Tag Archives: wordpress

Mark Pack

Ten WordPress plugins to help make your blog shine

By Mark Pack | Thu 31st March 2011 - 10:24 am

Good content produced at the right time is at the heart of any successful blog. Good content often needs a helping hand courtesy of sensible promotion too. All of which is to say that fiddling with the technical details can be a tempting distraction from main business at hand, but it can make a difference even if it isn’t the main factor in success or failure.

One of the reasons I’m sure a fan of WordPress (as used by Lib Dem Voice, on my own blog and also on Lynne Featherstone’s blog, which I helped look after for …

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Posted in Online politics | Also tagged and | 6 Comments
Mark Pack

Do your blog comments make a good impression?

By Mark Pack | Sat 20th February 2010 - 10:53 am

There are many reasons people have for posting comments on this site or others: because they’ve got something to add to the conversation, because they want to correct an error, because they like taking part in a debate, because they’ve got a question to ask or a myriad of other reasons.

For those seeking public office, judicious commenting on other people’s sites can also be rather like going to events and meetings in the area; it’s a way of getting to know people, getting known by them and discussing relevant issues. Reaching out to other people’s sites, particularly if they aren’t …

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Posted in Online politics | Also tagged and | 3 Comments
Paul Walter

Moving from Blogger to WordPress – ten lessons learnt the hard way (aka “The Long March”)

By Paul Walter | Sun 22nd November 2009 - 5:50 pm

The Voice recently highlighted how popular Blogger is with new Liberal Democrat bloggers. But if you’ve started with Blogger and want to move over WordPress what do you do? Paul Walter recounts the lessons he learnt along the way:

NERD’S CORNER, with apologies to any grandmothers for ovum-evacuation lessons herein

On 28th September I decided, in a fit of conscience, to clear out all the posts from my Blog archive with other people’s photos in them. I did it the wrong way and, in a tantrum, deleted all my old blog posts and started a fresh blog on …

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Posted in Online politics | Also tagged and | 17 Comments
Mat Bowles

What’s the best blogging platform for new bloggers?

By Mat Bowles | Sat 17th October 2009 - 7:20 am

Young woman, blogging by windowWelcome to part two of our “Introduction to blogging” guide for Liberal Democrat bloggers or would-be bloggers. It’s appearing each Saturday between now and Christmas, with all the posts available via this page. The series will then be revised and collated into an e-book, so please do post up your comments as the series progresses. Today it’s the turn of Mat Bowles, advising on the technical side of getting started with a blog.

So, you’re thinking of starting a blog of your own. You could do what most people seem to do at this stage, and go sign up directly to Google’s Blogger service and just get writing. Personally, I don’t think that’s necessarily the best idea. I’m a Lib Dem, my membership card says on the back:

No one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity

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Posted in Blogging guide | Also tagged , , , , and | 13 Comments
Mark Pack

Canonical URLs: improving your website’s performance in search engines

By Mark Pack | Sun 15th February 2009 - 7:48 am

A rather more technical post than usual, but if you are used to playing around with HTML tags or fiddling with the innards of systems such as WordPress, this post has some good news that could make your website perform better in search engines…

The multiple URLs problem

It is quite common for a page on a website to be accessible via more than one web address. For example:

http://www.libdems.org.uk/news/new-government-bailout-is-blank-cheque-131421437;show

and

http://www.libdems.org.uk/news/new-government-bailout-is-blank-cheque-131421437 (i.e. without ;show at the end)

both link to the same page.

There are two reasons this might be a problem. First, a search engine may fail to realise that these are the same page and so search results get clogged up with duplicates. Second, some people may link to one version of the URL and other people to the other. Splitting links between these two versions can mean the page performs less well in search engines than if all the links were to just the one.

Search engines are pretty good at trying to deal with this sort of problem, but they aren’t perfect.

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Posted in Online politics | Also tagged , , and | 8 Comments
Mark Pack

More news, fewer places to look

By Mark Pack | Wed 28th January 2009 - 10:20 am

The latest stories from a range of different (official) party websites is now being drawn together in one place, with our new aggregator at http://blogs.libdems.org.uk

It pulls in stories from places such as the party’s main www.libdems.org.uk website, specialist sites covering particular policy areas such as Home Office Watch, Nick Clegg’s www.nickclegg.com and also a selection of the latest media coverage of the party from around the internet. Also crammed in are the party’s latest YouTube film, Twitter updates and campaigns buttons. All in just the one place.

We’re currently looking at adding in the highlights from Scottish, …

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Posted in Online politics | 5 Comments
Mark Pack

What next for social networking?

By Mark Pack | Thu 7th August 2008 - 9:45 am

Predicting which companies and software are going to prosper and which are going to fizzle and disappear is a notoriously unreliable business, but it certainly looks at the moment as if Facebook, Myspace and Bebo are pretty well entrenched as the major social networking sites not only in the UK but also in many other countries, including (perhaps crucially in terms of predicting the future) the US.

Possibly this trio will change slightly in composition, having one of its members replaced or being joined by a fourth or fifth, but at the moment all three seem set pretty …

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Posted in News and Online politics | Also tagged , , and | 9 Comments
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