Jonathan Davies

You’ve got to love them. The day I get on holiday (over 9 weeks!) our home network starts to fail. We have a pretty complicated one which involves several wireless routers and bridges.

It seems that the source of the problem is the BT Home Hub which is failing. Every so often I am able to restore it - bit it is very unreliable.

That is pretty much why there has been a lack of content lately, i have been busy which various projects and things that frankly took precedence over the blog. In the near future I will be talking about some new software I have purchased, The best ways of running Windows on your Mac and a bit about my experiences with web design.

For the past few months I’ve been trying to come up with “the perfect sidebar”. You may have seen me mixing and matching, but at least fore now, I have come to a result that I am happy with. With the advent of my “thick footer” I am able place things that are less about the content of the site bellow, where they can still be reached - but aren’t obtrusive over the rest of the content in the sidebar.

There are a few things you have to take into account when putting together your sidebar:

• Importance
• Readability
• Reader’s interest
• If it will be used at all

These are all things that I took into account and used to help me structure my sidebar. There are some things, that for me, make total sense to go towards the top. Like the welcome blurb and the search box. Why have I put them there? When I come to a site and want to find out about the writer the sidebar is the first place I look, I’m not looking for their life’s story; just their background and why they are here to blog.

A search box. I’m always very surprised when I see a search box way down the sidebar, for me it is one of the key features on a sidebar and should not be to hard to find. Case and point - Techcrunch. Expecting to have it up high it was placed near the bottom pretty much out of site.

I formatted the sidebar so that the further you go down the less important the it becomes. Both the archives and categories offer easy “singular” navigation - so people can find exactly what they are looking for easily.

Another point on sidebars that is important to me, I suppose it’s for of an annoyance when you see a sidebar flung full of crap. Personally I hate it when you have Twitter, Pownce and Jaiku - all displaying the same message right underneath each other! Or when you have a massive amount of Google Adsense flung in there making your sidebar not only an eye-soar but hard to navigate around.

Find the right sidebar equilibrium may take you time and is pretty much up to you, after all there are many variations in sidebars, some have two, some don’t have any, but instead situate them singularly in a “thick footer”. The main advice I am giving you is: keep is small, simple and select; only use what you need. Don’t put it in because you can.

Lately I have been on the hunt for some good Wordpress plug-ins to enhance my blog, a couple of the results you have probably seen around the site recently. Here are a couple that I thought may be of interest.

What Would Seth Godin Do?

One of them is the message that you get at the bottom of every “single post” page which looks like this:

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. You can also contact me. Thanks for visiting!

This was created using the “What Would Seth Godin Do?” plug-in. What’s with the name of this plugin? Well, it was inspired by blogger Seth Godin who advocates the use of cookies to distinguish whether you have a new or returning visitor.

One opportunity that’s underused is the idea of using cookies to treat returning visitors differently than newbies - Seth Godin

One of the features of the plugin is the ability to customize the message, pretty much to what you desire, you can also choose the location of where it pops up and finally, how many time you have to visit before it disappears.

Something that I have considered doing, simply for convenience and customizability (though it does fold the use of the times the message is shown) is using it in conjunction with the Adman plug-in.

You can get the plugin from Richard K Miller’s website. I’d also like to thank Chris Thomson for showing me this plugin. Remember to report back on your experiences with the plugin!

Social Bookmarks

I have been looking for an easy and good looking way to integrate social networking within the site. There was a big emphasis in the easy, I didn’t want to have to go start cutting and pasting code here are there. So I scoured the Wordpress Plugins site and found Social Bookmarks. It is a reasonably simple plugin with banks of options for what pages you want to see them on and in what circumstances.

I am not going to plough through the exaustive list of social networks it offers but a few I have picked out are: Digg, Del.icio.us and Reddit. I am now aware that there is a Social Bookmarks RELOADED plugin which simply adds upon the massive list of social networks.

You can find Social Bookmarks here.

Yes I know…

The last few weeks have been pretty busy lately and I just haven’t found something particularly interesting to post about.

I’m working on some stuff, so stay tuned.

You may have noticed something new pop up along the sidebar of my site in the last couple of weeks and I haven’t had a chance to write a post talking about it (luckily, Daniel, reminded me ). Thanks to, Jerry, from Embraceware I officially have a sponsor for the blog!

Jerry develops Awaken - the best alarm clock program for the Mac; which you may have seen recently in this year’s Macheist Bundle.

All I can say about Awaken is that it has made getting up a joy, something that I can’t say I ever imagined it would ever be.

If you can’t take my word, for it maybe these will make you:

“I went from a person who hated getting out of bed to someone who couldn’t wait to hear my iTunes music play in the morning when my iMac woke me - so much better than having a family member open the curtains and shout get up!”

- Glenn Wolsey

Without Awaken, I would have been fired long ago.”

- Matthew Kelling

“A wonderfully elegant, simple to use, yet highly sophisticated program! Thanks a million!”

- Ryan Patrico

Once again, thank-you Jerry for sponsoring the site!

If anybody else would like to advertise on the site then please do not hesitate to contact me.

Happy New Year Everybody!

There are a lot of things that I would like to accomplish in 2008, some big and some small, some I don’t really expect to necessarily reach, but I’ll give it a stab.

