Category: Social Media

Moving old site to WordPress

My old web site has been evolving over the years.It started off as an SMF site (Simple Machines Forum). Initially this was fine because it allowed me to share snippets of Loadrunner code and other useful information with my friends and colleagues.

Eventually, I tired of the basic look and feel of this website so I added a CMS front-end based on Joomla.I found Joomla awkward to use and really fancied a blog.I created a WordPress blog on my website and really enjoyed editing content and found it very easy to use.

This got me thinking………
Why maintain three separate websites?

The simple answer for this was
“Because it’s easier than migrating the content on to a single site” .

But I found that this isn’t true.I found a couple of great plugins on the WordPress which allowed me to migrate the content of my existing WordPress blog as well as the Joomla site on to this new blog. I still haven’t managed to migrate my old forum and I know that lots of people linked to the content there. For the time being, I’ll leave it up and running, but if any reader finds out how to migrate that too, let me know.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the new look and feel of this website .

#neverseconds – A lesson for us all in Internet marketing by Martha Payne (9 years old)

I suspect that many of you will have heard about the 9-year old girl from Argyll and Bute in Scotland, whose blog site http://neverseconds.blogspot.co.uk/ was the victim of censorship by her local council because it drew attention to the catering standards in her local school.

School dinners.....

I was monitoring the story yesterday and wrote a semi-geeky article on my website (and Intechnica’s blog site) about the impact that this appeared to have on the complaints page of the council website. (It broke!)

As a measure of just how much publicity the #neverseconds story has generated for Martha Payne’s blog, when I checked Martha’s hit counter at 13:20 on 15th June 2012, the site had around 2.6m hits. Today that stands at 4.6m hits (and it’s still rising quickly).

Martha’s “Just Giving” page http://www.justgiving.com/neverseconds, supporting school feeding projects in communities where poverty and hunger prevent children from gaining an education, has raised well over £50,000 in the last 24 hours.

Well done, Martha !

Is Argyll and Bute’s web team going to suffer due to their colleague’s PR disaster?

As bad weather lashes Britain, a storm of another kind is causing difficulties in Argyll and Bute. A 9-year old girl who blogs at http://neverseconds.blogspot.co.uk/ about her school dinners has been prevented from photographing her school meals and tweeting about their quality.

Her cause has been taken up by Jamie Oliver who this morning tweeted this to his 2.3 million followers.
Jamie's tweet

Since then #neverseconds and “Argyll and Bute” is trending on Twitter and articles referring to this are appearing on news sites both nationally and internationally.
Never seconds news articles

 

As bloggers and tweeters (me included) add to the storm, Argyll and Bute’s webserver seems to be having difficulties….
Argyll and Bute error message

It shows that you can’t plan for peaks in load such as this, but perhaps lessons will be learnt. It would be a shame for the IT guys to get it in the neck as well as their colleagues in PR.

This article is also reproduced on the Intechnica blog.
http://blog.intechnica.co.uk/2012/06/15/is-argyle-and-butes-web-team-going-to-suffer-due-to-their-colleagues-pr-disaster/