Blogging
Paying tax on AdSense income
If you earn money from Google’s AdSense or from some other affiliate or internet related source do you declare it? Do you pay tax on your income? I’m betting a lot of people don’t treat this kind of income as real income and don’t pay any tax on it. If you have a normal day job which you pay tax on, and you just get a ‘pocket money’ [...]
Proof that Alexa rankings can be very inaccurate for small websites
Here is a comparison of the actual viewing figures for this site (as recorded in Google Analytics), against the values that Alexa reports. Alexa vs Google Analytics page views This is a fairly small blog, getting 600-800 page views per day. If you too have a website which is of a similar size you might be interested in just how wrong [...]
Notes on upgrading to WordPress 3.0 on 1and1
Normally I’d wait until at least the x.01 release of a new WordPress before upgrading. But this time I wanted to try the new WordPress soon after the final 3.0 version was out. I still waited a few days before installing it to let other people discover and fix any initial problems. Problems and fixes My wait paid off as a number of people [...]
Renaming table prefix on WordPress 2.9
I wanted to rename the table prefix for this blog before upgrading to WordPress 3.0. I knew about the WordPress Table Prefix Rename Plugin which claimed to work for WordPress 2.x, but I couldn’t find anyone saying they had tried it specifically on WordPress 2.9. The only thing to do was to try it myself. As stated in the documentation [...]
Visualising the Google PageRank scale
Google’s PageRank is a scale from 0-10 that shows how well connected web pages are. Web pages with higher PageRank values have more quality links pointing to them. It is not a linear scale, it is a logarithmic scale. People estimates that the logarithm base is between 5 and 10. Because it is a logarithmic scale it can be quite hard to [...]
What I’ve learnt after 100 blog posts
Today marks a significant milestone for this blog. After two and a half years I have reached my 100th post! I thought this would be a good moment to look back at what I’ve learnt from writing a hobby blog. Why I created this blog I’ve been a hobbyist website builder for about 13 years now. I’ve created a mixture of technical and [...]
Writing WordPress posts offline in Word with the help of VBA macros
If you want to write your WordPress posts offline (i.e. in a separate editor to the WordPress editor), then you may find you have to spend a fair bit of time reformatting the blog post to add any required WordPress formatting before you can publish. There are lots of reasons for wanting to write your WordPress blog posts offline. You may not [...]
Tips for upgrading to WordPress 2.9 on 1and1
A few days ago I upgraded this blog from WordPress 2.8.5 to 2.9. Here are some tips on what I did in case you run into any of the same issues that I did. My blog is hosted by 1and1 and some of the information may be specific to them. This isn’t meant as a full upgrade guide – just a collection of tips that may help you. First make sure [...]
Upgrade WordPress to 2.8.1 on 1and1
In the bad old days upgrading anything WordPress related (plugins, themes, or WordPress itself) would at best involve manually downloading a zip, extracting it locally and then using FTP to upload the changes to your web server. At worst it could require manually editing files, and making database changes. In February last year I wrote about [...]
Speeding up a WordPress blog with caching
I decided to investigate some methods of speeding up page load times on my this blog. An obvious way to do this seemed to be to add some caching to the site to reduce the load on the MySQL server. Searching for WordPress caching information gives a lot of references to adding a define('WP_CACHE', true); line to your wp-config.php file. [...]