Build up a Readership of  100+ uniques a day:

This is a pretty big thing to achieve, so far I get about forty to fifty a day, this means at least doubling the amount of unique readers. There are a few ways I intend to help publicize the blog: one, write more articles that may attract the Digg.com readership. Two, offer incentives or people too tell their friends about the blog (hopefully more on that soon!). Of course it also means keeping up a reliable amount of blog posts. As you may have noticed I have started publishing three times a week, I found that every day was a too harder target and I was going for quantity rather then quality.

Start to Earn a Small Income from the Blog:

Currently, pretty much all the money I earn comes from doing work, not related to the internet, I would love to start making a small income so that I can afford to both keep the blog going and pay for more purchases for me to review. I am currently working on a page of “My Gear” with Amazon links and the review of the product so if you feel like buying a cool piece of kit and supporting the blog then the links are at your disposal.

Get 200+ Downloads per episode of Tech Today:

Both Daniel and myself have been finding it very hard getting a show out, mainly because of the time differences and our busy schedules. In light of this we have decided to make the show bi-weekly and to begin a big push on publishing the show, you will soon see links coming up and the RSS feed for the show on the site to help.

To Start Producing More Video Content:

During the summer I had a small stint where I uploaded a lot of YouTube videos, I am hopefully going to try and renew these videos by attempting to do one a week. These would cover how-toos, short reviews and questions answered from those who watch. If you do have any questions then please email me with the subject being “Video Show Question” and I will try to answer your question.

Not to loose track of why I started this Blog:

Even though I am making these targets and looking for bigger and better things I don’t want to forget why  I started this blog, to have a good conversation about technology and tell you my thoughts on subjects; I don’t want this to change.

I hope that this coming year will be a prosperous one for you, as for myself I hope to be a lot further and for a lot more people to hear my voice on the internet at the end of it.

So yet another month has come and I have managed (some how) to churn out some posts that I am very happy with and would like to share with you. So take a look and enjoy!

Where is Social Networking Going? -

I wrote this post when Google acquired a site I use called Jaiku, I talked about how this seems to fit into big picture at Google.

The iPhone SDK a sign of Mac OS X weakness’? -

I seem to have benn the only one who found anything bad about Apple’s excuse about iPhone apps, read it and tell me in the comments if you agree or not!

Why I Love and Hate Skype -

I wrote about my feelings towards one of the most popular applications, used for VOIP and how it changed the way I communicate.

The iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store: Flawed Perfection-

I wrote about my thoughts on one of the biggest leaps Apple has made, on the iPod Touch and iPhone.

Did you have a post on my blog that you enjoyed? Tell us, by leaving a comment or using the contact form!

You may have noticed some new ads appear on the the site lately.  I thought that I would go through and explain what these are and how they benefit both me and you. These are purely to help me host the site and buy new tech related products to review for the site.

There are currently two ad schemes running on the site:

Text-Link-Ads

Text-Link-Ads are a company that help you make money through your blog. If you click on the link - and sign up for free you will be able to in-bed some code into your blog and start making money! They are a great site and I am starting to make a little amount of money every month - but considering I don’t really have to do to much its great.

Click on the link and check them out and even maybe sign up - remember it is free!

Amazon

I’m sure that you all use Amazon, they have insanely good prices and you will probably see about four ads lined up on each post whenever you click on a independent blog post. Why four? Because it looks a lot better, and gives you a more choice. You will quite often see links to products that I talk about on my blog such as the Lacie Hard Drive and iLife 08.

So if your in a spending mood feel free to buy something for yourself and help me keep the site going!

I am looking at getting some better looking advertising that is less intrusive so watch out for that.

 EDIT: AFTER PLAYING WITH A FEW OTHER THEMES I'VE DECIDED TO REVERT TO 281 FOR THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE 

You will have noticed that once gain I have changed the theme that I am using for my blog. I am still looking for the one that does everything I need. I think that I will have to get one made for my site, but at the moment I am not really prepared to do that until I get a stronger readership.

I really like my old theme 281. But the fact that I didn't have an editable sidebar with out going into the CSS was very annoying. I think I'll stick with this new theme for now.

 I see a lot of people calling each new design of their blog Version 1, 2, 3 etc. If I had done that I wold probably be on version 10. So I think I am going to call this the Official version 1 of jonathandavies.org.uk

 So enjoy the new theme and please email me some good wordpress theme designers who I might want to look at when I get one made for myself.

 What Wordpress Theme do you use and why? Leave a comment or use the contact form!

Another month has come and past and the month of October is now upon us. In this post I will cover some of my favourite posts from the month. Remember to leave a comment telling me what your favoutite posts and I will add it to the list.

Dell V Apple Displays
In this post I talk about the pros and cons with the Dell and Apple Displays, then finally what I recommend.

My Top Four Wordpress Plug-ins
My blog runs on the popular blog publishing platform Wordpress. One of the great things about wordpress is that it is open source so many people are developing plug-ins, these are my favourite ones

MacBook Pro - The Review
I have has my MacBook Pro for about a month now and in the post I go over the good, the bad and the ugly and anything else that I think of.

Yet Another Reason I Use Safari
I talk about Safari’s colour management features and show you how much of a difference it really makes.

Software Pick: Vienna
I talk about my favourite RSS Reader, Vienna and why I chose it over any other one.