• simplenote iphone app (search for simplenote in the app store)
• simplenote client for mac (selfcoded.com/justnotes)

they are simple to use, they sync with each other. its free. all notes are editable!!!!!

ive been using both for a week. this post was written using simplenote, when i had some free time on the train. there are a couple of clients for your mac, I chose Justnotes.

you will need a simplenotes account (you can create one when you open the iphone app) – once its setup your notes sync to the cloud automaticaly and are available on your mac and your iphone – no more mailing yourself todo lists – simply create them on your iphone (or your mac) and edit them as you do things =)

• simplenote iphone app (search for simplenote in the app store)
• simplenote client for mac (selfcoded.com/justnotes)

they are simple to use, they sync with each other. its free. all notes are editable!!!!!

ive been using both for a week. this post was written using simplenote, when i had some free time on the train. there are a couple of clients for your mac, I chose Justnotes.

you will need a simplenotes account (you can create one when you open the iphone app) – once its setup your notes sync to the cloud automaticaly and are available on your mac and your iphone – no more mailing yourself todo lists – simply create them on your iphone (or your mac) and edit them as you do things =)

here are some foto’s

the all  importnt sign on the door

photo from my phone

photo from my camera 

auntie susie (my mum), uncle john (my dad) and lisa (my wee cousin)

the hardest part about having so many email accounts and social networking accounts is finding the time to log into them all and check for mail and messages. this will free up some off your time to do other stuff

firstly, you will have multiple email acocunts, eg I have one for spam mail, one for my personal mail, an old hotmail acocunt, a yahoo account for my flickr, one from my isp that my isp bills get sent to, one for my domain, two for my band,  and one for my work. thats 9 that i need to check regularly. that takes hours of loging into and out of google, hotmail, yahoo mail and my isp’s mail. not to mention trying to get them on my iphone =|

about a year ago google started a feature that lets you fetch mail from other services with POP3

that takes care of the hotmail (you cannot forward hotmail to another acocunt that isnt part of the microsoft network)

yahoo and google let you forward all mail to another account.

good. so you get the picture.

• login to your individual accounts and forward all emails to your designated grand-master account
• if they dont let you forward, then login to your main gmail account and goto
• settings > accounts and import
• the first option lets you import your contacts from hotmail, yahoo mail, etc (very handy)
• the third option lets you check your accounts with pop3 access (check with the service for details on this (eg hotmail))
• the second option on this list lets you send email from the addresses of the accounts you are importing (so if someone sends an email to your hotmail address, then you can send the reply from that hotmail address but using gmail)

• I suggest setting up filters for every email address so that you can find mail from specific accounts easily
• it also makes it easier when using gmail to find stuff.

once you have all the email coming in to your grand-master gmail account then you can then

• setup mail.app to get your grand-master gmail account emails

• sync your iphone / ipod touch with your gmail account (and get all your google contacts and calendars at the same time)

• sync all your contacts from your gmail google contacts to your addressbook

by this point you should have all your email flowing from all your different email accounts into your grand-master gmail account and from there into your iphone and your mail.app

I have tidied up the stylesheet (I started again) so that it is more readable – it still has a lot of work to do on it, and im not sure i like the font!

hopefully i will be able to add the geolocation stuff, but i have to clean up some code first to make sure that it gets off on the right foot =)

I kept the mootools menu i had from before, but tweaked it slightly – its not ideal for google to crawl, but it looks nce. tradeoff =)

the google adverts are still the old colours, but i might leave them like that because it is obvious they are google ads!

