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long known Sphere Related Content plugin existed, in fact the version I had in the plugin directory was a few versions out of date, but I never really expected much from it and as such never used it.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... 

Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes It has been another behind the scenes weekend for me tweaking the theme over at Brad’s Tiny World and editing Pack hopefully some agent will just fall in love and be on my side for a six figure advance. Alright I know I really looking at probably a $5k advance at best, which means I have to sell 4900 copies of it in paperback just to cover that so when it is out I expect every damned one of you who read my blogs to buy at three copies. I was going through my feed this afternoon when I found the coolest new tool to share with you. It isn’t out yet but that shouldn’t stop you from drooling over it tool. i found Utility Poster through Jack Humphrey’s Friday Traffic Report. If you aren’t reading this you should be, and I have added it to my blogroll just for you guys. convey_source = "English"; Read More →

Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes One of the best techniques for really driving traffic to your site  is the use of keywords and knowing just how to use them  Wait! Wait! Stop!  I know some of you are thinking other blogs say keywords are dead and don’t matter to your PageRank or this or that program because they can be manipulated.  That is true to a point. What isn’t mentioned often enough is keywords do still matter and that Google isn’t the only game in town. Search engines are getting better about seeing who is fudging their keywords and actually looking for them in the text of your post.  You can’t get away with just picking out popular keywords, plugging them in and thinking you are beating the system.  Other search you can still get away with that on, but it isn’t to your benefit even there. So how do we pick a search engine oh mighty guru?  There are a couple of methods.  There are plugins of course which will do it for you automatically. ... 

Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes The First thing you need to do when thinking about a theme is deciding who you are designing it for. There are a number of tools that will tell you what your visitor’s monitors resolution is set to and this is a key factor to consider. As often as not these days new computers come with a wide screen monitor and most of the older 17 and 19″ 4:3 monitors were capable of 1280×1024. Like I said use one of the many site tools to figure out what size people are viewing your blog at. For me 1% were using 640×480, that is just too small to design an effective money making blog. 9% were doing 800×600, which can be done, but 90% of my viewers were using something more, so I chose to go bigger. Only 25% had resolutions above 1440, meaning If I went higher than that 75% of my people would lose something and I Almost certainly would love that low res 10% crowd. I settled for going with a width of 1000 pixels for the theme. Some of the... 

Reading time: < 1 minute I modified the original LiveJournal CrossPosting plugin and have had it sitting on Brad's Tiny World since the day 2.5 came out. It is a rather handy tool to have as cross posting your blog entries to your LJ page certainly brings in more traffic without any extra work. With the move going on at Tiny World I am bringing the plugin over here. LiveJournal XP WordPress25 convey_source = "English"; Read More →