Tech and life

It’s important to monitor how your blog host provider is performing. You may only have one chance to attract a visitor from a search query or a backlink to your blog and if your site is down temporarily for some reason, chances are they may never retry your link and discover your blog. There are a number of free services which will monitor your site and email or SMS you when it’s down, and back online again. I’ve been using the website monitoring service Montastic for about a year now and I’m quite happy with them. The free plan actually lets you monitor up to three sites with an interval down to every 30 minutes. Each site account also includes an RSS feed.

Of course it doesn’t have to be your blog that you monitor, could be any site you’re interested in. The reason I mention this now is because I’ve noticed that of late my blog host Bluehost isn’t providing the uninterrupted service it used to, so I must contact them and find out why. Here’s a snapshot of email alerts I’ve received over the past week from Montastic. You can see that my blog was down for parts of most days.

I have another site with a different host which I’m also monitoring and it isn’t experiencing anything like this sort of downtime so it’s time to put in a ticket with Bluehost.

So I can recommend Montastic, but other free blog monitoring services were reviewed in a Mashable post back in April.

If you’re new to Tech and Life, please subscribe to the RSS feed or sign up for free email updates at the top right of this page… and have a look through our over 100 archived posts. Thanks for visiting!

It’s common knowledge in SEO circles that not posting frequently and regularly will decrease your blog page rank and probably lead to a drop in RSS feed subscribers. What I don’t accept is the advice I’ve occasionally read on some blogs that if you’re suffering from feed overload and looking to prune back your RSS subscriptions, you should unsubscribe from blogs which don’t update frequently and regularly.

As I see it, the most important consideration in unsubscribing should be content. If a blog is offering interesting fresh content, even if on an irregular basis, I would keep my subscription. Having said that, if the blog is clearly stagnating with no posts for the previous 3 or 4 months, I might just drop it, unless the blogger has posted good reasons for taking a break.

Lighten the load

When you think about it, cutting back on blogs which update only occasionally isn’t going to have much effect on your blog overload. What you should be aiming to do is cut the blogs whose content isn’t interesting to you anymore, or the blogs which are pushing out poor content just to achieve a daily post target. In addition, in the tech space there are quite a few blogs which just reblog tech news and press releases. You don’t need this duplication so cut out a few of these. All these are the culprits in overloading your blog feed.

Spare a thought for the blogger

If you’re blogging in your spare time and aren’t a full-time blogger, it certainly isn’t easy to push out good fresh content on a daily basis. I blog in my spare time and put out posts when I can. And good unique blog ideas don’t come daily. In addition, the research which goes into make a good post may take a couple of days in your spare time. I only manage to post at most 3 times a week, but it can be as little as once a fortnight. So far I haven’t put adverts on my blog so I get no monetary reward for blogging. I do it for the enjoyment. So don’t penalize the part-time or occasional blogger who hasn’t taken the step to full-time blogging or perhaps just doesn’t want to.

And if you are a full-time blogger, take a few days off now and again to recharge. You’ll almost certainly return with fresher content and have developed a few ideas in the meantime.

Content is king

This should be the main focus on whether to unsubscribe from a blog feed. If a blogger is pushing out good fresh content which is of interest to you, keep subscribing even if they do post on an irregular basis. And if you do like a post, try and thank them in the blog comments or share their post in your social network. It may be the only reward they get for their efforts.

The case for continuing to subscribe to blogs which don’t update frequently and regularly is a post from Tech and Life. If you’re reading it in full elsewhere, it’s been copied without consent. Please go to Tech and Life to read the original post and many others in the archive.

If you’re new to Tech and Life, please subscribe to the RSS feed or sign up for free email updates at the top right of this page… and have a look through our over 100 archived posts. Thanks for visiting!

