More Than Scratch The Surface » General

2009 On More Than Scratch The Surface

Stephen Cronin — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 06:54:37 +0000

Happy New Year to all! A year ago, after looking at my Google Analytics stats for the year, I wrote a post reviewing 2008. I figure I may as well do it again for 2009 and also take the opportunity to explain the direction of this site.

The Top Ten Visited Posts In 2009

According to Google Analytics, the top ten visited posts in 2009 (with the home page and plugin pages stripped out) were:

Creating A JavaScript Array Dynamically Via PHP (2008)
Blogger – How To Add Adsense Inside Single Posts Only (2009)
How To Display Ads Only To Search Visitors (2008)
Poll – Which WordPress Theme Framework To Use? (2009)
WordPress – Simple CSS Text Boxes In Posts (2007)
WordPress – Most Viewed – Sidebar Widget (2007)
WordPress – Rounded Text Boxes in Posts (2007)
Custom Page Templates – Calling An External CSS File (2009)
Setting Cookies In WordPress – Trap For Beginners (2008)
How To Avoid Adsense Smart Pricing On Blogs (2008)

While I feel some of those posts deserve to be there, there are some that I don’t feel are particularly deserving.

Also, as you can see, there’s only 3 posts written in 2009 in that list. The others were written in 2008 (4 posts) or 2007 (3 posts). I guess that’s not too surprising as a lot of my traffic comes from search engines and old posts are just as likely to rank well as new ones.

It also doesn’t help that I only wrote 20 posts in 2009 (not counting automatic lifestream posts), but more on that later.

My Top 5 Posts From 2009

Last year, I included a list of the 10 posts that I thought were my best in 2008. If I were to do this again for 2009, I’d only go with 5 articles that I was particularly happy with. There are others which are okay, but don’t particularly stand out for me.

So, here are my top 5 posts written in 2009:

Other Interesting Stats From Google Analytics

Google Analytics also provided some interesting statistics for 2009 on this site.

Traffic

The site had significantly more traffic in 2009 than in did in 2008. There were 75,343 Visits and 113,016 Pageviews in 2009, up from 46,488 Visits and 74,916 Pageviews in 2008.

That said, the first half of 2009 was the best: traffic tailed off slightly in the second half of 2009 (since I disabled my DoFollow plugin).

It will be interesting to see what will happen in 2010. Unlike last year, I’m not particularly concerned about whether traffic will increase in 2010.

I now consider this site as an area for me to write about my WordPress plugins and my Greasemonkey scripts – I no longer have any grand ambitions about creating a thriving blog.

Browser Breakdown

The vast majority of visitors were using Firefox. That isn’t surprising given the nature of this blog, as it appeals to web developers and bloggers, groups given to using FireFox. The full breakdown is as follows:

Firefox – 67.62%
Internet Explorer – 17.65%
Chrome – 6.24%
Safari – 4.75%
Opera – 2.30%

Of the Internet Explorer users, 20.66% were using IE6 (about 3.6% of all visitors). Too many! The numbers are roughly the same as last year, but with a slight drop for IE and a 5% increase for Chrome.

Operating systems

The major operating systems used by visitors was virtually the same as last year, being dominated by Windows. The full breakdown is as follows:

Windows – 82.92%
Macintosh – 12.28%
Linux – 4.25%

Top 10 Screen Resolutions

The screen resolution of visitors is always important to web developers. I’ve included the top 10 resolutions below.

1024×768 – 21.23%
1280×800 – 19.57%
1280×1024 – 15.07%
1440×900 – 11.88%
1680×1050 – 11.06%
1920×1200 – 5.21%
1152×864 – 2.36%
800×600 – 1.76%
1366×768 – 1.50%
1280×768 – 1.46%

Interesting things to note are:

800×600 has actually moved up one place, despite me proclaiming last year that it had almost dropped off the list at last. It’s hanging in there grimly.
1024×768 is still the most popular, but it’s 5% lead in to 2009 has been reduced to just 2% in 2009. Will it hang on in 2010?

Top 10 Countries

US (by far)
India
UK (London was the top city)
Canada
Australia
Philippines (Hi RT)
Germany
Indonesia
France
Netherlands

Not much change here.

Report Card For 2009

I didn’t meet many of my goals for 2009, as I changed my objectives during the course of the year. Here’s a brief rundown on how I did for each of my 2009 goals.

Post More Often

I published 52 posts in 2007, followed by 41 posts in 2008. One of my 2009 goals was to post more often. I failed big time, only publishing 20 posts in 2009. As I said last year:

It’s not for lack of ideas – I have lots of half written posts that I just need some time to finish off. I tend to spend more time working on my projects than writing about what I’m learning.

That’s still true, but I’m more comfortable with it now. I’ll probably post more this year, but won’t sweat it if I don’t.

Post On Topic

Last year I wrote:

It’s noticeable in my top 10 posts above that many are my Make Money Online posts. I’d like to keep posting on that topic as I learn more about it, but I want to post more often on my Web Development efforts (and WordPress of course).

I didn’t post often in 2009, but I was probably more aligned with my core topics than in 2008.

Update My Current WordPress Plugins

I had planned to overhaul my my existing WordPress plugins and move them into the official WordPress plugin directory. Didn’t happen. The new ones are going into the official directory, but the old ones haven’t been touched. Still on my list for 2010.

