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long known Sphere Related Content plugin existed, in fact the version I had in the plugin directory was a few versions out of date, but I never really expected much from it and as such never used it.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: 2 – 2 minutes Something is up at Technorati. For more than a month now I have been having problems with them properly indexing one of my blogs. Despite the fact that it was being updated either manually or automatically with daily digest posts, http://www.bradsotherblog.com was simply not getting its ping through to Technorati. This just isn’t me, either. The first suggestion they made was to manually ping your blog at http://www.technorati.com/ping this works for all of my blogs except The Other Blog. After trying that and a ticket submitted with no answer I finally complained on the post board and the blog was quickly taken care of. They apparently want to take care of people who open their mouths in public a lot faster than they do those who wait patiently for returned emails. Well that one ping they did worked exactly once, the blog updated and jumped from an authority of 8 to 14 when all was said and done. I checked back a week later and nothing since that... 

Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes There were several old combinations that worked well together but since WordPress 2.3 came out many of them stopped working properly or stopped working altogether. Fear not there are replacements out there. Unlike many of the regurgitated idiot lists currently out there, everything I list will work in WordPress 2.5 the only version of the blog software you should be running. Ultimate Tag Warrior hasn’t been supported by the author since WordPress 2.3 came out. Many of its features and those of Bunny’s Technorati Tags, Jerome’s Keywords, and other tagging programs are easily replaced in better plugins. The All in One SEO Pack can even be replaced now. The new power plugin combination consists of Headspace2 and Simple Tags. Between these two plugins you can hand every task that you used to require half a dozen plugins and tweaks. convey_source = "English"; Read More →

Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes Digg Every blogger should have a Digg account, no matter where you blog. If you don’t write crap for blog content, it won’t long before someone starts Digging your posts. You are going to need an account to help with the self promotion and respond to people Digging your work. As you build your network you can shout out not just your cool new finds but the ones elsewhere to your friends. Digging others is almost as important as getting dug yourself, since people do profile the people Digging them, especially when you’re among the first to Digg a new page or the other user is just getting started. On that same note you should be profiling the people Digging you and reading their work, not just to be nice either. You reap what you sew in social networking. Popularity snowballs on Social Networking. Stumbleupon Just like with Digg every Blogger should get a Stumbleupon account. At first you should be asking your friends to your posts not to mention...