A recent family bereavement got me thinking. What would happen to this blog and all my online accounts if I died tomorrow? I hadn’t really given it much thought before and I’m sure many of you are in the same boat. It’s hard enough to cope with a family bereavement let alone sit down and try and sort out someone’s online accounts so we really should give our loved ones as much help as we can to cover this unfortunate possibility. As it stands, I’m sure my wife would be completely at a loss to know where to start with my online life. Not surprising really as she doesn’t know which online accounts I have! So let’s have a look and see if there’s anything we can do to help deal with our virtual life in the event of our actual death.

What about your blog?

If you have a blog, have you thought what would happen to it if you died tomorrow? It’s actually an asset you own and I guess the first question is would any of your family want to take it on? Better find out now and if there is someone, you’ll need to be able to get your blog admin details to them somehow after your death. Don’t forget to include domain renewal dates and blog host renewal dates. More about that later. If you’ve monetized your blog through advertising for example, the income from that may be a nice little bonus for your loved ones and that may be another reason for keeping the blog alive. So remember to pass on your PayPal details. They’ll need that to be able to remit the advertising revenue back to the family. On the other hand, if no-one is really interested in carrying on your blog, they may consider selling it to another blogger. After all, a ready-made blog may well suit someone who wants to move into blogging and bypass all the hassle of setting it up and building up traffic. What will happen to your blog when you die is summed up very nicely in this post on Daily Blogging Tips.

What about Facebook?

Your loved ones will have the choice of terminating your account or keeping it in a ‘memorial state’ which removes features like status updates and contact details and lets only confirmed friends view the profile and post comments on it. Discuss this with them. Again, they’ll obviously need your admin details whichever they choose. You may also want to arrange a farewell message to be posted in the event of your death. You could keep that with your log in details as discussed next, but make sure your digital heir knows where to find the details.

Passing on the important details after death

Bear in mind that the terms of service of most online accounts don’t permit passing them on to a ‘new owner’. Each site tends to have its own rules about who can do what should someone pass on, and executors may need to make special requests to close down accounts or access your information. For info on the policies of Yahoo, MySpace, Google and Microsoft when it comes to dealing with the accounts of deceased users, read this Educo blog post or this MakeUseOf post.

If you can pass the accounts on, first you’ll have to identify someone who would be willing to tidy up all the loose ends, probably your spouse or partner. But don’t forget to cover the possibility that you and your partner may die at the same time. If you’ve already made a Will, this may all sound familiar. Of course keeping your online admin details with your Will may be a good solution. But I can hear you say, I change my passwords regularly and add new online accounts all the time, I can’t keep changing these details in my Will. Well, if you use a username/password manager like LastPass, you only have to add your email address and one master password to your Will documents. All you account usernames and passwords are held securely in LastPass. Once your digital heir accesses your LastPass Vault, they can see all your usernames and your passwords. Another possibility I read about recently on MakeUseOf is LogAway which allows you to create a single click log in for hundreds of websites. You will have to change the master password occasionally but this is all that will have to be updated with your Will documents. Of course, you don’t have to keep your details with your Will. Any secure place will do where your spouse, partner or executor can get hold of the details when required. You could also use a service like Death Switch to email your loved one with all the details after you’ve passed away.

There are also online services like Legacy Locker and Entrustet that allow the creation of a will for digital assets. Legacy Locker’s free ‘trial account’ limits you to listing three digital assets and two beneficiaries. Lifehacker have a post on Legacy Locker here and Entrustet here. Entrustet lets you assign an heir to access your accounts when you pass away. It lets you set up unlimited password-protected accounts to be transferred over to a trusted person upon your passing and lets you decide what will happen to each account.

So don’t leave it until it’s too late. You have a great opportunity to make these decisions now. Do yourself and your family a favour and make some backup arrangements to help deal with your online world in the event of your untimely death. Drop a comment below if you have already made these arrangements and you have some advice for us.

What would happen to your online accounts if you died tomorrow is a post from Tech and Life. If you’re reading it in full elsewhere, it’s been copied without consent. Please go to Tech and Life to read the original post and many others in the archive.

