This morning on Twitter I was whinging that my Spotify had ceased working for the past eight hours. @spotify did actually reply (which was nice) but in the end it was The Man Solution that did the trick (turning it off and on again). However, there entailed a brief discussion with @DavidFiske and @ChrisEFrost about paying for, or even using Spotify after the Freemium Model Disaster.

@DavidFiske @philhancox I lvoe them too, but I’m not paying for love I’ll undoubtedly rejoin in the future, but for now trying MFlow.

— Chris E Frost (@ChrisEFrost) May 20, 2011

I have used Spotify for a very long time. Five years I think it has been since I received my first invite and fell in love. If you’ve been living in a cave, Spotify is a music program that allows you to listen to millions of songs for a tiny fee per month or free with adverts and (now) other restrictions.

It has been growing massively in popularity and soon all my less technically minded, non early-adopter friends had Spotify too. Of course, the vast majority, if not all of them, are using the Free Model which was subsidised by advertisements. After the new restrictions were enforced, such as only being able to play a track five times per month, my friends starting ditching Spotify instead of upgrading which I presume Spotify had hoped.

I switched to Spotify Premium (£9.99 a month) about a couple of years ago. Working from home means the incessant and awful adverts that break up the music irritated me endlessly plus I can sync it for offline use or use it on my iPhone. It also makes me feel like I’m supporting them and the music industry, even if it is supposedly only a tiny little bit. I don’t believe Spotify really is screwing the artists, but I won’t, and never have purchased CDs (I’ve bought about five in my entire life). CDs (or MP3s, whatever) have never interested me and with the advent of this kind of technology, never will. So a tiny little bit of money from me is better than absolutely no money and I bet if everyone stopped pirating music, those tiny little bits of money would add up.

What Spotify does is replace my piracy with a legal method which I’m happy to pay for. Since Spotify came into my life, I’ve actually been recommended artists and gone to see them live (Bonobo being a particularly favourite example) which I hear from my musically educated friends is much more profitable for the artist.

I love Spotify and the community that has evolved around it (I’ve been an avid fan of sharemyplaylists.com also since it’s inception). For Spotify with no limits and no adverts is a stupendously small £4.99 a month (the £9.99 model has offline mode and mobile Spotify which I admit are features I seldom use). This, I’m sure, is less than the price of one album a month and I’m surprised that more people haven’t upgraded, even if Spotify are effectively forcing people to.

I am aware of other services such as we7 and grooveshark; I use them myself occasionally when I can’t find a band on Spotify (such as INME, don’t laugh – they were my first gig). But I still believe Spotify is an amazing tool that is revolutionary and I hope to continue to use it for a very long time.

Social Media Counters plugin not working?

Due to introducing support for Pages and custom post types, the checkboxes for where the social media counters are displayed have changed. All other settings should still be the same. If your counters have disappeared, simply go to the settings screen in your admin (the link called ‘Social Media Counters’ underneath ‘Settings’ in the left hand menu). If the ‘Posts’ box is empty, you simply need to tick it and save the new settings and they should reappear, as always.

My sincerest apologies for any inconvenience caused. It makes me very happy that so many of you are using and enjoying the plugin. I will endeavour to ensure that any future upgrades do not have similar issues but I hope that this is a minor issue and easily solved.

This is my first WordPress plugin and I am overwhelmed by how popular it has been. As you can see by the comments on the plugin page, I am committed to offering support (also by email) and will continue to do so where possible. Therefore, if you do have any further issues, feedback or feature requests, please do submit them via the comment form on the plugin page and I will endeavour to answer them all.

Thank you for your continued support,

Phil Hancox

P.S. If you really like the plugin, why not buy me a beer? You will be permanently linked to in an upcoming feature page which involves photos of me drinking beers purchased by your kind selves.

P.S.S Hat tip to CannabisChris for spotting a minor bug with the StumbleUpon badges. A fix has already been submitted and available as version 1.1.1

I was surprised Leon got this far. An early regular of the boardroom and a lack of appearances in the opening trail led me to suggest he wouldn’t last long but lo and behold, he made it relatively far.

I’m writing this post as an avid fan of the Apprentice, I was amused before the series started as I did my annual “who’s the obligatory fitty” scan of the candidates to see Leon’s white teeth shining back at me. I was first shocked because this is his second foray into BBC entrepreneurial gameshows (and he didn’t perform that well in the first, but more on that later) and also because I used to know and work with him.

You might find it difficult to believe that as a geek who writes website code for a living that I had a part time job during university promoting nightclubs. It was a very entertaining job; one that saw me dress as Elvis and perform drunken Vegas-style fake weddings in poorly erected wooden sets within the nightclub or collecting phone numbers from every female I could clasp my eyes on (data collection for the company, of course).

