This is my first post in a long time, as you can tell. One of the reasons I'm writing an entry is due to what's been going on in the WordPress world. In case you've been living under a rock, there is currently a big public battle going on between Matt Mullenweg, the company he runs, 'Automattic', and a rival called WP Engine. I can only speculate as to the real reasons for this public spat. On its surface, one side claims it's about a trademark dispute. But based on the actions of that same side, it seems to be some poorly thought out plan to exert more control over the community, and to attempt ...

I was recently looking for a decently priced VPS where I could host a couple of small to medium sized websites. I actually signed up for a few random ones that I found on Google and tried them for a few days, but they didn’t strike me as working very well. One of them actually crashed after about an hour, and it took about eight hours for support to finally restart it for me. Eventually I started looking around the internet a bit more, and ran into a relatively new company called Digital Ocean. Digital Ocean VPS I realize that not all web companies have nice looking web pages, but whenever I ...

I was recently attending WordCamp Europe near Amsterdam, and met Vladimir from ManageWP. I’ve heard lots about ManageWP over the last year or so, and even helped do an integration with WPtouch Pro to make it work with their system. But I’ve never actually sat down and spent any time with their system, and decided it was time to sign-up for an account, do a bit of exploring and write a basic ManageWP review to let people know what the service is all about. ManageWP is a service that basically helps you manage multiple WordPress websites, all from their own proprietary dashboard. As anyone who ...

One of the first things I did when I committed myself to travelling around the world was to set up a blog. Indeed, I recently just assisted two other people in getting theirs up, one for a trip around the world, and one for a yearly RV trip down to Arizona. This post will give you easy instructions for how to set up a blog using WordPress. Part of the motivation I find with most people is the desire to share some of their experiences, both positive and negative, with others. Since so much of travel research is done these days via the Internet, the desire for most people to contribute to that wealth ...

After my recent mention on Reddit last week, I decided to try and improve the responsiveness of my little DigitalOcean VPS even more than it already was. I was definitely happy that I was able to withstand almost 20,000 visitors in just a few hours, but thought I might be able to improve things further by switching from Apache to Nginx. I debated it a long time ago, but never made the plunge for a few different reasons. First, I typically used hosting services based on cPanel. From what I gather, cPanel doesn’t really work well with Nginx (or at all), so that was never really an option. And ...

I’ve been trying to track where exactly people go when they leave my website for a few pages recently, and wrote some code based on a few other examples on the Internet. Basically this bit of Javascript will force Google Analytics to log a special request so that you can see where the user went. It uses jQuery, so you have to make sure you have that included in your theme. Here’s some code that will let you track outbound links on your WordPress website. jQuery( 'a' ).on( 'click',function( e ) { var url = jQuery( this ).attr( 'href' ); var customName = jQuery( this ).attr( 'data-link-name' ...

I’ve recently been optimizing a few different WordPress websites, and wanted to share with everyone some of the easy ways to speed up your WordPress website. Some of these tips are intended for server administrators and assume that you have root access to your server and/or cPanel/WHM (if you’re using cPanel). Other tips are intended for any WordPress website administrator. This article has 5 different tips for how to speed up your WordPress website. If you currently don’t have a WordPress website but are considering setting one up, here is information on how to setup a WordPress blog. Install ...

I recently returned returned about four month’s ago from a three week visit to Australia. I managed to make it as far as New Zealand in 2011, but didn’t have the time to get across to Australia. Despite appearances, most people think Australia and New Zealand are fairly close – but they are actually separated by a distance that would take between 3.5 and 4 hours to fly between them, which is obviously quite far (like going from Calgary to Toronto). I left Vancouver on a Wednesday with the goal of being in Sydney on the Friday (you lose a day crossing the date-line). It was a long flight ...

I had an opportunity the other day to record an hour long podcast with my friend John Biehler. John recently started a technology-based podcast called TekEh that has a particular emphasis on Canadian content and guests. His first episode was Kemp Edwards from HootSuite, and talked mainly about the experiences of being in Austin, Texas for South by Southwest. I was excited to be the second guest in the series, and spent an hour sipping a rum and coke and talking about WordPress, our experiences at BraveNewCode creating commercial plugins, having clients, photography, travelling around the world, ...

Update: Here are the slides from the presentation – enjoy! I’m giving a talk in a few hours down at The Network Hub, and wanted to start a post here for some of the information. For those of you who can’t make it or are stuck on the waitlist, I’ll be talking about the following items: Creative Commons Licensing WordPress and Social Media Stats Plugin: Copyrighted Posts (Licensing Content) Plugin: Tweet, Like, Google +1 and Share (Sharing) Plugin: ShareThis (Sharing) Plugin: Sociable (Sharing) Plugin: Flickr RSS (Flickr) Plugin: MudSlideShow (Flickr/Picassa) Post From Flickr to WordPress ...

