For the last several years I have been working on a wordpress MU project that seems to be the bane of my existence. I will work on it non-stop for several days, and then leave it alone for a few months and then go back and find errors that I hadn’t noticed before. It is really frustrating but some day I will actually finish and launch this project.

One of my biggest issues though, is my desire to have the theme editor active while I am in the development phase. Obviously, it is not wise to have the theme editor available when you launch a community. Having your theme editor global allows any user the ability to change the theme for your whole community. Yet, I spend a lot of my time in the wordpress admin area and having to jump from admin to ftp is annoying (yes, I admit I am lazy, efficient, but lazy).

Happy 2010! For some reason I always prefer even years over the odd years. Not sure why, but I just feel more energized at the beginning of even years (probably a part of my OCD-ness showing).

Today I was looking at a couple of my blogs and I realized that the copyright date in the footer of some of them had not updated from 2009 to 2010. I figure I am not the only person to have this problem. So, I thought I would offer as a new year’s gift the below PHP code that automatically changes your blog’s copyright date to the current year on January 1st.

Required Code
Copyright © //Shows the copyright and its associated symbol
< ?php echo date('Y'); ?> //shows current year
< ?php bloginfo('name'); ?>. All rights reserved. //shows the name of the blog found in the wordpress general settings and reserved rights

auction-tag One of my favorite things to do is to find wordpress plugins. In fact, the plugins are what made me fall in love with wordpress. There are so many things that you can build and do with plugins. The nice thing is that you don’t have to pay someone to create these programs. I always tell clients, when I am using wordpress as their CMS solution, that there is probably few things they will ever need to build since the wordpress opensource community is so vast.

Currently, I am creating a finance website and was asked to include an auction into the site. Surprisingly, there are not a lot of auction plugins. However, I did find a plugin I was impressed with—wpauctions.com (yes, this is an affiliate link). Unfortunately, to get all the plugin’s functionality you need to put down $40 (they do have a free version you can use to test drive the plugin).

However, for me it was worth it because it added an additional layer to the overall site. The function that was valuable for me was the ability to put an auction into any of my posts or pages. I have a real gripe with ecommerce solutions that require a defined page or post that I am restricted to.

So, I know that this isn’t a marketing post, but when you eat, breathe, and drink computer programming you tend to also write about it as well. Currently, for my master’s program I am enrolled in a Java programming class. As stated in previous posts, Java hasn’t been easy for me to learn. I am a hard core marketing guy. However, I do see great value in being able to speak geek language. It probably isn’t efficient any more for me to tell programmers to wave their magic keyboard and build what I am dreaming up in my head.

With that being said I am going to post the java projects that are either a) really cool or b) projects that I am just dang proud of completing. This project falls into the later category. The project is not all that interesting, unless you are someone who wants to validate ISBN codes for fun. Didn’t think so!

Earlier this year I wrote about a quick way to fix wordpress themes that wouldn’t wrap text around your images correctly. It was just snidbit of code that you dropped into your style sheet, but it worked like a charm. I have since used the code on several free themes.

Recently, I was having issues with a couple wordpress themes not being able to use the caption section with the image function. Here are some screen shots I created for a friend showing the problem I was having:

Looks Fine in the Post Editor

For the last several months I have been working with Janet (aka newspapergirl.com) on creating a title for her new online pr book. That’s right, I said several months! We have gone through hundreds of possibilities. Personally, my favorite so far is, “Lois Lane’s Complete Guide To Online Press Releases” (her blog tagline is: The Lois Lane of the Web). Something about not infringing on trademarks keeps her from going with that title. Can you really trademark Superman!

It would not surprise me to learn that Janet has lost some sleep over her struggle of coming up with a nice catchy title. So, I decided I would help her further and research the titles on books people like. I’ve read hundreds of people’s top 3,5,10 books list. As I read these lists I would copy to a text file titles I liked. Soon I was creating a rather comprehensive list of my own.

I realized that my research might be of use to others so I compiled them into categories and created my own (rather large) top list. I do give full disclosure that I have not read most of these books. Though, I do start out with a list of the books I have read, which are books found in other lists. I also must disclose that each book links to Amazon for you to buy, and yes, my affiliate code is embedded (hey, this list represents countless hours of my life, the least I can ask for is 15% of your purchase ).

These days I use wordpress for anything related to web management or development, or at least some variation of wordpress (bbpress, buddypress, and anything else press). Recently, I received a forwarded email from a friend who was making a case for wordpress. The email was to the executive leaders of his company who are thinking of creating a custom blog system from scratch and trashing their current wordpress blog they’ve had for over a year.

I do not doubt other individuals have run into similar issues with their own company. When I worked for Oracle I spoke with many billion dollar companies who felt they could create something better than what Oracle had.

podcast_cr If you ask any of my friends I am passionate about blogging. I even have a vanity license plate that says “Blogger.” So, I admit I am a bit of a fanatic.

However, being the fanatic blogger that I am, I also get the priviledge of being annoyed by certain elements of blogging that probably doesn’t bother the majority of the blogosphere.

My biggest gripe deals with the podcasting element of blogging. I build a lot of blogs and there really isn’t a good free theme for either video or audio. Not to mention that the audio podcast plugins are not that great.

The BUM Award Back in the day, companies would come up with awards and then give these awards to certain websites. The whole purpose of the award was to stroke the ego of the website and to build links to the company giving the award out. I have decided that if I were to create my own imaginary award I would call it: Blogger Unknown to Many or BUM.

Not just anyone would receive my BUM award—for there certainly are many unknown bloggers out there. No the BUM Award would have to go to the blogger who: 1) actually really was an expert in his/her field (not just a self-proclaimed guru) 2) provided stellar content, amazing value, and knew what he/she was talking about, and 3) no matter how good their blog was or how knowledgeable they really were—the vast majority would still have no idea who they were.

The blogger I would give the BUM Award to this year is Joost de Valk, who blogs over at yoast.com. If you are a die hard blogger (particularly on wordpress) than you probably think I am crazy to believe that Joost deserves the BUM Award. A lot of the well known wordpress plugins are either developed by Joost or maintained by him. He also is one of the most advanced Internet marketers out there. His combination of programming knowledge and SEO is far superior than most bloggers on the web.

blog-pitch It has been an interesting journey trying to find the purpose of MyMarketer.net. If you look at some of my earlier posts, you will see that I am all over the board. Mixing personal, with hobby, and professional. It actually took me a year to really find my voice with mymarketer—and then I sold it.

I thought it would be easy to pick up my voice with another domain, but I was wrong. First, it took me sometime, and several domains, before I could find a place to call home. However, it wasn’t mymarketer.net. I worked hard to find the unique voice for that domain.

Finally, when I found it, the company that had purchased MyMarketer decided to give it back to me—and I started the process all over again.