Leon Doyle was the team leader of us nightclub promoters and it was instantly obvious he was entrepreneurial and talented. He knew how to lead a team, generate ideas, get involved when he had to and yes – never stop bloody smiling. The cheeky chappy you see on the show isn’t a fake. He really was like that – charming with a generous dose of confidence that can be so easily confused for arrogance.

The nightclub promotion company left my university town for one reason or another. Rumour was they spent too much money. I distinctly remember a tank being driven round the town centre to promote the army fancy dress night. Whilst Huddersfield (the town in question) is very much a student town, it isn’t exactly Leeds. Regardless, I never saw Leon after that (I don’t think I had a Facebook back then – internet years make me feel very old).

Until Dragon’s Den that is. Not long back, Dragons’ Den had an online spin-off which was briefly broadcast on BBC2. In it, budding entrepreneurs did the usual pitch but to two different entrepreneurs, Shaf Rasul and Julie Meyer for a lower sum of money (under £50k). Leon entered with his “Master Menu” which essentially is all the takeaway menus you usually get through your door but binded together into a handy booklet.

It didn’t succeed and I couldn’t agree more. Although looking at a PDF version of the Master Menu today it does seem like a handy idea for the end user, I still can’t see it as a multi-million pound venture. The idea lives on today, coupled with an online ordering system which is a clone of Just Eat or Hungry House, two famous and dominant names.

Leon will do well, I have no doubt. He’s just not having much luck in the business “gameshows”. I wish him all the very best in his future business endeavours but please, do something about that “white pumps” ecommerce site. It might be a popular one (although living in the affiliate world, it’s just another nice domain, made-in-a-week website in my eyes) but it really needs a facelift.

Leon’s official website is at http://www.leondoyle.co.uk and you can follow him on Twitter @leontrepreneur.

Why donate to me?

You don’t have to. WordPress just asked for a link to this page. I write free handy plugins that save you loads of time and hassle, but cost me some time and some hassle.

If you knew me in real life you might be like “Hey, thanks for writing that bit of code for me buddy. Let me buy you a beer.” and I would be like “Well, I was writing it for myself anyway so I decided to submit it to the community too, but sure, I’ll take that beer.” That’s what this page is for. If you really wanted to, you could buy me a beer.

How much is a beer?

Well thankfully I don’t live in that epicentre of hopes, dreams and extortionate land prices otherwise known as London and even better, I live about two hundred miles North of it. Which means a pint of the nectar costs around £2.70. Or about $4.40, or EUR 3.05.

Would you really spend my donations on beer?

I’m not going to lie to you. Yes, I probably will. However, note that this pint will definitely be drunk with you in mind. I could even send you a picture of me with my pint as a virtual “Cheers”. We could even drink a pint together through the medium of Twitpic or something. That would be fun, no?

OK, how can I buy you a beer?

With this little nifty button here that will take you to Paypal and you can donate as much, or as little as you want.

Can I pay you to make changes to your plugin?

Well you can donate as thanks for the plugin, sure. All comments on any individual plugin can be submitted via the plugin page and I’ll take them on board and perhaps implement them in it’s next release. Buying me a beer won’t guarantee I’ll implement your suggestions though.

Can I pay you for bespoke plugins? Or maybe for other work?

Sure. I have rates for that though, and sadly it’s not as convenient or as cheap as one pint of beer.

Could I get a link in return for my donation?

Sure. For now, anyway. I will give link thanks on this page to the first 50 people who buy me a beer.

I have another question

Then this handy form below will help you. It won’t answer your question, it’s just a form. But it will allow you to send me your question and then I will probably email you back with my answer.

So has anyone bought you a beer yet?

Sadly not, no. But this will be the section where I’ll add links to those kind people over the world who purchased me a beer.

What’s the weather like where you are?

Right now? Pretty sunny. Beer garden weather. Clicky clicky.

Introduction

This is my first ever plugin and I will be submitting it to the WordPress plugin directory imminently it is now available in the official WordPress directory here. I was inspired when trying to add social media counters to the School for Startups website and finding it surprisingly difficult to find a decent plugin that was flexible and did what I needed. So, I created my own and you can see it working here and on the School for Startups website.

Description

This plugin allows you to add social media counters to your blog posts. These are buttons that allow your site’s visitors to share your content, but also to see (and for you to see) how many times it has been shared through different services.

The options make this plugin incredibly flexible.

You can add counters to the top of your posts, the bottom of your posts or both and customise it so different services and different styles can be used for top and bottom. You can add a title to them and style the titles however you like.

Social counters can be added on posts, pages and even custom post types. They can also be applied to post excerpts and you can choose whether you’d like tall counters or compact counters (or one for each part of the blog post).

