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. convey_source = "English"; Read More →

Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes BlogBoy doesn’t often make political stands when it comes to the online world, but this is one that can’t be ignored. There isn’t a blogger alive who doesn’t need to consider freedom of speech issues in fact. In Yahoo news this morning they write about public online spaces not having the same freedom of speech rights as say your public park. ‘Public’ online spaces don’t carry speech, rights “Companies in charge of seemingly public spaces online wipe out content that’s controversial but otherwise legal. Service providers write their own rules for users worldwide and set foreign policy when they cooperate with regimes like China. They serve as prosecutor, judge and jury in handling disputes behind closed doors.” convey_source = "English"; Read More →

Reading time: < 1 minute Digg is probably one of the best tools you can use for driving Traffic right to your sight, but it is not for the timid. Getting Diggs is like selling cars. When I started selling cars I was on the used lot and my Sales Team Manager told me something the first day which has held true any time I have sold things. Bill told me, “Brad selling cars is like getting pussy. If you don’t ask them to do it you aren’t getting it.” Getting a Dugg is a lot like getting pussy too. convey_source = "English"; Read More →

Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes I am surprised these days how many people still don’t know what an RSS/XML/Atom feed is. Almost every website be it a blog or anything else has some variation of that nice little orange symbol that looks like this: Okay now that you all know what those are, the question some of you still have is yeah, but what do they do. First lets explain RSS. In the guise of K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid) RSS is Really Simple Syndication. As my MIL (mother in law- in case you are really knew to acronyms) would say RSS and Atom are the same meat, just different gravy. They are syndicated feeds of blog posts. XML is just the technology that both of those things are built on. So what is syndication? I knew you were going to ask that. Simply put, it is anything you subscribe to, just like television stations get reruns of shows or newspapers buy advice columns, but web syndication is free. You click on the link and add to any number of web...