That’s right, I was seeing other content management systems (cms). Before I started going steady with WordPress, I tried other CMS’s. Sure we got on great together, it was fun learning to use them. Customising themes and building websites for other people. I even ran my websites on them for a while, but WordPress was always there on my computer running on localhost, giving me the sad puppy eyes.

So eventually in about 2008 I commited myself to WordPress. Sure I have all the popular CMS’s and shopping carts running on localhost for testing. But WordPress is the one for me now.

Erm, yeah, the blog post title…

Joomla vs Drupal

I’ve been asked to write a guest post title “Joomla vs Drupal” for a high traffic website. They’re also keen for me to write other CMS’s too, so maybe I’ve found my calling in life. Writing reviews of CMS’s, although hardly glamourous, it was interesting and fun to do.

So having used both Joomla and Drupal for my own websites and those I’ve built for clients. I decided it was a great idea to become re-aquainted with them again. Joomla I’ve used more than Drupal, but having said that. They’re both great to use and play around with. I’ve always liked them for the great uses you can put them to, such as using them as ecommerce shopping carts or for real estate uses.

I realise WordPress has caught up in this area, but it is too fractured with too many options. It’s difficult for a newbie to get to grips with them all. On Joomla you have Virtue Mart and on Drupal you have Ubercart. They are the most widely known and used because they’re damn good and free!

I don’t want to write the article here on my own blog, so I’m going to get on with writing it and post a link when they publish it…

FriedGreenKidneyBean

Strange title I know but since I’ve realised that I’ve basically got one month now until I finish Uni and I really need to consider my options job wise. I’ve decided to kick myself up the backside and start looking harder for Manchester SEO Jobs which I can do since the ones that I have seen popping up here and there all appear to be for more experienced people with agency experience. Since I’m self taught with only freelance experience behind me and never worked for a digital marketing agency. I’m finding a lot of the Manchester SEO Jobs I would have applied for out of my scope so I’m left wondering what to do now.

The idea has crossed my mind about trying harder to get more freelance work, but since I was at Uni before hand, I never had the time or the necessity to really throw myself out there to try and find monthly paying clients as I had my student loans to fall back on. But the serious business of finding businesses willing to cross my palm with silver (and a few £50 notes) every month is going to be tough going. The type of companies willing to pay unquestionably are likely to want to hire an agency and the companies who need convincing of the worth of using an SEO are unlikely to understand why they should be paying for SEO every month when their website is probably put together on a shoe string budget and be a total after thought of their business.

So what to do? Do I apply for anything and everything that comes a long knowing that without the agency experience they so obviously want me to have I cannot provide them. Do I bang on every Manchester SEO agency door over the next few weeks offering to do the sandwich run and make cups of tea and coffee to get the opportunity to add to my CV “worked in numerous Manchester SEO agencies…making cups of tea“

Has to be a Manchester SEO company out there that is recruiting for their Manchester SEO Jobs and willing to take people on like me (but preferably me) with he knowledge and experience of SEO principles and implementation, just without the experience that is gained from working in and around an SEO team.

FriedGreenKidneyBean

Guest Blogging is well, in laymen’s terms – Blogging without any of the effort! Put simply, somebody else goes to the effort of writing Blog posts for your website and you sit back, see what they come up with and then you either send them away to fix any issues or you sort them yourself and then make the post on your website.

Seems easy enough of course, but what’s in it for them? For the writers of these free content… Well usually a part from fame and glory, they will be doing it so their website or brand get put ‘out there’. By this I mean a completely new audience in some cases will then get to read about their views and what they have to say and hopefully, follow it up by reading more on their own website. There is also another reason, usually they will also be allowed to add one or two links within the Blog post to their own website which in turn builds up the number of links to their website in a very natural looking way.

So this post, why? Well Back in December 2011, I was doing SEO work for an online letting agency but since it wasn’t going so well as I was pretty much forbidden from altering the website, making any changes or even posting content on the website. The only thing I could do was write Blog posts and get myself active in landlord forums to try and build up links to their website and get some much need exposure and visitors. This is where I started to run into a problem, since I love WordPress and for simple ease, I decided to stick with Blogger as I could setup a number of Blogs easily and pump out the posts on there. Well that went well for a couple of months and then one day I was sat at home over Christmas bored, checking out domain names that may be available and I came across Advice for Landlords which happened to be available. I debated asking the client to register the domain, but knowing I was starting to feel a bit fed up with doing nothing more than ‘kicking tyres’ with the website as I couldn’t make any direct changes (even though it seriously needed a heart, lung and brain transplant – yes it was that bad!). So I decided to register it myself knowing that I could work on the site and build it up after I quit working for them.