Services available as part of the plugin include:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Google Buzz
• Google +1
• LinkedIn
• Digg
• StumbleUpon
• AddThis

Installation

How to install:

• Click here to download the Social Media Counters plugin.
• Unzip and extract to your wp-content/plugins folder.
• Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
• Configure settings through your WordPress admin via Settings > Social Media Counters.

Screenshots

 

Screenshot of the options screen

 

Screenshot of the icons in action, at the bottom of a blog post

Changelog

1.1.1

• Fixed minor bug with StumbleUpon and Twitter badges

1.1

• Added support for Pages and custom post types
• Added support for excerpts
• Addded option for Twitter handle

1.0

• Initial Version

This morning on Twitter I was whinging that my Spotify had ceased working for the past eight hours. @spotify did actually reply (which was nice) but in the end it was The Man Solution that did the trick (turning it off and on again). However, there entailed a brief discussion with @DavidFiske and @ChrisEFrost about paying for, or even using Spotify after the Freemium Model Disaster.

[blackbirdpie id="71506128760082432"]

I have used Spotify for a very long time. Five years I think it has been since I received my first invite and fell in love. If you’ve been living in a cave, Spotify is a music program that allows you to listen to millions of songs for a tiny fee per month or free with adverts and (now) other restrictions.

It has been growing massively in popularity and soon all my less technically minded, non early-adopter friends had Spotify too. Of course, the vast majority, if not all of them, are using the Free Model which was subsidised by advertisements. After the new restrictions were enforced, such as only being able to play a track five times per month, my friends starting ditching Spotify instead of upgrading which I presume Spotify had hoped.

I switched to Spotify Premium (£9.99 a month) about a couple of years ago. Working from home means the incessant and awful adverts that break up the music irritated me endlessly plus I can sync it for offline use or use it on my iPhone. It also makes me feel like I’m supporting them and the music industry, even if it is supposedly only a tiny little bit. I don’t believe Spotify really is screwing the artists, but I won’t, and never have purchased CDs (I’ve bought about five in my entire life). CDs (or MP3s, whatever) have never interested me and with the advent of this kind of technology, never will. So a tiny little bit of money from me is better than absolutely no money and I bet if everyone stopped pirating music, those tiny little bits of money would add up.

What Spotify does is replace my piracy with a legal method which I’m happy to pay for. Since Spotify came into my life, I’ve actually been recommended artists and gone to see them live (Bonobo being a particularly favourite example) which I hear from my musically educated friends is much more profitable for the artist.

I love Spotify and the community that has evolved around it (I’ve been an avid fan of sharemyplaylists.com also since it’s inception). For Spotify with no limits and no adverts is a stupendously small £4.99 a month (the £9.99 model has offline mode and mobile Spotify which I admit are features I seldom use). This, I’m sure, is less than the price of one album a month and I’m surprised that more people haven’t upgraded, even if Spotify are effectively forcing people to.

I am aware of other services such as we7 and grooveshark; I use them myself occasionally when I can’t find a band on Spotify (such as INME, don’t laugh – they were my first gig). But I still believe Spotify is an amazing tool that is revolutionary and I hope to continue to use it for a very long time.

Still using the old “status=foobar” query string in your links to pre-populate status text? Switch to Web Intents: dev.twitter.com/pages/intents

— Arnaud Meunier (@rno) May 17, 2011

Apparently, Twitter has switched off the old method of pre-filling statuses and turned on a new one. Without telling anyone. I might have dropped my eye off the ball, but I’m certain I’ve seen no blog posts from either Twitter or the blogosphere warning about a switchover, perhaps a certain amount of time for developers for change the links etc.

The new system is pretty fancy. Called “intents”, you can add your link and it will open a small window with a nicely designed interface for you to login (if necessary) and then post a tweet, retweet something, reply – whatever. It is quite nice and I may go into it more in a future post but for those of you who, like me, missed the announcement, here’s what changes to make:

Your original link to prefill a Twitter status might have looked like this:

http://twitter.com/home?status=My+tweet+to+@philhancox+goes+here

You need to change it to this:

http://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=My+tweet+to+@philhancox+goes+here

It’s simple but there are all kinds of things you can do with the new system. I recommend you check out the official documentation. But any chance of more warning next time, Twitter?

It doesn’t really disappoint but it’s not exactly inspiring either. In a nutshell, Godin declares Old Marketing (meatballs) is dead, New Marketing is brilliant (ice cream) but a traditional organisation can’t just employ New Marketing for the sake of it and expect massive results (a meatball sundae). Old Marketing, as you would expect is TV advertising, paying for shelf space, newspaper estate and so on. New Marketing isn’t just blogging and social media, though they are mentioned a lot, it can be the entire business model of the company itself, such as CafePress allowing thousands of people to open their own “stores” selling custom printed shirts and products which CafePress then produce and distribute.

