psionmark

, ,

Red and black and kinda weird, but I like it!

In blogging on June 22, 2009 at 8:52 pm

So, what do you think of the new theme? I fancied something a little different and it sure is that!

Not sure if it’s a keeper yet, but I’ll try it out for a while.

I had a quick play with SquareSpace over the weekend. It does look pretty neat, but I’m not sure it’s really worth the $14 a month you’d need to pay to get a custom URL. It was pretty easy to import my blog from here, although the images needed some work to remove some tags. Overall, nice as it is, there’s nothing shouting “Wow, this is amazing. I must move over right away”, so I’ll be here for a while longer at least.

Comment »

, , ,

Last.FM in your car

In iphone on June 20, 2009 at 8:04 pm

I love Last.FM. I’ve discovered some great artists that I’d probably never have heard of otherwise.

I recently inadvertently trashed the music library on my iPhone – apparently the iTunes database had become corrupt. I’d been listening to my iPhone in the car using one of those nifty FM transmitters that lets you listen through your car radio, so was a bit miffed at not having my collection available, when I suddenly remembered Last.FM. So, I connected everything up and set off on my journey and am delighted to report that everything worked smoothly! There were a few drop-outs on a 2 and a half journey, but it soon recovered.

This is one of those things that, when you think about it, is pretty amazing. There I was, in my car, streaming my own personal radio station over the Internet to my phone, then broadcasting that via FM to my car radio. That’s pretty impressive in my book.

Comment »

,

su.pr adds URL shortening for your domain and SEO friendly redirects

In stumbleupon on June 14, 2009 at 12:13 pm

I’ve been playing around with su.pr for the past few days (see my earlier post for my first impressions) and I’m pretty pleased with it so far.

Stumbleupon seem to be listening to their users and are adding features quickly. The latest additions are “Short URLs on your domain” and “SEO friendly redirect”.

The latter is probably the most important. With these 2 services installed, anyone who clicks on one of the shortened URL’s now ends up on the original URL, rather than one prefixed with the Stumbleupon short URL section. This is important for SEO, as the click is now registered as a click on your own domain.

Is it bringing in traffic?

su.pr additional traffic

su.pr additional traffic

It certainly looks that way. Not a huge amount at the moment, but, as Tesco would say, every little helps! Check the image above. In 5 days of use, I’ve had an additional 192 page views as a result of using the service. That’s not to be sniffed at. And, given that it’s very early days, I’d expect to see that increasing.

More coming soon

One of the features being worked on is the ability to post to Twitter, Facebook etc automatically when you post to your blog, as many other URL shortening services already do. When that’s in place, I can really see no good reason to use any other URL shortener. Stumbleupon’s ability to generate huge amounts of traffic can’t be ignored.

Comment »