I've mentioned top commentator before, it's going to be a website that acts as a control centre for commenting on other blogs of interest. It's easy to get carried away reading blogs and as it's something I do anyway, I thought I may as well try and get some links back to the top commentator site by dropping a comment or two when I'm reading other people's blog.

photo credit: premasagar

Anyway, this one has been on the back burner for too long. If you check out the sidebar on the right hand side you'll see a countdown timer indicating that TopCommentator.com should be launching in about 5 days times. Well I've started work on this site today and plan on completing it ahead of schedule. The main objective of this project is to use the site as a base for commenting on other blogs and it's essential to complete the site and get working on this sooner rather than later. The design of the site and ideas for the content we develop can evolve over time, but for now the main thing is to get it out there and see how the project kicks off! I'd normally be hesistant to go public with a site without having much content up on it but for this one we'll be sticking around on other peoples blogs for a while so I'm sure they'll keep coming back to the site every now and again to have another look anyway!

I've teamed up with Sean MacEntee on this project and we're taking the launch date forward to the 1st of August. That leaves us kicking off on a new month with zero visits and we'll be updating the site with monthly stats to check the progress. So check out TopCommentator.com later this week to see how it looks.

When I launched my new theme design, I said that I'd be trying to drive more traffic to this site:

I was reluctant to push too hard and try to begin new visitors to this site until I had customised the theme, but there's no stopping me now and I'll be trying to boost traffic to this blog now that it gives more of an idea of who's behind iliveontheweb.com

photo credit: Ross Mayfield

So yesterday I got round to commenting on some other blogs for the first time. For now I just left comments at JohnChow.com on his Canada Day post and I also got in with one of the first comments on Shoemoney's post on switching over to the iPhone. One of the main things I see bloggers mentioning is to get active with your comments and to get in there first, if you want to increase traffic back to your own blog. My site needs a lot of work yet, but I did this as a experiment, I've commented on these two blogs as I enjoy reading them anyway and I'd like to see how much traffic I get back as a direct result from these comments. I'll be looking at the stats tomorrow to see the effects and will possibly follow up with another post to show the results (if any ). It's something I'll be doing long term anyway with the launch of topcommentor.com, so a bit of practice in getting active with the comments is worth it at the stage!

I installed Google Analytics a while back. When I launched my new blog theme a few days ago, I've since realised that I overwrote all the files for my theme and therefore replaced the Google Analytics code. I don't know if many people have made this mistake before, but it took me a few days to pick up on what I'd done. My Google Analytic stats weren't rising and I knew there was something wrong as I was checking my AWS stats that I installed as part of my hosting plan and this blog actually had it's best day of traffic since I started out. So this is just something to be aware of, if you're updating your WordPress theme. Yeah I know I'm spending lots of time looking at stats but I'll be making more of an effort to boost traffic very soon so it's something I need to be looking at.

photo credit: richardmasoner

It's easiest just to place the Google Analytics code in footer.php as the footer shows up on every page and therefore this tracks all hits on your website. There's a nice article on exactly what to do over at ThemePlayground.com. It cleared things up for me as I previously thought I needed to put the Google Analytics code in a few different files, but it turns out that footer.php is the only place it needs to go! If you're using WordPress, there's lots of other nice tips on ThemePlayground and I'll be checking back there for a few tips and tricks as I continue to update this site.

I just uploaded my new blog theme. Everything seems to be working fine for now so hopefully I don't find too many problems along the way It's based on the default WordPress wide theme that I had been using previously and I've customised the header image, sidebar and added some links to my social networking profiles. There's now links to my Twitter and Facebook accounts and others in the nav bar... expect more stuff here soon!

Last week I added the countdown timer to pressurise myself into getting this done and I'm launching a few hours ahead of schedule. Although there's a bit more I'd like to have done, putting the countdown timer there made sure the theme got uploaded today and saves me tweaking for weeks on end trying to make everything 100% perfect and putting off the launch date again and again. I'll definitely be using this method again to get things done!