If you’re new to Tech and Life, please subscribe to the RSS feed or sign up for free email updates at the top right of this page. Thanks for visiting!

Further reading: Handling computer accounts after death – Rocket Moms

Image credit: Roy’s funeral

Since I started blogging, I’ve always been interested in what WordPress plugins other bloggers recommend. So over the last couple of years I’ve bookmarked 63 favorite/essential/recommended/must have WordPress plugins type posts that I’ve come across. I thought it would be useful to get an idea which were the most recommended plugins in these posts so I keyed all 300+ recommended plugin names into MS OneNote and totalled the recommendations (or votes) for each plugin. I imported everything into Excel then sorted on the vote column, excluded plugins with less than 5 votes and plotted a graph in Excel. I’ve only listed plugins with more than 5 recommendations (or votes) so as to pull out the most popular 36 from the 300+ recommended WordPress plugins.

You can probably guess which would be in the top picks but anyway here’s what I found

I’ll briefly run though the top 15 recommended plugins. Out in front were Google XML Sitemaps (39 votes), All in One SEO Pack (36 votes), Akismet (33 votes) and WP Super Cache (21 votes) which I guess everyone should have on their blog.

Google XML Sitemaps (39 votes): Generates a sitemap which helps search engines crawl your website content. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a new post.

All in One SEO Pack (36 votes): You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want. Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines. Easy for beginners to set up.

Akismet (33 votes): Blocks the majority of spam comments. Checks your blog comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

WP Super Cache (21 votes): Generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After an html file is generated, your web server will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. Your server won’t be as busy as before. This plugin will help your server cope with a front page appearance on digg.com or other social networking sites.

Contact Form 7 (15 votes): Plugin to place a contact form on your Contact page.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) (14 votes): Gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site.

Subscribe to Comments (14 votes): Enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent comments.

Sociable (14 votes): Automatically add links to your favourite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. You can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites.

Broken Link Checker (13 votes): Monitors your blog for broken links and lets you know if any are found.

NextGEN Gallery (12 votes): A fully integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option.

FeedBurner Feedsmith (11 votes): Will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/feed/ or http://www.yoursite.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed and optionally, your main comments feed as well.

WP-PageNavi (10 votes): Improves your website page navigation including the ability to jump several pages and links to jump to the start or end.

Wordpress.com Stats (10 votes): Focuses on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provides them in a clear and concise interface. Collects information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave.

Redirection (10 votes): Manages 301 redirections, keeps track of 404 errors, and generally tidies up any loose ends your site may have. This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation.

Google Analytics for WordPress (10 votes): If you are using Google Analytics then it makes sense to add this plugin. It automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links, links within comments, blogroll links and downloads.

I actually use 6 of the top 15 plugins on my blog and during the course of preparing this post I’ve spotted a few in the list which I should consider. But at the same time, I don’t want to overload my blog with plugins and slow it down given Google’s stance on page load speed.

So if you’re just starting out blogging with WordPress, or if you’re looking to add some plugins recommended across the blogosphere, have a look through these.

Are there any WordPress plugins you can’t do without which aren’t on this list? Drop a comment below.

The top recommended WordPress plugins is a post from Tech and Life. If you’re reading it in full elsewhere, it’s been copied without consent. Please go to Tech and Life to read the original post and many others in the archive.

If you’re new to Tech and Life, please subscribe to the RSS feed or sign up for free email updates at the top right of this page. Thanks for visiting!

Another small milestone here at Tech and Life – the 100th post! Time to thank everyone who’s been following the blog so far – I’m enjoying doing it in my spare time and am really encouraged by the subscriptions to the feed since I began about 18 months ago.

