Archive for the ‘Blogs’ Category
Monday, October 29th, 2007
I updated my Wordpress blog the other day to version 2.3 and noticed a clever new feature. Now, when I write a post, there is a small field at the bottom of my editor for tags. Tags are like categories, but you can make a bunch more of them without cluttering things up.
This new “Tags” feature works with a few Wordpress Plugins, including one called “Simple Tags.”
I started using this neat new feature and am very happy with it. When I place a few tags (words) in my post, they are recorded and displayed at the bottom of each post. The blog also automatically takes those tags and find any related posts and displays them as well. Basically, related posts are just other blog entries with the same tags.
Take a look and become mad jealous.
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Sunday, October 28th, 2007
The other day, I noticed that my Google PageRank on this blog lost a point and is now a 5. I scratched my head and thought to myself that it was kind of expected. I know that I haven’t been writing too much lately as I try to figure out some business stuff.
I was just checking out my Uncle Bob’s blog and noticed that his PageRank jumped a point and is now a 7. Ahhh…the good days are over. Well, for me anyway.
The actual Google PageRank isn’t the thing that gets to me…it’s the competition of the whole thing. Not that I am competing with him, per se, but I am competing with every other website on the planet.
My search engine rankings aren’t affected by my PageRank and my traffic certainly isn’t either. So why do I care? Who knows. It’s probably a guy thing.
I am wondering why I suffered from Google’s last PageRank update and Bob flourished. I guess if I think about it for a second I can figure it out. Let’s look at the differences between the two sites -
1. His is mostly on topic and mine is all over the place. You can see this from my two million categories.
2. He writes frequent posts. Lately, I have gotten out of the habit.
3. He write long posts, most of the time. Only sometimes do I write long posts. I tend to use a lot of pictures.
4. He has a fairly loyal audience of readers who comment often. I have a smaller audience of loyal readers who comment not as often.
5. His comments are long. Mine are good, but not as long.
6. I tend to give away links to brand new sites with 0 PageRank. I don’t think that matters, because I trust those sites.
7. His readers may be slightly more tech savvy than mine in that they may have bookmarked his blog in their Google Toolbar Bookmarks.
8. He is smarter than me, but I don’t think that has anything to do with it.
So does this even matter, beyond my own ego? A lot of people are saying it doesn’t.
I tend to agree with them, but I can’t say that I’m still not a little hurt.
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Thursday, September 6th, 2007
I have been getting hammered lately with blog comment spam, apparently sent by auto dealers in China. The messages are very short and mostly include, “cool,” “interesting,” “really” and more like that. The URL plugged into the website field is usually something auto”esk” with the extension being “.cn.”
What is going on with Akismet? I deleted a bunch yesterday and woke up to thirteen this morning. Perhaps these spammers found a hole to get through.
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Saturday, August 25th, 2007
I’ll tell you. What’s good is when someone commits a whole blog to it.
You know I like olive oil because I have written about it in the past. There are tons of health benefits of olive oil and it just tastes good. Every time I use it, I feel like I am using something that not too many other people use. Yes, even I like to feel special.
When my buddy, Bob, told me that he is helping out with a blog devoted to the topic, I was pretty excited. You gotta see this thing. It’s called, “Olive Oil Passion” and has lots of good stuff for the olive oil lover out there.
Hey Bob…good luck with it!!!
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Sunday, August 12th, 2007
C’mon, be honest. Do you like it? It’s to the right. I thought this was the coolest thing when I found it. No, I’m not going to tell you where I got it. Just grab the damn feed already.
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Thursday, August 9th, 2007
Sometimes I write and write. I think I used to write a heck of a lot more than I do now. I mean, when I first started out with this blog, I think I used to write longer posts. Now, I write more, but shorter ones. How do you say that? More, but shorter?
There are many times when I come across information in news stories or other blogs that I flip though. There may be something that catches my eye…something I find kind of funny. It may be because I deal with a bunch of buttheads all day long or something like that. Sometimes my sensitivity meter is off. The story that I may have found amusing isn’t always all that amusing to others. Really though, most of the time they are pretty amusing. I probably have a pretty thick skin for these types of things because I am super exposed to them.
Well folks, we have to be careful. I mean, what we write really is our business, but like any other sort of media, people are reading our business. We can go day in and day out and choose to write what we want and ignore any comment that someone throws our way, but there might come a time when you say to yourself, “Hey, where did all my readers go?” Well, I suppose you may have a whole new breed of reader visiting your blog, but it was those faithful ones back in the beginning who really are the ones who matter most.
