April 14, 2008
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I happened to think that it was just the odd issue that I’d seen with one of my blogs when I went to try and reorganize my sidebars, but I’m now pretty convinced that there’s some plugin issues with WordPress 2.5.
The main problem is, though, that it’s not bad enough to crash the blog, or trigger the function that disables plugins if they’re not performing properly. Okay, so maybe not crashing the blog is a good thing… 
But when I go to edit my widgets, there’s a fatal error listed that makes it almost impossible to rearrange the widgets on the sidebar. The whole thing appears to be the FireStats plugin, which is rather disappointing, simply due to the fact that it’s what I use for analyzing stats on all of my sites. Needless to say, if I can’t find a solution to this, I’m going to need to rethink my continued use of the plugin.
Unfortunately, though, it doesn’t appear that there is a new version. I’ll do a little more investigation and post a follow up on this. But if you’re considering the plugin, and you’re using Wordpress 2.5, you might want to reconsider.
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April 10, 2008
Sometimes when you get out of the groove of posting daily, it can be harder than you imagined to get it back. That’s definitely what I’m finding out as I’ve been struggling to get topics to post about, not only here on BloggingNotes, but my other sites as well.
And I’m sorry to say, that my niche site has not being doing very well at all, not generating much in the way of traffic, and definitely no income. In fact, I put out a call yesterday for other local bloggers who might be willing to take on a partnership in writing the thing, with an equal split of all income from the site.
There have been no takers.
One of my blogs has essentially shut down until next fall, when the hockey season starts up again (at least for the Vancouver Canucks), so there’s not really any pressure to do much posting there.
I’ve launched another site (http://windowsnotes.com) and am looking forward to contributing to that. In fact, that was a last minute toss up between being a blog and a ‘traditional’ web site. The blog won.
If you’re starting to feel that you’re running out of ideas for a blog, rather than abandoning it, write some posts for it that’ll never see the light of day. Stuff that’ll never get published, but keeps you focused on the site, and looking for new topics that you would be willing to post. That’s what I wish I’d done for Blogging Notes.
I know that I said I’d be posting more regularly, and for those of you who’ve stayed subscribed to the feed, and commented in the last little while, I appreciate it more than I can tell you. I am working on posts, and will have them go live in the next day or so.
I can feel it coming back.
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Posted in Blogging 8 Comments »
April 9, 2008
Now that I’ve gotten all of my blogs up and running on Wordpress 2.5, I wanted to share my thoughts on the whole thing. First up, I’m really enjoying the new interface. I’m even writing this post in the admin interface, instead of Windows Live Writer, although, that’s probably not going to become a regular occurrence - I just happen to prefer WLW.
The only complaints that I’ve got so far have to do with the time stamping issue - I created a post to drop at 07:30 and Wordpress took that to mean 7:30pm (if I meant that I’d have put 19:30) and I had to change the post time to 5:30am to make it even go live. Not very helpful.
The other had to do with the live updating. I had a few plug-ins that reported that they needed updating, so I chose the Automatic update feature, which requires your login and password. Yeah, a small security risk, but I wanted to see how it went. And for three out of four, it worked fine. On the fourth update (CommentLuv), though, it crashed, and when I went back to have a look at the blog, it had removed CommentLuv from the posts. Went back to the plug-in interface, and found that CommentLuv wasn’t even in my list of available plug-ins. Uh, WTF?  I don’t think that’ll happen each time something doesn’t work out, but I’m glad it wasn’t Akismet, or something like that that just got torched.
I’d be interested to hear from others on their thoughts and experiences with Wordpress 2.5 in the comments.
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Posted in Blogging 1 Comment »
March 20, 2008
It goes without saying that one of the best blogging tips you’re going to get is to use Wordpress. Back in January, though, they announced that they were going to blow through their usual 120-day cycle and actually skip the release of Wordpress. 2.4, and put out 2.5 on time in March.
Well, according to Aaron Brazell of TechoSailor.com, they’ve now got a Release Candidate out, although the official release date hasn’t yet been announced. But if you use Wordpress.com or have had a look at the demo site, you’ll know what’s upcoming. I’ll try and summarize what Aaron’s posted and include the stuff I find most relevant to myself.
New Admin Interface
This is going to be the most obvious change that you’ll see. The colour scheme has been changed to include lighter blues, greys and and even some orange thrown in there as well. It’s a very “Web 2.0″ experience, and if you don’t mind that, then you might not mind the new interface. If, however, even the term “Web 2.0″ makes you look around for something to bludgeon, then maybe you’ll want to create your own custom look, which you can now do.
