Last night, as I was doing my usual rounds of visiting my favorite blogs, I came across a very useful post written by none other than my uncle Bob. It was a blog post written about a really neat plugin for Wordpress blogs called “Broken Link Checker.”
This is one of those plugins that’s really easy to install. Just upload it to your plugins directory, activate it and let it do its thing. After a while, you can check how many broken links your blog has by visiting the broken links settings page.
So, uncle Bob has over 3000 posts and had only 16 broken links. I have 1290 posts and about 180 broken links. Something wrong here?
I will admit that most of my broken links were internal. Many were external, but the majority were of photos that I deleted from the server and links to websites that I have taken down. It felt great to “unlink” to these dead web pages.
Why is it even important to get rid of dead links on your website? Well for one thing, it is highly annoying for your visitors to click a link and have it go to a 404 page, or even worse, a page that doesn’t exist at all. For another thing, it makes the person who operates the website look a bit amateur. Lastly, search engines hate links to dead pages and punish accordingly. Trust me, I know. They don’t like it at all.
So, if you have a blog and think you might have some broken links, go ahead and install this plugin. You might be surprised at what it finds.
Due to popular request, I have decided to reactivate the posts by email feature I had going a while back. Apparently, people don’t like visiting my blog. They like getting my posts emailed to them. Is there anything else I can do for you guys? Anything at all? Breakfast in bed perhaps?
Anyway, this time things are going to be a little bit different. The post by email feature will be by manual sign up only. This means that if you would like to be put on the list, you will need to email me and tell me. I will add you to the list and you will just have to click the confirmation link in the email that gets sent to you. I sure hope this avoids all the trouble I had with the spammers the last time I had this set up.
Believe me, I really wish I was in the mood to write. I have the content and the time, it’s just that I really haven’t found the motivation to write any blog posts lately.
As a fellow blogger recently suggested, it may be the weather. I think people just get lazy during the Summer. I’m sure things will pick up when we are all stuck inside again. I know it’s not just me…hardly any blogs I know have been updated with any regularity lately.
I am going to try to make an effort again very soon. I need to tell you about how I reseeded the entire lawn and how I used peat moss for the very first time. What else…oh yeah, I cleaned out the chimney by myself instead of paying over $200 for someone else to do it. I also want to tell you about how I miss college, especially now that the weather is getting cooler again. I am sure there are some other things too, but I just can’t think of them right now.
If you are like me, you have a number of websites or blogs that you check daily, just to see what’s going on. I have a few blogs written by friends and then a few blog/websites put together by communities. These communities are quite entertaining, let me tell ya.
Let’s talk about the sites not put up by friends. Right now, I visit three of them a few times a week. I would say that more often than not, I laugh out loud. Am I allowed to say that, or do I have to write LOL? I am not a LOL writing type of guy and I serious mean that I laugh so people can hear it. Anyway, these websites are pretty damn hilarious.
Last week, I planned to list all three of them here in a post. Then, as I was visiting them to see what was new, two of them had some hilariously offensive material right there on the first page. Now, while I might LOL at this, many of my reader might not (I know that they are secretly LOLing, but I’ll still get yelled at). I am sure you are all aware of my strict policy of non-offensiveness.
Now, I want you to know that at the time of me posting this link, there is nothing offensive on the first page. That’s all I checked. So, if things get interesting, it’s not my fault.
You have to check out this site. I guess the people who created it have some source for getting emails written by whack jobs. Strangely enough, I have actually received a few of these types of letters in my day. People think they can pretty much say anything through email. It’s like driving. Same thing. That’s where road rage comes from.
Check out the site and let me know what you think. I want some comments by tomorrow morning. If you’re good, I’ll drop some hints about the other two sites. After you check them out, you’ll be LOLing on the floor.
