Category Archives: Articles

WordPress as an Alternative to Instagram

By iamronen | Published: December 20, 2012
Instagram (now owned by Facebook) has taken a beating in the media for changing its terms and conditions to enable it to … pretty much do whatever it wants with the photos of its users. Its a tempting topic to cover but I have grown tired of delving into it. To me its obvious. There [...]

Resuscitating Intense Debate

By iamronen | Published: March 14, 2012
From shortly after the time Automattic acquired Intense Debate and made it part of its offering I've been using and recommending it as a commenting system for blogs. However during its installation in a recent project I ran into difficulties and got no response from the support team. Over recent years I've also been watching Disqus expand and evolve while Intense Debate seems to be dead in the water. I've visited the Intense Debate blog and indeed it seems that the project is for the most part dormant. I am no longer at peace recommending Intense Debate as a commenting system ... and I want that to change.

Proactive design panel on the front end

By iamronen | Published: February 15, 2012
As a followup to my email to Ian – I came across this post with a “proactive design panel on the front end”. It’s nice to know I’m not living in my own imaginary bubble “This further raises the question, what else should we bring to the front to enable a better visual connection between [...]

28 Non-Financial Benefits of Business Blogging

By iamronen | Published: February 12, 2012
I used to spend more time amongst business people and as a result had more conversations about blogging for business. They would usually “want a website”  – which would usually be a few basic static pages – what I consider to be dead in the water. I would often encourage them to consider getting a [...]

Email to Ian Stewart

By iamronen | Published: February 7, 2012
I left a comment on this post by Ian Stewart. The comment was: “this sounds nice but superficial … I would wish for something deeper and more substantial …” Ian did not approve the comment but did write me to ask what I meant. I wrote him a lengthy email. He replied and said I [...]

WallPress – A WordPress Alternative to Facebook?

By iamronen | Published: January 19, 2012
Andreea, my life partner, uses Facebook. It has played an undeniable role in her developing an outreach and real-life, professional social network here in Romania. It is used to support her WordPress powered website. Yet I continue to be disturbed by the fact this is happening on Facebook. Every word she types into their systems [...]

Celebrating 1,000,000 Page Views

By iamronen | Published: January 12, 2012
One of the website projects I have been involved in has just (January 12th, 2012 - 10:40 Romaian time) crossed 1,000,000 page views and almost 300,000 visitors in it's 3 years of existence. The website I am referring to is Andreea's (my life partner) Romanian speaking website Feminitate. Feminitate is an expression of Andreea's Dharma - a website that has gone way beyond binary bits in a computer.

Content is more Valuable then SEO

By iamronen | Published: January 11, 2012
You can have the best technically configured SEO optimized website but that's not what people are looking for and not what Google is looking for. You can have good content in a technically poor site and Google will make an effort to compensate for the technicalities, to recognize your content and to deliver to people who may benefit from it.

WordPress 3.3 Media Uploader – Developer Indulgence at the expense of Reliability

By iamronen | Published: January 10, 2012
WordPress 3.3 introduced a new media-upload interface. If you read about this feature inside the WordPress community then it will be hailed as a "cool" feature ... and to developers or technically oriented users sitting in front of two screens it may be. However if you think about most people this "cool" feature is actually an obstacle.

The Bhudeva Story – Creating a Library of Links on WordPress

By iamronen | Published: March 14, 2011
As I mentioned in the previous Bhudeva Story post, we wanted to create a library of links. We are exploring tons of links (at the moment mostly about construction as that is our main focus, so this search will extend into other subjects), filtering out (a time consuming process) the ones we will are best, most relevant and worth sharing and those that are left we want to collect in a library that we and others can access as needed.