Seth keeps the metaphors and frustratingly short case studies coming at an almost blisteringly fast point, regurgitating points made only a couple of pages ago. In parts it feels very limited; fluffy feel good stories about new businesses offer no actual analysis or statistics and sometimes you question whether the businesses mentioned are actually making profits despite employing this lovely New Marketing. Seth also shies away from actually telling you what or how to do New Marketing and so this is less of a manual and more of a guide to change your mindset about marketing. This it does do well.

Some of the points he make might seem common sense to A-Level Business students but it has to be said that there are many insights and case studies that force you to take a breather and really think about marketing from every perspective; as a consumer making a brand choice, as a current employee trying to achieve results and imagining what you would change if you worked for a big FTSE 100 company.
Overall it’s not a bad book. It won’t tell you what to do but it might change the way you do it. Click here to buy from Amazon.

I get a lot of e-mails from networks and programs and although I often don’t read them all, this one caught my attention. Titled ‘Important Affiliate Notice’, I opened it and read as follows:

Dear Phil,

You have joined TotallyGifts.co.uk affiliate program some time back.

We have noticed that you are not participating in promoting TotallyGifts.co.uk using the methods you mentioned at the time of joining.

We will like to discuss how we can help you in order to start promoting TotallyGifts.co.uk website.

Please respond us by Tuesday 30^th June 2009 with the proof of promotional activities otherwise your account might be suspended.

Look forward for your response.

Thanks & regards

The e-mail starts off innocently enough, but I’ve bolded out the points where the e-mail seems very accusational and perhaps cheeky. First of all, what the hell is this supposed to mean: “We have noticed you are not participating in promoting TotallyGifts.co.uk using the methods you mentioned at the time of joining”? Have they decided that I am promoting the site via other, unscrupulous means? If I am, I’m not doing a very good job of it because the total number of sales I’ve generated for them are none which I’m fairly certain wouldn’t be ringing many bells on an affiliate managers fraud-o-meter.

Secondly I’ve joined the program on an account called “thediscountblog.co.uk” where my methods of promotion are described as “discount voucher sites”, “blog” and “seo”. If we take a look at the only place I am promoting them, you’ll see a highly neglected page on The Discount Blog for Totally Gifts voucher codes:

That seems fairly accurate to me.

So next they want me to prove how I’m going to promote them. Well I’ve just proved where I’m promoting them currently, but if you really want to know, I have three other sites in development that would be a reasonably good match for the program as they will be targeting kids toys, gifts & gadgets and experience/activities respectively. But if I don’t e-mail back and tell them this, they will suspend me? Forgive me, but this sounds a little hostile and also, why do affiliate managers cull affiliates for no reason? I have three other sites in development that are a great match and therefore could be generating sales come the Christmas peak period but hey, I might be suspended and my sales will have to go to their competitors. It’s a pretty competitive market too.

Did you receive this e-mail or was it really just me? What did you think if you did? Personally when I develop these future sites, I’ll be promoting the old favourites in the gifts and gadgets market.

So, how does the new Woolies site look, feel and work?

From the very first glance of the homepage, there is a sense of disappointment and lost opportunity. It looks, to be blunt, pants. As much as red is their primary colour, the use of red on the site is dismal and quite depressing. There aren’t any other colours that really stand out, apart from the bright green and blues that sit atop the tabs on product pages, which don’t really blend in.

Besides the use of colours, space isn’t used well either. The homepage is dominated by a Flash section detailing the three different stores rather than promotions or price cuts; the same of which can be said of the category pages which also appear uninspired and even confusing. In fact, the big picture of a family titled ‘XBox’ on the consoles page actually lead to XBox accessories, not the console itself.

The navigation has friendly dropdown menus but they take a moment to appear which can be irritating, particularly when the anchor title appears before the menu itself and even obscures them.

The product pages are dreary in design but the information provided is quite good. Interestingly enough, the popup that appears when you add a product to your basket is unedited open source library AJAX/Javascript code because the site I’m currently redeveloping has the exact same pop-up (which I’ve redesigned because personally I think it’s a bit rubbish).

Switching sites just confuses you further. For a start, the checkout isn’t shared throughout the sites so you either have to buy your product or empty your basket before visiting another section of Woolies, which is even more bizarre considering you buy your X-Box in a different part of the site to the X-Box games. I like the funky Pick ‘n’ Mix site but again, different checkout, different product pages and so on.

Never mind that this is the resurrection of a well known and well loved family brand, this new Woolworths site has to compete with the likes of Amazon and Play.com and quite frankly Woolworths have gone into battle with a wooden sword. It’s a big shame because the new site was supposed to revive the brand aswell as provide a cover story for how a big high street brand that saw it’s demise during the recession was brought back thanks to the power of online marketing. I think with their current website, this isn’t going to happen.