The recent Headway 1.7 beta along with it’s GPL announcement has a lot of people buzzing on the web.  While the Headway theme for WordPress was already revolutionary, it really got a boost in popularity thanks to the social media world.

1.7 offered us great new additions like auto upgrade, columns, search bar navigation, more design options and a quicker and more responsive interface.  It has a lot of people excited about where Headway will go from here.

Luckily, I got to take a SUPER sneak peak at Headway 2.0 (Codename: Themezilla).  I was sworn to secrecy but I think the people deserve to know what the future of the Headway theme holds.  I hope this doesn’t come back to bite me in the ass, but here is a top secret look at a mere 10 of Headway 2.0′s new features.  Hold on to your hats…

1. The Headway Visual Editor will make use of current technology by becoming fully integrated with pen and tablet set up: You can now draw your website!

2. Headway will include new powerful S.E.O capabilities which include (but are not limited too):

• Ability to get accepted into DMOZ with one click.  No more months of waiting!
• Automatic Google Sandbox Protection. No more fearing the slap!
• Automated backlink generator. Turn on the automated generator and Headway will create backlinks in a natural manner behind the scenes.
• Headway offers cutting edge coding, that will actually have your post indexed by Google, before you finish writing it!

3. Flash/HTML5 Editor: Now drag and drop elements to create Flash intros in only minutes!  Even better, convert any Flash file into HTML5 with the click of a button.

4. Headway Monitoring: You can now set up Headway to monitor your site.  If there is an issue with your site you will be notified via text.  If someone tries to hack your site, they authorities are informed and that IP is locked down.  Also, Headway will send you timely texts if you run low on beer of if you are near a police radar.

5. Headway X-ray Features: Remove those pesky clothes from the people in your sites images.  One click control will allow you to remove the clothes of all people in all images.  Note: You can also filter this by age, sex and body type.

6. Instant Viral Sensation Leaf: For an added cost (nominal) you can get the latest add on leaf, any video or blog post used in this leaf will instantly be a viral sensation.  You can expect shows like Tosh 2.0, Talk Soup and Howard Stern to mention your viral post within 48 hours.

7. Aggressive Donation Leaf: A lot of bloggers love adding a donation leaf to their website.  This way their loyal followers can make a donation that can help cover their costs.  The one problem is how cheesy it is, and it is never effective.  Well that is a problem of the past.  Enabling this leaf will mean your website traffic will be subject to threatening emails and phone calls until they donate.  In the toughest of situations they will receive a face to face meeting with Mongo Griffiths, the 6’7″ 350lb member of the Griffiths clan.

8. Enhanced Start Up: Every time you enter the Headway Visual Editor a random audio clip will play.  The audio clips are taken from the Wu-Tang Clan Collection.

9. Headway didn’t stop at GPL compliancy: 2.0 will also be fully recognized by the AAA, BBC, NAACP, NCAA and 3 of the four major sports leagues MLB, NBA and NFL.  The NHL is still rolling with Thesis.

10. Headway Pornography Escape: Headway will sense when your mother, father, wife, boss or family priest is within 3 steps of your bedroom and all pornography will be instantly hidden by the Headway visual editor.

I am personally pretty excited!  I think Headway was an obvious choice at 1.6 and it only got better with 1.7.  I think that the Headway 2,0 release will garner more media attention than ever.  I can’t wait for the beta release.  In fact, I could have used it about 45 minutes ago when my brother’s girlfriend opened my door without knocking.

Headway has released it’s 1.7 beta.  I had to try it out instantly!  I am very excited about this release and judging from my quick glance this is going to be great.  If Headway wasn’t a no brainer before, it might be now!  Let’s dive right into it…

1. Visual Editor is Quicker - Right away I noticed the visual editor loaded faster and was significantly quicker while navigating within it.  it is clear the Headway developers have been busy optimizing the code for the 1.7 release.

2. Notification – Second thing I noticed was right at the top of visual editor it shows what page you are editing (i.e. Blog Index).  This will be handy since so many pages etc… have similar layouts.  One quick look and you will know what you are doing.