Release Some New WordPress Plugins

Last year I wrote:

I started off by writing that I’d like to release another 4 WordPress plugins this year (I already have 4 half finished plugins that I want to finish off). However, thinking of my workload, I changed it first to 3 plugins, then to 2 plugins! So we’ll have to see how many I can actually get out.

Spot on! I released 2 new plugins in 2009. I’m sure more will follow in 2010.

Release A WordPress Theme

I had been thinking that I’d release a WordPress theme in 2009. Didn’t happen. This is now far down on my priority list. I may release one in future if I create my own theme framework for my sites, but it’s not likely anytime soon.

Release Some Greasemonkey Scripts

I released a couple of Greasemonkey scripts in 2009 and plan to release more in future. Greasemonkey rocks! I write little scripts for it all the time, although I haven’t released many of them (yet).

Changing Goals For 2010

I don’t really have many goals for this site in 2010. As I mentioned above, I’d like to update my old WordPress plugins and move them into the official directory, release some new WordPress plugins and release some new Greasemonkey scripts, but that’s about it.

I have other projects, which I won’t mention here, that are more of a focus for me in 2010. This is just going to become the ‘portal’ to the software I release, with the occasional post thrown in.

Final Thoughts

Well that’s a quick look at the year that was and the year that will be here at More Than Scratch The Surface. I hope all your endeavours for 2010 are successful! If you have any big plans for your blog, feel free to share in the comments.

2008 On More Than Scratch The Surface

Stephen Cronin — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 14:12:29 +0000

Happy New Year to all! A new year, a new start, but before I start churning out new posts, I want to have a quick look at 2008 on More Than Scratch The Surface. I’m not normally given to writing review posts, but I was looking at my Google Analytics stats for 2008 and felt moved to write a review of 2008.

The Top Ten Visited Posts In 2008

According to Google Analytics, the top ten visited pages on my blog included the home page and four of my plugin pages, which was pretty predictable. Stripping these out, leaves the following as the top ten visited posts in 2008:

Interestingly, four of these posts are actually from 2007! Apart from the WordPress Most Viewed Sidebar Widget post, which was out of date as soon as I posted it, the other three are some of my better work (although I now use a different rounded corners technique and wouldn’t recommend it anymore)

If we were to just look at 2008 posts, the following four would be added to the bottom of the list:

Although some of my best posts are in the top 10 2008 posts, there are also some that I definitely wouldn’t have included.

My Top Ten Posts In 2008

Now, if you asked me what my top posts in 2008 were, in terms of importance to me, I would have ranked them this way:

Other Interesting Stats From Google Analytics

Google Analytics also provided some interesting statistics for 2008 on this site.

Traffic

The site recorded 46,488 Visits and 74,916 Pageviews in 2008. Not bad, but I’m hoping to improve on that in 2009.

By far my largest source of traffic was Google, accounting for a little over 50% of all my traffic. This is normally 70 – 80% on a day to day basis, but a couple of posts went hot on StumbleUpon and DZone, sending a surge of traffic and driving down the percentage from Google over the whole year.

Browser Breakdown

The vast majority of visitors were using Firefox, with IE a distant second. This isn’t surprising given the nature of this blog, as it appeals to web developers and bloggers, groups given to using FireFox. The full breakdown is as follows:

Firefox – 69.74%
Internet Explorer – 21.63%
Safari – 3.95%
Opera – 2.02%
Chrome – 1.47%

Operating systems

I thought it would be interesting to look at the major operating systems used by visitors and it was dominated by Windows. The full breakdown is as follows:

Windows – 83.48%
Macintosh – 11.57%
Linux – 4.56%

Top 10 Screen Resolutions

The screen resolution of visitors is always important to web developers. I’ve included the top 10 resolutions below. Some are pretty damn big, but the important one to note is that 800×600 has almost dropped off the list at last!

1024×768 – 24.77%
1280×1024 – 19.34%
1280×800 – 17.89%
1680×1050 – 10.68%
1440×900 – 10.09%
1920×1200 – 4.56%
1152×864 – 2.68%
1600×120 – 1.83%
800×600 – 1.60%
1280×768 – 1.53%

Top 10 Countries

US (by far)
UK (London was the top city)
India
Canada
Australia
Germany
Philippines (Hi RT)
Netherlands
China
Indonesia

Goals For 2009

Here are some of my goals for the upcoming year.

Post More Often

I only managed 41 posts in 2008, slowing towards the end of the year, with only two in November and two in December. By contrast, I managed 52 posts in a little over 7 months in 2007. I’d really like to get more posts out.

It’s not for lack of ideas – I have lots of half written posts that I just need some time to finish off. I tend to spend more time working on my projects than writing about what I’m learning.

Post On Topic

It’s noticeable in my top 10 posts above that many are my Make Money Online posts. I’d like to keep posting on that topic as I learn more about it, but I want to post more often on my Web Development efforts (and WordPress of course).

Update My Current WordPress Plugins

I want to overhaul my existing WordPress plugins, make them more efficient, add some new features and move them into the official WordPress plugin repository.