I’m trying to improve the blog when I can and have just signed up to FeedBurner, primarily to add the option for readers to subscribe by email for those who prefer that. I’m a little slow at getting round to it and my apologies. Anyway, please sign up for emails in the side bar if you prefer to receive updates that way. I post at most 3 times a week so I won’t be flooding your inbox! Be sure to add our email address to your ’safe list’ in your email client to make sure newsletters reach your inbox and aren’t diverted to your bulk or spam folders. Let me know if you have any problems with the subscription or any improvements I can make.

I’ve also added Google Translate to the sidebar. Although it’s not perfect, you may prefer to have this option to translate the blog into your own language. I’ve blogged about automated blog translation before. I had some problems getting it to translate to other languages and discovered that the Firefox extension Flashblock causes a conflict with Google Translate. Disabling the extension solved the problem. So if you’re using Google Translate and getting the error message: Error: The server could not complete your request. Try again later, try disabling the Flashblock extension in Firefox.

I’ve also recently added the Wapple Architect plugin so this blog can be viewed on mobile phones.

Finally, I hope to have more guest posts in the coming months – look forward to the first coming up soon. Oh and if you have any suggestions for the blog or for blog topics, drop a comment below.

Image credit: Mzelle Biscotte

If you’re new to Tech and Life, please subscribe to the RSS feed or for email updates at the top right of this page.

With the ever-expanding smartphone market these days, it’s important that your blog is mobile ready, meaning for example, that it can be rendered nice and clearly without having to scroll around too much on your phone. If you have a WordPress blog, there are a number of plugins which will remove the sidebars for example and convert the blog to a nice clean format for viewing on a cellphone. But which WordPress plugin to choose? Here’s a quick run through of how I narrowed the field down.

I went through my Diigo bookmarks and found I had bookmarked blogs discussing quite a few plugins: WordPress Mobile Pack, WPTouch, MobilePress, Wordpress Mobile Edition, and Wapple Architect Mobile to name just a few. But what I really wanted to get hold of was a comparison to see what people thought was the best mobile plugin.

Comparisons of WordPress mobile plugins

I found it hard to track down any blog which had reviewed and compared mobile plugins. In fact, if anyone’s interested and has access to a range of cellphones, there’s an opportunity for a really useful blog post here. WPFeed compared a number of plugins and chose Wordpress Mobile Plugin (but when you click the link now you’re directed to WordPress Mobile Pack), and the only other site I came across was Alpha2beta which I had Google translate from Chinese. They also compared a few and chose WordPress Mobile Pack.

I know that WPTouch is being quite well received, particularly for iPhone and Android platforms. Technically Personal uses the WPTouch plugin. In a reply to me in the comments there, Raju said he had tried quite a few plugins and found problems with them all. Wapple was a disaster he said.

Narrowing the choice down

On Mahalo Answers, I asked ‘What’s the best Wordpress plugin to make my blog mobile friendly?’ I received three answers recommending WPTouch, Wapple Architect and WordPress Mobile Pack. I was getting the feeling now that it was between these three. I liked the Wapple recommendation:

Finally, I tried a search on Twitter for wordpress AND mobile. Jumped into an interesting lead:

@dannybrown Did you test other WP mobile plugins before you settled on Wapple Architect? I’m finding it hard to pick one for my blog

@techandlife I did. Tried WordPress Mobile, WP Touch (good for iPhone, not so great others). Wapple best one I found

@techandlife And Rich Gubby of Wapple is just awesome http://bit.ly/7z2qwx

I checked back on my own bookmarks and Wapple Architect sounded really promising even though it doesn’t work for some. So I thought I’d try it first.

Installing Wapple Architect

Wasn’t just a case of downloading and installing the Wapple plugin. Had to register to receive the Developer Key, click a link in an email to complete registration, then received a Developer Key which was required to set up the plugin. Didn’t take too long though. During set up, you can upload an image to use for your mobile header and which would be automatically resized. Didn’t work for me on this occasion but I’ll try that again later. Incidentally, 2 days after registering, I received an email from Rich Gubby the Lead Developer at Wapple offering to help with the mobile styling – that’s a nice touch.

