I’ve been holding off on the tagging feature on a few client projects for this release and now that it’s in beta I’ll be looking forward to playing around with it and giving it a healthy test run or two before it’s ready for public consumption.

Also, thanks to Dean’s Permalinks Migration plugin, I finally made the switch from my old-school permalinks to something a bit cleaner this evening. With quite a few pages indexed and pulling traffic, setting up 301 redirects was important to switching URL styles and there’s no way I wanted to go through and do it manually. Dean’s work brought it down to less than 30 seconds. We’ll see how it affects traffic (if at all) over the next few days.

Have a wonderful rest of the evening my friends.

Until next time,

-Jonathan

P.S. I started up a WordPress Tumblr awhile back. It’s still a bit small, but it has some good resources for anyone interested in WordPress development. Grab the feed and pass along any additions you may have.

An interesting experience of mine as a developer has been my limitation to dial-up Internet access for just about a year now. My family and I have a nice little home out in the country and although our neighbors have been graced by DSL’s presence, our little home was ignored.

As such, I haven’t been all that big on downloading new programs. Internet Explorer 7.0 is still on my “to download” list along with a few other updates.

But, yesterday morning, I made an exception and downloaded a copy of Opera 9.2, weighing in at a relatively light 4.6
megabytes.

And so here I am, writing and (in a few more minutes) working a way on a new browser. So far, I’m impressed. Here are a few
things I like:

• “Speed Dial” - Typing Ctrl + T in Opera now opens the “Speed Dial” tab. In my short experience with it, I already see it as an improvement on Firefox simply opening a new empty tab.
• Mouse Gestures – My good friend Mr. Mitchener has informed me that this isn’t something new to Firefox. What impressed me, though, was the very thorough explanation given and the fact that Opera made it a point to make me aware of the features
• “Faster” – While speed is subjective, especially for those of us web developers on dialup, and though I may be just imagining things, I get the sense that Opera has a bit of a snappier response time than Firefox and certainly more so than IE.

That said, there are a few things that would take some getting used too. It appears that Opera doesn’t work so well with WordPress’s built-in WYSIWYG editor which quickly became a reason for me to dump the WYISWYG altogether.

Other than that, I’m impressed and will continue to experiment.

I’m still a big fan of Firefox and am even looking forward to playing with Internet Explorer 7 when I finally get a chance to download it (Maybe 8 will be out by then?). A primary reason for getting Opera is to add another level of testing for client projects. But the other big reason after that is “the bottom line.” How can using this browser make my life as a web developer easier? I will continue to experiment with Opera and see if I can find a solid answer for that. If I can, I’ll be hooked.

Cheers to the Opera development team. You guys have done excellently.

For the Opera users out there, web developers especially, any tips or suggestions you have to share from your experience are all greatly appreciated.

Alrighty, back to work! :)

-Jonathan

About a week ago, I was doing some casual searching for a stats tracking solution. I had been working on an idea for a way to monitor information across my entire network of websites from a single location. So far, while I had a few possibilities in mind, none of the programs out there quite fit the bill. I wasn’t just interested in a program that could monitor traffic for me, I needed something I could customize to display other important information as well.

Then I found pMetrics. And it looks like I found it the very day that it launched! :)

The feature that immediately sold me, above and beyond its nice interface and thorough stats tracking, was the ability to export the data via RSS. Eventually I’ll be taking those RSS feeds and encorporating them into a backend manager for my various website networks.

I signed up and immediately logged in to upgrade my account to premium. Quite humorously, it took me several minutes to figure out how to purchase a premium account without waiting for the trial to end, which I’m suggesting that they change as they continue work on the site.

In the first week, I’m extremely happy with the service and, as soon as they give me the ability to test it out on multiple sites *hint hint*, I’ll be looking forward to rolling it out on a few of my other projects.

More on pMetrics as time goes on, for now, I suggest giving it a try. The price is right.. *grins*.. for sites under 1000 uniques a day it’s free and once you pass that, it’s only a few dollars a month.

Link: Check out pMetrics stats tracking (my personal referral link)

For those of you reading this immediately after the update there may still be some bugs floating around here and there. If you find anything, drop me a comment and let me know. The hunt is on!

-Jonathan

This is my first public offering in the world of niche marketing. The idea behind Content Heroes is to furnish niche marketers with high quality content.. content that you’ll be proud to have on your site, content that your visitors will understand and actually learn from and content that will last.

My goal is also to make it something that’s affordable for the niche marketer, web designer, and anyone who has a desire for quality! Content writers can easily be anywhere from $10-20 an article for a small 400-500 word article and, unfortunately, even at those prices you don’t always get the highest quality.

I’ve been blessed and priviliged to work with a team of excellent content writers on this project who understand the importance of high quality and who are proud of their work. As ContentHeroes grows I’m looking forward to working with even more : ).

With the launch of ContentHeroes, we have a single product offering, and that’s something called the “MiniPack”. For just $5 you get 5 high quality, completely original, proof-read and double checked, 400-500 word articles in a given niche topic. We started off with 5 topics and we’ll be adding more and more as time goes on.

Check it out and above all, let me know what you think! I appreciate all the feedback you guys give : ).

Thank you all and I look forward to hearing from you!

-Jonathan

-Jonathan

I’ve been planning it for awhile and things have finally fallen into place. This time around, I’ll be building jonathanwold.com entirely in CSS with valid XHTML markup, a fun challenge! Along with that makeover I’ll be finally making the switch of my blog over to the WordPress blogging engine.

..Scary stuff ;).

Potentially scary, but mostly very exciting. Once the structure of the site is finished it’ll be a matter of going over all my old content, republishing the bulk of it and rewriting the rest, as well as adding in new stuff. Its going to be a monster of a project, but I’m looking forward to it!

Along with the restructure and the new look, I’ll be looking at ways of sharpening my focus and providing more value through my blog. It is first and foremost an account of my life and my experiences, and beyond that, I want it to be a way for me to share the things I’ve learned and help others in every way that I can.

That’s one of the things I really really enjoy, being able to share the things I’ve learned and innovated and then be able watch what I share make a difference in someone ele’s life.

So, with the new release of my blog, you can expect to see more of the general updates on what’s going on in my life, and then a stronger focus on sharing and teaching the things that I’m learning and innovating. More lessons on things entrepreneurial, more articles on niche marketing, community building, and other passions of mine, and more surprises :). I love surprises and just as much as I love them, I love sharing them.. Look forward to surprises ;).

And that’s just about that! The next few days are gonna be crazy. I didn’t realize how fast Thanksgiving’s coming! I’ll spend a little bit of time on the site and the rest will be spread between Youthcove and a project that I’m working with Paulie on.

Have a beautiful evening and I look forward to hearing from you guys!

-Jonathan Wold