This is only version 0.1 of my customised wordpress theme and I have lots of changes still in mind for it.

Things I'm happy about:
I'm pretty happy with the general look and feel of the design. It's now a more personalised site which I thought it should be, as after all it's my online cv and I'm the man responsible for getting things done on this site and on other projects I'm working on. I had always intended to create a caricature of myself on the site and tried to give it a 3d like look by leaning over the navigation bar into my site to let readers know who's behind it. I think I've achieved this by gripping my hand over the nav bar. In general, I think the style and layout of the header looks good.

photo credit: Netream

Things I'm not happy about:
As I mentioned above this is only version 0.1 of my updated WordPress theme and there's lots more still to do. I think the cartoon that I created of myself needs some more work and I'd like to brighten it up a bit. I'll be styling the sidebar on the right hand side of the site to fit in a bit more with the look and feel of the rest of the site. I'll also be changing the style of the post titles and maybe the font used in the posts themselves. There's lots of other stuff too that I want to update pretty soon. One thing that is really annoying me is the way that the images for the site load up. It doesn't look good at the minute but I'll get this fixed by changing the background colours etc. to match a bit more. There's also some colour mismatch at the top of the page but these are simple fixes and I'll get them all sorted. The size of the images I'm using can also probably be reduced and I'll look in to doing this too.

So along with the update to version 2.8 of WordPress, my first major site update seems to have went smoothly enough. Here's a look back to what my site looked like at the very beginning. And I'll add a screenshot below here to to show how the site looks at the time of writing this on the 28th of June 2009. I like doing this as it tracks progress on how this blog is evolving:

You can see the comparison in the screenshot above on how the blog looked original and how it looks after my first major update. I think it's come a long way! I'm coming up to my 50th post and hopefully this and the theme update proves my commitment to developing my online presence with even more projects. I've talked before about potential partnerships. I'm hoping this level of commitment and the design of the theme itself gives others an idea of what I'm capable off. I'll be meeting face to face with a potential partner on Tuesday this week regarding multiple projects. As soon as we get things sorted officially, I'll be updating the new ads section on this site with details of these new projects that I'll be involved in!

So things are moving on for me and my online ventures. I was reluctant to push too hard and try to begin new visitors to this site until I had customised the theme, but there's no stopping me now and I'll be trying to boost traffic to this blog now that it gives more of an idea of who's behind iliveontheweb.com. This is version 0.1 and I wont be leaving things like this! Expect version 1 proper... maybe not today.. maybe not tomorrow... but it'll be here!

My custom theme design is near completion, and to compliment it I want to add as much interactivity and tools to increase traffic to this site as possible. The first thing I wanted to do was to add some social bookmarking links to the bottom of my posts. I had a look around and the plugin that I liked best was SocioFluid. Have a look at it in action below this post, I like how the images increase/decrease in size when you hover over them. It's easy to configure that way and you can select from a choice of 4 different image sizes when you configure the sociofluid plugin in the WordPress dashboard.

photo credit: aqhong

SocioFluid allows your site users to save bookmarks to the following sites: Digg, Reddit, DZone, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, BlinkList, BlogMarks, Furl, NewsVine, Technorati, Magnolia, Google, Myspace, Facebook, Yahoo Buzz, Sphinn, Mixx, TwitThis, Jamespot and Meneame. You can configure the plugin to select any combination of bookmarking sites to add to the bottom of your posts. I think I'll be adding all of them, or at least as many of the more popular one's that I can fit into my new theme design...

This is only the first step, I plan on adding a lot more plugins to this site to increase my chances of getting some traffic and to encourage user activity. Next on the list will be TwitterCounter and Feedburner stat tools and I'll also be upgrading to a new comments plugin to further increase interaction with social networking sites. Admittedly, I'm not a member on all of these sites yet either so that'll be another step in working towards increases my blogs through awareness of these sites. I'll also be upgrading to WordPress 2.8 in the next few days and I'm hoping everything goes smoothly with that and the transition to my new theme..