zedzdead

Adding Microformats and GEO location data

Like everybody, when I set up Wordpress, I quickly added a few perfunctory lines to introduce myself. I knew I should be able to code it up and make as many microformats available as possible. I did most of it last night. I pretty much used the example on the microformats website and changed it with my own details.

When I tested it with Operator, everything looked great, except that the Locations tab was not showing any functions. I (wrongly) thought that the zip code would be used. So tonight, I had a little look around and even twittered for help, but most of my followers must be bloody spammers so in the end I found what I was looking for myself, on the microformats site. I pledge to visit it more often (thanks to RSS) because there’s loads of new stuff on there.

Tags: colophon, geospacial, markup, microformat

Domino to PHP the final nail

This evening, in between messing about with Twitter, I took the first steps to moving the last bits of my web empire (ha!) off the domino platform and onto LAMP. I’m using a very cheap hosting service from media30 and have had no complaints, however, the domino costs had spiraled in recent years mostly down to my poor management, but once I pull the plug, I’ll be able to look at some quality PHP hosting.

Anyone got any recommendations for LAMP (PHP5) with good symfony support (doesn’t have to be UK based). At the moment, I’m drawn towards media temple but I still have a few days before I close the domino platform down.

Tags: domino, hosting, php, symfony

Panic Set-Up

Byrne Ave Baths

Last Friday my brother contacted me.  He had become chairman of a trust, that had gone bust which looked after a local baths at Byrne Avenue, Rock Ferry.  He needed a website set up quickly, and at minimum cost – isn’t it always, to guage interest in trying to save the baths and to get as much expose as possible.

I told him to give wordpress a whirl, its free and you’re set up in minutes and as long as you don’t want your own specific domain name, its fits the bill.  I could tell by the sound of his voice that that was exactly what he was looking for, but that he wasn’t confident that it was as easy as I said it was.  So I quickly fired up wordpress.com, and set up a userid of byrneav.  Up went the site.  I registered the site with my brother’s email address so I rang him back straight away to let him know that I’d done it.  He was impressed.  I asked him if he’d thought about using twitter.  He said he’d heard of it but hadn’t used it and didn’t really understand what it was all about anyway.

Ten minutes later the account was set up.  I knew he wanted maximum exposure, so I hooked up a few of my followers, who I knew were local journalists and who I knew by using twitter myself used it as a tool to find local human interest stories.  I rang him and asked him to verify the twitter account via his email and told him to give it a try.  I also completed the bio information and hooked up the website and left him with it for the weekend.

By Monday morning he had tweeted once, and composed the about page on the site.  Twitter in the same time had organically grown 5 genuine followers.  I gave him a push by adding a blog post as he had told me that there was going to be a piece on the trust and the baths on the Roger Phillips show that afternoon.  The site and twitter were both mentioned as part of the broadcast and by this morning there were 21 followers on twitter (2-3 of which had signed up for accounts purely on the strength of the broadcast) and there were 4 comments on the site (no spam, Akismet still hasn’t kicked in).

Within the direct messages on twitter were information on a Facebook group which was duly hooked up and comments about where to find the specific feature on BBC’s iPlayer.  By this afternoon 3 journalists had twittered their interest and those contacts are now in the hands of my brother to follow up.

I’ll keep an eye on the site and on twitter but I think that I’ll just see how my fledgling flies now that I’ve pushed him out of his Web1.0 nest into the big blue Web2.0 yonder.

Good luck bro, and good luck Byrne Avenue Baths….

Tags: byrne av, publicity, twitter, wordpress