Darren Rowse declared the day of April 14th the unofficial Blogger Appreciation Day. Although I’m a day late, I would like to take this opportunity and say thanks to a couple of the bloggers who inspired me over the last couple of years.
- Darren Rowse - Problogger - like I said in my first post, when I first found Darren’s blog, I spent hours reading his interesting articles. It was my first real contact with the blogging phenomenon.
- Yaro Starak - Entrepreneur’s Journey - Yaro’s dedication to help others succeed is well known. I really enjoy his articles and podacasts, as well as the BlogMasterMind course (I have to catch up on my reading though).
- Alex Cristache - Blogsessive - I met Alex after finding his blog in a CSS gallery. If you are looking for blogging tips (SEO, plugins, themes), then you should really visit his blog. Alex was kind enough to implement a couple of improvements to my recently released free Wordpress theme.
For me, their blogs have a special meaning: the beginning, the initiation, the pursuit. Thank you, guys!
And since it’s Blogger Appreciation Day, here’s a wacky idea: I’m no SEO expert or anything, but we all know how important link titles and link captions are for SEO. So wouldn’t it be nice if every blogger had these things visible on their blog, for other bloggers to use them? Call it “blogging courtesy”.
Maybe someone can take this idea and transform it into a plugin, or even a website. Just like Matt Brett’s Feed Icons, create some kind of standard.
It’s just a thought! 
After upgrading to Wordpress 2.5 a couple of days ago, I promised I would write a review. I will use some screenshots of Wordpress 2.5 and Wordpress 2.3, in order to highlight the improvements, but also the things I consider to be a bad move.
Hopefully, this will help some of you decide whether upgrading to Wordpress 2.5 is a good move. Here goes:
Overall Comments
- The new design is definitely a step forward. It’s much lighter and has some nice AJAX too, making it easier to work with.
- The header containing the main navigation went through a drastic change. I like how they split the menu into links you use on a regular basis and links that you use occasionally. The problem with the new header is that it’s a bit too high, pushing useful content below the fold. The Dashboard tab could be placed next to the right hand side links (maybe highlighted using an icon) and placed on the blueish area. So getting rid of that gray bar and tweaking spacing a bit would save some space.
- I noticed they got rid of the the Edit link in every listing: Posts, Comments, etc. This is not such a big issue, I guess I can get used to it. I’m not sure how a new user (one that jumps straight to Wordpress 2.5) would feel about this: is it more intuitive to have an Edit link, or to click the actual title?
The Dashboard
Wordpress 2.3
Wordpress 2.5
I think the Dashboard is a major step backwards in terms of usability and layout:
- I really don’t find the blog statistics to be that important. That big Right Now section is useless. I think the Incoming Links and Comments (most important part of the Dashboard) are pushed downwards for no good reason. Sure, they’ve put those big buttons there, but I never really use those links. I always click the Write tab, as I am sure most users do.
- There’s something really wrong with the content from those two panels. The font is too small and there are way to many styles in there: bold text, underlined links, various font sizes. That right hand side panel from the old Dashboard was just what the doctor ordered. The first time I saw the new Dashboard I was like: say what? I hope they change something in the next version. But hey… I guess that’s what admin themes are for.
- I noticed there’s now an RSS link for Incoming Links. I guess that can come in handy when you have a popular blog. I’ll be sure to subscribe to that feed when I’ll start getting more links.
The Write Pages
Wordpress 2.3
Wordpress 2.5
The Write page has some improvements, but in terms of usability I think they screwed up:
- Moving the Catgories panel below was a bad move, because now I have to scroll down to choose the categories, then go back up to click Publish. It’s great that they mixed some of the right hand side panels into a single Publish Status panel, but I don’t understand why they couldn’t add Categories above or below that. The Related links seem useless to me.
- By the way, changing the Timestamp is not so obvious. You have to click the Edit link next to where it says “Publish immediately”.
- I like the new Media toolbar. It’s much easier to now add images, video or audio, but most of all it’s much easier to organize your file, by using the Media Library. See screenshots below.
- Something that always bugged me in older version of Wordpress was the fact that I always had to click the Advanced Toolbar when creating a new post. In Wordpress 2.5 your settings for each post are saved, so you will find the screen just like you left it, in Visual or HTML view.
- Interesting fact: for some reason, the Advanced Toolbar is now called Kitchen Sink. Maybe it’s because those settings are for tweaking things “under the hood”?
The Manage Pages
Wordpress 2.3
Wordpress 2.5
Not much to say about the Manage pages. I think they did a great job here:
- It was frustrating to delete items one by one, so having those checkboxes makes it much easier.
- Like I said, the Edit links are gone and so are the View links. To edit an item you have to click its name and to view that page you have to click the Published link (this one is less obvious at first, but you can get used to it).
- They filled the new space with links to Categories and Tags, which is not bad at all.
- Now you can choose to view your Published or just your Draft pages.
