We’re protesting SOPA and PIPA today with banners placed on all our properties.

Please join us by visiting American Censorship and adding your voice to those protesting against legislation that could censor the internet and could results in sites like ours having to shut their doors.

Even if you don’t live in the US you can still protest by petitioning the State Department who constantly speaks out about internet censorship in other countries.
Pressure them to speak out about America’s new domestic censorship system.

Help kill SOPA and PIPA in order to keep sites like ours alive for your enjoyment.

Take Action: Petition the State Department and  Stop American Censorship.

Image credit – Dan Fugate

It’s with a heavy heart that we’ve made this switch,  but updates to the Facebook pages for all of our sites when posts are published are now being handled by RSS Graffiti instead of Wordbooker.

Wordbooker is an awesome plugin and formats the posts  in a much nicer way than RSS Graffiti does but it has one major flaw, a flaw which it isn’t even responsible for – as far as we can tell Facebook doesn’t like it.

Facebook isn’t blocking the plugin, but it does appear to be grouping or hiding the updates from people’s streams, an issue which doesn’t appear to be affecting RSS Graffiti.

We’ve used both systems for a while on various sites and thought that the lack of interaction on some of our less established sites pages (which were using Wordbooker) was down to the limited numbers of users, however we switched over two of our main sites to Wordbooker and the difference was instantly noticeable.

The pages, which usually have interaction one every post had ZERO interaction for 24 hours after switching.

It could just have been that we were posting crappy content, but we doubt it. The posts did well on the actual sites and a mirror version of one of the pages which was left using RSS Graffiti (the mirror version is a remnant from a rebranding) continued to get likes and comments on the posts.

Again, let me say that we make this change almost against our will. Wordbooker is an awesome plugin, it just appears that Facebook does not like it.

BarCamp Mobile is being held on the at University of South Alabama on November 12, 2011.

We’ll be there. In fact, Sara is the one organizing this years even and Scrw Media will be one of the sponsors (which BarCamp could do with more of.. hint hint!). I’ll be running a session at the event, although we’re not sure about what yet (we have plenty of time) and we’re hoping that it will be an even bigger and better event that the last Barcamp Mobile.

You can register to attend (which is free) here or drop along to the site to find out more information, such as what a BarCamp actually is and why they’re so different to other conferences.

We’ll be in Birmingham, Alabama on Tuesday the 27th of September for TechMixer University.

TechMixer University is an annual one-day conference that offers a full day of free technology training. This Birmingham, Alabama event is attended by the area’s brightest and enriched technical professionals, including developers, database professionals, project managers, network professionals, IT directors/managers and C-level executives. The event also provides coverage of non-Microsoft technologies such as Oracle, MySql, and Ruby.

There are 40 sessions that day (a full list can be found here) and I (Paul) will be speaking about “Optimizing WordPress for Shared Host Environments” from 2:55 to 4:15.

Register for TechMixer University.

Last weekend we made our way to Birmingham Alabama (photos on Flickr) to partake in BarCamp Birmingham 5.

While we were there we got to meet some awesome folks who were kind enough to share their expertise on everything from critical thinking to running your start-up and cutting the cord.  I also had the opportunity to give a talk on “WordPress Optimization for Shared Host Environments”.

We’d like to send a massive thank you to everyone who made BarCamp Birmingham 5 a possibility and for welcoming us so openly.

There’s a full post about our trip over on my blog.