That’s now been corrected with new sites which offer directory and review services for such bingo sites. Yes, like everything else we now have a way of comparing and commenting on the options!

For instance, WTGbingo is an online bingo directory that gives you information about UK bingo sites – new sites, promotions, special deals, etc. Each site can be searched and there are reviews from those that run the site. The one thing currently lacking, at the moment anyway, is the ability for visitors to the site to review the individual companies. In the meantime they’re making good use of Social media “like” features, such as Facebook Like, Google +1, Digg, etc.

It’s been an eye opener too. I didn’t realise, for instance, that there were different types of online bingo sites – no deposit bingo sites, for example.

As the bingo sites all jostle to be the best the inevitable flashy websites and advertisements give way to the inevitable – search engines, comparison sites and social sharing, to make the whole experience easier. Welcome to the 21st century, bingo!

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There was always the issue over searching. I love having a little search box in the corner so that I can do a quick Wikipedia or IMDB lookup. The Chrome equivalent is not as convenient.

However, that would never be make-or-break.

I like the fact that Chrome, when synchronising bookmarks, now looks up the favicons and populates them (it doesn’t synchronise them as Xmarks does, though).

No, what finished off Chrome for me is the total lack of control or visibility with synchronising. Chrome has synchronisation of bookmarks, etc, built in. I therefore imported them from Firefox on one PC to allow it to transfer over to my other installations Sadly, after a number of days it had only made a vague attempt to synchronise a few bookmarks and not much else. All Google offer is a line on your profile settings page to show how many it’s synchronising. No control. Nothing else. Why weren’t my bookmarks moving across? I’ll never know. The thing is, on each machine I could have imported them from Firefox. BUT how can I trust Chrome to correctly then keep them in sync with each other after that? Simply put, I can’t.

I also don’t like the fact that Chrome has no way of displaying separators in bookmark lists.

Maybe I’ll try again later next year. Until then, Firefox remains my browser of choice.

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But let’s get back to the plugin. Once installed you have option to use a sidebar widget, use an in-post (or page) shortcode or even just manually call it via PHP. A new templating system allows you to define exactly how the results are output – yes, you can output a list of draft posts, but what about adding an author name, word count or date of last update? All of this is possible.

It’s all cached so takes as little resource as possible and you can even exclude certain posts from being included in the list (this is done in the editor itself). Finally, you can make sure that the list only includes drafts for a particular time period – for instance, any created in the last month.

Scheduled posts are not excluded either – these can be included and can be indicated via an appropriate icon.

So, how does this help SEO? Well, let’s take a live example from my site. I recently had a product review post in draft. Searching for that product in Google, gave the following result (click to see a larger view)…

As you can see all the top results in Google are for my site – even though the review hasn’t been published. Instead the fact that the text is in the list of drafts within the sidebar has already attracted attention to my site and getting me listed. Of course, this is quite an obscure product so don’t expect top billing in Google for anything as a result. But it does help with your SEO and it give your readers a helpful insight as to what to expect soon.

Download Artiss Draft List from WordPress.org.

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So, I’ve been excited by the launch of the Galaxy Nexus – the newest release from Samsung, sporting Android 4 as its main highlight.

Other than Android 4, it’s other big thing is the screen – 4.3″ inches at 720×1280. Although the screen physically is bigger the whole device is apparently on a par with the S2 as the screen is taller rather than wider and this extra width takes the place of the buttons at the bottom.

However, ignoring the OS and screen resolution for a moment, when you start comparing the rest of the phone specifications it suddenly starts to look a little more disappointing…

• The Nexus has a Super Amoled screen. The S2 has a Super Amoled Plus screen. There is a difference, and it’s important.
• They both sport a 1.2Ghz Dual Core processor.
• The S2 weighs 116 g, whereas the Nexus is 135 g.
• There is no removable storage option on the Nexus, compared to the Micro SD on the S2.
• The Nexus lacks USB On-the-Go and Wi-Fi Direct.
• The rear camera on the Nexus is 5MP and the front 1.3MP. On the S2 you get an 8MP rear and 2MP front camera. However, the Nexus does give you a twin LED flash rather than the single on the S2.
• The headphone socket is on the bottom. Really? Because when I have a set of headphones plugged in and my phone in my pocket, I really want to have it upside down. No news yet as to where they’ve sited the USB socket.
• It’s a personal preference but the Nexus has more rounded corners, looking like one of its cheaper cousins, and I don’t like it.

