blogging 102

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: 2 – 2 minutes We all know it and we all hate it, and believe it or not we have all participated in it to some degree as internet noobs. There are several ways to deter spam on a blog. First is the use of plugins, I like Askimet WordPress. it works really well and used by most of the big name bloggers so that is good enough for me. The second place to deter spam is with email. if you are a pro blogger you need to have your contact information out there. It is your internet business card and people need to access it. There are some nice forms that will do, but those are only a partial solution, because unless you are able to program it to accept attachments, links, etc it doesn’t have the functional range of email. Posting your email address openly though is a call for spammers, and while many companies like Yahoo and Google do a good job at filtering it for you others don’t. I have found the javascript code below however works very well and keeps bots...