Release Some New WordPress Plugins

I started off by writing that I’d like to release another 4 WordPress plugins this year (I already have 4 half finished plugins that I want to finish off). However, thinking of my workload, I changed it first to 3 plugins, then to 2 plugins! So we’ll have to see how many I can actually get out.

Release A WordPress Theme

I’ve extensively customised themes on several of my WordPress blogs, including this one. It’s always been my intention to build a theme from scratch, which I’d then use as a basis to create WordPress Themes for release. Hopefully, I finally get around to it in 2009.

Release Some Greasemonkey Scripts

I have a couple of half written Greasemonkey scripts that I plan to finish off in the near future and I’m sure that I’ll develop more as the year progresses. I’m really loving how easy it is to tweak the behaviour of the websites I visit.

Final Thoughts

Well that’s a quick look at the year that was and the year that will be here at More Than Scratch The Surface. I hope all your endeavours for 2009 are successful as well!

If you have any big plans for your blog, feel free to share in the comments.

Christmas Update – Greasemonkey, WordPress 2.7, Plugins And More!

Stephen Cronin — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 13:44:50 +0000

First let me wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! I hope you all accept my best wishes, even if you don’t celebrate Christmas.

December has been a very busy month for me and I haven’t had much time for posting. I may not get another post out this year, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to update you on some of the projects I’m working on.

Brand New Acer Aspire One Netbook

I suffer from having too many ideas for the amount of time I have to implement them! In an effort to get a little more time in on my various projects, I recently bought an Acer Aspire One netbook to use on the train to work. I have two 35 minute train rides, so that gives me about an extra hour a day.

Hopefully, this should allow me to get more posts out – in fact I’m typing this very post on the train. I’m also planning to do some web development work on the Acer Aspire One as well.

There’s no wireless network on the train, so the term ‘netbook’ is a little misleading, but I’m happy to work offline and to sync it later. I’m using XAMPPLite (Apache, PHP, MySQL bundled together), so I can do all the web development work I need to do.

WordPress 2.7

WordPress 2.7 was recently released, meaning it’s time to upgrade: I’ve upgraded one of my blogs and I’m working on the others. I know the upgrade is supposed to be quick, but it’s not so simple for me. I don’t just suck it and see, I carefully consider the impact of the upgrade on each blog.

For the first blog, the whole process took about 4 hours. The upgrade itself only took 15 minutes, but I had to go through all the plugins I’m using and update them. The main problem I have is that I’ve hacked quite a few plugins, so when I upgrade them I need to port my hacks across to the updated plugins.

I’ve also hacked the WordPress core in a couple of places and one of these had moved, so I had to track it down. Hacking the core and plugins gives you a more flexible site, but the cost is the additional time and effort at upgrade time. Fortunately, this isn’t a problem for most users.

As for my verdict on WordPress 2.7: so far, its great!

WordPress 2.7 And My Plugins: News Coming Shortly

Now that I’m running WordPress 2.7, I’m testing all of my WordPress plugins with it. I haven’t been through everything, but so far its looking good. I’ll write another post in the near future outlining the results of my testing.

Updating My WordPress Plugins

I plan to go through and rewrite all of my WordPress plugins, to add some new features, tidy up the code, etc. This will incorporate any changes necessary for WordPress 2.7, if testing reveals any problems.

I’ve been planning to do this for a long time as RT from the Untwisted Vortex Living In The Philippines blog will be able to attest. Sorry RT, I will get to it early next year!

Once I’ve rewritten the plugins, I plan to add them to the official WordPress Plugin Directory (also something I’ve been planning to do for a long time!).

New WordPress Plugins

I’ve also been working on some new WordPress plugins. I’ve got at least 3 or 4 on the go at the moment. I won’t mention what they do yet, but one is a DoFollow plugin that I’ve mentioned before. We’ll see how they work out, because they are one of the first casualties of my busy schedule.

Greasemonkey

I’ve really been getting into Greasemonkey scripts recently. As well as creating hacks to fix the Google Reader Print Button and Numbered Google Results scripts (written by other people), I’ve written two of my own scripts.

They are both highly specialised and still need some tweaking, so I’m not sure if I’ll bother releasing them or not. One is for the OurBrisbane.com TV schedule (to only display the common Free to Air channels) and the other is to tweak the output of the Google Reader Print Button script to print the article’s URL.

In both cases, I embedded JQuery in the script, because it’s just so much easier. I’ve also really been getting into JQuery lately – it rocks!

Jobs in China

There’s lots happening over at my Jobs in China site.

First, l’m creating a job listing service for the Teach English in China market. I’m investigating several ways to do this. At the moment, I’m playing with the TDO Mini Forms WordPress plugin to allow people to post jobs.

I’ve checked out Jobberbase but discounted it because although it’s nice, it doesn’t do enough of what I need. I may look at the BlueFur.com job script, although I’d probably need to extend it.

On top of this, I’m also planning a new theme for the site.

Client Work

I’ve been working on a client site and I’m just putting the finishing touches on it. Hopefully I’ll have it finished in the next week.

Posts

I have quite a few monster posts almost completed. I hope to get some of them out the door soon, but then again, I thought I’d get a couple of them out over the last couple of weeks. These posts take a lot of research and I want to make sure they’re right before I publish them. It’ll probably be January now before they start to appear.

