Archive for category My Projects

The Twitter effect

Posted by Johann in Internet, My Projects on May 28th, 2009

Recently I decided to start marketing one of my projects with Twitter. Newsvibe is similar to Digg, except that it automatically collects news from most South African news sites. What I did was to integrate it with the Twitter API, and automatically tweet all South African news stories to Twitter accounts I set up specifically for the site. The main account is http://www.twitter.com/newsvibe. After I did this, the following happenned:

twitter

Traffic generated by Twitter

According to Google Analytics, I now get almost a 1,000 hits a day, compared to less than 30 before I started using Twitter. This is awesome - loads of traffic for free. I’m still figuring out how to best monetise and exploit the traffic. More importantly, I need to figure out how to get these visitors to use the site and start discussing the news stories.

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New theme!

Posted by Johann in My Projects on May 26th, 2009

I finally got round to finding a really good looking theme for my blog (at least I think it looks great). Although the old theme looked nice, it was a free theme from Woothemes, meaning a lot of other people were using it. Also, the main column for content was not very wide, meaning the pictures had to be drastically resized.

This theme still looks relatively simple (I’m a huge fan of 2 column websites), it clearly shows the article categories and it is compatible with all my Wordpress plugins.

What do you think?

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