Ennui Blog

Welcome back!

After several days of testing and working out the bugs, my latest web project, Webinar Central has gone live today.

Webinar Central will become the web’s best destination to find out about the latest free webinars taking place anywhere on the web. It’s the ultimate webinar directory. At Webinar Central, you can view the latest free webinars, submit your own for inclusion and comment on past webinars. We’re harnessing the power of social media to spread the word on the latest educational webinar opportunities.

Key Features of Webinar Central:

• Submit Your Own Webinar
• See Upcoming Webinars for Current Week
• View Month by Month Calender
• Subscribe to RSS Feed of Latest Webinars
• View Webinars by Category
• Comment on Webinars
• Updated Daily
• Ongoing Blog About Webinar Tips and Tricks

Why did I start Webinar Central?

I love to learn and the advent of webinars has revolutionized the way knowledge can be disseminated over the internet. I’ve learned so much from these wonderful tools that I want to make sure that anyone has the knowledge and abilitiy to learn via this medium. There hasn’t really been a central location for all the webinars taking place on the web. There is so much going on, that if you don’t have a way to find out about it, you’ll miss out on valuable learning opportunities. So using some tools that I’ve set up, I’ll be able to monitor for future webinars all across the web and let you know about them here first. Don’t see your webinar in the database? Then you can add it for free by filling out the submission form.

I’m testing something new out, to help encourage participation on my blog posts. This blog is now a do-follow blog.

I blogged the other day about what it means to be a do-follow blog.

Basically if you leave a comment on the blog, linking to your website or blog, it will count as a backlink to the search engines. I have a Google pagerank of 2 on this blog, so it will be a decent backlink to have.

This is not a free for all. Please, do not abuse this privilege. I will be on the lookout for blatant spammers. The goal is to encourage participation.

Also, it would be nice if readers would return the link love and link back to my blog from theirs.

Have fun!

It can be difficult finding an Apple app for a specific task. Especially if you’re in the middle of a project and need a program quickly to do one thing and do it simply. So, I’ve put together a list of the 10 Mac Apps that you may not have heard of in the hopes that some people find these programs as useful as I have.

Adium

All iMacs come with iChat but it’s not fully featured enough, especially if you use Yahoo or MSN Messenger. Adium is a multi-protocol instant messenging app. It combines all the major IM protocols into one app. You can use AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Bonjour, Jabber, iChat and much much more. Best of all it’s completely free.

Cost: Free
Website: Adium

Evernote

Evernote is an incredible application. It’s a multi-platform notetaking program. It has a standalone program for taking notes, an iPhone program and a web based client. You can edit a note on any medium and they will all stay synced with each other. It’s revolutionized the way I write. A really cool feature in the iPhone program is that you can take photo snapshots and sync them. The program and the service are free (but there is a usage quota - I have never hit it).

Cost: Free
Website: Evernote

Livequartz

Everyone knows that photoshop is the mother of all image editing applications. The problem is that I have no freaking idea how to use it. Simple tasks elude me and I don’t have the time to learn it. Livequartz is a simple application sort of like MS Paint, you can edit images quickly, resize, save in a multitude of formats and do more advanced things. It’s open source and free. Great little program, it’s light and quick. You’ll have an image resized before Photoshop even opens.

Cost: Free
Website: LiveQuartz

Filezilla

Transmit is the best FTP client for Mac, in my opnion, but FileZilla is a good, free full featured alternative. It intergrates well with OS X and is very stable. It’s free and open source as well.

Cost: Free
Website: FileZilla

NeoOffice

Don’t want to gouge your eyeballs out installing MS Office for Mac? NeoOffice is a good alternative. It’s free and works with all the Office formats. It’s pretty fast and is now native to OS X.

Cost: Free
Website: NeoOffice

Scrivener

Scrivener is a fantastic writing program. It’s designed to help you brainstorm your ideas, outline them, put in notes and images and then finally write your book. Once your book is written, it will compile it for you in a Word Doc. It also has full screen writing mode, which takes away all distractions. You can do all of this in one program, it’s fantastic.

Cost: $39.95
Website: Scrivener

iStat

Not really an application. It’s a free dashboard widget that tells you everything you could possibly want to know about your computer. It tell you how much hard drive space you have, how much ram is being used, CPU temp, etc. It has it all. Excellent widget to have to keep tabs on your Mac.

Cost: Free
Website: iStat Widget

Journaler

This is a great little program if you want to keep a daily journal. It has all the requisite text editing features needed, it’s laid out like Apple Mail and other similar program. What sold me was that you can choose to blog your journal entries or you can export them easily to another format. Great for if you ever want to turn it into bookform.