One of the post I’m getting close on is the one I promised K from the ShanKriLa technology blog, long ago, on the effects of the KeywordLuv plugin on SEO.

Final Thoughts

These are just some of the things I’m working on. I have a few other projects that I won’t mention here. I also have a busy full time job and a family and Christmas just around the corner, so I’m having to learn to just do what I can!

Exciting New Look For More Than Scratch The Surface

Stephen Cronin — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 13:00:29 +0000

This post marks an exciting new theme for More Than Scratch The Surface. Regular readers won’t recognise the site! I’ve extensively overhauled the theme and in this post I explain the changes, the choices I made and why I made them.

Firstly, for my regular readers, if you’re reading this in a feed reader, come on over to the site and check it out. I’d love some feedback from you. And if you find any problems, please let me know.

Screenshots

For posterity, here is a screenshot of both the old theme and the new one:

A New Theme?

Actually, it’s not a new theme, it’s the same theme. I’ve just totally overhauled it to the extent that you wouldn’t know it’s the same theme.

My original plan was to start from scratch and build a new theme from the ground up. However, I’m short on time at the moment, so I decided to just adapt my current theme.

I started by creating the header graphic and the menu section in straight HTML, then modified my current WordPress theme to incorporate it.

Making the new stuff work with the old has resulted in some very messy HTML / CSS. I’m quite irritated by this, so I’m still planning to create a new theme, from the ground up, when I have time.

It’s also not quite finished yet. I have some other features I’d like to add and I’m not quite convinced by some things (the font, the link colour, the background colours), so there’ll be some small changes in future.

However, this post marks the big change and I’m pretty happy with the general look of the theme, especially the header. So which designer did I use to create it? Me! And I really enjoyed doing it.

The Menu

I originally included a text based menu, but ended up changing to an image based menu.

In general, I prefer text based menus because they’re simpler, cleaner and easier to maintain. However, I’m a bit of a control freak at times, and the text menu didn’t look so good when the text was resized. This was a ‘problem’ even when specifying the font in px (IE won’t resize but Firefox will).

By using an image based menu I could ensure that the menu will always look right. As a bonus, using an image allowed me to use a far more attractive font! I was going to go all glassy buttons with the menu, but decided that would make the page too busy.

I understand that one of the principles behind accessibility is that the user can decide how the page will look. I don’t mind resizing for most of the page, but I don’t want the menu to appear broken, especially as the site acts as an advertisement. Let’s face it, potential clients are probably more concerned (wrongly) about looks than they are about accessibility.

Anyway the menu IS accessible: the HTML is clean and the menu is an unordered list. If the user disables CSS, provides their own style sheet or is using different media, they’ll get a nice list of menu options. Note, I made a point of saying the menu is accessible, because once you hit the sidebars, things aren’t perfect. It’s not terrible, but not as good as I’d like.

Images And Performance

Having read many times that one of the keys to speeding up a page is to reduce the number of http requests, I made a concerted effort to reduce the number of images used in theme. I even went so far as to sacrifice size to achieve this.

The old theme had 8 images with a total size of 18KB. The new theme only has 3 images, but they weigh in at 68KB. The new images were always going to be larger than the old theme’s, but I’m sure I could have kept it under 50KB if I’d split the images up further.

The image based menu increased the total size of images used, especially as the image changes on mouse hover. I used CSS sprites to keep the number of images needed down: the images used for the menu’s normal and hover states are both part of the main header image.

I’ll admit that the image size worries me, so I’ll be keeping an eye on performance. I’m not sure at what point the size outweighs the number of http requests.

This influenced my decision not to use JQuery to fade in the hover state. I’ve been playing with JQuery lately and I like the idea, but it’s not worth adding the size of the JQuery script just to get fading menus. If I start using JQuery for something else, I’ll revisit this idea.

Finally, I used an image for the background of the WordPress plugins blurb near the top of the sidebar. No big deal right? Well I actually used a vertical sliding doors technique to cater for the user resizing the text. It may be overkill, but you have to increase the text size about 20 times in Firefox before it starts to fall apart. I’ll write up how I did this in a separate post.

Advertising

Another big change with this theme is that I’ve finally embraced direct advertising and built ad spaces into the theme. I’ve been planning to do it for a while and the new theme seemed like the right time to introduce it.

I’m offering special introductory prices (50% off) until the slots fill up, making it only $12.50 for a spot at the top of my sidebar, or $7.50 for a spot lower down in the right sidebar. If you want to advertise on More Than Scratch The Surface, check out my Advertise page!

One important thing to note however, is that I’m nofollowing the links, to protect both the advertiser’s site and mine from attracting a toolbar PageRank penalty from Google. Advertising here is purely to build brand awareness for your site and send you traffic, not to game the search engines.

Final Thoughts

I’ve spent a fair bit of time making these changes to my theme and I’m very happy with the new look. But what do you think? Leave a comment and let me know!

A Couple Of Productivity Tips For Microsoft Windows

Stephen Cronin — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 13:09:54 +0000

Okay, so this isn’t directly related to what I normally write about (WordPress, websites and web development), but if you use Microsoft Windows, these tips may increase your productivity, giving you more time for other things. For me, that’s more time for WordPress, websites and web development!

