Opinion

Blogging Trends

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Has WordPress reached a tipping point? Right now 14% of the web is powered by WordPress. That’s an astonishing statistic.

comparison of top blogging platforms
Comparison of top blogging platforms - July 2011

According to the WordPress stats page, there are over 50 million websites using WordPress. About 25 million of these are WordPress.com sites – that is, sites that are hosted by WordPress themselves on their shared blogging platform. These hosted sites are in the main blogs rather than full-blown websites. As a specialist in WordPress hosting, we find customers need the extra power you get with Self-Hosted WordPress, which is what we provide.

It was in September last year that Microsoft gave users of it’s Windows Live Spaces blogging platform 6 months to move to WordPress. From what we’ve heard, the transition was smooth. Live Spaces once hosted 7m bloggers and had 300m visitors.

The Google owned blogging service ‘Blogger’ doesn’t publish user numbers, but it’s thought to be around 15-20 million. In July of 2011 it was announced that Google intends to change the name of the service from “Blogger” to “Google Blogs,”. Whether this rebranding will have a negative or positive affect remains to be seen.

So what is WordPress’s secret?

Here are some of the features of WordPress

WordPress.com Features

  • Free hosting for up to 3GB worth of space
  • Blog content is maintained on WordPress.com web servers
  • Ability to choose and customize templates (limited flexibility)
  • Easy to get started; easy to use
  • Upload and store image, video, and other (limited) file formats

WordPress Self-Hosted Features

  • Blog content is maintained on user’s preferred web host
  • Nearly unlimited ability to choose and customize templates and widgets
  • Takes some technical ability to setup and configure – that why you should choose 2020Media!
  • Files support limited only by web server, which likely means more than you’d ever need.

Use as content management systems

Finally, we look at the use of software that started out as blogging platforms as full blown content management systems. Many of our customers use WordPress as a website content management system, not as a blog.

Once again, WordPress is leading the way.

Top content management systems
Top content management systems

How to read the diagram from Web Technology Surveys:
73.5% of the websites use none of the content management systems that we monitor.
WordPress is used by 14.5% of all the websites, that is a content management system market share of 54.6%.

So although most websites surveyed didn’t use a content management system that could be detected, of those that could WordPress was again the clear leader.

 

Opinion, Tips and Tricks

Themes that do more

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The WordPress.org website includes an online directory of thousands of completely free themes. WordPress insists on GPL licensing which also means these themes are free to modify to your own custom design if you wish.

There are also many many sites offering paid for themes. The quality is generally high and if you are after something that gives your site instant wow appeal, it can be worth spending a few pounds on a theme. Expect to pay USD $35- USD $95 (GBP £20 – GBP £60) for a theme.

This post is about WordPress themes that do more than just change the appearance of your site. We’re looking at themes that include specific functionality. This often means the theme comes with extra plugins to perform these roles.

Business Directory

The DirectoryPress WordPress theme is a complete theme and plugin. Cost  is USD $79. The theme includes maps, payment gateways for paid directory listings and around 20 different template designs.

Business Directory for WordPress is a plugin only. It allows simple text based listing, submitted by the unregistered users. There’s no editing facility. Cost is free although a suggested donation of USD $5 is requested by the author to help fund further development.

WP Business Directory Manager is a plugin only. It supports user registration, paid placements (at extra cost to the plugin creator). It allows images in the listings. The plugin is free and you can see a live example at www.hairdressing.co.uk

Jobs

9-to-5 theme. This theme from a paid theme provider costs USD $35 and includes both a  job board theme and the listing plugins. Features include ajax filtering, google maps, and the ability to take payments via paypal for paid listings.

Jobroller is another paid theme. It includes separate portals & tools for both job seekers and employers, has built-in payment gateway support and a has a CV section. Cost is USD $99.

Job Manager is a plugin only. It’s designed for a single company’s job listing and includes functions to take online applications and manage the interview process. It’s free and has been downloaded over 30,000 times from WordPress.

Classifieds

Sofa OpnPress is a paid theme that styles itself “WP Yellow Pages”. It offers front-end editing for users, paid or free listings mode, a voting system, and supports localisation. Cost is USD $35.

Another WordPress Classifieds Plugin is a well established free plugin (2 years old) and boasts upwards of 70,000 downloads from WordPress. It allows for paid or free ads, moderation, notifications and social integration. A number of premium (paid-for) modules are available which add things like featured listings, fee per category and google checkout integration.

wp-classified is a simpler option that adds a simple information & advertising blackboard or classified page in to your wordpress site. The plugin is free. A few comments in the forum indicate that some users find the documentation lacking.

