As we move into 2009, I’m looking to be more focused with my blogging in order to cover topics that YOU want to read!  With this in mind, I’m conducting a poll on the existing topics that I cover, and looking for key topics that you *wish* I was covering!

Please complete the poll below and I’ll publish the results in a few days:

If anyone else is thinking of doing this, don’t worry!  As long as you follow the instructions, it should be plain sailing!

In reality, you shouldn’t notice any changes to the site itself, apart from an improvement in performance.  However, the improvements to the admin interface are huge!

There are also a large number of new plugins which have been developed solely for version 2.7 which I’m confident will make your experience of John’s Tech Blog more rewarding.

So what am I doing to prepare for this upgrade?

Backups

My first step will be take backups.  I’ll backup the site itself by logging directly onto a shell at my host and using the UNIX command line to backup all the files (using tar).  I’ll then use the phpMySQLAdmin utility to dump all my data tables out to a SQL file (Wordpress has a great description of how to do this here).  Luckily, I set a unique prefix for the tables relating to this blog, so they’re easily accesible!

The Upgrade

One of the things that Wordpress are famous for is their quick installations and upgrades.  A complete description of the simple process is available here.  In theory, this should be a painless step….!

Bringing Site Back

The final step is to bring the site back online.  Again, this should be fairly straightforward, but you need to only activate plugins one at a time, in order to be confident.  I use the fantastic “Maintenance Mode” plugin which will be the first one activated.  This should allow me to test the rest of the upgrade before any visitors see my site.

So this should all be a fairly painless exercise.  Check back tomorrow to find out if it was….!

WISH ME LUCK!

The thing is, time’s running out for you!  The doors will close on the equity sharing opportunity on 31st December 2008.

Look, even if you decide to do nothing with it, you owe it to yourself to register with them now!  You can always change your mind in the future.  On the other hand, imagine what an additional 6 figure income could do in your life?

Click here for the full story.

Before I do, let me tell you how I came across this….

I’ve been working for quite some time on monetizing my blog (which was part of the reason for the recent re-design).  I’m constantly looking for new ways of doing this, and new opportunities to get involved with.  Because of this, I have WAY MORE podcast content on my iPod that I could ever hope to listen to!!!

Last week, I was in Poland on Business and on Friday evening, was flying back home.  I’d had a tough week, so on the plane, I wanted to do nothing more than rest, and not be bothered by anyone!

Imagine the scene: I’m sitting there with my iPod on, pretending to be asleep (hey, you’ve done that too, haven’t you??) listening to some recent podcasts.  What I normally do is to start at the bottom of the list of podcasts (the earliest) and work my way up the list - but doing that would have made it obvious that I was awake!

So what could I do?

Despite that fact that listening to the podcasts in reverse order can sometimes be a bit irritating, I decided that I needed to do that in order that my “sleep” would be convincing!

A recent podcast that I’ve discovered is from “Blogger & Podcaster“.  They offer 3 different ways to subscribe to their content:

1. Paid Magazine Subscription
2. Free online magazine reader
3. Free podcast

I’d subscribed to the free podcast, as it suited my needs best and I had something like 50+ episodes to listen to!

Back to the flight….

I’m sitting there listening to the most recent few episodes, doing my best to pretend to be asleep, when I stumble across an episode about the “Blogger and Podcaster Media Network“.  This talked about their goal to provide regular, everyday bloggers like you and I with a Six Figure Income!!!  As I heard this (and the really exciting information that followed) I suddenly sat bolt upright - all pretences of sleep far from my mind!  I really needed to hear this!

You like me, have probably come across the likes of “The Podcast Network” for podcasters, and “b5media” for bloggers.  These sites act as a kind of media co-operative where loads of bloggers (or podcasters) sign up and receive aggregated ads from the network.  Advertisers win by being able to place a single ad on the network, but know that it’s going out to targetted audiences across the world.  However, this is the first such network that I’m aware of that’s targetted at bloggers and podcasters!