I should point out that I’m just passing these tips on. They are things I’ve read recently, that have helped me. I decided to put them into a post in case it helps others, and also to remind me what they are, in case I forget!

Tip 1 – Keyboard ShortCuts For Windows

I recently read IntelliAdmin’s Windows keyboard shortcuts you never knew existed! article. It’s two and a half years old, but it’s still well worth it. The tips should work for Vista, although I’m using XP. Let me know if they don’t!

I’ve been using Microsoft Windows for 17 years and have even taught how to use Windows, but there were some shortcut gems in here that even I didn’t know! The really useful ones, that I wasn’t aware of, are:

Alt+Esc (Cycle through windows in the order they were opened): Faster than Alt+Tab, because it doesn’t display the icons, it just changes the window.
Windows+Shift+M (Restore all minimised windows): I often use Win+D to bring up the desktop and minimise all windows. I restore them manually, one by one, as needed. This shortcut restores all of them at once.
Shift+F10 (Brings up the context menu): I use the context menu all the time. I’m always right clicking! This will save me from having to leave the keyboard to go to the mouse.
Windows+L (Locks the computer): Probably my favourite. I lock my computer at work every time I leave my desk. I use Ctrl+Alt+Del, wait for the dialogue, then press Enter. The problem is waiting for the dialogue as my computer is slow and there’s often a lag. This gives me an instant lock.
Windows+Pause (Opens System Properties): A neat alternative to right-clicking on My Computer, but I guess it’s not something that would be used very often.

I found the IntelliAdmin article through @comment.net’s Essential Shortcuts for Geeks: Over 21 Software & Web Services post. It has links to many shortcut lists for most operating systems, web browsers and several other applications. It’s worth checking out – it might save you some time.

Tip 2 – Taskbar Shuffle Utility

I also recently learnt of the Taskbar Shuffle utility through Sergio Pereira’s Software I can’t work without article. Taskbar Shuffle is a free Windows utility, which allows you to drag and drop the items on your taskbar.

Why would you want to do this? Well, I use it to reorder the taskbar items so that related windows are next to each other. I often work on many different tasks, each of which has several windows open. If I open a new window, I want it to appear with the other taskbar items related to that task, not at the end of the taskbar.

I did without this functionality for years. In the last two years however, it’s become a real pain. Why? I have the same issue with a huge number of tabs in Firefox and I can drag the tabs around so they are grouped logically. Now I’m used to that, it drives me crazy that I can’t do it with taskbar items.

I’m very surprised that this hasn’t made it’s way into Windows core functionality. As more and more people get used to tabbed browsing, this is a logical extension for Windows.

Don’t Ask Why I’m Using Windows!

I know there will be some people out there asking why I don’t move to Linux or even a Mac. I have considered switching to Linux. The idea appeals to me because I’m a fan of open source software. However, I have some pretty good reasons not to (for me):

Satisfaction: I’m happy with Windows XP SP2! Windows XP wasn’t so good in it’s early days, just like Vista isn’t so good at the moment, but it’s now a good operating system.
Work: I use Windows at work and have done so for the last 14 years (apart from about a year on OS/2). Yes, I could use a different operating system at home, but it’s just added complexity. I like to have a standard desktop environment wherever I’m working.
Choice: When it comes to choice of applications to use, Windows has it over the other operating systems. Although they have decent software for most situations, there is greater depth of applications for Windows.
Experience: Because I’ve been using Windows for so long, I can pretty much bend it to my needs. I can’t think of anything I need a computer to do that I can’t make Windows do.

I’m not likely to switch any time soon. I won’t rule out experimenting with Linux (I’m thinking about getting an Eee PC for the train), but that’s purely because I like the idea of Linux. For practicality and productivity, I’ll be sticking with Windows XP for the moment.

Final Thoughts

I hope some of you out there find these tips useful. They are certainly making my life easier and giving me that little bit of extra time to spend on what I really want to do.

Roundup – Work, Plugin News, Theme Update

Stephen Cronin — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 13:18:09 +0000

This is a brief update on what I’ve been doing, my plans for the site and my WordPress Plugins.

Busy, Busy, Busy!

Work has been pretty busy. For those that don’t know, I head up the web team for a large organization based in Brisbane. The role is mostly management / internal consulting, but with
a little hands on development.

The website uses the RedDot CMS, which is an interesting challenge for me, because it’s a proprietory Windows based solution, and I come from an open source background. I haven’t learnt much about RedDot itself yet, but I’m going to focus on that soon.

We’re looking getting a project off the ground to revamp the intranet site, which I’m very interested in. You’ll probably see some intranet related posts in future as I’ve been reading a lot about this topic.

I’ve also undergone some training in the Prince2 project management and ITIL service delivery frameworks, both of which were fairly intensive.

Because work’s busy, I have less time for my online ventures. It’s a little frustrating, as I have so many things I want to do. At least I enjoy work!

WordPress Plugins

As yet, I haven’t performed any testing of my plugins in WordPress 2.6, but I know I need to do it soon. I’ve had reports that DualFeeds works fine in WordPress 2.6, but don’t know about the others.

There is one very small issue with most of my plugins. WordPress 2.6 may break the Check Version function in the Options page. This does not affect the core functionality of the plugin and is only likely to occur if you have moved the wp-content folder from its default location.