The Media Page
Wordpress 2.3
Wordpress 2.5
The old Uploads section is now called Media Library and it’s full blown admin page for all your media files. The new table is much cooler than the old boring list. This one has screenshots, permalinks and also a column with links to posts where you used a certain item.
It’s the first time I noticed each attachment has its own page where you can even leave comments. I wasn’t sure what that attachment.php file was for, but now I know. This might come in handy.
The Comments Page
Wordpress 2.3
Wordpress 2.5
The same comments from Manage pages apply to the Comments page, plus the fact that Wordpress 2.5 also displays Gravatars for each comment. This might be a bit tricky for Wordpress 2.3 users: in order to edit a comment you need to click the person’s name. Thanks goes to Alex from Blogsessive for pointing this out!
The Widgets Page
Wordpress 2.3
Wordpress 2.5
The new Widgets page layout has changed and there are also a few changes in functionality:
- You can only drag the widgets in order to switch them around. If you want to add a widget you have to click the Add link. To remove a widget you have to click Edit and then Remove. I think a small close icon next to the Edit link would have been much better.
- I like the AJAX effect on the widgets when you click Edit. Very nice. Much easier to edit the widgets.
- I would prefer to have the active widgets on the left, but I guess it’s not a big deal.
That’s it for now.
Exactly one month ago (funny coincidence) I said I will release a couple of free Wordpress themes. I’ve been tied up with a couple of projects, but I managed to make some time and implement the first theme:
Today I would like to present Corporate Sandbox, a minimalistic Wordpress theme based on the Sandbox theme. The theme look and feel relies almost entirely on CSS and uses just a couple of images. I wanted to keep it as simple as possible, so that it would integrate with almost any website.
The theme is widget ready and very easy to customize: you can change title color in CSS in just a couple of seconds.
Corporate Sandbox is a clean and light theme, ideal for corporate blogs. It’s also a great starting point for developing future Wordpress themes. Designers can use this theme as a canvas for their creative ideas.
Preview Theme|Download Corporate Sandbox (956) - 70.41 KB
Feel free to leave your feedback or questions in the comments. I would love to know what you think about this theme. This is version 1.0, so version 1.1 will incorporate all your feedback.
LATER EDIT: I fixed the IE6 and Safari issues and made some other small tweaks. You can download the valid, cross browser version using the above link.
This blog now runs on Wordpress 2.5. Once again, the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade came in handy and saved me a lot of time. I’ll be back with a thorough review of all the new features in Wordpress 2.5, cause there are some pretty cool ones!
For now, I just want to give you a quick tip: in case you have an older version of the WPAU plugin installed (for example I had 0.8), you will probably encounter some problems when trying to use the new Automatic Plugin Upgrade feature.
If you get an error saying something like Fatal error: Cannot redeclare class pclzip in …, don’t panic. Just upgrade WPAU to the latest version using FTP. Everything should work fine after that.
Although I’ve set up this blog in December 2007, the actual blogging started about one month ago. That’s when I started to write more often, to set up plugins and make all kinds of tweaks to this blog, to interact with other bloggers, to promote my blog on forums and social networks, etc.
I will use March 1st 2007 as reference and I will write a post like this one at the beginning of each month (first day of the month if possible). I will post information about this blog’s traffic and the methods used to bring more traffic. My plan is to reach and most importantly keep an average of 500 visitors /day in the next 3 months. But hey, I won’t be upset if this happens sooner.
Below is a screenshot from Google Analytics with traffic stats from March 1st to April 1st. And no, that sudden increase is not an April’s Fool joke. It’s not Photoshop.
As you can see from this graph, there was a spike in traffic on March 13, generated by the fact that one of my articles was posted on StumbleUpon. That’s when I reached 273 visits. Apart from that, there were no major events. Still, the traffic levels increased from 10-15 Visits in February to about 50 Visits in March, so I guess that’s pretty good news.
That abrupt increase in traffic from the last couple of days is due to the fact that I have been receiving some traffic from various sources:
On April 1st this blog had 249 Visits. I know that from this graphic it looks as though traffic really took off, but I will have to disappoint you: after April 1st, traffic levels didn’t continue to rise above the record of 273 Visits / day. But there is some good news: traffic didn’t fall all the way down to 50 Visits, but is steady at about 75 Visits / day.
And now it’s time to draw some conclusions:
- Work on your SEO and how you can bring more traffic from search engines. I know I have to: search engine traffic accounts for only 11% of the traffic I received in March. This is way, way too little, but the good news is there’s a lot of room for growth.
- The occasional wave of social networking traffic will make you popular, but only for a while. You will soon find out that you can’t ride the wave for too long. You just have know how to take advantage of your 10 minutes of fame.
- Building traffic for your blog is not an easy thing to do and it doesn’t happen over night. Like with every other thing in life, you have to put some hours of work into it, before you can see some real results.
I’ll be back on May 1st with Part 2 of this article.
