I've been Squarespaced...

New blog!

Ok, so not so new...

I had a few issues with the Wordpress blog overnight which looks like the result of the site being hacked. Don't ask me how or why, the Wordpress instance was on a separate account on my dedicated server, all the plugins were up to date, (except for one) and I was running the latest version of WordPress. I'd updated the version before all the recent hacking reports so I'm a bit non-plused as to how it happened.

Must admit though, I'd been meaning to revamp the Wordpress blog for a while but it was one of those things I kept putting off. The thought of trawling through all those WP themes....

So the events of last night were an impetus to get off my butt and sort something out. I'd checked out Squarespace before and was impressed. The thing that swung it for me was the Wordpress import features. It only took me a couple of hours from scratch to import all my Wordpress posts and graphics. Most of that time was getting used to the features of Squarespace, of which I've not even scratched the surface.

For full disclosure, I've no affiliate or any working arrangements with the Squarespace guys, heck, I even forgot to use one of the discount codes available from MacBreak or Tekzilla - d'oh!

Just a word of warning though. I really wanted to move quickly, so the appearance of the site may (will!) change over time as I get more familiar with the Squarespace interface and its capabilities.

I've also not been able to move across the user accounts over from Wordpress although all the comments have come over properly attributed as best I can see. The new blog is setup not to allow unmoderated comments so if you'd like to comment, please feel free but it may take a short while for it to appear.

I'll let you know how I get on as play a bit more!

Light blogging!

Apologies for the dearth of posts on the blog! Twitter seems to be the place where I post little snippets or thoughts leaving this blog for more considered thoughts. Looks like I haven't been considering much then - not true! Looking forward to posting lots of speculation soon about the upcoming September releases from Apple :-)

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The Next Big Thing.....

Remember the Million Dollar Homepage? A very simple idea where an enterprising 21 year old entrepreneur sold 1 million pixels of ad space on a single page for $1 per pixel. What a brilliant idea! The whole thing went viral and the guy made a fortune. Well I wonder if this is the next big thing? Two enterprising Masters Students from Northern Ireland (Paddy and Lee) have launched a site called "The Big Word Project" and it's another simple yet brilliant idea. Basically, you can buy any word in the Oxford English Dictionary for $1 per letter. Once you've bought it, you can link the word from The Big Word project site to your own site. And that's it! Absolutely bloody brilliant. I don't think it's any co-incidence that one of the guys is researching into Viral Marketing for his masters. It's only been up for a couple of days but a link from Gruber has brought them loads of traffic and at the time of writing, 1419 words have been purchased. Let's say an average of 6 letters per word, that's 6 * 1419 = $8514 in just 2 days. There are over 500,000 words in the OED Some big names have bought up some words such as:

• 37 Signals - Signal
• Mint - Mint
• Icon Factory - Icon
• Daring Fireball - Jiminy
• Lego - Brick
• MGM - Movie
• ScreenCastsOnline - Screencast

OK - I inserted that last one myself but hey, I bought the word (and a few others - see if you can guess) My only regret about the whole thing is that I didn't think of it myself! Good luck guys, this could make you some serious money!

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Comments on the Blog

I previously had the blog set up requiring you to be registered as a user to post comments to the blog. I also had moderation switched on. I now see that this was a bit restrictive and may have prevented people from leaving comments. As of this morning I've switched off the need to be a registered user to post comments so please feel free to leave any comments you like. Mind you, moderation is still switched on!

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BBC on Twitter

The BBC have started posting news on Twitter. Very cool! Just search for BBC on your Twitter home page and you'll find about a dozen BBC twitter entries. Add them as friends and you'll get news popping up during the day via Twitterrific

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