The only plugin that’s likely to have it’s core functionality affected by this issue is LocalCurrency, which uses an AJAX call similar to the one used by the Check Version function. If you use LocalCurrency, don’t move the wp-content folder from its default location.

This means I’ll need to re-release all my plugins with this fixed. I’ll take the opportunity to add a few new features that I’ve been promising for a while.

Also, as mentioned in my last post, I’m working on a new DoFollow plugin for WordPress, which will only reward the people who leave good comments with a DoFollow link. Progress is slow because of a lack of time.

I also have several plugins that I’ve written and use, but haven’t released because they need some polishing (ie an option page added, the code tidied up, etc). There are also several half written plugins, that I’ve never got back to. When I have time, I’ll plan to finish these off, but don’t hold your breath.

The problem is, the more plugins I release, the more work’s involved with maintaining and supporting them.

New WordPress Theme Coming

I’m also in the middle of creating a new theme that looks a lot better than the current one. I am a good web developer and I do have design skills, but this doesn’t come across looking at my blog. I plan to rectify this soon.

Here’s my current header (click to see full resolution):

Here’s a sneak preview of the new header (click to see full resolution):

Let me know what you think! That’s just the header. The whold theme will be revamped – in fact, I’m rewriting it from scratch.

Direct Advertising

With the new theme, I’ll probably start offering some direct advertising. Many other bloggers do this, but I haven’t taken the step yet.

I’ll nofollow the links, so as to stay in Google’s good books. I haven’t determined the pricing yet, but I’ll provide details in future.

Services

I’ve been turning down requests for custom WordPress plugins because I’ve been so busy. I’ll have to drop free model as there just isn’t time: I’m not going to stop working on my projects, unless I’m being paid for the work.

I’ll still be offering a Custom WordPress Plugin service, but I’ll have to be adequately compensated.

I’ll also offer a Custom WordPress Theme service in future, now that I have the taste for WordPress Theme development. This was always on the cards: it’s a natural extension for plugin developers with web design skills.

Final Thoughts

There’ll be a number of exciting things happening here in the coming months. I’m busy and I’m only going to get busier – but it’s all good!

BullGuard Resolves Customer Service Issue

Stephen Cronin — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:09:40 +0000

In a recent post, I talked about poor customer service from BullGuard, the anti-virus software company. A relative of mine paid for their subscription to be renewed, but the money was lost and their protection was disabled.

I’m pleased to say that BullGuard have now resolved the situation satisfactorily and my relative is now happily using BullGuard once again.

After my previous post, I was contacted by both Ovidiu Anton, Head of Customer Support and Bronwyn Gascoigne, Australian Sales Manager.

I hadn’t realised that BullGuard has an Australian office. They aren’t listed in either the White Pages or the Yellow Pages and a Google search didn’t turn up any results.

There is now an Australian Office listed on the BullGuard Contact page, but this page only included the UK, Denmark and Romanian offices when the issue first occurred. There’s still no phone number for BullGuard’s Australian office, but that’s because BullGuard doesn’t have phone numbers.

BullGuard are a modern Internet based company that uses Live Chat for support. That’s fine for modern Internet users, but there are plenty of potential customers out there who are a little more old-fashioned and are looking for a phone number. That’s not a criticism, just an observation.

Anyway, BullGuard do have staff in Australia and they are very helpful, if Bronwyn’s example is anything to go by. Most of my correspondence was with Bronwyn who did a great job of communicating. She answered emails quickly, politely and clearly and advised us when the problem was resolved.

Bronwyn also sent my relative what appears to be 3 free copies of BullGuard. I’m not sure how long the licenses are for, but they’ll be able to give it to their friends to try the product. I may even give BullGuard a whirl myself – although I’m quite happy with Avast, so we’ll see.

The situation was probably helped by my relative sending a scanned letter from the bank, confirming that the cheque was sent to Global Collect BV. It wasn’t straight forward to get the letter or they would have done this sooner. I have to say that BullGuard really should have been able to investigate the situation without this letter.

It took about three days from the time BullGuard got the scanned letter, until the subscription was renewed and BullGuard started working again. It probably should have been done immediately – the problem was with Global Collect BV, not my relative – but anyway, BullGuard is working again and my relative is happy that the situation has been resolved.

In hindsight, it seems to have been a simple administration error between BullGuard and Global Collect (although my relative still lost out). The problem could have been avoided if a credit card had been the method of payment instead of a cheque.

The Lesson: Use a credit card when purchasing over the Internet.

There are concerns about credit card fraud online, but you’re probably protected by your credit card company. If you’re dealing with a traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ company, a cheque may be fine, but if you’re dealing with an Internet based company, credit card is the way to go.

To conclude, BullGuard’s customer service was poor in the first place, but they recovered well and resolved the situation quickly, rather than let it fester. Thanks BullGuard for sorting this out!

BullGuard – What A Load Of Bull!

Stephen Cronin — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 12:45:35 +0000

In my last post I wrote about comment spam. Today, I’m writing about BullGuard, the anti-virus / spam software. Unfortunately, I’m not writing about BullGuard because of their software – I’m writing about them because one of my relatives lost their money when he tried to renew his subscription.

UPDATE: This issue has now been fully resolved. You can read about it here: BullGuard Resolves Customer Service Issue.

