I Need Discipline

Let LearningGate Help You Master Those Online Skills
Why I Ditched Thesis When Launching My New Design
Keep Calm and Carry on Using Feedburner

Let LearningGate Help You Master Those Online Skills

Posted: 22 Sep 2012 02:32 PM PDT

Have you ever been told that you are never too old to learn? It isn't just one of those worn out sayings that people say which mean nothing, at the age of 34 (I'll be 34 on the 26th of this month – hint hint) I am going to start training at a local college to be a football coach by the end of the year.

My dad is 72 years old and he is desperate to learn about the internet and how to use his laptop better, I have been trying to teach him but I don't have the time nor the patience to teach him so I have been thinking about buying him a course as a Christmas present.

Better than a pair of socks or some aftershave, right?

Obviously I wouldn't buy him a course with a company like Learning Gate, they specialise in helping and training professionals who wish to embark on a career in the IT world and their training might be a bit too much for my dad.

Taking a course with them could help you master any number of areas such as:

Online Marketing
Project Management
Executive Strategy
QuickBooks
Microsoft Office
Adobe Creative Suite

The online marketing one caught my eye, you might think that these courses will set you back a lot of money but all it will cost you is a mere $25 a month while you are taking the course and you gain access to hours and hours of videos which I would personally not wish to put a price on how much they are worth.

There is no long term commitment so you can cancel when you feel that you have accomplished your chosen subject and are then free to embark on your career with a newly acquired skill.

If you wish to find out more information then check out the link – http://www.learninggate.com/?page=go

Why I Ditched Thesis When Launching My New Design

Posted: 21 Sep 2012 12:43 PM PDT

I am notorious for changing my themes with alarming regularity. Long-term readers of this blog and my personal blog will be able to vouch that I used to change the themes to the respective blogs on a weekly basis. It wasn't unheard of for people to go away on holiday and come home to discover I had changed the theme not once but twice while they were away.

When I first decided to try and do this blogging lark full time (January 2010, up until then it was purely a sideline) I decided that I could no longer keep changing my theme as often as it would probably upset readers, so I picked a design from Thesis and stuck with that design for nearly three years.

I decided it was time for a change because more and more people had started to use the same premium theme as me and a lot of them were in the same niche as me.

Ditching Thesis

Let me set the record straight here, I enjoyed experimenting with Thesis but I decided to try something else because a lot of the little hacks that work with pretty much every other theme do not work with Thesis themes because they are built differently. It became incredibly frustrating that I would have to pay someone a lot of money if I wanted to add these hacks for me.

I also found it difficult to find a designer who would create me a new theme to use with Thesis without forcing me to take out a huge loan or rob a bank. Seriously, I know Thesis might be different but is it really worth paying FOUR TIMES AS MUCH AS A NORMAL THEME?

Onwards & Upwards

Making the change to the new theme was helped even further when I discovered that I could not only cut down on the amount of plugins that I use (cut at least a dozen of them) but it also displayed a nice condensed version of itself for mobile users.

Faster baby!

The site also now loads noticeably faster, but I think this might be down to me uninstalling over a dozen plugins, some of which took a lot of room. I was running 38 plugins and have shaved it down to 20 and I'll be looking to reduce that even further to speed up even more.

Images

After spending many years acting like an old grump refusing to move with the times I have started using images on my blog. I'm only using thumbnails and an image slider but it is a start.

Even Better Social Media Interaction

When I released my last update I wanted to make better use of social media on the blog and I started to do that but it took a while to find the right plugin. Thankfully this theme comes with a decent social media section built into it and it offers a staggering 45 buttons to choose from.

What Do You Think?

I'm keen to receive feedback on the new design, please feel free to leave a comment below and let me know what you like and hate about the new theme or what additions you would like to see.

Keep Calm and Carry on Using Feedburner

Posted: 20 Sep 2012 08:56 AM PDT

You may have read recently via blogs and forums that Google will be shutting down Feedburner, a service that helps people run their RSS feeds better for free, on October 20th 2012. It has caused a huge storm on the internet and the ultimate message seems to be "Move your feed before Google closes and you lose it".

There have been a number of events that have happened recently which have fueled this state of panic among people:

Google depreciated the Feedburner API (along with a number of others).
Their official Twitter account has suddenly been closed with no warning at all.
The Japanese version was shut down when Google forgot/refused to renew the domain.

Many people have pointed to the fact that Google have depreciated the Feedburner API, I believe that some people don't fully understand what the API does and have immediately got the wrong end of the stick.

Depreciating the API means that plugins and scripts that you use to display your data on your site will no longer work. Google could have made this decision in a bid to make more people display their own counter which I'm sure works on something different.

Yes they did stop using their Twitter account but the account is still up and Google have recently completed moving all their Feedburner support to one big forum, their Twitter account had only twelve thousand followers their forum attacks 20 times more people.

I am puzzled as to why they allowed their Japanese domain to run out though, we all get emails informing us when our domains are going to expire so my only reasoning is that they deliberately let the domain run out as they intend to merge the Japanese version with the English version.

I am not sure what is going to happen as Google has been completely silent, despite several top sites requesting them to answer us, you could jump ship right now to one of the rivals (FeedBlitz is always mentioned but it is a paid service) or you could just calm down, take a deep breath and see what happens.

What do you think? Are you looking to move? Or are you going to remain calm like me and see where Google goes with Feedburner?