I recently decided to stop outsourcing my blog feed control as well as the “read by email” feature. It’s amazing where one finds one’s blog posts out there on the vast internet. It’s like, “Gee, I didn’t know some 90 year old guy in Singapore wrote that. I thought I did. But there are no links back to my blog…Oh, I get it, they are a spammer running an automated bot that goes out and steal people’s content.”
The reason I stopped using the feed service and decided to go back to the original feed feature that comes with the blog software is that I have more control over who uses the feed and where it goes. When you let another service control that, you lose those two options.
Unfortunately, by doing this, I also lose the option of emailing my posts out to my faithful readers. I was getting up there in readership too. I’m sorry, but I gotta do what I gotta do.
Soooo, if you currently read my posts by feed reader, kindly update your URL to use the new (or original) feed URL. It can be found by clicking the huge “RSS” button to the right. The other feed will be cut off tomorrow.
I know I am going to hear it about changing the format for this blog homepage. Please understand, it had to be done. I have tried this a few times in the past, only to get push back from some top blog readers. Let me apologize ahead of time, but this is the way it’s going to stay.
I will tell you that you are welcome to sign up to receive my posts by email if you can’t get past the change. As far as I know, they are still in the same format and you won’t even have to visit the site anymore. The sign-up is to the right.
As you may have noticed, I am toying with the idea of having people register at this blog. As I said, I am toying with the idea.
Right now, I have every new user registration set to “subscriber.” In the future, and if I trust the person who registered, I may set an account to “contributor.” As of right now, three new users registered since yesterday. None of their user names or email addresses look familiar, so I feel pretty comfortable keeping things the way they are.
Of course, if a good friend registered, or perhaps my mother or sister, they might become a contributor. All that means is that they will be able to write new blog posts that will be reviewed by yours truly before being posted.
So, if you feel like you might be of benefit to this blog and wouldn’t mind writing a guest post once in a while, I invite you to register for an account (top right).
UPDATE: I am temporarily turning off registration. Apparently, many people from other countries are very interested in registering at this website at a very fast rate.
You may have noticed a little change today. If you haven’t, that’s good. I am not even going to tell you about it then.
If you did notice something, let me just tell you why I did it. No, not because I’m bored. It’s because I was getting tired of writing for three blogs. Oh man, sometimes it’s exhausting on the brain. Now, I write for just one common blog because I merged them all together. I still have a little work to do, but if you see anything odd, please let me know.
What’s in a name? I just thought paddling down a beautiful river in the Solomon Islands would be nice…the Kwaree River, that is.
So we have been tossing around the idea of having a few guest writers on this blog. How’s that sound? Personally, I would love it if I were one of those people who couldn’t stop talking about my favorite TV show.
I mean, seriously…there are some reality shows that I just can’t shut up about, but for me, those are limited. I am sure there are a heck of a lot more people out there who love TV more than I do. I know I could write a whole post just on that Fifth Gear T-Rex on Rob Dyrdek’s Fantasy Factory. If you haven’t seen it, check out something like it here:
Yup, that T-Rex would certainly have a post of its own.
Anyway, if you have a lot to say and you like to write, please write a comment letting me know. Show us some of the stuff you’ve written before. Hey, maybe you can make yourself famous. You could even be like this lady…
Woman using a laptop in the snow on the side of a mountain
PS – It doesn’t only have to be about TV. It could be about movies, the internet, radio, or whatever. It just has to be exciting and awesome.
I’m not sure if you know this about me or not, but I’m addicted to reality TV. I think it happened a few years ago…the addiction, that is.
Anyway, the other night, while I was watching “Bad Girls Club,” I came up with this great idea. I thought that I would start up a blog so I could discuss all the shows and movies I love so much. I mean, how much fun would it be to bounce theories off one another about “Lost?” I’m sure we could all use a few good answers about what the heck the Dharma Initiative is really doing on the island and why Ben killed the whole group.
I’ve decided to allow registration on this blog and to let users write blog posts. We’ll see how that turns out. Please behave.
TYSM I read this one and decided to try it out on my ACER (See, its not always HP with the problems)...