The Blog Studio Blog

Wordpress 2.8 Upgrade Special!

2009-06-11T13:06:02-06:00

Wordpress 2.8 was released today, and brings some notable improvements to the platform. Enhanced widget control, over 790 bug fixes and many speed improvements (navigating through the control panel is downright snappy now!).

If you’re currently using a previous version of Wordpress, you’ve got a lot to gain from this update. At The Blog Studio, we’re currently offering an upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress for $150! The service includes a backup of your current site and database (an essential, yet often ignored step), as well as performing the upgrade itself. Some conditions apply, contact Lucia at +1 (647) 428-7038 or today for more details.

Making a living with WordPress in 2009

2009-05-08T19:17:50-06:00

Earlier today, Lucia and I gave a talk at WordCamp Toronto about the changing blog design marketplace, and the opportunities that we see for professionals delivering services using WordPress. Below are the slides from that talk.

Making a living with WordPress in 2009

View more presentations from Peter Flaschner.

Guide to Using Expression Engine v 1.6.4

2009-02-24T03:28:49-06:00

Expression Engine is a flexible, feature filled web publishing tool that we love using here at The Blog Studio. If your not familiar with this content management system, take a peek at their website and check out how feature rich this system really is.

For all you new users download our getting started guide here --> Basic Guide to Expression Engine. This guide covers a few of the essential basics to help get you started & comfortable with the control panel.

We will update the guide as feedback pours in - so please feel free to leave you questions or comments.

Blogs, social media, and the President’s new digs

2009-01-21T03:34:44-06:00

A few hours ago, a high priced consultant told a friend that blogs were a fad, and not worth the author’s time, and that websites built on blog platforms were kludgy inelegant poor cousins to more robust enterprise level CMS driven sites.

Two minutes later, I fired up whitehouse.gov, and nearly fell out of my chair laughing. Oh how I wish the order of those events was reversed. How I’d have loved to point out to this high priced nincompoop that the official website of the new president of the United States was by all appearances built on a blog platform. Not only is whitehouse.gov elegant and modern, but today it stood up to simply massive traffic.

That the official website of the president of the United States is built on a blog platform is a testament to the level of efficiency that can be achieved by using a modern blog platform

a trust in the security and stability of the platform
a thoroughly modern understanding of the web
a willingness of this administration to embrace social media
a willingness to engage the public

This heralds an even greater acceptance of blogs and social media into the mainstream. We in the social media world tend to forget just how big the knowledge gap is between us and the less techno-literate. The President’s new platform will expose a whole new audience to blogging in particular and social media in general.

Let’s take a moment to think about why the President’s team may have chosen to use an off-the-shelf blogging platform for whitehouse.gov. Given a relatively massive budget, why not go custom? I can think of a bunch of reasons:

Building on a blogging platform is much quicker. Most of the components of the site have already been built.
Most blogging platforms have hundreds if not thousands of pre-existing plugins to choose from. These can add functionality both immediately and over time as new features are invented.
The more popular blogging platforms have thousands of experts who can develop and support the systems.
Modern blogging systems are robust enterprise level content management systems. They feature caching mechanisms to withstand large traffic spikes, sophisticated search functionality, advanced categorization and tagging systems.
Built in support for RSS, email gathering, member profiles, ease of posting video and audio content.
Ease and low cost of administration. There’s no need to create specific help documentation – it already exists. Help for both administrators and users is usually just a few mouse clicks away.
Ease of use. Posting new items, editing existing items, reordering, re-categorization, and more are easy and fast.

Here in Toronto, ChangeCamp is running this Saturday January 24 2009. ChangeCamp

is a free participatory web-enabled face-to-face event that brings together citizens, technologists, designers, academics, policy wonks, political players, change-makers and government employees to answer one question: How do we re-imagine government and governance in the age of participation?

Most of us at The Blog Studio will be attending ChangeCamp . As active digital citizens, we’re keen to help shape the future. Looking into the past I’m reminded that we’ve been building non-blog websites on blogging platforms since 2004. It’s awfully nice to see the pioneering work we did reach such a level of acceptance.

Guide to using WordPress 2.7

2009-01-15T18:34:31-06:00

Back in October we posted a WordPress tutorial for version 2.6.2. Mike created another guide for Version 2.7 since it looks quite different.

Link to the guide: TBS-Wordpress_Walkthrough-2.7-V1_.pdf - it covers all the essentials for someone who is unfamiliar with WordPress 2.7.