Well to cut a long story short, I stopped working for them in January 2012 and at the time, the website had hardly any content, just a handful of Blog posts. It was nowhere to be seen in search, but after about 4 weeks popped up onto page 2 which was quite impressive since I had only done minimal link building for the website, instead concentrating on the content. Because lets face it, no point in driving visitors to a website with nothing to engage them! Well anyway, last week I was curious as to where the website was ranking, but as I hadn’t done anything with it in well over a month, decided to add it to the SEOmoz rank checker to see where it was thinking it was still on page 2. Imagine my shock when I realised it had jumped up about 6 places onto page 1 and best of all, with no new content since around January/February. Oh and in fact that isn’t the best thing. The best thing was getting an email from a marketing company working for a landlord website asking me if I wanted to accept guest posts. Of course this was pretty awesome news since it meant one of two things… 1) What content I had added to the website must have been pretty respectable and 2) Being on page 1 meant that the website was getting noticed at last and it’s started to show with the website starting to see a steady increase in visitors over the past week or two.

FriedGreenKidneyBean

Geotagging might be a great idea for social networks, sharing both photos and their locations as well as check-ins with your friends. Services like foursquare and Facebook allow you to check-in so your friends know where you are and where you’ve been.

But what happens when you’re in the military or you’re a rich or famous person? This information in the wrong hands could literally be the difference between life and death. Especially for the military who in 2007 found itself at the mercy of hostile forces when geotagged photos of a new fleet of helicopters ended up in the hands of enemy forces who mortared the base and managed to destroy several of the helicopters. The photos could have been of almost anything, such as a field hospital or a barracks which could have resulted in a high loss of life.

It was due to this, that the US Army set about publishing it’s own guidance on geotagging and giving warning to it. Rather than take a heavy handed approach, they appear to be more accepting of the new technology and it’s adoption. Therefore the article is merely calling attention to the matter rather than taking any serious action.

For any military force including the US Army, it is going to be difficult to control the use of the devices that their personnel use. The take up of social networks and new technologies such as check-ins and geotagging is going to become more and more prevalent. At best, all they can do is try to educate their personnel to minimise the risks and impacts of social media and other sharing technologies. It is testament to the take up, power and reach of social media in such a short space of time that the US Army and probably other military forces around the World, that they have felt the need to educate and make aware, the potential dangers associated with these technologies.

Although it is unlikely that soldiers will checking in, in the middle of a fire fight with enemy forces, or geotagging photos of their location whilst out on patrol in enemy territory. With so many civilian personnel posted out with military personnel such as journalists, civilian contractors, etc. There is a real risk of someone sharing information on the Internet which could easily fall into the wrong hands. So the emphasis is on making sure everybody understands the consequences of what they’re sharing and who they’re sharing it with.

During the World War II, there was a saying, “Loose lips sink ships“, where by the Allied Governments published posters advising people to be careful who they were talking to and what they were saying during the war. Geotagging photo and sharing check-ins is essentially the 21st Century version of that saying and with the ease of social sharing, has the possibility of being utilised by such groups as corrupt regimes and terrorist groups.

FriedGreenKidneyBean

I came across this a couple of months ago but never quite got around to posting it on here. Well anyway, I was going through a list of the bookmarks I have whilst having a clear out and came across a link to Yahoo Answers with the question “Where can i buy an youtube?“. I mean seriously? Is this person for real or is it some sort of language barrier thing going on. Well anyway, it would have passed by unnoticed had it not been for one guy/girl calling themselves “Panda” who left quite an amusing answer in reply to the question. I’ve taken a screengrab so you can read it below or if you prefer, you can see it on the Yahoo Answers website by clicking here…

FriedGreenKidneyBean

I came across this post on Wired.co.uk by Ricky Gervais no less talking about Twitter. If you’re a fan of the guy and you have some free time you should take a read. It was actually quite amusing taking in his perspective on Twitter and a few other musings.

He mentions quite a bit that we shouldn’t be affraid to fail, to try new things and generally allow that childlike quality of being able to express yourself creatively without fear. Something that happens as we grow older is we’re told we have to conform, to be adults meaning we lose that childish quality to have fun, be silly and not worry about what people think of us.

