Category Archives: London bloggers

London bloggers

London Bloggers are either bloggers in London or Bloggers who blog about London.

Contents
WordPress London #7
London Bloggers – Heather Cowper
Weather Photography Competition
WordPress Developer Required for Small Coding Job
London Bloggers new venue, competition and pubs
London Bloggers presentations
London Bloggers

London Bloggers are either bloggers in London or Bloggers who blog about London.

WordPress London #7

Posted on 18/11 by Andy Roberts

I went to WordPress London meetup number #7 last night, hosted by Headshift at their office near Shad Thames, along the south bank of the Thames, east of Tower Bridge. Nice to have something on the East side for once, although south of the river, I wouldn’t normally mention the general location but for Londoners, having different travel options is essential and I was pleased to be able to exit the Transport For London  system at a zone 2 tube station, Bermondsey.

WordPress London is not really a mainly social gathering like some of the bloggers meetups, it’s a business learning event and last night there were three sections, each packed with fast moving presentations full of detail, actionable insights and deeply understood data.

First up, a round up of news from the world of WordPress from Chris Adams  of Headshift with a peek at the new drag and drop file upload interface for WordPress 3.3, out very soon. There was also a heads up for the ManageWP service launched this month, a service which I use myself and would also heartily recommend for anybody who maintains more than one self-hosted WordPress installation, in fact it’s brilliant if you have dozens or more.

WordPress London Meetup

WordPress London Meetup

Then David Bain delivered a comprehensive briefing about SEO for WordPress, including an outline of a hub and spoke structure for content based on using pages for the main parts of a site, supported by posts  All based around keyword targeting, which, while possibly on it’s way to becoming somewhat old-school,  is after all what search engine optimisation is all about. One or two plugin tips to be followed up there.

Finally, Keith Devon a WordPress developer explained how and why to use WordPress Custom Post Types. Custom post types are not types of posts at all, but other types of content alongside of posts or pages. The example given was that of a real estate property rental site, for which the element “Property” needed to be a thing of itself, with it’s own display template in the theme, neither a post nor a page but with it’s own “add Property” section within the dashboard. This gave me some great ideas for how I might have designed one or two of my existing sites much better had the concept been around a few years ago. Keith showed us how to implement custom post types by dropping in chunks of code into functions.php “because it’s easier” but discussion from the audience suggests that using specialised plugins for the purpose may be the way to go if you want to be able to keep your site up to date with new software releases.

Time for some brief discussions and an optional visit to a Samuel Smiths pub afterwards, so I walked back along the south bank and over London Bridge back to dry land.

Hashtag: #WPLDN

WordPress London – #7 Links and Slideshare

WordPress News

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/chris.d.adams/wpldn-monthly-new…

Video: http://youtu.be/gdGOvoDmRSc

WordPress Site Structure and SEO

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/13pillars/the-3-ps-of-wordpress…

Video: http://youtu.be/rAeqcP0CHLk

Custom Post Types

Slides, video and write-up: http://keithdevon.com/2011/tuts/custom-post-types/

Download the podcast

 

 

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted in London, London bloggers, wordpress | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |

London Bloggers – Heather Cowper

Posted on 02/09 by Andy Roberts

London Bloggers Meetup last night featured a talk by Heather Cowper from Heather and Her Travels  about travel blogging in general, and in particular how travel bloggers make money from their blogs.

Heather on her travels Travel Inspiration and destination information with travel stories, travel videos, travel photos, travel podcasts
An interesting and thorough presentation, but the thing that intrigued me was the makeup of the attendees at this long established London Bloggers meetup. Very few reconisable faces amongst the eighty odd people there at The Long Acre, and if you got the chance to talk to anybody, for the most part they turned out not to be bloggers at all but people from corporate marketing departments and even one so called “blogging consultant” who doesn’t blog and never did!

Have the real bloggers left the building, content to post their valuable unique content into Facebook Twitter and Google Plus (or just reshare others) or is it just because it’s August, the silly season?

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted in London bloggers | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , |

Weather Photography Competition

Posted on 04/08 by Andy Roberts

Pools of Sunlight By Worms Head I’ve just heard about the British weather photographer of the year competition and decided to enter myself. This provided me with a nice opportunity to look back through my photographs of the summer on Flickr to see if I could find something appropriate. I browsed through my pictures of rain and a few summer seaside scenes and then lost a bit of confidence. I have pictures of light, pictures of scenes affected by weather but nothing I could really call specifically “weather photography”. My thoughts turned to extreme weather – tornadoes, floods, ice storms etc but I don’t seem to have witnessed many of those recently, not with a handy camera ready anyway. Then it occurred to me I was being far too literal in my interpretation of the competition requirements:

…to find the best amateur photographer of the British elements. Judged by top professionals and experts in the field of photography and weather, 12 finalists will be chosen for the flair, technique and originality they use in capturing British weather.

I’ve got it down to two photographs that might fit the bill here, the first is a picture of sunlight shining through gaps in the clouds over the sea near the Worms Head, Gower, South Wales. If you click through and look at the large or original sized photo I think it looks quite stunning, and it was quite an unusual weather pattern to observe for me, even if it might happen in such places more regularly than I imagine.

Pools of Sunlight By Worms Head

The second picture I’m considering is one of the dried up lake bed during an extended period of drought.

The patterns made by the drying out process in the mud make interesting shapes, and this one looks a bit like a map of Australia, a country where drought is a more familiar problem than southern Britain.

Australia

Whichever I decide, (suggestions?) or maybe I can submit both, you can have a chance to vote for me if you feel like it there, but probably more likely and preferable anyway, would be to enter one of your own weather photographs in which case do please leave your link in the comments below.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted in Art, Blogs and community, Flickr, London bloggers, UK | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , |

WordPress Developer Required for Small Coding Job

Posted on 03/11 by Andy Roberts

Are there any good coders out there with an hour or two spare?