WordPress Presentations at the Network Hub, photo by Ianiv and Arieanna Rebecca is over in Victoria right now for Social Media Camp, and it sounds like it’s a great event. WIthout a doubt, everyone is interested in social media right now, and learning how they can leverage it to build relationships and better run their business. While it hasn’t been officially announced yet, I’ll be giving a talk about WordPress and social media on June the 23rd at the monthly WordPress meet-up in Vancouver. It’ll be at the Network Hub, and should be a fun event. Hopefully whoever comes out will be up ...

We’re getting pretty close to releasing WPtouch 2.0 soon. We haven’t officially set a date, but the release will probably be counted using weeks, and can probably be counted using the fingers on one hand. We’ll hopefully firm that up next week. Dale wrote a pretty informative post over on BraveNewCode, so check it out. In short, we’ll be releasing a very reasonably priced paid version that includes support first, then will eventually roll out another free version using the new codebase. The major addition to WPtouch 2.0 is a new theme framework for creating mobile themes. WPtouch 2.0 will ...

It’s still early in the process, but today we (as a group) started planning a big WordPress event in Vancouver: WordCamp Vancouver. For those of you who follow regularly, you’ll remember that I was a co-organizer of WordCamp Whistler, which turned out to be a very well received event with an attendance of about 120 people, which is rather remarkable, given how expensive Whistler is and how far many people drove to be there. In the past, I’ve helped put together a few small WordCamp Vancouver events, but the one we’re planning is going to be a fairly large one I imagine. Right now we’re ...

Everyone keeps asking me if there’s going to be another WordCamp Whistler this year. Unfortunately the answer is no (at least for the January – March period), not because there’s not enough interest (in fact, many people approached me during the social last year and said what a great time they had, and how they wanted to do it again), but because the 2010 Olympics are happening around the same time, and the logistics of that event will basically make it impossible to pull off this year. So while I make no promises, perhaps there will be a late 2010 version or and early 2011 version of WordCamp ...

This weekend was pretty uneventful. I wasn’t feeling overly ambitious, so I hung out close to home mostly and rented a few movies. I’m not sure if there really are no movies, or if Apple TV is exceptionally crappy right now, but I hardly found anything to watch at all. Back in September I wrote a post about switching to Server Beach. For the most part, it’s been pretty rock solid. We have a dual core server there with cPanel on it, and it’s been relatively pain-free. One of the reasons we opted for a dedicated server was to make our lives a lot easier. Prior to setting it up, Dale and ...

Wow, it’s only Tuesday, and already we’ve had quite the week so far at BraveNewCode. Yesterday we pulled the curtain back on a brand new Vision Critical site. Vision Critical was recently announced as the fastest growing company in British Columbia, and it was a lot of fun working with that team. Today Dale and I woke up and starting seeing some press about the new mobile versions on WordPress.com. WordPress.com is the free, hosted version of the WordPress platform, and currently has around 5 million blogs or so on it I believe. As of today, the iPhone plugin for WordPress that Dale and I ...

Well, I made it back home late last night. Thankfully, the border agents didn’t grill me as hard as they normally do, otherwise I probably would have started with the smart ass responses. I gotta say, WordCamp Portland was a really amazing event, so major kudos to everyone involved in pulling it off. In fact, with each WordCamp I attend, I think that bar is getting progressively pushed higher and higher. For example, prior to my talk someone came and fitted me with a wireless microphone in addition to a normal microphone, the former being for the live stream. In addition, they exported all my ...

Well, here we are. It’s been a long time coming, but WordCamp Portland is finally here. I spent most of yesterday traveling, mainly due to the slowness of airlines, but ended up arriving around 6:30pm or so last night. There was a dinner last night for the speakers and sponsors, and it was good to finally meet everyone involved in the event. The restaurant was Ethiopian, which you don’t see too many of back in BC, so it was a great treat. Thanks to the dinner sponsor who picked up the food and drinks last night. I was originally going to come back to my hotel room last night and work on my ...

I’m trying to include some stats in my WordCamp Portland presentation. I was hoping everyone who reads this might be able to answer a few questions (please only vote for the topics that are relevant to you): [poll id=”16″] [poll id=”17″] [poll id=”18″] [poll id=”19″] [poll id=”20″] Based on the results from this, I might ask a few more questions. Thanks everyone. ...

I just finished booking my flight to WordCamp Portland, so I figured now was a good time to write a post about it. I was a co-organizer for two WordCamp Vancouver events, as well as one up in Whistler, but strangely enough I haven’t actually spoken at a WordCamp for almost about two years now. So having me up front should make for some interesting entertainment. I’ll be speaking on mobile blogging, with an emphasis on our WPtouch plugin. I’ll probably also talk a bit about mobile blogging in general, similarly to what I talked about at the Network Hub a few years ago. If I have time, I’ll ...