I now have over 320 posts written on this blog in under a year. I have only had to remove one post and slightly edit another. Neither of them were that bad, but when I hear even an inkling of dissatisfaction, I correct whatever is bothering someone. If I don’t like the person, I just ignore them. That’s not such a bad track record, right? Even newspapers get it wrong sometimes and they have full time editors. I am just a one man show. I have the strength of one million men, but still, I am just a guy.
This evening, I did a little Google search for “offending people on blogs.” Interestingly, there wasn’t much offered. I did find a nice post called, “3 Ways To Offend Readers and 4 Ways Not To.” There was a super duper link in there called, “Seven Reasons Not To Post To Your Blog.” It made me feel pretty good that there are people out there who have at least thought of the same stuff as I have and have had to deal with it as well.
Let’s face it, writing on blogs is fun. That might be why there are so many new ones popping up every day. Reading blogs is fun too. They really have become an integral part of people’s lives. It might be a good idea to get back to what we started in the first place, and that’s writing for our readers.
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Wednesday, July 11th, 2007
Well, this is my 300th post. Can you believe it?
I started writing in this blog just last August, so I would say 300 post isn’t all that bad. If I had only written a few more, I might have averaged one post per day, but I guess everyone has their ups and downs. Sometimes I like to write five posts per day, but sometimes I just don’t feel like writing at all for the whole week. Hey, I’m a redhead, what did you expect?
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Sunday, June 24th, 2007
Introducing the new Ask.com homepage
No doubt, it’s slick. Perhaps. I think I may have used Ask.com back when it was AskJeeves.com. I just wanted to try out the “Asking the search engine a question” trick. After I typed in a question, I quickly realized that all the search engine did was to strip out the question words, such as “how, why, when” etc…and give regular old search engine results. Well, that was my take on it years ago. It may have changed since then, but then again, I haven’t tried it.
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Saturday, June 9th, 2007
Here is what my admin panel tells me – “Akismet has protected your site from 26,240 spam comments.” That’s pretty good. Since I began using Akismet, very few blog spam comments have slipped through and very few legitimate comments have been caught as spam.
Lately, as in the past few days, I have been receiving about 10-15 spam comments per day. These comments have slipped through the Akismet filter and have shown as legitimate comments. This strikes me as odd. Have these people found a new technique?
On a side note…any recent blog program uses the rel=”nofollow” tag for any link placed in a comment. It’s my humble opinion that spamming blogs probably isn’t the best way to go, if you want to advertise your mega cluster of websites. Hey, I may be wrong.
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Friday, June 8th, 2007
My sister Laurie emailed me these really cool photos this morning, so I decided to dedicate this post to her. Now she can print it out and hold it close forever.
Now, I don’t have much of a memory of any of these pictures being taken, but I am sure they did, because we are in them. Laurie’s email indicated that they were taken in 1976. Her email said, “All the things I love…..my stroller, my Jenny Doll, my blankie, my little brother and having lunch on the driveway (I still have the blankie and the little brother).” Now that is just too cute. Thank you so much Laurie. I love these kinds of photos.
Man, I have a lot of memories of that porch we were standing on in the first photo. I used to sleep out there when it got too hot in my room in the summer. Back when breakdancing was huge, I had my own cardboard box that I placed on the floor and tried to do the windmill (don’t laugh, you know you did too). There used to be a wooden bench that ran the length of the porch that my father built…it was pretty cool. Our cats, Smokey and Tiger, used to meow at the back door when they wanted to come in and I gave my sister Laurie a very meaningful hug on that back porch during a pretty hard time for her.
The driveway is a similar story. There is a lot to remember when you grow up your entire young life in the same house. My parents built most of that house, so there was a lot of heart put into it. Sure, they were ready to go when the time came, but you have to respect the amount of work that went into it.
I remember trying to roller skate on that driveway when we got roller skates…probably at a yard sale somewhere, or what we called “tag sales.” The blacktop was never quite smooth enough, no matter what we thought. Later on, we set up a basketball net to practice what I am still horrible at…basketball. I remember people kept on asking me why I don’t join the team (probably because I am tall) and I wanted to tell them because I stink at the game, but I didn’t say that. I can’t even count how many times I had the hood of my Camaro open in that driveway, just looking at the engine. What fun it was to try to fix things. I guess that’s where I get it from.
I am sure Laurie has a bunch more…
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