Some of the great new features of WordPress version 2.7 are:

Stick Post to Front Page - you can select this option and the post will stay to the top of the front page.
Quick Edit - this function allows you to quickly edit any context excluding the body of the post without having to load the page
Quick Press - allows you to post right from the dashboard if you only need access to the title, body, tags & upload function.
Mass Editing - you can now edit categories, tags, status etc… of multi posts at the same time.
Screen Options - allows you to choose what items you want visible on the pages of the control panel. You can strip an entire post page to only show the title and body.
Pagination of Comments is built in to the theme
Dashboard - you can reply to comments & are reminded of drafts directly from the dashboard
Comments - you can reply to comments from the Comment admin area
Threaded Comments - makes discussions easier to follow

We will update the guide as feedback pours in - so please feel free to leave your questions or comments.

Theme Customization Confessions

2008-12-10T02:50:05-06:00

I have a confession to make. I love customizing existing themes. I’ve designed within the confines of a pre-existing theme a couple of times now. It’s fun. It’s easy, and pretty fast. Design brain candy, if you will.

I can’t show you the work yet, as it’s still underway. But I did want to let you know that we do accept theme customization work. We have developed custom plugins for existing themes, and have done total design overhauls.

Some of the existing WordPress themes offer excellent bases for customization. We enjoy working with them so much, we’re developing our own set of themes to be released in early next year. More details will be forthcoming.

We’d love to talk with you about your design or development needs. Please use the info on the contact page to get in touch.

Thanks!

Free WordPress Advice

2008-12-09T18:32:44-06:00

I’ve been spending a bit of time each day helping people with their WordPress, blog design, and template questions on Twitter. It’s really fun, and it’s already led to some new work. Deb from Aligned Structures sent us a direct message over Twitter two days ago, and we’ve already wrapped up a bunch of tweaks and changes to her site.

If you’ve got questions, I’d love to help if I can. Follow @theblogstudio.com, and address your question us using @theblogstudio. I’ll do my best to answer any and all comers!

Twitter is an amazing tool. Much like blogging, it can help you find people interested in the same topics as you. Try using twitter search to search for keywords relevant to your interests or your habits, and I guarantee that you’ll find something you didn’t know before.

Sneak peek at our upcoming free WordPress Theme

2008-11-28T14:17:25-06:00

It’s been ages since we last released a free WordPress theme. I’m kind of embarrassed about it to tell the truth! I’ve started at least 10 free theme blog designs over the intervening years, but something or another always comes up. This time though, I am committed!

In the spirit of forcing myself to finish this thing, I thought I’d show you a bit of a teaser. The image below is very much a work in progress. Certain elements will probably make it through to the final, while others won’t. The theme release is about a week away. It will be our holiday gift to you.

So without further ado, here’s a wee look:

Experiments in SEO update

2008-11-24T22:02:55-06:00

If you recall, late last week, I made a number of small changes to this site to see if I could gain back some of the google juice we recently lost. I think our drop in position is related to a decision I made to reduce the number of words on the site’s home page. I made some tweaks to the home page layout to accommodate longer post excerpts.

Five days have passed, so I thought I’d have a look at the search results to see if we’re ranking any higher for “blog design”. We are, but only by a single spot. However, looking at the cached versions of our site on Google, I see that the site hasn’t actually be indexed in about 6 days. So, the changes to the home page aren’t yet being reflected. Should be interesting to see what happens. As a side note, the search results for “blog design” are very volatile. I see a lot of change in the listings from day to day.

I’m chomping at the bit to try a couple of other SEO tweaks, but I’m trying to be smart about this by making one change at a time, so it’s effect can be measured.

Next up: waiting to see what effect the home page change has, then diving into meta description. Fun!

Experiments in SEO

2008-11-20T14:26:28-06:00

For years, The Blog Studio has sat near the top of Google’s results for “blog design”. Not only was our home page keyword rich, but we had a ton of incoming links, and we’ve been doing this for longer than 95% of the rest of our little industry. Recently though, we’ve slipped off the first page.

I think the drop in position was timed with our redesign. One of my goals was to reduce the number of words on the home page. I wanted to let the video and the work speak for itself. In retrospect that might have been a bad decision. Looking at the folks who have taken over “our” position on the search results, the thing that is most obvious is that they have a LOT of written content on their home page. I’ve made some adjustments to the home page to lengthen the post excerpts, and rejigged the layout slightly.

As of today, we’re the 13th result for “blog design” on google. I’m going to give Google a few days to see if this change has any effect. I will, of course, report my findings!