One thing I’m not sure about, comparison wise, are the GPUs in the 2 phones which are very different. However, forum discussions would suggest that the S2 might edge it.

One thing that I can find on the Nexus which is better than the S2 is the battery, which is 1750 mAh, compared to 1650 mAh. Extras, the Nexus has a built in barometer. Really.

So, a higher resolution screen, a bigger capacity battery and ability to know if it’s about to rain in the next few hours. But you get a poorer set of cameras, more weight and a load of features missing. Or have I missed something?

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There are a number of new features, some of them cleaning up changes made recently to work around some issues that users were having. For example, you can now turn on and off options to use HTTPS instead of HTTP. I’ve also taken the opportunity to improve the error reporting as well.

Away from that, new features include more specific options for thumbnails – you now have 5 thumbnail types to choose from – and, most importantly, support for the latest API changes.

Recently, you may have noticed that the default YouTube player has changed from a light grey to a much darker scheme. At the same time YouTube updated their player API to allow users to switch between light and dark themes. They also took the opportunity to add a feature where you can change the colour of the progress bar from red to white. Both of these are now supported by my plugin, so if you want the old light colour back you can do.

However, whilst testing this I can across what looked like a bug with YouTube’s API. I couldn’t get the light theme to work with the white progress bar – the progress bar would always appear in red. I double checked my own code to ensure it wasn’t my issue but I don’t believe it is.

YouTube’s own blog entry suggest that this entry is valid…

I opened this up in their forum where another user of the API confirmed my find. However, over 24 hours later, I have yet to receive a response from YouTube.

I’m therefore releasing the plugin as-is but with mention of this issue in the instructions.

Update (19/8/11 @ 19:36): Google have provided an update on the bug…

This is a bug, and it is scheduled to be fixed next Wednesday
evening.

Cheers,
-Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team

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Starting in the US, it spread quickly to other countries. Google offered $5.3 billion for it last year but were turned down. Instead, Google are launching their own equivalent, “Google Offers”, as is Facebook. Indeed, there are 500 similar sites already offering a similar offer. However, what Groupon has that the others don’t is the number of customers and the number of companies queueing up to use them.

So, using Groupon is simple – sign up, specify your nearest city and they’ll email you each day with their current offer (or, alternatively, visit their website – there’s no requirement to receive emails from them). If you decide to accept it, and enough other people do, you have your deal. Most of these offers are usually around dining out and health & beauty products and services, but you’ll usually save over 50% if not a lot more.

When you have signed up, and assuming you like their service, if you recommend a product to a  friend (and they buy the product) you’ll receive £6 credit to your account!

At the very least, it’s worth a try – you really do have nothing to lose!

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The amount of free storage for Picasa Web Albums is 1GB. However, this doesn’t include certain photo sizes. For non-Google+ users this is anything up to 800 x 800 pixels. For Google+ users this is a much better 2048 x 2048.

For videos there are no changes for Google+ users – any videos less than 15 minutes long don’t count towards your limit.

If you get to your 1GB limit then anything you upload will automatically be resized to fit within the limitations of the free storage.

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1. I’m very busy on version 2 of my YouTube Embed plugin – a huge change and my most complex plugin yet – this is taking a big chunk of my time.
2. I’m using the excellent new Google Page Speed Online to look at various improvements to site speed. I’ve also been, and will continue to, making changes to this site.
3. Spent far too much time trying to sort out a technical issue with Streamline. It’s still not resolved and I’m sure, at the rate they’re going, a rant post is imminent.
4. I get a lot of this work done at home in the evening. However, I’m looking at moving house so apart from traipsing around various properties, I’m also getting lots of DIY done as well.

I’m also expending a bit of time preparing for my birthday in a couple of weeks time. It’s a, erm, “special” birthday and I’ve asked for money or Amazon gift vouchers – I’ll then be the proud owner of a Playstation 3! I should add that all the preparation is deciding what games and accessories to buy

However, I do have a couple of articles to publish so, when I find time, I’ll try and get those completed.