My relative would prefer that I don’t publicly identify them on the Internet, so for the purposes of this post, I’ll call them Jack.

Jack received a subscription renewal notification in early April and duly paid for another two year’s subscription (AUD$134.95). Six weeks after paying, he has received neither the subscription, nor his money back.

The BullGuard software is no longer working and I’ve had to replace it with Avast. At this stage it seems unlikely that he will receive his money back.

The Full Story

The story started in early April. Jack was advised that his subscription was about to expire, so he went to BullGuard’s website and placed an order for another two years subscription.

When he reached the payment option section, he chose not to use credit card, due to the various stories he’d heard of people losing money because of keyword logging software etc. Instead, he chose to pay by cheque. It was here that the problems started.

BullGuard don’t have an office in Australia, but their website provided instructions to make the cheque out to Global Collect BV and to send it to a Locked Bag in Lakemba, Sydney, NSW.

Jack followed these instructions and sent the cheque. Three days later (in mid-April), the cheque was cashed and the money left his account.

The money never made it to BullGuard. Presumably the money is with Global Collect, an international payment service. The problem is, Global Collect doesn’t have an office in Australia either. Who knows who actually cashed the cheque! Perhaps an agent who works for Global Collect in Australia?

Two weeks later, the BullGuard subscription expired and BullGuard stopped working. At this point, Jack hadn’t realised that the renewal hadn’t gone through, so he was left completely unprotected for a whole day while he tried to sort things out with BullGuard.

BullGuard advised that it can take 2 to 3 weeks for payment to appear in their account, so they extended the previous subscription by several weeks, so that Jack’s computer was protected.

They also suggested sending “a scanned bank statement as a proof of your payment”. However, Jack wasn’t willing to send a scanned bank statement, showing all his bank account details, to anyone (not just BullGuard).

Subsequent emails from BullGuard were nicely worded, but stated that they could not make any inquiries to Global Collect without this. They stated: “All we need is the bank statement containing a visible BullGuard payment”.

The problem with this (apart from the fact that Jack wasn’t willing to send it), is that the bank statement only shows “Personal Cheque” along with the cheque number and the amount. It doesn’t mention BullGuard at all!

BullGuard had already been supplied with the name on the cheque, the date it was cashed, the cheque number, who it was made out to, the amount it was made out for. The only extra information on the statement were the words “Personal Cheque”.

After emails back and forward over a two week period, this is where it ended. BullGuard need to see the statement, but Jack wasn’t willing to send it. He’s trying to get a letter from the bank as proof of payment, but of course the cheque was not made out to BullGuard (it was made out to Global Collect BV), so it remains to be seen if this will be of any use.

The additional subscription period expired and BullGuard stopped working again. I helped Jack out by adding Avast to his computer so that he is protected against viruses and spam.

Jack also sent a letter to the same Locked Bag that he sent the cheque to, asking for the situation to be rectified. He did not hear back.

Bad For Business

BullGuard haven’t followed up since the subscription expired for the second time. That seems to be pretty poor customer service to me.

I’ve spent most of my career working, in management roles, for an international software development company. I’d never have let this situation develop as far as it has. No company is perfect, but if I had a customer complaining that they’d paid, then the extended cover expired, I’d at least contact them again to touch base.

Note, I’m not saying that they should have extended the cover (although there is an obvious case for that), I’m just saying that they should have contacted the customer! Is that too much to ask?

BullGuard are operating in a fiercely competitive market, dominated by companies such as McAfee, Norton, Trend Micro, Kaspersky and with free alternatives such as Avast, AVG and AntiVir. BullGuard have done well for themselves, but don’t want to get a reputation for bad customer service.

Also, they are sitting on a lawsuit waiting to happen. It’s only a matter of time before someone has the same problem, is left unprotected as a result and is infected by a virus. If you were to lose all your data in such circumstances, wouldn’t you consider legal action?

You Win Some, You Lose Some

So who are the winners and losers in this farce?

Jack is the big loser, having paid AUD$134.95, which he will likely never see again, for nothing! But he is not the only losers – BullGuard are losers too:

They’ve lost a customer, they didn’t get the money that the customer tried to pay them, and they got a little bad publicity to boot. Also, as I mentioned above, this sort of thing is bad for business.

GlobalCollect (or whoever collects their cheques) are the winners – they are $134.95 up and it appears unlikely that it will be passed on to the intended target. If they do this often enough, then they’ll being seeing nice profits!

A Scam?

Let me emphasise: I do not believe that BullGuard or GlobalCollect intentionally ripped anyone off. I’m sure that this is not a scam. I think it is just an administrative mess up.

However, the result is the same: Jack paid his hard earned money to get a service from BullGuard. He ended up with neither the service, nor his money.

I know have another customer service issue with Bed Bath N’ Table. As it’s not computer related, I’ve written about it on a separate site.

Final Thoughts

This whole episode has left a bad taste in Jack’s mouth. He is still hoping to make some progress with BullGuard, but has almost given up. I can’t say I blame him. I certainly won’t be using BullGuard at any point in the future.

Anyone out there like to comment on their experiences, good or bad, with BullGuard?