He says that being a celebrity makes things a lot tougher. Journalists want a story and writing the same old nonsensical things about famous people doesn’t sell newspapers, but misquoting people does. Twitter for Ricky Gervais therefore means nobody can screw with his words. There is no middle man there to try and take what he says out of context. Pretty ironic I know that I’ve wrote a whole blog post based on what I read so go read Ricky Gervais talking about Twitter.

FriedGreenKidneyBean

First off, I’ve sort of half arse skipped through the blogs I’ve seen about Pinterest but as much as they swoon on about it and its merits. I’m not sure I get the reasoning for its (overnight?) success.
Lets see, people “pin” photos on a “board” which other people comment on. Sounds absolutely awesome to me [/sarcasm] so I’m going to try it and then update this post with my insightful findings…

Heres some more info about Pinterest I came across.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/02/18/10-reasons-pinterest-booked-10-million-visitors-a-month-so-fast/?view=pc

FriedGreenKidneyBean

For several years, DeLorean Motor Company of Texas has been reconstituting the fruit of John Z. Deloreans’s troubled loins (phrasing!). Now we are working with electric-car startup Epic EV to put an all-electric DMC-12 into production by 2013. – Delorean.com.

I also came across this video by GeekBeat.TV for Electric Delorean. I so want one, they said it does 0-60 in under 5 seconds. Now that’s quick if it’s true even if it does mean you could run out of juice before you get home…

Read more and watch an interview with the CEO of Delorean by ABC TV News.

FriedGreenKidneyBean

Well after sitting around on my laptop and noticing the little bubble pop up telling me I have to move my butt quickly and find the charger before it died. I suddenly remembered a few years ago something about a battery that was set to revolutionise the way use our portable electronics.

As it turns out, a quick Google search later, I found a story from 2001 in the Economist.com about a Mobile Fuel Cell, they also had a prediction in there that this technology might be available within five years but fast forward eleven years and I’d all but forgotten about it as I never hear anything about this type of battery. In fact, the laptop manufacturers seem to be more intent on pushing Intel UltraBooks and Netbooks which have batteries capable of lasting 6-9 hours or more but not Mobile Fuel Cell. It reminds me of those predictions from the 50s and 60s that the futurists has where they expected us to be zipping around in flying cars and using robots to do all of our chores. I guess although we don’t have robots in the home, we do have microwaves, dishwashers and washing machines. Though not strictly robots, they do make doing the chores one hell of a lot easier so I guess they were on the right path.

But that doesn’t help my or your I guess, insatiable need for power on the move. These days, nearly everyone has a Smartphone, they suck so much life out of your Mobile Phone when you have the Internet and a bunch of apps running, it’s not even funny. On the Fuel Cell entry on Wikipedia, it has a list of other uses for a Fuel Cell beyond cars and buses, so why do we not have them yet is the question?

It seems I’m not the only wondering what happened to them, with AppleInsider.com covering a story about the prospect of Fuel Cell powered Apple MacBooks and other mobile devices. With Apple’s patent applications published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office entitled “Fuel Cell System to Power a Portable Computing Device” and “Fuel Cell System Coupled to a Portable Computing Device.”

Maybe it’s only a matter of time before somebody comes up with something. I mean, how cool would it be to be able to use your Mobile Phone or Laptop for weeks or even months at a time without charging them? You could throw away all of those chargers you have lying around your home. No longer needing to dig around for a charger for your device as it is flashing up the dreaded ‘Find me a Charger’ message.

FriedGreenKidneyBean

So that’s about the be all and end all of it. I’ve often seen on some SEO company websites, the “Adwords Qualified” accreditation. So after working with Adwords myself for the past 6-8 months, I figure it shouldn’t be too difficult to pass the exams. That was until I went onto the Google Adwords Exam Study Learning Center. There’s quite a bit to go through so I’m not so sure what to do now as I have Uni work and other stuff to do too.

I’m guessing it’ll be one of those things that will look great on my CV so I guess if I can get it done in the next month or so before my mad rush of getting in my Uni assignments all due around March, I should be fine. Just don’t want to go rushing into it since it’s going to cost around $100 for two exams and that’s based on me passing them both first time else I need to pay for more *ouch*.

FriedGreenKidneyBean