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Draft version of the new site design

Since the beginning of the year I’ve been working on a revised version of the site. More than just a theme change, this has been a review at every site component. I’m now nearing the end of this work and will launch the new site design soon. However, I thought I’d take the opportunity to provide details of some of the things that have changed – bear in mind that I have a list of 70 changes that I made (many of them individually wide ranging) and 17 things that I didn’t.

Theme

First up is the theme. It’s darker and much more professional. Images have been reduced to save bandwidth (yours and mine!) and new fonts are used. A new “social bar” in the sidebar provides quick access to the sites Twitter and RSS feeds along with the PayPal donation option.

I’ve also implemented “margin reduction”. The site uses a new width, designed to fit perfectly horizontally on screens with a resolution of 1024 pixels or higher. This is in combination with a reduction in blank margins, fitting more information on the screen.

A new drop-down menu has been introduced, including quick access to blog categories and the most popular WordPress plugin pages.

Oh, and XHTML validation has been fixed

A screenshot can be found to the right of the new design – this isn’t the final

Performance

Performance changes have been critical. The site now has a YSlow A Rating (that made me very happy!) with improved caching and compression. I also copy external scripts (e.g. those provided by Google, Twitter and Facebook) to my own server, so they can be compressed and delivered quicker. Numerous plugins were removed after investigation into what was hogging resources the most.

A bizarre change, but bandwidth has been reduced by changing the 404 error page. Originally showing a large image, this now contains an embedded YouTube video. The 404 page is visited every time an invalid page is visited, so a reduction in this page size can make big savings.

Plugins

For those of you who are interested in my WordPress plugin work, 2 big changes have been made.

First up, I’m now using Mantis Bug Tracker to record bugs and enhancements. As part of this I’ve written some code to integrate the results of this directly into the plugin pages on the site – at the bottom of each it will list any bugs or enhancements for that plugin.

Secondly, I’ve added a forum for plugin discussion. Using comments tended to get a bit crowded after a while so comments on plugin pages are now closed (but viewable for historic reasons!) – instead there’s now a link to the forum.

Comments

Speaking of comments – the commenting system has been much improved with a better layout (for those WordPress geeks, I’m now using the automated comment features that WordPress offers, rather than the manual method that was implemented before).

I also now show how many comments are awaiting approval.

Reviews

Any reviews on the site included hidden Google “microcode” – information that Google can pick up and integrate into search results. This was present before but how now been improved.

Anything Else?

Tonnes more, but I’m now going to list them all – when the new site designed launches, I’m sure you’ll find them

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Version 2 was almost a complete re-write and introduced a few more bookmarks and a direct link to my Simple URL Shortener plugin for shortening URLs.

Well, now, I’m jumping straight to version 3 in what is another complete re-write!

Where-as previous versions may have introduced 1 or 2 new bookmarking sites, version 3 will increase it from 43 to 158! And there’s more possibilities in future – I’ve trawled various sharing sites (such as AddThis, etc) for their lists of bookmarking sites and have come to a list of 432. I’ve then ranked them according to the number of Google hits against their URL (145 I haven’t yet done) – the higher the hits, the more used they are. Only those with over 100,000 hits have been included (with the odd exception). And that’s just the current situation – I’m sure by release, these figures will have changed.

Anyway, other than a plethora of new bookmarks, here’s what else is changing…

• I’m now using AddThis and Shareaholic for the majority of links – by using their API, they will handle the passing of data to the services. I’ve also added a new parameter so that you can specify which one of these companies will be given priority if they both handle the same service.
• I’ve removed use of Simple URL Shortener plugin – you now pass the shortened URL yourself, allowing any shortening plugin to be used
• All the default icons have changed – obviously lots added, but existing ones changed. This is because, with so many, I can’t use a swizzy matching set, as before, so I’m now using the sites own favicon.
• I’ve separated bookmarks and tools (e.g. sending the URL to a site that creates a PDF) and, optionally, you can display a separator between the two
• There are now 140 bookmarking services and 19 tools available
• Used smush.it to compress images
• I’m adding the ability to provide basic animation of the icons – one set for static display and another can be used for when the icon is “hovered over”.

If there’s anything else you’d like to see, now’s your chance as I’m still in the middle of the above changes. What would you like to see it do? What would you not like to see it do?

What I should do (and haven’t yet) is to look at the competing Social Bookmark plugins and see what they can do. I’m also mulling over the idea of integrating in Google Analytics as well. Hmm…

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