Back In The Seat

Stephen Cronin — Fri, 02 May 2008 12:22:14 +0000

Regular readers will have noticed that posts have been pretty sparse over the last couple of months. For those wondering about the reason, we recently moved from China to Australia. This has been a big move for us and has meant that I’ve had almost no time for blogging.

I’ve been able to check for comment spam every couple of days, but haven’t had time for writing posts or replying to comments, let alone keeping up with my regular reads or working on my WordPress plugins.

I didn’t announce our move before it occurred, because both hackers and spammers love an unattended blog. It wasn’t really unattended for long, maybe a week at most, but it looked unattended.

Service will slowly start to resume, but I may not catch up on responding to all the comments and I may need to declare feed bankruptcy. I’m still busy organising things and settling in to my new job, so it will still be slow for the foreseeable future. But at least I’m back in the seat!

Changing Focus

With the change in country, it’s a good time to refocus the blog. I originally intended to write about web development, highlighting things I learnt while working on my other projects. Of course, I got side tracked and wrote about blogging and WordPress and the other projects were abandoned.

In future, you’ll probably see more of the following:

WordPress (especially plugins): This has emerged as the main theme of the blog. Check the tag cloud in the sidebar to see what I mean!
Usability and Accessibility: These themes are important in my new job. I may write about them (in general, not about specific issues at work).
Other Web Development: I haven’t quite given up on writing about this! I’ll focus on issues I encounter while writing WordPress plugins.
Issues Related To Running Websites: SEO, PageRank, Security etc.

You’ll probably see less on making money online and on general blogging issues, although I may write about these topics occasionally. This may be a little dangerous as these topics have been amongst my most popular. We’ll see if I can stick to the plan!

Final Thoughts

I’ve missed blogging, but sometimes the ‘real world’ demands all your attention. That’s been the case for me recently. I suspect that I won’t have quite as much time as I used to, but I’m still here and I’m raring to go!

Chinese New Year – Introducing My New China Blog

Stephen Cronin — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 16:01:41 +0000

Happy Chinese New Year! The arrival of the Chinese New Year seems like a good time to announce my new blog at jobsinchina.com. Primarily a blog, for now, JobsInChina will cover issues related to living and working in China.

What JobsInChina Will Offer

I’ve been wanting to write about China and my experiences here for a long time. This gives me the outlet. I’ll write about anything related to China: daily life, culture, travel, news articles, amusing stories, pictures I’ve taken, etc.

I’ll relate these back to living and working in China, because the primary focus of the blog is to help people understand what it’s really like here.

The site will also aim to provide resources for people wanting to live or work in China. I plan to add sections covering work visas, legal issues, etc. This part of the site will build up slowly, as I’ll need to research it carefully.

It’s also quite likely that at some point in future, the site will list jobs available in China. This will probably be done in partnership with an existing job listing provider.

There are lots of possibilities with JobsInChina. I’ve taken the unusual step of leading with a blog and adding other services later. That doesn’t mean that those services won’t be provided in future.

Why Lead With A Blog?

I’ve owned the jobsinchina.com domain name for four years, but never done anything with it. My original plan was to create a job listing service, but I was too busy to put it into action. Time passed and the opportunity was lost. There is now a lot of strong competition in this area and a new job listing site would be unlikely to succeed (without a lot of money behind it).

However, my experience with More Than Scratch The Surface made me confident that I could create a successful China-related blog. I realised that the easiest way to succeed with the www.jobsinchina.com domain would be to build the blog first, then leverage that to add the other services later.

Besides, I wanted to write about my experiences here in China anyway!

Monetization Of JobsInChina

If I can build the JobsInChina to a reasonable level, it will offer some good monetization options, including:

Adsense (search traffic only): While not a high paying niche, it should work reasonably well, once search engine visitors start to arrive. With lots of content, it should be able to attract reasonable search traffic.
Affiliate Reviews: A blog lends itself to reviews of products related to China: books, DVDs, language software, cameras (to take with you).
Direct Advertising: This may be where the real money comes from, once traffic reaches a certain level. Potential advertisers include large chains of English language schools in China, corporations hiring in China, companies selling China-related products, etc.
Partnerships: I won’t talk too much about this now, but once the site is reasonably successful, it will open the way for partnerships with job listing sites and other China related sites.

I’m sure more opportunities will arise as things proceed.

Adsense Related Posts Explained

Regular readers will have noticed a lot of Adsense related posts recently, including:

These all came from the planning for jobsinchina.com. My first thought was to create a Made For Adsense mini-site, but I soon decided that I wanted to create a blog, so I could write about my experiences in China.

At that stage, I realised that a blog with good content, would be less successful with Adsense than an MFA site with mediocre content. This lead to the "don’t solve their problems" theory outlined in the Adsense Dilemma post. As part of researching that post, I learnt more about Adsense Smart Pricing and the high risk blogs have of being smart priced. That lead to the second post. The third post was my solution to the problem.

So that’s why I’ve been subjecting you to all these Adsense related posts!

Ultimately, I decided to go with a blog for JobsInChina with the plan to expand into other services later. This will mean a lot of extra work, but should result in better monetization options once it’s reached a certain level.

Final Thoughts

I’m excited about JobsInChina and I’m really going to enjoy writing about China. If any of you are interested in learning more about China, or what it’s like to live there, join me at Jobs In China. Happy Chinese New Year!