3. Styles - There are now 4 default styles to choose from.  For people who want to get a site up quick and painlessly this will be a big help.  Still easy to upload or export your own as well.

4. Columns - Amazing addition here.  You can now spilt your page into columns!  This is perfect for magazine style layouts.  I think when this Beta is officially released I will be updating my own blog.  A lot of people had problems lining up leafs, and this takes the stress out of it.  Really exciting addition.

5. Header Options - A couple great options added here.  First off you can simply click a radial button to add a search from to your navigation!  This  was done with a hack previously and wasn’t exactly easy to accomplish.  Now you just click a button!  As well, there is another button to click to add a tasteful “Subscribe to RSS” link at the top right of your header.  It is these kind of details that make me very excited about where this theme will continue to go.

6. Site Dimensions - A lot of really great changes here.  Now you can control the padding of the wrapper AND leafs by just using a slider button.  The addition of the easy to use Leaf padding settings is a huge one and addresses an issue that is prevalent on the support forums. Another added bonus is that you can now add rounded corners to your leafs AND wrapper. Really updates the look of headway designs in my opinion.

7. Leaf Templates - Yay!  Remember how in past Headways you linked pages and then couldn’t edit them.  This deals with that.  Now you can set a leaf template, save it and you can apply it to any page you want.  This is better than the “default leafs” setting because you can save multiple templates and use them over on your site.

I haven’t even looked inside the Headway’s back office yet but I am sure there are more goodies there.  These changes, along with promises of cleaner code and less plugin compatibility issues have me super excited.  headway continues to prove they are a progressive company that listens to their customers needs.  I can’t imagine what they have in store for the future, but I am sure it will be great!

Anyone out there using the new Digg yet?

I got my invite today and it is looking very interesting.  First off it adds twitter like following capability.  You can easily follow you friends and/or the big names in the industry.  I follow Wired magazine and Mashable for instance.  The new thing about this is how your main page displays at Digg.  When you go to the new Digg, now you are taken to “My News”.  This page lists everything that your friends are Digging and submitting.  This is great for people who like to work together on Digg.  It will be super simple to make sure you Digg you friends articles because every time you log in, you will see them first thing.  You can also click on Top news to see a more traditional layout.

Another sweet feature is their is now auto submission for RSS feeds!  What a time saver, now when I make a post – it will be submitted to Digg automatically!  Not  huge deal for some people, but if you are cranking out content on a daily basis it saves you a couple minutes.  Minutes add up!  Ask my cell phone provider.

Anyways, if you get the invite, take Digg up on the offer.  The new Digg has some great advantages that might keep the Digg brand viable for the near future at least.

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I know…weird.  The truth is I will be updating my blog to Headway eventually – just haven’t had the time to do it yet.  I haven’t had the time becuase I have been setting up other Headway themed WordPress blogs for clients.

I love the Headway theme and the ease of use its visual editor supplies.  I have come across some problems with it though – but usually these are very easily fixed.  here are a couple tips that I have used to address certain issues in Headway.

WordPress Login Redirect Loop

This issue sometimes happens in conjunction with a WordPress upgrade.  I have only seen this issue using Headway 1.5.6 (not the recently released 1.6.1).

Anyways, on a couple blogs I have had this issue.  I upgraded WordPress and everything looked good…UNTIL I tried to login to the WordPress dashboard.  Firefox gave me an error that roughly said “WordPress is trying to contact a page that will never complete…” and in Safari I got a big line of redirect errors.

This can be caused by a couple problems, but if you have Headway there is a good chance that is causing the problem.  The fix is simple:

1. Using FTP navigate to your sites wp-content -> themes folder
2. Rename the headway folder by adding a TEMP to the start of the folder.  (headway-16 would become TEMPheadway-16)
3. Try to log in to your wordpress site again – you will get a prompt to Upgrade Your Database – Do it.
4. Once your Database has succesfully been updated, using FTP navigate back to your Headway theme folder and remove the TEMP from the folder name.
5. Refresh your site and everything should be as is.

If this doesn’t fix the problem then your issue is non-Headway related.  It is most likely a plugin.

