If you run a site which constantly adds new products or services then are you utilising RSS feeds too? I've recently set up sites for clients and used RSS feeds to allow people to subscribe to their newest product list without giving up their details. People like to be anonymous online, so even an email subscribtion is invasion of privacy especially when a lot of people are concerned with spam. RSS feeds are the perfect, private way to keep tabs on a site without anyone knowing and without you having to constantly visit that site. It's a win win situation, especially when you pay for bandwidth!nnOne client who is using this successfully sells pre-owned watches, so every watch is a new product as no two watches are the same once they've been worn. I added the RSS feed to their site at the start of the year, and without even mentioning it on the website, simply linking to the RSS file in the header, there have been 12,800+ hits to this file for this month alone. Whether it's improved sales or not I couldn't honestly say. With it being unknown technology to a lot of people outside of the Web Design/Development circle, I doubt anyone in the office would even think to ask customers if they'd used it. They probably don't know it's there!nnAnother client runs a Recruitment website. This time I've simply set the RSS feed to display the latest 10 jobs from the database and there's one for each department. Looking at the site stats I can see a little takeup on this, not bad considering it's not really advertised yet! I also demonstrated this to the company owner by showing him how I could check on the latest vacancies by subcribing to the feed on my mobile phone (Nokia N73), thus showing complete privacy from anyone else knowing what I was doing – also helpful when I could then email him a word document acting as my CV!nnThe great thing with RSS is that you can simply subscribe to the feed and then forget about it. It checks for new items in the background and only mentions itself when there are new items within the feed. Whilst it's handy for sites with constantly new content/products/items to market, it could still be utilised on product sites that gets a new product occassionally. Afterall, plenty of people will subscribe and then forget about your site and the feed. Suddenly you add a new product and hey presto, everyone knows about it again. A much better method than relying on people to bookmark and return to your site, especially if they return twice and find nothing new.nnRSS feeds are relatively simple to set up. I tend to just use PHP to populate them and use a PHP extension setting the output as XML so that they're picked up correctly. You can also set your PHP to write to an XML file and write out a static XML page instead. You'd need a CRON job to run every so often to ensure the file is always updated. However I'd personally stick with the dynamic XML file route. There's no difference really nnFurther Reading: RSS 2.0 Specification

Further to my post on how Alexa Rank affects income for those who sell advertising via companies such as Text Link Ads. After looking at the stats of Site 2 on my other post, last week the visitor numbers rose even further to an average of over 800 visitors for the week days.

So I've decided to try adding the Alexa button to the site in question. I know in the past one minute I thought it worked, then more recently I tried it on a quieter site and saw the rank in fact drop. I know others have tried and not really seen any changes either, but I figured that with the bizarreness of this site's stats vs Alexa rank, it was maybe a good guinea pig for the experiment.

I've decided to leave the button there for at least a month. To monitor the visitor stats and of course the Alexa rank, once a week. So first of all, to prove what they currently are:

So, I'll keep an eye on this and see if anything changes.

It's been a long hard week this week. I didn't realise until this week that some of the pains in my head had been caused by an infected nerve in my tooth. On Monday night the pain escalated and just refused to go, and this pain was starting from my back tooth all the way up to just above my ear. Have to say, it's the first major toothache I've even had, well the first toothache, besides a little sensitivity, and it is definitely not fun.

I finally got to the dentist on Wednesday who x-rayed my tooth and gave me some antibiotics, however 48 hours later the pain still hadn't eased and over the counter painkillers were not even touching the pain. I got some extra strong painkillers from the doctor and even those did nothing for me. I've been relying on using Oil of Cloves (the most disgusting thing you could ever taste!), plus rinsing with Vodka/Barcardi to help numb my mouth and ease the pain, but by early Saturday morning even that wasn't working. So I went to see another dentist yesterday who cleaned out the tooth, put antibiotics directly in the base of it and put a new temporary filling over it. Finally last night I got an almost full nights sleep of 10 hours and despite a bit of a headache, I'm feeling 100% better.

I have to say I've never felt so helpless with pain. In the past the biggest pains I've had were Appendicitus and a Kidney Infection, however both were eased very quickly. This time around I've spent 3 weeks in semi major pain, but painkillers could take it off, however this week I've been in such agonising pain, especially in the middle of the night, and have felt so helpless (as has the people around me watching me in pain). I am so relieved.

Not much else happened this week as I've managed very little work, only when I could manage, and have spent most of the week on the couch watching the DVD boxsets I got for my birthday. I feel pretty bad too as I had to miss one of my closest friend's birthday yesterday. However I do have to give so much thanks to Dave who's looked after me, run around for me, taken me to the dentists and sat with me whilst I quivered and had panic attacks in the chair and surgeries (yes I adore Dentists ), and more than anything, put up with me waking him up every night with me getting up and down in the middle of the night trying everything I could to ease the pain.

Gotta say, toothache – not fun!

So since I was commissioned to write an article on getting started with WordPress, and in theory was meant to write 6 (but the magazine was closed right after the first was done), I've been thinking about writing up about WordPress on here instead. We use WordPress a lot these days. I run 3 main blogs plus a couple of minor blogs with WordPress powering each site. We've also taken it one step further and used WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS) to power client sites, for either budget purposes or if the client is intending to have a news/events section and therefore can utilise the blogging system.

WordPress is so simple to use, and with the addition of a selection of plugins we can have a great site set up pretty quickly. For basic brochure style sites this is great. Theoretically you could set up a new site within a day easily, still providing the client with their own CMS to update their site. However you can push WordPress further, write custom template pages and then you start to unleash the flexibility and control you have. I can allow clients to update their own without messing up certain sections by simply putting the code into the template whilst allowing them to just update the page content.

WordPress is also well spidered. One click and your blog goes from dynamic URLs to directory style URLs. Posting a news or event sends a ping out to all the top blog search sites and the post can often be in Google Blogsearch within the hour. With certain plugins you can retain even more control over how the site runs, and safe in the knowledge that the client will have to work hard to mess the site up!

So I'll be adding the odd post here and then which runs through the basics of WordPress before moving onto the advanced aspects. With so many people asking about WordPress these days I figured it may be of use to some I'll try to not swamp my blog in it for those who don't care

Today I got word from a colleague who had sold my shopping cart script for me. I need to do some additional custom work on it but I've essentially sold a script that's already been paid for in the past. It got me thinking that perhaps I can finally get this script more modular, and perhaps sell it a few more times over. I realise there are free off the shelf scripts out there such as osCommerce, but I also know how bloated they are. My script is valid XHTML and CSS driven.nnI still have a lot of work to do to take it further, at present it's a little too custom made for general use, but still, theoretically it's been my best AIS day yet! (well it will when I invoice for payment!).