shanemcdonald.org

As of 1pm today, Facebook has been offline. For some it is very slow loading for others it just shows en error like …

Server not found
Firefox can’t find the server at www.facebook.com.

Twitter usage is up as a result with 20-50 tweets per minute about Facebook.

We will just have to wait for Facebook to come back on-line – I’m sure its nothing serious but is certainly unexpected as Facebook haven’t had too many outages in recent times.

Solution

However if you need your fix http://m.facebook.com/ does work !!

I Saw a very funny twitter post from @ Nathan4791 “With Facebook Down I give it 3 hours before people start eating each other.”

Now that the World Cup is over, I’ve been looking at the website stats for my website. Overall, the World Cup saw an almost 200% increase in web traffic as people searched for match information and also running commentary of games in progress.

For the duration of the World Cup, June 12th to July 12th I had 63,100 Visitors to the site and 126,900 pages viewed. So for this year there have been 394,000 visitors to the site and over 854,000 page views generated – and hopefully there should be a quarter of a million visitors to the site, and 1,600,000 page views by the end of the year.

During the last month I would have thought World Cup topics would overtake other search terms on the site but not necessarily.

The top queries to this site were as follows – the keywords are linked if you want to read the actual sections they refer to.

Top 5 Referring Search Queries
4g iphone release date ireland / 4g iphone release date england / 4g iphone release date netherlands
keyboard chords list / basic keyboard chords / easy piano chords
guitar chords list / guitar minor and major chords
queen discography
reading music for beginners

There were also some news items or local events which showed.

Top Search Queries in the News
carlow to kilkenny motorway opening time / m9 kilkenny opening date
iphone signal calculation
vou vou zela / vous vous zela

It seems that the popularity of the iPhone is mapped likewise onto the web and it shows how many people are  searching for iPhone related items. With the iPhone 4G being released this month in Ireland and UK websites which have iPhone related information will see a rise in traffic.

Wordpress 3.0 is now available for download with tons of exiting new features.

Watch the video from Wordpress below on what has been added in the new Wordpress release.

A Brief rundown on the features of WordPress 3.0 include New menus, new designs, better posting, nice default wordpress template called Twenty Ten, customistion of the Twenty Ten template, creation of short links, bulk plugin upgrades, huge revamp of the Wordpress API, and much more.

You can get the full list of what’s changed in Wordpress 3.0 at http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.0

WordPress 3.0 is available for download from http://wordpress.org/download/ or you can upgrade WordPress to version 3.0 automatically from your control panel dashboard.

Happy Blogging!

WordPress Blogging software is one of the best and one of the easiest to Install and Setup.
This is a basic guide to installing WordPress.

This is a very quick guide to installing WordPress is aimed at those who already have a working knowledge of concepts such as FTP, Config Files, MySQL Databases and have access to their own web server. This WordPress Install Guide is guided towards Apache servers running on Linux with PHP installed and a MySQL Database available.  For version 2.9.2 (version available at time of writing this install guide) the minimum requirements for installation are PHP version 4.3 or greater and a  MySQL database version 4.1.2 or greater. If you are unsure contact your website hosting company or check your control panel (e.g. cPanel). You will also need FTP Access to your web server and FTP Software – I recommend FireFTP which is a FireFox Plugin and is quite a good FTP Client.

Step 1 : Download WordPress & Extract WordPress on your PC

WordPress is Free and you can download it at http://wordpress.org/download/

The software downloads as a compressed ZIP file and is about 2.2Mb which would take under a minute on decent broadband.

Once Downloaded, you can extract this on your PC. Depending on your PCs setup you can usually right click on the zip file and select “Extract Here…” – a folder should then appear with all the source code in the root directory and 3 subfolders.

Step 2 : Upload your WordPress code to your webserver

Next you need to connect to your web server by FTP.

Usually you will be brought into / or if you are lucky /public_html/

The /public_html/ directory is where your homepage’s files are located – if you want your blog to be your homepage you can install the software here – Be warned if you already have content in this directory overwriting it could stop your current site from working.

However if you want to have www.yourdomain.com/blog then create a folder called “blog” in /public_html , and upload the code into that directory. You can call the directory anything – but if you are writing about for example Social Media, a good address would be /social-media-blog/ giving you keywords in your web address (always try use keywords in your web address)

Uploading the code to the server could take up to 10 minutes. Only when your files have been uploaded , visit the web address where you installed your blog, e.g. www.yourdomain.com/blog

If everything was uploaded correctly, you will be presented with a screen telling you that you have to create a configuration file – click the button to create your WordPress config file on-line.

Step 3 : Config – Setting up the WordPress Configuration File

You will be asked for the following;

- Database Name   … This is the name of the database which you want to link to
- Database Username … This is the username for your WordPress database
- Database Password … This is the password for the database you wish to use fro WordPress
- Database Host … usually localhost but some hosting providers may differ
- Table Prefix … set to wp_ but you can change this if you wish for security.

If you have entered the details correctly you will then be able to run the Install Script – click the button to start Installing WordPress.

Step 4 : Final Parts of Installing WordPress

For this next step you will be asked for the following;

- The Blog Title, e.g. “My First Blog” or “Shanes World of Social Media and Blogging”
- Your Email – as administrator you will be notified of major events on the blog
- All blog to appear on search engines – Make sure you tick this box so that the Wordpress Blog notifies search engines when you post new content.

Click Install

You will then get a username of admin and a cryptic password.
Very important that you now copy this password (ensure it is copied) and click  Log In.

Log in as admin with the password you got above.

Thats it – Installing WordPress is finished … Congratulations you now have a WordPress Blog installed.

I hope to extend this install guide to cover how to add plug-ins and themes in the future.

The title of the post does sound a bit like a tongue twister but the Trendsmap real time twitter trend tracker is a great way to see what Trends are currently being discussed and Tweeted on Twitter.

How to use this system … it couldn’t be easier. Just go to www.trendsmap.com and you will see a map of the world overlaid with what is being discussed on a local level on Twitter with subjects, hashtags and mentions appearing. I have included the screenshot from the Irish viewpoint below.

If you want to see a larger version you can click the image above – but what you will see is the tweet subjects for that area. So over Ireland we had the following Twitter Tweet Subjects…

• Fianna Fail
• Glee and #Glee
• @PlanetJedward and #Jedward
• #rtefl
• eastenders

If you scroll around to Northern Ireland and the UK you can see Glee and Eastenders are repeated a few times, so these are obviously hop topics.

Trendsmap is an interesting website if you are a regular Tweeter and Twitter user. I haven’t really got into the depth of information which is available, as I’m not really into Twitter that much, but I’m sure somebody will like this!