Header Image Is Taking A Long Time To Load

Some people report that their header image takes a long time to load.  One example would be on a website I built.  The rest of the page would load, but the header would be a small text link for a couple seconds before expanding to fill it’s place.

This is an issue you can correct in the Visual Editor.

1. Open Visual Editor
2. Click On Site Configuration
3. Click on Header Image
4. Make SURE that “Enable Header Image Resizing” is NOT clicked.

Turning off Header Image Resizing should fix this issue.

I Want A Fluid Repeating Header Background

When we do a premium header for our clients – quite often that header includes a top to bottom or bottom to top gradient.  This just adds a bit of uniqueness to the header, and helps it stand out more than a traditional solid color.  The way this is handled is you take a sliver of the gradient (say like 7px wide, height equal to your header) and you repeat it on the X axis so it covers the whole header area (a fluid header expands and contracts to the size of the screen viewing it).

To add a gradient to your fluid header:

1. Create the sliver of gradient (this will usually be included if you have used a paid service for your header)
2. Upload that image (jpg or png…gif is not good for a gradient btw) to the Headway theme folder.
3. Add this code to your Custom.Css (use the WordPress editor or the live CSS tool on headway Visual Editor):
   body.custom div#header-container { background-image: url(header_bg.png); background-repeat: repeat-x; color: #333333; }
4. Replace the bolded part above with the name of your gradient image.

Once that is done your fluid header should now have your gradient background.  if it isn’t appearing make sure you uploaded your graident image diretly into the Headway folder (no one of its sub folders)

Visual Editor Won’t Load

This can be tricky and there are a couple different causes.  Sometime the cause will be due to your webhost unfortunately.  By far though the most common problem is permissions!

Make sure your Headway Folder is set to 755 (set it recursively and apply to all sub folders).  In my experience 777 is not OK.  I figured it would be since it is even more lenient than 755 but it wouldn’t work with ANY files set to 777.

Setting permissions is usually as easy as navigating to headway Folder via FTP and then right clicking on the folder.  That will bring up a menu that will have permissions in it somewhere.

Featured Content Gallery Isn’t Working

I have had some clients want the FCG plugin – some are very adamant about it.  I explain to them that Headway has it’s own Featured post system, but they still want FCG.

Problem is, it wasn’t showing up for me and it was causing the content leafs on the same page to act weird.  Here is the fix (assuming FCG plugin is already installed):

1. Create a HTML/PHP leaf to house the FCG and place it where you want the FCG to appear.
2. Instead of using the code that FCG tells you to use to call it – use this code:
   <?php global $post; include(WP_CONTENT_DIR . ‘/plugins/featured-content-gallery/gallery.php’); ?>
3. You also have to change the Gallery.php fil that is found IN the FCG plugin folder (use FTP).  Make sure it is the gallery.php in the FCG plugin folder, not another gallery.php.  Replace all the code on the gallery.php file with this code:
   
   <div id=”featured”>
   <script type=”text/javascript”>
   function startGallery() {
   var myGallery = new gallery($(‘myGallery’), {
   timed: true
   });
   }
   window.addEvent(‘domready’,startGallery);
   </script>

   <style type=”text/css”>

   .jdGallery .slideInfoZone
   {
   height: <?php echo get_option(‘gallery-info’); ?>px;
   }
   </style>