This isn’t what got me excited though.  It’s not what had me sitting bolt upright.  On it’s own, it wouldn’t have been enough for me to stop faking sleep…!

Would you like to know what got me really excited???

Anyone who signs up to the Blogger and Podcaster Media Network (BPMN) before 31st December 2008 will get an equity stake in the company!  This means that when they decide to IPO, we could have a significant windfall!  As they say on their site:

“Keep in mind, all members who register before December 31, 2008 will be given equity in the BPMN as a benefit of membership. In this case if you ’snooze’, you really will lose.”

We also have a huge opportunity to build our own networks within the BPMN by having people sign up under us.  They estimate that doing so will net each of us something in the region of $500-$1000 per year for each person that joins.

This brings me to my competition….

I know that the majority of my readers are blog owners and I’d love to see you benefit from this too.  To that end, I’d like to ask you all to sign up with BPMN using my name (John Landells) as the referrer.  To make this more interesting, I’m running this as a competition….

The first 10 people to sign up with me (who are also members of Entrecard) will win 50 Entrecard Credits, as soon as I receive confirmation from BPMN.

If you don’t use Entrecard and you’re one of the winners, I’ll give you a free 125×125 ad on this site for a month.

See the video below for details of how to join:

Once you’ve joined, please drop a comment below to let me know (so that I can double check my stats and be sure not to miss any entrants).

To register, please go to http://www.bloggerandpodcaster.net/ and fill out the form.  Please remember to enter “John Landells” in the “Referred By” field to be eligible for the competition.

Good luck!

UPDATE:

I’ve just been in touch with the fantastic team behind BPMN and they’ve offered to donate a copy of “Perfecting the Pitch: Creating Publicity Through Media Rapport” by Ben Lewis to one person, to be drawn at random on 1st January 2009 from the list of subscribers referred by John’s Tech Blog!

“What happened?”, you might ask!

Well, before I tell you, let me take you back a few weeks to where the story really starts….

Regular readers know that I’ve recently been making a whole raft of improvements at John’s Tech Blog.  You’ve seen the changes, haven’t you?  New design, more respectful navigation, more regular (and I hope, better quality) posts for your entertainment.

If you owned your own blog, wouldn’t you want it to be more popular?  That’s certainly my desire for John’s Tech Blog, and that’s why I posted my “Fave This Blog” competition last week (read the post here).  The essence of that post was that I was offering a free ad for a reader chosen at random from my “Fans” page on Technorati.

Yesterday, I sat at my computer in my hotel room in Poland and wrote a post reminding everyone about the competition.  Oh, and that was before breakfast, too!

I was getting excited about the buzz, so today I clicked the bookmark for my Technorati page to see how everything was going.

I was anticipating the page loading.  I could already see in my mind what the page looked like and where I’d have to scroll to in order to see how many fans I had.

Do you know what I saw?

“Network Timeout”.

Network Timeout???

Yup - Network Timeout!  Technorati was down!

I’ve been monitoring it all day and there have been a variety of messages and obvious attempts to get it up and running again, but as of now, it’s dead!

I can picture the frantic scenes at Technorati HQ.  I can imagine the huge quantities of coffee and pizza that are keeping the technicians functioning whilst they try and fix things.  But they don’t know what I know….

Think about it - Technorati was running perfectly well until recently, but then something changed.  Do you know what that was?

I posted my competition!

That’s my theory - Technorati died as a direct result of my competition being announced.

OK, so maybe my ego needs a rest!  I hope the guys get the site up and running again soon.  They do a fantastic job and we bloggers are proud to be associated with them.

If the outage lasts too long, I may change the competition - watch this space….

Before I get onto that though, did you catch my earlier post on how to get a free ad on John’s Tech Blog?  Time’s running out on this, so I’d urge you to read the post right now before it’s too late!

Anyway, back to what my readers want!

