I did it – I went and joined a cult, that’s why I’ve been so quiet! Now, this is done too.

Some of the fun stuff to look forward to in 2.7 includes:

• Automatic one click upgrades (admin privileges required)
• One click plugin installation from WordPress.org (suspect this also requires admin privileges)
• Customized drag & drop dashboards
• Quick posts from the dashboard
• Word count on new posts

For more information on the new WordPress goodies, I highly recommend checking out the following posts:

Aaron Brazell lays out the 10 Things You Need To Know About WordPress 2.7 and an additional post roundup.

Taylor Pratt at MarketingPilgrim.com has video and a quick overview of new features.

Sean P. Aune has a timely wrapup of 20+ plugins already compatible with 2.7 – since this has slowed upgrade times in the past, this was a welcome post.

Rick Turoczy at ReadWriteWeb takes a look at how WordPress listened to their raving fans to build a better release candidate that should be required reading for all software developers.

Last but not least, don’t Robert Scoble’s interviews with WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg on the future of blogs.

This is a great, low cost way to learn everything you need to know to set up and run your own WordPress blog.

Please join us!

Ok, it’s new to me, but if you’re on Facebook, why not add me?

Look what showed up in the mail today!

They made a good choice – I’ll probably use both the cookbook and the apron.

While I’ve been silent a lot lately, I haven’t been idle. My most recent project has been helping a former client sell some equipment on eBay. Yes, eBay – I haven’t used them in a few years, but their audience *is* massive, and he wants to clean out his storage unit, so I agreed to help.

It’s still somewhat of a hassle to list on eBay, but it’s gotten easier from the last time I did battle with it back in 04. I was able to list 5 pieces of equipment in 3 hours and sold 1 the first day. What I wasn’t expecting, however, was to experience an internal phishing attack. Luckily, I switched to Firefox and avoided it. More eBay thoughts after the jump, along with screen shots.

Here is the warning I received:

If I wasn’t so aware of security issues, I might have missed this and assumed it was a real question. I couldn’t resist trying it anyway just to see what would happen:

Score: Phisher 0, Firefox 1

Back to eBay. I stopped using eBay back in 2002 because most of the inventory I had wasn’t moving well at auction. When I went to list this equipment, I paid careful attention to pricing – most eBay users are searching for bargains, after all, so pricing the initial auctions was going to be key to how they perform. There wasn’t much at eBay, but thanks to some other equipment dealers, I was able to set fair market values and calculate where to begin the auctions.

So far, so good – as I said above, I’ve sold one piece outright – it was picked up today. The next auction closes on Saturday and the bids are still a little low, but there are a lot of people watching it, so hopefully it will pick up.

After the auctions are complete, I’ll talk more about the keyword research I did to help spur bids.

Posts that contain "Acephalous" Meme per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

While you can see a huge spike of blogs linking in during the first 2 days, it quickly trails off, illustrating again the “long tail” effect.

What is more interesting (to me) is to monitor the spread through blog topics and time – from knitters to lawyers, artists to architects, the willingness of non-academic bloggers to participate surprised even me.

That it continues to spread more than a dozen days after his initial post has implications for businesses and organizations looking to leverage the blogosphere for promotion. Specifically, campaign times, personnel, expiration dates and server loads need to be examined carefully.

This will be the 12th Christmas since my mother passed. Although I miss her keenly throughout the year, the first holidays were brutal. One of the ways I cope is to embrace some of the traditions I miss so much and find new ways to share them.

One of the first things I remember learning to do with my mom was to make candy, specifically, fudge. She learned from her mother, who learned the recipe from her mom. It was a special holiday treat for us, since it was expensive to make and took several hours. We often got a piece of carefully horded fudge on Thanksgiving, carefully wrapped in tin foil, but only if grandma or mom had time. At Christmas, however, it was part of the tradition – there was always a tin of it out for guests.

I remember making batches of it once the season turned – most of it in the pot above. It’s a fussy, picky recipe prone to screwups, which we ate anyway. Learning to do it right simply meant you didn’t make hockey pucks or burn it. If the fudge didn’t candy it became frosting for a cake or ice cream sauce; if it did, it meant hours of cutting tin foil squares and wrapping it.

I have no daughters to pass the tradition on to, but thanks to the internet, I can share it with you.

The recipe (if this is hard to read you can click the image to see a larger version):

Most important detail? Don’t stir this fudge once you start cooking it. Even if you think you know better, don’t – it will ruin the batch, I swear – I’ve tried it. Just let the heat, pot and temperature deal with that for you – you’ll be rewarded with an enjoyable treat.

If you’re thinking of trying this recipe out, I’ve loaded up a Flickr set of the stage by stage process so you can avoid all the mistakes I made along the way of learning to create an edible batch. The flickr example is for a double batch of peanut butter fudge without nuts, enjoy!

* To adjust for flavor, 1 square = 1 ounce, ergo 4 oz of peanut butter chips = 4 oz of chocolate.

That is, they did until we talked with Felix.

Keep in mind this isn’t the first time we’ve thought about replacing these units. In fact, when we bought the house, we bought a new washer & dryer to replace the old ones. The delivery people tried for over an hour to figure out how to get them into the basement but the narrow entry kept them from being able to make a turn. We ended up moving the new units to the old house and settled into the cycle of repairing the old, inadequate units until we couldn’t.

After hearing our story, Felix the repair guy found a solution. It’s elegance can’t be understated – for one, it was breathtakingly simple, once I heard it, and for two, nobody else had figured out a solution that would work. His solution?

He took both units apart and easily carried the pieces in through the narrow opening.

He then re-assembled the units once he reached the basement. Voila – clean clothes! (Yes, we checked, this method did not void our warranties)

The lesson here? Anything large can be broken down, addressed in its component parts and then reassembled. Sometimes, breaking things down is the only way to make something work.

As you can see, there has been a dramatic increase in visitors and page views:

Google really likes the new service – they spidered 6,013 more pages in November than they did in October (there was no apparent benefit in other engines):

I believe this firmly establishes translation as a safe and effective traffic-building tactic.

Angsuman and his team have been great to work with – it was a fast install and required minimal tweaking from our end. The plugin is also fully supported, so our 2.0.5 upgrade was a snap. At $30, this is low-cost/high-return upgrade worth making.

One last item of geeky interest – note how Ask.com has overtaken AOL and MSN in referred visitors.

< Fine print: >These results are from a niche content site. Jen has invested two years in developing a unique body of resources unlike anything else online, so your mileage may vary if you use this strategy to expand your market. < fine print / >

I’m still finishing my analysis of her server logs, but once I’m finished, I’ll also post a chart breaking down country and language.