Cost: $34.95
Website: Journaler

MarsEdit

I manage about seven blogs right now and it got increasingly annoying to login to all their respective web interfaces. This consolidates all your blogs and puts them into one program. You can write and update blogs on most platforms directly from the program. You can also enter your own HTML and upload images. It’s great. It has saved me a lot of time.

Cost: $29.95
Website: MarsEdit

Papers

Paper is a pretty cool app. It searches your hard drive and indexes all or your PDF files. You can rate them, tag them and organize them like you would in Mail or iPhoto. Pretty slick application. Useful for me because I save PDF’s when I come across an interesting story that I want to keep, for ideas and research.

Cost: $42.00
Website: Papers

Sometimes going through Google Analytics reports is like looking at porn. I could spend hours pouring over the figures and seeing what far flung parts of the globe that traffic comes from.

I recently ran into a problem though, on this blog actually. It appeared I was getting no visitors. This saddened me greatly because of all the work I’d put into it and SEOing it correctly. Something was fishy.

I double checked everything and everything appeared to be set-up correctly. I decided to install a Wordpress Plugin and compare the two. I installed the Statpress Wordpress plugin. I immediately discovered that something was terribly wrong.

Google was not tracking the site at all, despite everything being set up correctly. I was actually getting more than a hundred pageviews a day and Google wasn’t picking it up! I did have readers, by golly!

I re-installed Google Analytics and now it appears to be working correctly.

This raises an interesting point that I want to share with everyone. Don’t rely on one web traffic statistic platform. If you’re running Wordpress, it would be a good idea to install both Google Analytics and Statpress, that way you have redundancy and can have fun comparing the two data sets. Google does not pick up everything, especially since a lot of people block javascript and their visits would not be read. If you’re running other CMS’s such as Drupal, there are traffic monitoring programs built in that provide pretty good data.

So, from now on, Statspress will be part of my default Wordpress installation, along with Google Analytics.

I recently decided that it would be a good idea to add a link directory to one of my blogs, Anglotopia. I wanted to create a repository for links related to Britain and Anglophilia. I figured there was a simple Wordpress directory plugin for this.

I was wrong.

A google search revealed two competing link directory plugins. Neither of them actually work and have been abandoned by their developers. Both have not been updated in sometime.

If you’re really interested, here are the links.

WP-Directory
WP Link Directory

Initially, both were rather impressive. They were integrated well into Wordpress and their interfaces made sense. The only thing is that they didn’t work. Both suffer from pretty much the same problem, they fail to actually display any links.

They both display the categories just fine. But both fail to show the actual links. I did some digging and this has to do with them being incompatible with the latest Wordpress updates. And since neither plugin has been updated in quite a long time, that leaves us with no Wordpress Link Directory Plugin.

Since I don’t know PHP or how to write Wordpress Plugins, I have not idea how to figure how to fix the Wordpress Link Directory Plugins.

There is, however a roll your own solution that I adapted to fit the situation. It’s called PHP Free Directory. It’s a simple PHP script that can run along side Wordpress since they use the same platforms. It can even coexist in the database you use for Wordpress (be sure to use a different prefix).

It’s fully customizable and themeable. Though, it would take some work to make it look like your Wordpress theme.

PHP Free Directory doesn’t take much work to set up. Just change the setting in the config.php file with your preferred text editor and upload the files. Run install.php and in a few seconds you’ll have a full operational link directory. Best of all it’s free.

The only caveat is that to remove the footer, you need to buy a license, which is $50. There is also a more advanced script that has more functionality such as charging people for links.

Now, the question is how to integrate PHP Free Directory into Wordpress? The simple solution is to just keep it separate and put a static page link in your header to it.

That’s all well and good but it’s not integrated in the blog.

The solution I found was simply to embed the page in an iframe (using the tag. This will put the directory in a frame on the template page and the user can navigate through the whole directory.

I don’t think there are any SEO issues with this, Google theoretically treats the iframe as a separate page and should crawl it accordingly. It’s not elegant, but it works. I don’t have an example because I opted to just let the directory live on it’s own for now.

It would also be feasible to simply copy the code of a loaded PHP Free Directory index page into your wp page body. Again, this works. But any clicked linked will take you to the actual directory and you’ll have to update the page every time you make changes to the front page.

Hopefully, some good soul familiar with PHP and Wordpress will adapt this fantastic script into a Wordpress Plugin. I’d like to see PHP Free Directory as a Wordpress Plugin.

Stay tuned for tips on how to customize PHP Free Directory. There is also a forthcoming post on how to put a static link in a Wordpress header.

Check out the two link directories I’ve set up.

Anglotopia - Anglophile Link Directory
BacklinkUtopia - SEO Link Directory