I think I’m going to need a WordPress developer of some sort to help me try out an idea I’ve had for better navigation within some of my blogs. To begin with it’s probably just a chunk of code to create a single loop inside a template file, but if it works well there’s a good possibility to turn it into a handy plugin that would be helpful only to certain types of blogs.

WordPress developer required

WordPress developer required

So where do I go from here? I could go onto one of the rent a coder type sites and ask for a quote I suppose but I thought I’d start by putting this down on my blog so I can refer to it within my networks.

If you think you might be interested in discussing my requirements and starting very soon then do please get in touch.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted in London bloggers, wordpress | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , |

London Bloggers new venue, competition and pubs

Posted on 29/07 by Andy Roberts

I’m looking forward to the London Bloggers meetup tonight at a new venue near Blackfriars Bridge. Organiser Andy Bargery says there will be “plenty of space and cracking views over the Thames” which sounds good.

Blackfriars Bridge for London Bloggers meetup

With it being a larger venue, I noticed on the meetup site that there are still two places left at the time of writing, which would be unusual this close to the event normally. So the London bloggers group is slowly developing into an enjoyably friendly and interesting regular event, with occasional sponsorship, some presentations and now even a competion with a great prize. It’s a trip on an Airship no less., something I’ve always fancied but unfortunately the deadline has passed – doh!

Star Over London

Actually one of the reasons I missed the date was because entry to the London Bloggers competition was by writing about your local pub and why it’s so good. Where I happen to live, all the local pubs are pretty dire right now so it’s hard to find inspiration on that particular topic. Local pubs are an important community resource in smaller towns, village and city centres as well but in London they tend to be more like retail outlets which happen to sell some drinks or else shabby old buildings with few customers where the manager is just keeping things ticking over. So we tend to have to get on a bus or train to visit a pub which we’d want to be in and that actually sells something we want to drink, and if you’ve taken transport to go out of your own borough then that hardly counts as local does it.

Even if I’d decided to write about say the George at Wanstead, which was lovely and cool inside on the hottest day of the year and sells Westons Old Rosie and Organic Vintage ciders on draught, I’d have had to mention the funny group of old men who hang around on weekday afternoons, the Friday night meat market, the gauntlet of smokers crowding the entrance and the highly strained relations between bar and kitchen staff which ought to put you off eating anything that comes out of there.

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

Posted in London, London bloggers | Tagged , , , , , |

London Bloggers presentations

Posted on 26/06 by Andy Roberts

London Bloggers

This month’s London Bloggers evening meetup organised by Andy Bargery returned to the Coach and Horses with a slightly more formal evening than the usual social event, having four presentations for us to consider.

Comment Tag

Commentag.com - widget to sort discussions on your blog
Presented by Xavier Damman. After a good roundup of general strategies for encouraging comment on blogs, the WordPress plugin CommentTag was presented. It’s for when you get loads of comments on one post (like the 178 comments on this Jodie Prenger in Oliver post) and the plugin generates a tag cloud which aids filtering and navigation of the comments. This could also be useful if the trend for video comments takes off.

The audience grappled with this concept, at first imagining all sorts of artificial intelligence for auto generating the tags but in fact the tags have to be typed in by the commenters and are then stored and retrieved at runtime from a third party database. Unless you are running one of the big media blogs it’s unlikely you would bother with it and I couldn’t help wondering if this comment tagging idea is a solution that’s looking for a problem. But let’s see.

Optimising Blogspot

A mysterious person (possibly Improbulus) who blogs anonymously shared some self discovered tips for optimising blogs for search engines as well as for human readers, based on experience in an undisclosed topic using google’s blogger software. It was refreshing to hear linking out encouraged, but the idea of deliberately mixing up UK and US spellings with synonyms was pretty weird.

WordCamp UK

wordcamp-uk-wiki

Tony Scott gave us the low down on the first WordCamp UK which is a semi-unconference for the whole range of WordPress users from novice bloggers to PHP developers taking place on 19-20th July 2008 in Birmingham. Tony claimed that the conference is being organised using “open source methods” to which I would ask “where is the source?” :-)

M3

M3 Mobile Social Network
M3 is a small startup company trying to launch a product which at first hearing sounded similar to buzzspotr, but instead of doing a mashup of twitter and google maps it’s a walled garden proprietary system. On the plus side, they say the site is designed for mobile devices right from the start.

Beers

I was too late for the Free Alcohol but enjoyed a glass or two of Old Rosie with Tony, Tim and Epicurienne .

Next month’s London Bloggers Summer Social is on Tuesday July 29th

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Posted in London bloggers | Tagged , , , , , , , , , |

London Bloggers

Posted on 28/01 by Andy Roberts

Andy Bargery, who I met at a London Geek dinner last year, has set up a new home for London Bloggers, which is a blog of course, and a meetup tomorrow evening near Waterloo. I’ll be there. If you haven’t registered already, it’s too late but why not subscribe to the blog and come to the next one in February.

Welcome to the Home of London Bloggers
If you live in London and write a blog then you might be interested to come along to the regular London Bloggers Meetup. The next event is on Tuesday 29th January at the Camel & Artichoke Pub near to Waterloo, check out the Meetup page for more info.

If you can’t make it, check back here in early Feb for a round-up of the event and quite possibly a handful of photos. Then of course you can register for the next event in Feb.

If you are a London Blogger you might also want to add yourself to the London Bloggers Wiki page

Posted in Blogs and community, London, London bloggers |

Thanks for reading Andy Roberts articles about London bloggers on the DARnet Blog