nelson Carnivale October 2011.

Closer crop of the action makes for a more interesting image and shows more of the movement due to slow shutter speed. I've got some other more convention shots of the band that may make their way here, but nothing like a bit of smoke, blur and lens flare to catch the atmosphere...

Before you say, 'not another bloody social media fad', take a look at the Pinterest site and stand in awe of the statistics.

Done that? Good. Now you can sigh if you must, but don't get left behind eh. The tides of change are unstoppable. Kingdoms rise and kingdoms fall, and Pinterest (quickly add that to the spell checker) is becoming the next big social media thing for business.

If you have a quick squiz at the site which all about sharing images, you get an idea of what the stats indicate - the rise is being generated by 18-34 year old upper income women from the American heartland. Hence the blow-dryer growth image.

People are saying 'move over Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Another social media site is stepping up as a valuable marketing tool for businesses.' Should you care?

If your driving a small business you need all the leverage you can get. How its impact spreads to the outer regions like Middle Earth time will tell. But don't take my word for it, follow some of the links in this post and go on a journey of discovery.

Women's barbershop quartet "Flame 'n Fortune" from Nelson, New Zealand. Casual shoot for promotional material.

See their Facebook page

What is Open Source?

Open Source is not a synonym for 'free' although most open source software is free. Open Source is a model for the creation and development of a range of things, not just software. It is essentially about collaboration rather than competition, combining skills and resource to produce and develop a product that is legally 'open'. You can read more about it on Wikipedia and How Stuff Works.

WordPress is Great

WordPress is free, open source software that is widely used with a global developer base.

Although WordPress comes packaged with a theme or two and some plugins, generally people like to choose from the many themes and plugins available to create a site with the look and functionality that suits their purpose.

It all seems almost too good to be true - a great platform, an endless supply of great themes and plugins - all for free. It's a bit like Christmas - all year round.

But then again, when it comes to the interweb we're kind of used to free stuff.

Caveat Utilitor

The other side to free stuff is, of course, that it often comes without guarantees. No guarantee that it will work as it should, no guarantee that it won't break something else, no guarantee that it will be supported or continued.

Welcome to the world of free (or not) WordPress themes and plugins. Or any free software for that matter.

Am I saying that free open source software is of poor quality? Mais non! Au contraire!! The secret's out - open source is frequently better than many of its proprietary equivalents. The popularity and growth of WordPress itself is testimony to that.

What I am saying is, when it comes to themes and plugins - take some time, choose wisely and be prepared to spend time trouble shooting or pay someone else to.

OK, Tell me Straight Up

There are thousands of plugins in the WordPress repository. Some are great and have been downloaded millions of times, some are not so great and will break your WordPress installation. Some are complicated, some are very simple. Some start strong and fade. Many are no longer supported.

Given that there are tens of millions of self-hosted WordPress sites on the interweb (see also WordPress.com) the hours spent troubleshooting plugins must run into the millions per year. It would be a similar story for WordPress themes. Straight up.

Build me a Website with Plugins Free

If you've had a WordPress powered website built for you, your developer will have used plugins. Despite choosing the best available at the time and whether free or not, they need maintaining and may need replacing.

Your developer is not selling you the plugins or themes, nor can she guarantee them. Plugins and themes are third party items over which they usually have no control.

Maintaining means updating and watching for update & incompatibility issues which sometimes break things. A plugin may need to be replaced if the author decides they will no longer develop that plugin and no one else takes it over. As time goes on, unsupported plugins may fail or cause issues as the WordPress core files evolve & improve.

Given the uncertain nature of themes and plugins, you will need to be clear on the support arrangement you have. Unless there is some maintenance contract, keeping plugins updated and even troubleshooting will be something you will have to do yourself.

Give a Little Bit

The thing about free stuff is it's not really free. When you use a 'free' theme or plugin you're enjoying the result of tens, maybe hundreds of hours work.

Why not give something back and give a plugin or theme author a donation? A bit of love makes the world go 'round. Developers have to eat and pay the mortgage and are generally not part of multi-billion dollar corporations which give you other 'free' internet stuff.

To summarise, free stuff is not really free. It cost somebody and it will cost you time and/or money to make something out of it and keep it running. Choose wisely and spread good karma by giving back and the world will be a better place.

The Living Wisdom site redesign has gone live.

We've been working with David and Rosemary Riddell - and around their hectic schedule - on a redesign of their original site launched back in 1997!

The new site is powered by WordPress which puts site owners in the driving seat with the ability, after a little training, to add and update content from the comfort of their own computer.

The basic site went live today, with an online shop and some other features to come in the near future.

The Living Wisdom School of Counselling is based in sunny Nelson, and holds regular seminars and workshops in Nelson and around the country.

An excellent blog post on company/organisation culture from Fast Company

Culture is a balanced blend of human psychology, attitudes, actions, and beliefs that combined create either pleasure or pain, serious momentum or miserable stagnation. A strong culture flourishes with a clear set of values and norms that actively guide the way a company operates. Employees are actively and passionately engaged in the business, operating from a sense of confidence and empowerment rather than navigating their days through miserably extensive procedures and mind-numbing bureaucracy. Performance-oriented cultures possess statistically better financial growth, with high employee involvement, strong internal communication, and an acceptance of a healthy level of risk-taking in order to achieve new levels of innovation.

Read in full: Culture Eats Strategy For Lunch | Fast Company.

That's got to be a good thing for everyone aside from those with ridiculous levels of ad content on their sites. Google estimates only about 1% will be affected.

As we’ve mentioned previously, we’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.

We understand that placing ads above-the-fold is quite common for many websites; these ads often perform well and help publishers monetize online content. This algorithmic change does not affect sites who place ads above-the-fold to a normal degree, but affects sites that go much further to load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree or that make it hard to find the actual original content on the page. This new algorithmic improvement tends to impact sites where there is only a small amount of visible content above-the-fold or relevant content is persistently pushed down by large blocks of ads.

Read more on Search Engine Land