Menu Layout
When you log in, you’re liable to say, uh, where’d everything *go*? The main tabs on the dashboard when you log in are now limited to Write, Manage, Design (formerly Presentation) and Comments. Settings, Plug-ins, and Users have been moved to the right hand side of the layout, almost as secondary menus.
Personally, I’d like the ability to move the main tabs around on the dashboard. I never use the Write tab, simply because I do all of my posting from Windows Live Writer. So I’d like to be able to swap Write for Plug-ins, for example. I’m more likely to activate and de-activate plug-ins.
Widgets
Holy crap. I like it. The whole concept of moving the widgets around and laying them out the way you want just got a whole lot better in my opinion. Aaron wasn’t wild about it, saying it feels like more work, but I have to say I really like the changes. It doesn’t feel like a module from 1999 that just got woven in. Much better, guys.
New Visual Editor
Sorry, but like I mentioned above, I don’t deal with the writing process inside Wordpress, so I don’t really have an opinion on this one. Maybe someone else could give it a try in the demo and let us know, eh?
Automatically Upgraded Plug-ins
A nice feature, but a security risk. This would require your plug-ins to be updated from anywhere, automatically. If this doesn’t make you a little nervous, it probably should. You will have the option of disabling this, however, and updating your plug-ins the old fashioned way, too.
Time stamping
Apparently it’s been given a complete re-write, and it’s long past time. The options now are much move like Movable Type (ugh) where you specify where a post is published or not, and you can then modify the time stamp if you wish. It’s something that needs to be seen to really get it.
So that’s what I got from Aaron’s post that meant the most to me. Have a look at the full post, by all means, and see what might be in there for you.
If you’re a bleeding-edger, you can test the latest version by getting it from: http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/trunk but all of the standard disclaimers apply. You’re on your own.
When the release date is announced I’ll be posting about it here on BloggingNotes.
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Posted in Blogging 11 Comments »
March 10, 2008
Rather disappointing if you ask me. While having a look at BloggingZoom’s blogging category the other day I came across a post about a blogger who in three months had gone to 50,000 unique monthly visits, 1500 RSS subscribers, and 1500 email subscribers. Impressive, I thought. I’ll have a look and subscribe to the feed if I find good content.
And you know what? There seems to be some pretty good information. The writer talks about providing value to the readers as being one of the most important things. Sounded good to me, so I subscribed to the feed.
Hey, uh…WTF?!? What do you mean it’s a partial feed?!?!
Well, so much for that. I’ve unsubscribed. It’s as simple as this - if you require me to click through to your site from the RSS feed in order to read the full post, then you’re not providing value to me. In fact, you’re forcing me to expend the most valuable resource I have - my time - just so you can inflate your impressions.
I can already hearing the whining. "But I’ve got advertising on my site. You can’t click on my ads to make me money if you’re not on my site." This is, of course, complete B.S. Run ads in your feed. I’m not opposed to ads at all. There are lots of sites that offer two different feeds - a full text feed with ads, or an ad-free partial feed. Guess which one I’m subscribed to?
I’ve said it before,and I’ll say it again. If you only offer a partial subscription to your feed, I will unsubscribe and never visit your site again until I hear from somewhere else that it’s now offering full text feeds. My time is too valuable to click through to the 100 or so sites whose feeds I follow.
If monetization is your excuse, then maybe you don’t know as much as you think you do. There’s no shortage of ways to monetize a feed. Feedburner will provide the detailed instructions on how to do it. It’s not hard.
One of the best blogging tips you’ll ever get is this - provide full text feeds to your readers. Let them get your content the way that’s most convenient for them. Give them some value. Or are you in this just to make money? Nothing wrong with that if you are. I’m making some money online myself. But I provide real value to my readers - I give them a choice on how they can consume my content.
If that site ever starts offering full feeds, somebody let me know, K?
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Posted in Blogging 25 Comments »
March 9, 2008
A few days ago, Skellie posted about Creating Sidebars That Work, and this got me to thinking about the way that I generally try to lay out the sidebars of the various sites that I work on. And when I went back and looked at them, they all seemed to be a little different.
Now, in some instances, this may be necessary. A niche site could have needs that suit that particular niche in the sidebar. But the point was, that adding to much stuff into the sidebar can be bad, but having just a barebones sidebar could be just as bad if it doesn’t give your readers access to information that might need about you or your site.
When I look at the sidebar for BloggingNotes, it has a tendency to look a little cluttered, but there really isn’t a whole lot there. Links to my top commenters, links to my del.icio.us bookmarks, archives, email subscription form and a tag cloud.
