Blog update
A quick post about the blog… As you can see, the blog has undergone an update, and there are two major changes.
The most obvious change is the move from a centralised view, to placing all the text on the left. The reason for this move is so that advertisements can be placed on the right (the blog is now carrying advertisements in an attempt to off-set development costs).
The second change, which is less obvious at first glance, is the addition of ‘tags’ to the blog posts.
Tags: These are good news for the reader as they link the blog posts by keywords. If you click on a keyword listed in the Site Search Tags: at the end of the post you will be taken to a list of articles that are also tagged with that word. Basically it is another way to find material in the blog.
As mentioned in some earlier posts (see a list of earlier posts – see, aren’t tags great?) I now use TextMate to write blog posts in ‘markdown‘, that are then handles on the server using WordPress. With TextMate and WordPress there are some great tools for adding tags/keywords to posts.
Basically I am using Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) and a TextMate bundle.
WordPress: On the server I have installed Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW site). This manages the tags and can be used through the ‘dashboard’ of WordPress. One ‘neat’ feature is it can even suggest tags for a post.
TextMate: To TextMate I have added the AutoTag Bundle from Circle Six Design. This bundle allows Textmate to retrieve UTW tags from the UTW database stored in the WordPress blog. The bundle can also make use of the ‘suggest tags for a post’ feature of UTW, via Textmate.
Another ‘positive’ of the tagging is these keywords can be used to ‘target’ the eBay ads that are now on the right hand side of the screen.
In this case, the ‘keywords’ are being taken from the UTW tag database and then ‘inserted’ (using php) into an eBay script provided by AuctionAds. (The ‘service’/script provided by AuctionAds is not ‘context-sensitive’ and keywords are added ‘manually’ to the Javascript variable ‘auctionads_ad_kw‘, however, with a simple bit of code this variable can be generated ‘on-the-fly’, using php, as the page loads.)
BTW, one thing that readers won’t notice, unless you view the blog from different countries, is that the ads displayed are ‘geo-senstitive’ (‘geo-targeted’). No information is collected (or stored) by MMISoftware, but when a page is requested a php script grabs the IP address and then does a ‘reverse-lookup’, using an MMISoftware database, to find the country of origin for the address. At present ads are only targeted for the UK and US, with plans to add other countries at a later date (if you are reading this in a country that is not the UK or US then the ads default to the US).
P.S. This update/change to the MMISoftware Blog was driven, in part, by having to do the same for the thesnowsite blog.