   <div id=”myGallery”>
   <?php
   $imgthumb = get_option(‘gallery-use-thumb-image’) ? “thumbnailimg” : “articleimg”;
   $wordquantity = get_option(‘gallery-rss-word-quantity’) ?  get_option(‘gallery-rss-word-quantity’) : 100;
   if (get_option(‘gallery-way’) == ‘new’)   {//new way
   $arr = split(“,”,get_option(‘gallery-items-pages’));
   if (get_option(‘gallery-randomize-pages’))
   {
   shuffle($arr);
   }
   foreach ($arr as $post_or_page_id)
   {
   get_a_post($post_or_page_id); ?>
   <div>
   <h2><?php the_title() ?></h2>
   <?php
   if(get_option(‘gallery-use-featured-content’)) {?>
   <p><?php $key=”featuredtext”; echo get_post_meta($post->ID, $key, true); ?></p>
   <?php
   } else {
   ?>
   <p><?php the_content_rss(”, 0, ”, $wordquantity); ?></p>
   <?php
   }
   ?>
   <a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” title=”Read More”></a>
   <img src=”<?php $key=”articleimg”; echo get_post_meta($post->ID, $key, true); ?>” alt=”<?php $key=”alttext”; echo get_post_meta($post->ID, $key, true); ?>” />
   <img src=”<?php $key=$imgthumb; echo get_post_meta($post->ID, $key, true); ?>” alt=”<?php $key=”alttext”; echo get_post_meta($post->ID, $key, true); ?>” />
   </div>
   <?php
   } ?>
   </div>
   <?php
   }
   else { ?>
   <?php $my_query = new WP_Query(‘category_name=’ . get_option(‘gallery-category’) . ‘&showposts=’ . get_option(‘gallery-items’));   ?>
   <?php while ($my_query->have_posts())
   {
   $my_query->the_post();  ?>
   <div>
   <h2><?php the_title() ?></h2>
   <?php
   if(get_option(‘gallery-use-featured-content’)) {?>
   <p><?php $key=”featuredtext”; echo get_post_meta($post->ID, $key, true); ?></p>
   <?php
   } else {
   ?>
   <p><?php the_content_rss(”, 0, ”, $wordquantity); ?></p>
   <?php
   }
   ?>
   <a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” title=”Read More”></a>
   <img src=”<?php $key=”articleimg”; echo get_post_meta($post->ID, $key, true); ?>” alt=”<?php $key=”alttext”; echo get_post_meta($post->ID, $key, true); ?>” />
   <img src=”<?php $key=$imgthumb; echo get_post_meta($post->ID, $key, true); ?>” alt=”<?php $key=”alttext”; echo get_post_meta($post->ID, $key, true); ?>” />
   </div>
   <?php } ?>
   </div>
   <?php
   }?>

   </div>

4. Once that is done you are ready to roll.  You MUST set your FCG to pull posts by ID though not category.  Yeah it is a pain in the butt, but for now that is how it will work.  Also remember you need at least 2 posts before your FCG will work.

If you want more tips but for WordPress in general, Please Check Out:

WordPress For Business

There you can sign up for a completely FREE, 101 WordPress tips eBook, as well as printable wall poster!  All really great quality.

If you are interested in the Headway Theme, Check It Out Here:

Headway Theme

NOTE: I am looking for a WordPress plugin that will highlight and display CODE…the thing is I do not want to have to turn off my Visual Editor in WP…anyone have any suggestions?

Looks cool – has a dislike and like buttons, as well as a much cleaner interface.

Here is a preview: (click image to enlarge)

This is also under the video when you click the arrows beside views:

I firmly believe that social media is “changing the game”. For example, if I am looking for late breaking news, I don’t bother with google anymore – I do a twitter search.  Right now there are people who “hate facebook” or “don’t get twitter”.  Well in my humble opinion…good luck with that because social media is becoming the latest medium for change…and big time change.

I could go on about the long term social and political ramifications of social media (ask my friends how long I can go on about that) but lets look at something a little less serious…

As a fan of rap music I have some issues with sample clearance.  I think that artists that refuse sample clearances are hard ons.  I’m sorry, I know this will piss people off, but I do.  If someone can create a brand new completely different amazing song, out of a tiny snippet of your original, while at the samtime introducing your music to an entirely new generation – then why would you say no?

Sample clearance usually means lots of back and forth between lawyers etc… It is a tedious and costly procedure.

Erykah Badu (the current QUEEN of RnB..and it isn’t close) decided to skip the suits…she took her sample clearance to TWITTER.  She wanted a sample cleared from no less than SIR Paul McCartney himself…here is the article below:

We recently looked at an example of Twitter collaboration in the music world, but this may be the first case wherein the micro-blogging network was used for mainstream sample clearance.

