Archive for April, 2008

The ideal WordPress comment code

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

When an article is written, various comments from other people may hold great deal of information regarding the topic. That's why it's very important to open discussion on web pages. In our company we mainly use WordPress, so I'll explain how to properly set up comments on WordPress. Our publishing platform Foliopress is based on WordPress version 2.2.3, so screenshots and settings will apply mainly to these versions, but other versions are surely, not so different.

First order of business is allowing discussion in wordpress. Settings for this are in Administration back-end in Options->Discussion. For our company these settings are preferred:

Wordpress discussion options
Wordpress discussion options

Information on these settings (from WordPress developers) are here.

WordPress | No comments

New York Times Online: Ad Revenue Mismanagement = Unemployed Journalists

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

Over the last month, the internet has been awash with stories of the fabled New York Times slow demise, as indicated by huge losses and impending layoffs. As the new Wall Street Journal hires, the New York Times fires.

The decline in New York Times revenue and readership surprised me somewhat, but I accepted the decline at face value. Given the New York Times atrocious editorial standards throughout the Bush regime, including aiming and abetting war crimes (Judith Miller), the loss in circulation seemed like just desserts.

But today, Comcast's list of the top 50 websites for March came across my desk. Based on unique visitors, guess who's at number 12 with 47 million unique visitors for the month? For refernce, that's just behind Wikipedia, Amazon and ahead of Facebook, CNET, Adobe, CBS and Craigslist: The New York Times Digital.

Comcast top 100 websites by unique visitors
Comcast top 50 websites by unique visitors

Which set me to thinking what kind of second rate media (advertising sales) strategy would it take to lose money with the number 12 website.

WordPress | 9 comments

SBI (Site Build It) versus WordPress: How to Structure a Website

Monday, April 28th, 2008

For years, I've been on the Site Build It list. SBI is the creation of the rather annoyingly gushy Ken Evoy who never stops his carnival barker cries about his one-stop-site-creation tool. 

Ken Evoy Pumping Site Sell
Ken Evoy Pumping Site Sell

Evoy's been at it since the bad old days when the internet was a mess and Site Built It! did have the advantage of actually getting a website up in some form - easier than coding html from scratch for the neophyte.

Throughout SBI's history, Evoy has shrieked about his process and his proprietary tools. On the surface, a clear process and proprietary tools are a good idea. Probably worth the price of admission (or so I thought at the time). The issue with the proprietary tools (which otherwise might be a good deal) is that you can only use them a little bit. Come and play for one hour per week, see you next week. Not exactly inviting brainstorming or creativity.

In contrast, the indepdendent expensive (many of which are free) tools Evoy condemns let you use them as much as you like once you find them.

Internet Marketing, WordPress | 18 comments

How to Convert a Clone CD Image to ISO

Saturday, April 26th, 2008

Just ran into a time consuming hiccup trying to work with a Clone CD Image. I hope the rather detailed explanation below will help someone else deal with a Clone CD Image faster on his Mac.

I'd downloaded a 600 MB disk image to use with Parallels. The disk image came wrapped in a .rar format.

Unpacking the .rar file was very difficult.

  • StuffitExpander crashed
  • Forklift couldn't handle it
  • Archive Utility just wanted to compress it further.

Finally I was able to unpack it with IAarchiver, slowly but certainly.

After unpacking, I was offered a directory with three files in it:

  • image.img
  • image.ccd
  • image.sub
Clone CD img ccd sub files
Clone CD img ccd sub files

I had no idea Windows used the archaic Mac .img format. It turns out that Windows doesn't. What I'd inadvertently downloaded is what is known as a Clone CD image. I was unable to mount it on my Macbook. No known solution or software for Mac OS X can handle Clone CD images. BIN and CUE files are no problem, but CCD files - there's nothing out there.

IT | 64 comments