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The Easy Way to Integrate WordPress and bbPress

I had tried messing around with bbPress way back when and it wasn’t the easiest animal to tame. Recently though bbPress has graduated to version 1.0 and is much easier to tame. Especially usefully is it’s built-in integration with WordPress.

I have to admit that my first attempt at getting bbPress and WordPress playing together did not go well. I was trying to get cookie integration working and it wouldn’t. I tried 3 different sets of instructions and the third set work. Here is a link to those instructions.

Integrate bbPress 1.0 with WordPress 2.8

Once I completed his simple steps cookies were working and I could login in either WordPress or bbPress and be logged into the other one. It is really nice to have two pieces of software that work so well together.

Next I am learning the templating for bbPress. I here it is not too different then the one for WordPress. Let’s hope it is as easy!

Playing with Faces and Places in iPhoto 09′

I was very happy to have received my $10 copy of iLife in the mail yesterday from Apple. I purchased my new MacBook a few weeks back and that allowed me to upgrade to the new version for a mere $10. If you have purchased a Mac in the last month or so be sure to get your copy, it is worth it.

I installed iLife 09′ last night and got a chance to play with the new Faces and Places features in iPhoto. We have roughly 20GBs of photos which comes out to about 10,000 photos (and my oldest son is only 5 years old!). I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by the results of both of these new features.

Faces in iPhoto 09’

When opening iPhoto 09′ for the first time I was informed that my iPhoto library needed to be upgraded. After clicking OK the upgrade proceeded and was finished in about 30 seconds. From there the faces scanner kicked in and informed me that it was going to scan my pictures in order to identify faces. The initial estimate for this process was around 300 minutes but actually took around an hour.

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Comments are Fixed

Comments are fixed here at idano.net now.

Sorry for the mixup.

A Quick Note to Comment Posters

I have received several emails telling me that comments are not working properly here at idano.net. I apologize for this as it is not intentional. It seems that the theme that I am using has issues if you require folks to login in order to post a comment.

I will try to fix it as soon as I can.

Behind the Scenes Progress Happening in the Network

I have been working on things – I promise. I will admit though that it has been slow going though, a WHOLE lot slower then I anticipated. This network is a monster and things have changed since I drifted from being a daily blog poster to a monthly one.

Currently I am working on a new custom theme for this site. I really do not know what medication I was on when I put this theme up here but I wish I had more. This is probably one of the worst theme I have ever put on any of my sites. To be fair this theme is of my own creation since the original theme was quite lovely. I just like the color blue for this site but it not quite working in it’s current rendition.

In the works is a Magazine styled theme that I will be developing and releasing several versions of. The main reason that I am going with a magazine styled theme is that their are certain posts/products that I want to highlight and a traditional blog layout just doesn’t cut it. The theme has a "Featured" section at the top and will show the last 3-5 featured posts. Under that the other posts will be aggregated in 2 columns. For this site/blog the posts from this blog will be in the "Featured" section and the the posts from the rest of the network will be below that in the two columns. You can see the wire frame of the theme to the right.

I have all of the pieces done, I just need to site down and put them all together. I probably will get them working on a couple of my sites first before I package them for the masses. Also, I am going to offer a free basic version for free and then offer a couple of premium version that will be for sale. I am going to price them pretty low since I actually want to sell them (some people charge too much IMO).

Anyway, I am still alive and kicking. Work is work though and takes time.

Technorati Tags: idano Blog Network, Blog Network, WordPress Theme, WordPress, WordPress Magazine Theme, Customer WordPress Themes, Free WordPress Themes

Writing Two Posts a Day on the idano Blog Network – Easier Said then Done

The picture says it all.

Two weeks ago Today I proclaimed that I would be doing 2 posts a day around the network. I started out with a bang and kept it going for 4 days. The 5th day I did a single post. From there I went AWOL in regard to posting. In my defense I did do things around the network. I updated some sites, created a new one, and did some general maintenance.

It is work though, I will not lie. Doing regular posts is what got me the traffic and page rank which attracted the advertiser but then I didn’t do anything on the sites for 9 months. Traffic is down a little, Page Rank is down a lot (this site went from PR 6 to 3 ) and I want to try to double the ad revenue that I am making now.

My hope is that by the holiday season that I am back on top again so I can cash in even more then I did last year.

Technorati Tags: idano Blog Network,Blog Network,Making Money Online,Web Entrepreneur

Google Analytics Missing Data – Benchmarking Tells All

It seems that Google Analytics has been having some hiccups in their data collection and process right around the end of April and beginning of May. They are currently processing the back data which is nice but it seems that e-commerce metrics from that time period may be lost. Users of Google Analytics have been pretty understanding and that is understandably so – I mean the service is free – but on the flip side loosing the e-commerce metrics were probably the worst metrics to have go missing.

Today I logged into my GA account and happened to click on Benchmarking and noticed a dip in the graphs. At first I thought that it was my traffic that had dipped but upon closer examination it was Google’s Benchmark that dipped. While this isn’t the end of the world in regards to using their service it does bring a case and point as to “You get what you pay for”. When there is no money on the table you really do not have a voice to complain with.

Free is great, if… your livelihood doesn’t depend on it.

Technorati Tags: Google Analytics,Google Benchmarking,Web Analytics,Data Integrity,E-commerce