I also changed all the links from yellow to blue. i liked the yellow, so i might change them back, im not sure yet.

ive tried to make it as easy to read as possible for humans, and googlebot. if you have any suggestions, then please comment =)

what you need:

• a wordpress blog
• social network accounts

the first thing to do is to setup your twitter account, facebook account, myspace, etc. once they are all setup with friends then

• login to the wp-admin section of your blog
• goto plugins
• install ‘pingpressfm’
• goto ping.fm
• sign up
• goto ping.fm/key
• copy your api key
• go back to your blogs admin section
• goto settings > pingpressfm
• paste the api key in the box.
• goto triggers
• click the dropdown, goto new
• dont change anything yet, hit update triggers
• hit save settings
• go back to triggers
• open the one that has @new
• chenage it to @m
• hit update triggers
• hit save settings

you need to do this double stage because pingpressfm is broken and only works properly if you do it that way. once that is setup your wordpress blog is set to send ping.fm a message when you post.

• log back into ping.fm
• goto ‘add network’
• add the ones you have

play about a little and you will get the best message format for your needs,

this is a great way to drive some traffic to your site, especially when you make decent content that people want to read. combined with a little SEO and a good choice of words then you will see the benefits in a few days to a week. there are options in both ping.fm and in pingpressfm for your wordpress blog so that you can setup triggers for different categories, eg if I only want the featured articles to go to my facebook so that I dont spam it then I can set that up (I havent yet, but i should!) I can have all posts from all categories going to twitter, and only posts from the ‘business’ categories going to linkedin for example.

remeber not to spam post. people will find you and will add you on their own. just make your content interesting and it will happen.

pc: hold ctrl + click on the thing you want to adjust

• google analytics – goes without saying
• google webmaster tools – also, goes without saying
• feedburner – also, goes without saying

once you start using these services then you can collect all sorts of information – you can see how many people come from your rss feed, which items are most popular on your blog, how many people come through search engines, which engines they come from, etc.

once you have this data then you can figure out the posts that are popular, and tweak them to perform better in searches. you can also tweak the posts that arent popular to perform better in search and you can write more stuff like the popular posts!

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We spend a lot of time making sure that the platform we have written performs as well as it can with the search engines. making SEO easy is a big part of the way we develop. but it still comes down to the way that the client writes their content in the end.

On friday I was invited to a seminar all about SEO. Rand fishkin was doing the talking. I learned a few tips and I also learned that our platform is doing everything right. sure there are two or three areas we can improve, but its nothing major.

the most important thing i learned is that a notepad and a pen is a fantastic thing. if you have your own site:

• write down what you want the site to be.
• dont stray from that line you wrote above
• work hard at it. it might take a while, but the rewards will come if you work at it

One of the things I realised is that you cant get enough stats. google analytics is pretty good, but for a blog its not prefect. for a blog you want people to read your page, and hopefully you want them to read another, but thats not your main goal, your main goal is getting people dorectly to your post. if they choose to leave after that then google records it as a bounce. a bounce in google analytics is counted as someone who only reads the page they land on. for a blog you arent trying to get people to go to a second page. you only want them to return to your site later. Analytics doesnt track this (though you can make it)

I made some minor improvements yesterday to make my site more readable for the end user. I already have a year worth of stats for people visiting my site. it shows me a decent ammount of information, how many unique users, how many page views per day, things like that. im looking into a few wordpress plugins to get some more stats so that i can improve my site even more. whats the point of a website if no-one can see it?

I will also be going over my old posts and making them better, replacing them where needed and 301 ing them to the new posts.

I recently added a protools section, I will be re-jigging the old protools tutorials and adding them to that section too, I think i will need a new notebook to take my notes in =|

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ive moved the (mostly redundant) images to below the excerpts and the actual content of the posts – I did this for two reasons – one is that it keeps most of the content above the page fold and the other is to see if more people stay on the site for longer =)

I have increased the font size of the <li> items – that way when i create a list it is more obvious in the page

I have removed the adsense ad on the single opsts pages – they werent converting anyway.

I have put the title of the article in the box where the advert used to be (I also gave it an <h1> tag instead of the h2 it had – a little bit more SEO)

Ive added the top 3 most popular posts to the side bar

I still have things to change, but i will leave it like this for a couple of months to see what works best then ill make a couple more changes to see if they work or not.

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