Well that was even easier than I expected!  The whole process (backups and all) took about 25 minutes!

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

I recently installed Wordpress 2.7 on another site that I’m working on, and I thought it was great!  However, there are apprently some big changes in this version, so I could have problems getting my site up and running again!

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?

Read more…

Do you like me, want 2009 to be a great year financially?  A few days ago, I posted about a fantastic “ground floor” opportunity that the likes of you and I typically wouldn’t get to hear about.  Check out the original post here.

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.

In this post, I want to tell you about a new way to make a significant income from your blogs and podcasts!

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? Read more…

There I was, minding my own business, trying to expand my blog readership when the unthinkable happened!

“What happened?”, you might ask!

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

Read more…

I write this blog for you - my loyal readers!  To this end, I’ve been doing quite a bit of research into what people want, and it seems that there are a few things that keep cropping up that I need to address.

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!

I had to share this with you! I was reading a post on one of my favourite blogs at SEOBook.com which featured a YouTube video that I’ve noticed making the rounds where an average looking model is given a makeover to make her a poster girl.  Here’s the video, in case you’ve missed it:
Read more…

It’s rare today that I come across something that appears to be truly new on the Internet. Everything seems to be a different take on an existing theme - which is not necessarily bad - but if something catches my eye as a fresh twist, then I usually give it a chance to hold my attention.

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

Just a quick note to tell you about TwitterGroups.  It seems to be causing a huge buzz on Twitter so I decided to check it out.

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!

As you’ve probably noticed already (if you’re a regular reader) I’ve been making some changes at John’s Tech Blog.  We’re using a new theme to try to bring the site more in line with Web 2.0 type designs and this started me thinking about other Web 2.0 sites and how I could better integrate with them.

One of the big sites in the blogging world is Technorati, so I made this the focus and started preparing my blog to be more “Technorati Friendly”.

Read more…