Sid Sidberry Reads

One in every three online Americans is what Forrester calls a “conversationalist,” defined as someone who updates her status on Facebook or tweets at least once a week. Conversationalists are also older, wiser than other online denizens — and predominantly female.

Forrester’s “The New Social Technographics” report (embedded below) is the product of surveying 10,112 U.S. consumers ages 18 to 88 in November 2009 to better understand social adoption.

Conversationalists are a new type of online content creator who accounts for 33% of the online population, and they’re sandwiched in between the most involved web users who either blog or publish web content — called “creators” (24%) — and the more passive “critics” (37%), who participate online as commenters and reviewers. In the social hierarchy, critics are followed by collectors (20%), joiners (59%), spectators (70%) and inactives (17%).

Profile of a Status Updater: It’s a Woman’s World [Report]

Been working on wordpress themes the past month and found the following article helpful.

Including a Theme Options page for your theme is one of the best ways to increase ease-of-use for managing a complex theme. However, a few quick Google searches later and most people give up. Such a great inclusion for theme design appears to have such little documentation, that it appears to be one of those heavily guarded secrets which only the crème de la crème of designers hold the key to.

In this article we will be incorporating an options panel for the ‘WordPress Classic’ theme. The methods you learn will allow you to very easily integrate it into an existing theme you’re working on.

Read it – Create an Options Page For Your WordPress Theme

Author Roy Osherove promoted pirated versions of his ebook, then polled readers to find out if they would purchase the print or offical ebook version. A great smart response to piracy I think.

Roy Osherove, author of The Art of Unit Testing, was naturally angry when he discovered pirated copies of his book on RapidShare and some people even had the guts to openly share links to those illegal versions of the book on Twitter.

It took him about three years to write the book which now sells for $40 and Roy makes about $2 for every print copy sold on Amazon. The download version of the same book costs around $25 though royalty earned from the sale of these PDF copies is even less.

Since there’s little you can do to prevent people from downloading your PDF books, Roy is trying a unique experiment – he has put some Rapidshare links on his blog from where people can download the full PDF version of his book without spending a penny. The idea is that this may convince some readers into buying either the printed or digital version of the book once they have read the pirated copy.

Science fiction writer Cory Doctorow is known for giving away PDF copies of all his novels for free (under a Creative Commons License) and this in turn helps in increasing the sale of his printed books.

David Pogue, who has authored several popular computer books, however has a different viewpoint. His publishers, O’Reilly Media, do not offer electronic versions of his books only to contain piracy.

Check out the article /w poll results:
http://www.labnol.org/internet/book-author-offers-pirated-ebook/9911/

so i logged into mint to find this as a recent incoming search : HI I found a ipod can I register under new name?

lol. i gotta good laugh from it so here’s a quick answer.

I’m going to assume the person really wanted to know how to change the device name etc.

wipe the ipod completely

came across this yesterday.

WP-Testimonials is a plugin for WordPress that lets you display your customer/client/product testimonials on your blog.

You may add, edit or remove testimonials through the “Manage” navigation tab in the admin area. The plugin includes the option to display a random testimonial in your sidebar using PHP code for older templates or using a widget for newer themes. The widget is built-in with the plugin, so you have no additional files to worry about.

Testimonials can also be displayed all on one page. A template file is included that will need to be uploaded to your theme directory. Once in place, simply create a new page and select that template from the drop-down.

check it out :
http://www.sunfrogservices.com/free-php-script-downloads/wp-testimonials/

just a reference point for myself

http://www.neato.co.nz/wp-content/plugins/UltimateTagWarrior/ultimate-tag-warrior-help-themes.html#tagcloud

Its weird I remember when everyone was either a designer or a developer. Over the past few years I’ve been finding myself defining more and more what I love / want to do.

i prefer to handle data either in arrays or classes, or better yet, arrays with classes.

That said. get an xml to array script, like this one made by : Razzaque Rupom. It’s my favorite.

http://rupom.wordpress.com/category/phpclasses/

I’m really liking exaile! and have been recommending it to friends. of course their first question is , can it run on mac / windows?

well as far as windows yes : heres a few links to help you run exaile! on windows :

screen shots : http://potatosaladx.blogspot.com/2007/01/exaile-029b-on-windows.html
Patch : http://www.exaile.org/trac/ticket/200

From: http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/1/salesforcecom-crashes-crm

An embarrassing hiccup for software-as-a-service giant Salesforce.com (CRM): According to numerous blog reports and hundreds of tweets, Salesforce’s site was completely down for about 30 to 40 minutes earlier this afternoon.

What do you when you’re entire business had moved into the cloud, and then the cloud crashes? One twitterer had a bright idea:

Check It Out:
Salesforce.com Crashes (CRM)