Testing Wapple Architect

I found a testing tool online to check mobile-readiness at mobiReady. My blog checked out okay.

At mobiReady, you can also check how your blog renders on a Nokia N70, Samsung Z105, Sony Ericsson k750i, Motorola v3i and Sharp GX-10.

I don’t have a smartphone but I fired up the browser on my LG Cookie and had a look at my blog:

Finally, at the top of the sidebar on the desktop version of this blog, I’ve also tried to indicate that it’s now mobile ready.

I’d love to hear how this blog renders on your mobile. Any annoyances you’ve noticed or any improvements you think I can make? If you do comment, let us know what mobile you’re using.

Most visited posts

Here’s a list of the most visited posts on this site throughout 2009. Site analytics are from Woopra. I’ve only included those posts with over 500 hits. As you can see I had a phenomenal response to my slow Firefox post. If you’re new to this site you should find some interesting older posts listed below. If these aren’t of interest, have a look around – there are about 90 posts to choose from at the moment.

Is Firefox slow for you? Here’s some tips to try which might speed it up – 11736 visits

Installing Easy Peasy Linux on my Acer Aspire One netbook – 2880 visits

Finding lost bookmarks in your info archive – 2037 visits

Send free SMS reminders to your mobile phone -1128 visits

Some Ubuntu resources for beginners – 776 visits

Uploading files to your website with Notepad++ – 649 visits

What is the best time to tweet? – 599 visits

Useful links: A to Z of search – 543 visits

Most retweeted posts

What is the best time to tweet? – 29 tweets

Is Firefox slow for you? Here’s some tips to try which might speed it up – 19 tweets

My top 15 useful bookmarklets – 13 tweets

Installing Easy Peasy Linux on my Acer Aspire One netbook – 9 tweets

Some Ubuntu resources for beginners – 5 tweets

Quick tip: Disable or remap the Caps Lock key in Windows and Linux – 5 tweets

Can I take this opportunity to thank everyone who has visited this blog throughout the year – hope you found your visit was worthwhile and thanks too to all who’ve taken the time to comment on the posts. Please subscribe to the RSS feed if you can – I blog in my spare time and it’s blog comments and rising subscriber numbers which are a great encouragement to keep blogging. Link back to any of the posts if you can and retweet any if you like them. And if there’s anything you’d like me to cover, or like to see more of, drop a comment below.

Wishing you all a happy and prosperous 2010!

As a native English speaker I’m really very fortunate. In the western world, English is the dominant language used for publishing even though globally only about 720 million out of about 6.8 billion people speak English, about 11% of the world population according to WolframAlpha. Every blog I’ve subscribed to publishes in English even though in many cases the bloggers are not native speakers but do a great job nonetheless.

But what about those many millions globally for whom English is not their native language, indeed many of whom can’t speak English at all. Are we reaching them with our blogs or could we do more? Yes I know there are online translation sites such as Jollo which can be used to translate text but should we all be providing an automated translation service on our blogs to help? After all, the net is global and so is our readership.

There are WordPress plugins like the Global Translator WordPress Plugin, widgets like the new Google Translation Widget, Microsoft Translator and others but are they really effective? Surely automated translation will never be as good as a human translation so are they worth it? I’ve always shied away from using one because I just can’t judge how good they are – I only speak English and minor conversational French.

Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspiration goes into some of the difficulties behind language translation plugins in terms of storing translation results in the blog database and more recently looks at Google Translate.

So I’d really like to know from my readers just what you think of automated translation plugins on blogs. Have you used them to translate blogs into your native language? Do you find any useful and if so which? Is the tech field with its specialized vocabulary just too much for these plugins? Do you prefer to do your own translation into your language? Please add your thoughts below and from the responses I’ll judge whether it’s worth adding this service on this site.