Pitchfork reports on an exchange initiated by Erykah Badu on Twitter (Twitter), seeking last-minute clearance for a sample from the Wings song “Arrow Through Me.” Looking to connect with Paul McCartney, she appealed to anyone who might help connect her to him or a closer contact in the chain.

Following the stream of tweets, it looks like Badu got a hookup to Lenny Kravitz, who knows McCartney’s daughter Stella, who then connected her to Paul. He approved the sample clearance and she thanked her “Twitter fam” for making the clearance come together.

As Tears for Fears’ Curt Smith talked about in our recent interview, usually this process involves lots of lawyers and in-betweens and can often be drawn out for weeks if not months of back and forth. In another excellent example of how social media can be used to disintermediate the music industry status quo, Twitter made sample clearance a collaborative and rapid process by putting two artists into direct contact.

OK maybe not a life or world changing use of Twitter – but it is yet another example of the power of social media and how it can help link up people worlds apart.

It is the future and the future is here.

I whipped up this doc recently for an offline gig.  It was a very basic overview of how to get backlinks to your website.  This is probably not news to people who have been into SEO for awhile, but I would have liked to have this guide when I first started learning about backlinks.

This guide is just a rough introduction to building links to your site.  It touches on a number of different ways to get links.  I mentioned a number of methods, but obviously some are better than others.  For instance blog commenting and forum signatures are not my favourite type of backlink, however they can be powerful traffic generating tools if used right.

Anyways if you are new to world of search engines and want a quick overview, feel free to download it below.

Do whatever the hell you want with it by the way.

Right Click and Save as…

Free Back Linking Guide

The Man The Myth The Legend

To my friends and family this may come as a huge surprise.

December 1st and 2nd was the first (of many!) internet marketing seminar that my good friends and colleagues Brad Gosse and Justin Popovic (Success) took the point on.  They were the key instructors for the course.  If you want to learn anything about internet marketing – then check out Brad’s blog, he has a good a grasp on making money online as anyone.  If you are interested in success in general and want to get motivated and inspired – check out Justin’s site!  Some great material on both sites.

They did a great job presenting the material.  I’d also like to thank Claire and Megan because without them this would have been impossible!  Plus they added to the good looking ratio of the room.

Anyways, this seminar went really well.  Having done some smaller seminars in the past, we had a good idea of the challenges we would face and I think we dealt with them all well.

I was hidden away, working remotely from Shelburne, ON.  I was setting up the WordPress powered websites that all attendees left the seminar with!  Pretty great value there.  We not only taught people how to promote themselves online, they also received the vehicle they needed to do it.

Besides a couple Hostgator issues (which were quickly worked out with the help of their great support) it ran pretty smoothly.  If you are looking for web hosting I really think Hostgator is the way to go.  You can learn more about them here:

I think the attendees got a lot out of the seminar and I think they really enjoyed it.  One of the attendees is a friend of mine and he said his only worry was that he learned too much!  Never a bad thing at a seminar, the workbook and DVDs we give them, will help people remember what they learned.

Thanks to everyone who came out!  Stay tuned for info on the next seminar.

Check out some pics below, I believe that these were shot by the incomparable Claire.  Amongst the litany of skills Claire and Brad have, professional photography is on the list.

This is a couple friends of mine discussing S.E.O. (search engine optimization) and some common myths.

The interviewer is Justin Popovic and he is interviewing Brad Gosse.

So why is he interviewing Brad Gosse?  He is doing it because Brad is a pioneer in the internet marketing field.  Who wouldn’t want to learn from this guy?  He has proverbially “been there and done that”.  He has made 7 figures from the internet.  He has been at the top of Google for the most competitive terms.

He even directed 3 MILLION website visitors to one of his websites..in a month.

If you have ever tried to generate traffic to a website you know how insane that is.  Imagine logging into Google Analytics and seeing a 100k day.  I would literally shit.  So check out these videos and learn a little something.  If you like what you saw then sign up for their FREE traffic generating seminar, no strings attached.

Learn Brad’s secrets to driving huge traffic:
FREE TELESEMINAR