Charity

Agency Theme is a paid theme that includes a nice “donation bar” on the home page. Ideal for fund raising towards a target, the donation bar shows progress towards the specified amount features a prominent donation link. Cost of this theme is USD $95. A number of plugins that offer a similar feature can be found on WordPress.

10 themes for non-profits. Not a theme or plugin itself, this post reviews 10 beautiful themes designed with charity websites in mind.

Donate Plus is  a free WordPress plugin with PayPal integration. The plugin contains lots of options for creating a donation form on your site, and includes a recognition function for displaying donations and comments. In function it’s similar to Just Giving, though does not include any Gift Aid functionality.

Conclusion

We’ve chosen just 4 categories here but there are dozens if not hundreds of customised themes and plugins for just about any specific function you might care to imagine (let us know in the comments). Costings shown above were correct at the time of writing but are likely to change in the medium-long term. Sometimes you may need to pay for the feature you want, but compared to the cost of bespoke development it’s likely to a be fraction of the cost. Many of the developers actively encourage customisation work so even if the plugin or theme doesn’t do quite what you want, it’s very well worth contacting the provider to ask if they will make a change for you.

About Us

2020Media is an established UK hosting provider. We offer WordPress hosting with expert technical assistance. Our service includes free migration from other hosts or WordPress.com and plenty of free help getting your site up and running. Hosting plans start at £45+vat/year.

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Technical

Notes on Hyper-V backups

Windows Hyper-V allows backups to be taken of entire virtual machines extremely quickly. To do this, volume shadow copies are used.

Sometime however the volume shadow copy service fails to run properly. You might get an error like this in your logs: vss_ws_failed_at_prepare_snapshot or ERROR: Selected writer ‘Microsoft Hyper-V VSS Writer’ is in failed state. – Status: 8 (or Status: 11)

When this happens, the next step is to open a command prompt and type

vssadmin list writers

You may see something like this:

Writer name: 'Microsoft Hyper-V VSS Writer'
   Writer Id: {66rfg1cd4-6e5ed-4f4b-8417-fd23456dc3de}
   Writer Instance Id: {f0dreda9-1459-4632a-9861-51e45g6414a7}
   State: [8] Failed
   Last error: Retryable error

To try and fix this, go to the Services control panel and try restarting:

  1. Hyper-V Virtual Machine Management (note this does not cause running machines any problems).
  2. Volume Shadow Copy (optional – try 1 first).

In practice we find that just restarting the Hyper-V Virtual Machine Management service is enough.  Run the command again and check if VSS is now showing ‘no error’ state.

vssadmin list writers

Then wait for your next backup job and check it completes properly.

There are a number of hotfixes available from Microsoft but we’ve not found a reliable fix for Windows Server 2008 (release 1). So far we’ve not seen the problem recur on Windows Server 2008 R2.

About Us

2020Media is an established UK hosting provider. We offer dedicated virtual servers with full root access on a variety of platforms, including Hyper-V. We also offer prebuilt and configured instances of popular open-source free software such as SugarCRM and Java Tomcat,  on virtual machine instances.

Technical

IPv6 Day – the aftermath

Graph of website traffic to 2020Media on IPv6 day
We got some extra traffic to our site

As we reported in an earlier post, 2020Media took part in World IPv6 Day, which took place on 8th June 2011. For 24 hours (or more) major websites around the world turned on IPv6 access to test how well this technology actually worked in practice.

Organised by the Internet Society, the project was intended to raise awareness about the need to start the global transition to IPv6 and to enable participants to gather data about potential glitches

2020Media’s website and blog were reachable over IPv6 (in addition to IPv4 of course), and we saw an increase in our normal website visitors on the day. We had no reported problems and our servers coped without any errors, so we consider the day a success.

Not so the boffins at Nominet, who were hosting one of the probes monitoring UK connectivity. For the early part of the day, routing problems there made UK sites, including the BBC look patchy.

ISOC measurements
ISOC measurements

One good thing about IPv6 day was that where there were any kind of routing problem, because everybody was watching, those problems were resolved fast.

Continue reading IPv6 Day – the aftermath →

Tips and Tricks

Spell it out with IPv6

Calculator showing b00b7e55Today is World IPv6 day –  a day for websites around the world to test their IPv6 readiness. One unexpected consequence is that IPv6 address are hex – and therefore contain the letters a-f. This hasn’t been lost on the network boffins at the big sites that are taking part in todays experiment.

  • 2020Media has gone for the simple: [2a00:19e8:20:20::20]

SysAdmins everywhere will enjoy inserting their favourite beverage into addresses: :c0:ffee

For more tips on spelling in IPv6, see Pingdom

And Finally…

Lancaster University Network Services have gone for the schoolboy favourite: [2a01:8900:0:1::b00b:1e5]

News, tips and reviews from one of Britain's leading web hosting companies