A few days ago, I noticed that some links in my blog posts were not clickable, or at least were only part-clickable. These were all near the right margin of the content column next to the sidebar on the right. Here’s an illustration of what was happening:

As I moved the cursor from left to right over the link Life Rocks 2.0, it would change from clickable (as indicated by the hand symbol in the top panel above) to unclickable (as indicated by the arrow in the lower panel above). Because it was near the right margin of the content column and next to the sidebar, I guessed the problem was something to do with the sidebar margin. Unfortunately, I have very little knowledge of css and php and most of what I’ve learned so far in tweaking a free WordPress theme has been through good old trial and error – keep messing around until you get the desired result. I figured that there must be an overlap of the sidebar left margin onto the content column and this was affecting links near the right margin of the content column. Perhaps someone will put me right here.

Unlike previous tweaking, I got a result pretty much straight off. This is what I did. I opened the theme’s style.css file and tried changing the width of the content-wrapper and sidebar-wrapper until things worked.

Here’s the relevant section of code before:

#content-wrapper
{
width: 60%;
float: left;
}

#content
{
float: left;
padding: 0 0 10px 30px;
}

#sidebar-wrapper
{
width: 35%;
float: right;
}

#sidebar
{
float: right;
padding: 0px 15px 10px 10px;
width: 210px;
margin-right: 15px;
margin-top: 0px;

and I changed this to:

#content-wrapper
{
width: 70%;
float: left;
}

#content
{
float: left;
padding: 0 0 10px 30px;
}

#sidebar-wrapper
{
width: 25%;
float: right;
}

#sidebar
{
float: right;
padding: 0px 15px 10px 10px;
width: 210px;
margin-right: 15px;
margin-top: 0px;

So changing the width of the content-wrapper from 60% to 70% and changing the width of the sidebar-wrapper from 35% to 25% made all the links near the sidebar completely clickable as shown below:

Very satisfying when you get a quick result.

So, I’d suggest you have a quick look at any links on your blog near the right margin with the sidebar and see if they’ve been masked by the sidebar margin. It may be just a simple fix in the style.css file.

Any css experts care to comment on what’s happening here? Is there any other tweak I could have used to sort out this problem?

I had a phenomenal response to my Firefox tips post yesterday thanks to submitting a link on the Technology board at Reddit. Yesterday was my first attempt at promoting this blog on Reddit and I’m amazed at what happened. I submitted a link to my Firefox tips post to Reddit around 2pm BST (British Summer Time) (9am EDT, 6am PDT) and over the next 24 hours, I’ve almost doubled my RSS feed subscribers adding about 350 to reach about 830 subscribers.

The link  stayed well up the first Reddit ‘What’s Hot’ page over the first 9 hours:

In hindsight, I’m actually in the wrong category on Reddit. Should probably have been in the category Software, but I was exposed to 145,000 subscribers on the Technology board.

Looking at my blog stats in Woopra, there was a huge increase to over 4000 visits and 10,000 page views yesterday. I originally published the Firefox post on my blog on Sept 2 and you can see a small effect there from previous RSS subscribers, Delicious and Twitter, but nothing compared to the Reddit effect on Sept 3.

Naturally, as the post was about Firefox, most visitors were Firefox 3 users, with Chrome the second most popular browser.

The plot below shows that Reddit and StumbleUpon were the best referrers by some considerable margin:

interestingly, with Twitter, Digg and FaceBook further behind:

I’ve never gone after bulk adding followers in Twitter but have just gone for organic growth – letting followers find me first, but clearly most of my 600 Twitter followers don’t seem to be interested in Firefox tips. I’ll keep a closer eye on referrers in future – quite easy to do with Woopra on my blog.

So, in summary, Reddit really drives traffic to your blog and it’s well worth registering and submitting a link to your blog posts there. I’ll try and get the correct category there next time, and doubtless I’ll reach a lower subscriber number with future posts – unless I start posting about technology. Still, it’s nice to have added a substantial number of new RSS feed subscribers.  I’ve just got to hold onto them now.

How do you promote your blog? Drop a comment below.