blogging 102

Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes

I was going through my Woopra stats not so long back when i noticed something very exciting and very unexpected.  My political blog, Brad’s Tiny World, was receiving a lot of traffic from CNN and within a few days of watching that incoming traffic I started noticing them coming from The Wall Street Journal.  When tracking down this traffic I found it had come in the form of a sweet little plugin I had accidentally left on when I was testing what did and didn’t work with the new theme tools and WordPress  2.6.  I had long known Sphere Related Content plugin existed, in fact the version I had in the plugin directory was a few versions out of date, but I never really expected much from it and as such never used it.  What a mistake that was.

While the traffic generated was small, it was all relevant traffic and directed at specific stories.   To get those links I was citing and linking to stories on the major sites.  This was usually an excerpt with a backlink.  it was a small common courtesy, but well worth it.  That new traffic which fades after a story is no longer popular, does bring you people willing to give relevant comments and more important, it increased my social bookmark submissions.  I can’t promise you will gain anything from this plugin, but I also know it doesn’t take up very much room either.  Add it and comment on sites using it and see what happens for yourself.  You too might just find links from unexpected places.

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Download: Sphere Related Content

Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes

The biggest means to increasing regular readership is involving your occasional readers through a better comment experience.  These five pugins will do just that if you do it right.

1) Nofollow Free:  Without going nofollow free few small blogs have a hope in hell of drawing lots of comments straight out of the box.  You will get some spam, but nothing worth having comes without a little bit of work.  there are easy ways around this too.  Akismet will block most spam.  Moderated comments will hold all of them until you can look at them.  You can also moderate them so regular commentators can post without moderation. You can also set it so the nofollow doesn’t kick until you have X number of approved comments.  At the very least the  plugin writes “Comments links could be nofollow free” to the end of the comment form, and this is a popular Google search phrase. Read more »

Reading time: < 1 minute

Those were the words I heard often enough at as kid when I was being cautious. I heard them from friends who tried to goad me into trouble making either with or for them. I heard them from many a male relative who simple mistook caution for timidity and didn’t really know what else manly they could say.

Now that I am older and wiser those words keep coming back to me. No, they don’t pertain to my blogging for the most part. When they do I shudder with revulsion and take action. This time though they apply to a lot of my fellow bloggers. So I say unto many of you, “Quit Being Such A Pussy!” Read more »

Reading time: < 1 minute

Every blogger wants a reaction to their posts. Whether or not everyone will admit, this is the whole reason we do what we do it. It is no fun talking out of your ass if everyone ignores you. So ask yourself what are you doing for those people?

I have put a lot of thought into this of late. I know how to get a lot of diggs when I want, and a lot of traffic too. What I was missing though were lots of comments. I read what the big guys were saying. Then I realized many of them were just talking out of their asses, because if it were really great advice they would be doing it themselves. Read more »

Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes

I was recently had the unfortunate experience of using a one of my local libraries computers to access one of my blogs.  Not only are they still using IE 5.X they have very limited resolution.  Despite 17″ monitors and a couple of 19″ for the really blind folks the resolution was horrible.  They were all stuck at a static 800×600 except for the large monitors for the severely visually impaired which were stuck at 640×480.  While those setting should be an option, they made for pretty horrific view of many sites I took a look at.

My challenge to theme designers is this design a theme or more importantly themes that make use of the theme switcher plugin.  I don’t have all the details worked out yet but there needs to three available sizes of the theme to choose from.  The small size should be readable full screen with 800×600 screen size with important data above the fold. The second size should cover the most prominent 1000pixel width size, but not extend past the edges of a 1024 width.  The last size should make use of wide screen monitors in either the horizontal or vertical.  Figure the resolution of 900×1440 as the widescreen standard.

I don’t know what the prizes are yet either, but if there are any sponsors who want to get in on this let me know.  The contest will begin August 1st.