I’m thinking of doing a little streamlining of the sidebar over the next few days, because I think that there’s some things that might be detracting from what readers might be getting from the site.
What could you stand to remove from the sidebar on your site? There’s got to be something that doesn’t serve a real purpose, so let’s hear it.
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Posted in Blogging 3 Comments »
March 8, 2008
When you’ve kind of fallen out of the rhythm of blogging, it can be tough to get back into it. Despite the fact that I’d had posts written before they were scheduled to drop, I eventually ran out of stuff that I felt was worthy of posting.
So now I’ve been accumulating post ideas for the last little while and I’m going to be posting on a much more regular schedule. I’m not going to say that it’ll be on a daily basis, but I’d like to get back into a schedule of three to four posts per week. I think I got a little burned out by the daily postings because even if I had a post written for a particular day, I felt that I had to get something written for a future post.
I didn’t think it’d burn me out, but it did.
And I’d rather have three good posts per week than six or seven mediocre ones. As I remember someone saying once before, posting crap is more harmful to your blog than posting nothing.
So, I’m going to start posting more frequently again, and hopefully I won’t be posting crap.
Thanks to those who’ve kept BloggingNotes in their feed reader, and stayed subscribed to the email subscriptions. You’ll have something to read in the next little bit.
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February 14, 2008
While there are a few bloggers out there who don’t ever want to make any money online, I think that they’re in a very small minority, which of course leads to a million experts all claiming that they can show you to the way to riches. Most of it is utter crap.
Now Grizzly has come out with another post on making money from Adsense, and one of the things that I really appreciate about how he does this is to break it down as simply as possible so that anyone could follow the tips. It really does primarily come down to keywords and SEO, with keywords being simpler but more work (in my opinion, anyway).
Using his past advice I’ve been able to make a little money from a “throwaway” niche site, although I need to tweak it a little more to make it perform even better. That’ll happen.
I have to say that between Griz, Vic and Court, I’ve learned some of the best blogging tips and more about the ‘business’ of blogging in the last three months than I have in the previous four years of doing this. Previously it was always kind of a half hearted attempt. No more.
Directing my focus towards niche blogs, and even a niche non-blog site that I’ll be launching on March 1st, I’m going to start bringing in more. Which I’m anticipating will give me more time to devote to this site than I have been lately.
I truly appreciate those who’ve stuck by the site in my extended absences lately. Thanks.
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Posted in Blogging 6 Comments »
February 5, 2008
Logged into my various blogs this morning with the announcement that a new version of WordPress had been released, and that it was being classified as an “urgent security release”.
Evidently you can upgrade the whole thing, or just apply a patched copy of the xmlrpc.php file. I was able to get all of my sites upgraded almost immediately, although I still have one that I don’t have command line access to, so I’m not able to do the instant upgrade on that one. So I’ll apply the patch on that one and move on.
If you’re running a WP blog, this is something that should be addressed as quickly as possible.
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Posted in Blogging 3 Comments »
January 30, 2008
In the process of trying to bring you the best blogging tips, I’ve constantly mentioned that all of your posts should be submitted to BloggingZoom, and when I looked at my site this morning, I noticed an updated BloggingZoom graphic to show how many times each of my sites had been ‘zoomed’. Very cool looking, too.
Then I had a look at the site to see if things had gotten back to normal after they got hacked last week. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that they’d done a complete re-work of the site! And I love the new look.
If you’ve never submitted your posts to BZ before, it’s something that you should start doing. Regularly. Unless you’re a big name blogger, what do you realistically think are the chances that your posts will make it to the front page of Digg? I’ll give you a hint: it ain’t likley.
With BZ, on the other hand, a lot of my regular readers came directly from the site, and any time that you can get exposure for your blog, it just eventually leads to more traffic.
I’m in the process of getting another niche site setup, and you better believe that everything that I post there is going to wind up getting submitted to BloggingZoom. I really believe that BZ is even more useful for more specialized niche blogs than just the standard “blog about blogging” or “make money online” blog.
Court and Vic do have one rule about BZ, that, while it was always in place, wasn’t being enforced - but it is now. When you submit a post to BZ, don’t just copy and paste directly from your post into the details box on BloggingZoom. You’ll get one warning if you do this now, and after that you’re banned. I’ll admit that this was I did in the past, until I got an email detailing how they want things done from now on.
So, write an original description of your post when you’re submitting it, because you definitely don’t want to get banned from the site.
It’s just too valuable a resource.
Good work guys, I love the new look.
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Posted in Blogging 6 Comments »
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