It turns out that there are a couple of things which I do here that can really annoy people (sorry!).  They are:

• Having links that open in a new Window
• Publishing an RSS feed which only contains a summary of every post

Let’s look at each one in more detail.

Links Open in New Window

My thinking behind this was that links to external sites should always be in an new window so that I wouldn’t lose visitors.  Guess what though, you know how a ‘back’ button works!  On top of this, if I’m doing my job and delivering good quality content on a consistent basis, you’ll keep coming back just because of the value that I get out of my site!

My goal now is to stop creating links which open in new Windows, and over time I’ll also remove any other links that I find around the site that still do (like the ad’s on the right, for example).  Please bear with me whilst I make this change, and in the meantime, I’m sorry!!!

RSS Feed Only Contains Summary

This one wasn’t so obvious to track down!  I noticed that I seemed to be losing subscribers to my feed almost as quickly as I was gaining new ones, so I started digging.  It struck me as odd that whilst every other feed that I subscribe to myself ave me a full feed, my own was always truncated.  I figured that was due to me being too tight to pay for some form of RSS feed publishing service, but then I spotted the option.  The ‘Reading’ option.  The default ‘For every article in a feed, show summary‘ option!

Doh!

So this option has now been corretly set to ‘Full text‘ and subscribers should start seeing what they were expecting.  If this has been affecting you, again, I’m sorry!!!!

If there’s anything else that’s annoying you about John’s Tech Blog, please comment below.  If not, why not subscribe via one of the RSS links on the top right of the page, or ‘Fave This Blog’ on Technorati using the green button in the top right-hand corner!

As a huge fan of digital photography and Photoshop techniques, I was naturally interested in what they were doing, and then YouTube really got my attention…

As you’ll no doubt know if you’ve watched any of these embedded videos in the past, when they’re done, they give you a whole host of “related” videos.  Sometimes these catch my eye and sometimes they don’t.  Often when they do, I end up disaapointed that I wasted the time waiting for the video stream to download.

However……

This time was different!  This was so funny, I COULDN’T WAIT for the stream to catch up so that I could watch it all!  This was a really well made parody!

You’ve seen pardoy videos in the past on YouTube I’m sure, and they’re often rubbish!  They’re made by some Muppet with a Handycam who thinks he’s funny!  This one though, is seriously different!

Watch it here:

Enjoy!

This has happened with BlogRize, which positions itself as follows:

BlogRize is a blog community and blog aggregator that brings you today’s most interesting web content by harnessing the collective intelligence of communities of people who enjoy reading the same blogs.

The way I see it, it’s a way of allowing us to all keep our own blogs, but to have a central place to share our content and to read other blogs that we’re fans of. To put it another way, it’s like StumbleUpon or Digg, but focused more on the readers rather than the content producers.

When you join, you get to claim your blog, which you do by adding an HTML span tag such as:

<span id=’2094227332′></span>

Bear in mind that some platforms may strip out empty ‘SPAN’ tags, so they also give you an option of simply entering the id number in your most recent post, then deleting it later.  Either way, you need to do this to get started!

It’s still early days for BlogRize, and the site currently looks very plain, so I’m keen to see what happens when they get some investment behind them!

Check it out for yourselves at www.BlogRize.com

At this stage, I’ll just share with you the description from the home page:

Who said that Twitter needs to have Groups?
Now you can create your own Group tag and invite your friends on Twitter to join you. Expand your Twitter experience by sharing links and allowing other to follow you and join your group.

Create a new Group or Join an existing group. Follow people with the same interests as you. Find new people to follow. Let people follow you. Share your favorite website links.

Create and promote your own groups… It is that simple…

In order to fully understand what it’s all about, I’ve created my own Twitter Group on the subject of Copy Writing.  Please join the group at http://twittgroups.com/group/copywriting so we can all share the experience as we move forward.

Oh, and if you’re not following me on Twitter already, you can link to my profile at http://twitter.com/jlandells.

Happy Twittering!