So you’ve been toying around with the idea of setting up your own blog. Your own little space on the internets to spread your ideas, share inspirational thoughts, make observations about the bizarreness of life, the universe and everything or maybe you just want to have a good old rant about the recession.

Whatever your reasons, the end goal is the same – to establish your own web presence where you can express yourself freely to just about anybody on the planet. The purpose of this series of articles is to help you achieve that goal.

Over the next few weeks we will take an in-depth look at the world’s most popular blogging platform and see how you can take advantage of it to create a unique and functionally rich weblog from the ground up. More »

Research firm Hitwise was recently commissioned to conduct a study focused on the UK online market. Among their findings they reported that one out of every 350 visits to a UK site comes from the social networking site Twitter, making it the 30th largest source of traffic in the UK.

The report goes on to say that while only 9.5% of this traffic is driven toward commercial sites almost 56% of it goes to other social networking sites, media sites and blogs. It’s clear to see from this that Twitter can be an important source of traffic to your blog.

One of the easiest ways to allow people to share your blog posts on Twitter is by allowing them to tweet directly from your site. There are a number of plugins available to help you do this. However, here we will look at one quick and simple method that does not require any plugins to be installed on your blog.
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Being an Irishman I should by now be fluent in at least two languages – English and Irish. Unfortunately things don’t always go to plan and I wasted my younger years quietly plotting world domination while I should have been paying attention to my Irish lessons. At the time I always wondered what was the point in learning a dying language. It’s only now that I ‘get it’ and regret not being able to say more than “An bhfuil cead agam dul go dtí an leithreas?” in Irish. This was one phrase you had to learn if you wanted to make it through the day in school – “Can I go to the toilet?” – If you didn’t master this phrase the consequences could sometimes be dire! More »

At the time of starting this post I am 25 years, 11 months, 27 days, 16 hours and 41 minutes old. Which unfortunately means that in just over seven hours I will be 26 years old. At 7:30am on Friday 25th March 1983 Phil was inflicted upon the world. I am now officially on the wrong side of 25!

I recently read a shocking statistic. Apparently 100% of those who live past 25 will have already turned 26 or will do so within the next year. Or to put it another way that’s a 0% chance of staying in your mid-twenties. That’s right folks, zero, nadda, no hope for anyone! So as I sit here, feeling myself shift from mid to post-mid twenties a sense of nostalgia bestows my aging brow. In not so quite contemplation I muse over my life so far, increasingly aware of the big 30 looming just a stones throw away.

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… There was nothing. But I’m working on it and hope to have the site up and running shortly.

Currently a major work in progress I’m using a free wordpress template until I have my own design ready to upload. Watch this space!

- Phil