January 24, 2008
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According to a post by Court, BloggingZoom has been hacked by “a pack of losers with nothing better to do.”
I thought something was a little strange this morning when the BZ button wasn’t showing up on my posts.
Hopefully Court and Vic can get things up and running as soon as possible, but no matter how long it takes, things will get back to normal.
So if you’re trying to get to BZ and just get a white page, that would explain it.
Court asked BZ users to pass on the word, so this is what I’m doing.
And now you know.
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Posted in Blogging 
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January 24, 2008
But, it’s not. As had been reported rather widely, Automattic decided to skip right over the 2.4 release and instead concentrate on version 2.5 to be released in March. This is the version that will incorporate the new Administration panels (finally) unless, of course, you use plug-ins to change your admin experience.
According to the Blog Herald, though, version 2.5 will include such things as:
- a new interface for widget management. This is another of those “FINALLY” changes that really needed to be made, because, as simple as widgets are to install and configure, the process for managing them really needed an overhaul.
- a new image uploader. This is the one that I’m really looking forward to, as I’m hoping that it’ll have support for secure FTP transfers. The host for BloggingNotes, and a couple of my other blogs requires an SFTP connection, and I haven’t found any blogging software, including the WP interface itself that allows this.
- the ability to reactivate all plug-ins that have been deactivated by the Deactivate All button in the plug-in manager. Not something I really worry about, but I’m sure that some will find it handy.
Those are about the extent of the major changes that I was able to come across for WordPress 2.5. What changes would you like to see them make?
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Posted in Blogging 4 Comments »
January 23, 2008
It’s a bit of a weird discovery, although I have to admit that it’s not limited to just BloggingNotes.
It’s been six days since my last post, and in that time, my number of feed subscribers has risen from around 30 to 45 this morning. I’ve seen this on a couple of my other blogs as well, where a bit of a break seems to make the subscriber count go up.
Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean more people checking the feed, because what FeedBurner is actually reporting is the number of times the feed was polled. It might have been the same number of people subscribed, but if they check the feed more often, suddenly the numbers go up.
Best way to confirm this is to see if my numbers settle back down into the low to mid-thirties over the next couple of days.
I’ll keep an eye on it and update tomorrow morning.
Update: The count this morning (Thursday the 24th) was back down into the mid-30s.
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Posted in Blogging 8 Comments »
January 17, 2008
No, I haven’t become disillusioned with the whole thing. I’ve been taking a little time off, though to try and refocus on things. I’ve developed a couple of new niche blogs, which I plan on devoting time to growing. If one of them hits big, I’m going to be very happy indeed, because I think it’s got a lot of potential.
I have to give thanks to Vic for a post that actually pushed me in the right direction to make this happen.
But I don’t want anyone to think that I’m abandoning BloggingNotes. I know that blogging about blogging isn’t a big money-making niche, but you know what? I don’t care. I started this blog to pass on some of the cool information that I came across, but it’s turned in to much more than I would have thought it would, and, as I said all along, I’m going to keep doing it as long as I enjoy it.
As I said, I’ve got other sites that I’m working to try and bring in some income, and I’m finally starting to see a couple of sites bring in enough to pay for registration and hosting on my other sites, but the goal is to get me out of the place where I’m living now and into a better place. I’m going to work as hard as I can to make sure that that happens, and I’m hoping that this new site is going to be a big part of helping me do just that.
So now you know why I’m doing this - I work on BloggingNotes because I get a huge amount of satisfaction by learning and passing on the information that I learn to my readers.
If you’re blogging about blogging, why do you do it?
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Posted in Blogging 16 Comments »
January 11, 2008
Once a month I’m going do something to the blog to modify it or clean it up a bit - get rid of stuff that doesn’t fit the anymore, just basically de-clutter a little. And I’d encourage you to do the same thing.
When you modify the site a little bit if forces you to take a good honest look at the page to see what might be working, and what might not. That widget that you installed on the sidebar a few months ago was pretty cool back then, but now? Not so much.
Or maybe it’s the ‘Please Subscribe To My Feed’ plug at the bottom of each post. Try rewording it, or making the text larger or smaller. Just do *something* that makes you actually look at your site. A lot of people spend so much time on their blog that they don’t even really see it anymore. Hopefully this’ll force you to.
I’ve decided to move the MyBlogLog stuff to its own page, for a number of reasons, with quicker load times being the primary one. Plus, it doesn’t really *add* anything to the blog other than to let me know who stopped by. So I’ve added it to its own page where you’re more than welcome to see who else reads the site.
Like I said, it doesn’t have to be a major thing, just as long as it’s something.
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Posted in Blogging 6 Comments »
January 10, 2008
This is something that I’ve wondered for the last little while, particularly while reading Court and Vic’s feeds. They both have some of the best blogging tips I’ve come across, but they mention having a number of different niche sites that they set up and run. While I’m looking at getting into creating a few niche sites of my own in order to generate some income (if you hadn’t noticed, I’ve pulled the ads from BloggingNotes), but I’m just wondering if I’ll have the time to dedicate to finding content for a number of different blogs.
I know that if you want to make money on the web that you’ve got to be dedicated to working on it whenever you can, but I’m just wondering how others who blog for bucks manage to generate content for all of the sites that they own.
I’d appreciate any feedback from those who are able to do it.
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Posted in Blogging 9 Comments »
January 8, 2008
A lot of people, when they come across a bit of news online, think, “OMG I have to get this posted RIGHT NOW!”, and they don’t take the time to find out if what they read is even at all true, let alone accurate.
And that’s one of the things that can really hurt the credibility of the blogosphere. Sure, there are some sites where having the information first can make a big difference - sites like Gizmodo or Engadget come to mind. But you’re not them. So don’t try to be.
In the long run, your readers while appreciate the fact that everything that you report on your site is accurate much more than they will that they stumbled across it on your site first.
Because when it comes to “breaking” stories first, that’s really a holdover from the days when the mainstream media (MSM) controlled what people saw, and when. Being first really only matters to some of the MSM news organizations now, simply because there isn’t a “local” market on the Internet. Sure, you might have been the first person you know of to post about the Bhutto assassination, but rest assured that bloggers in Pakistan had a hundred comments on their post of the story before you even heard about it. Except in very, very rare circumstances, there’s no such thing as a “world exclusive” anymore. And if one is offered to a website, I’m sorry, but it’s not going to be yours. Or mine.
I don’t have any formal journalistic training, but I know of a few bloggers who do, and you’d be hard pressed to find one of them who says that it’s better to be first than to be accurate. Being second won’t have long-term repercussions. Getting something completely wrong, though, can kill your blog’s credibility.
So in the future, if you have hot news that you just need to post, go ahead and write it up, but before you hit the publish button, try and confirm it in a couple of places. Google and GoogleNews are pretty quick at picking stuff up, and if it’s a true story and there’s very little online, go for it. Be first.
But be accurate also.
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Posted in Blogging 4 Comments »
January 7, 2008
No matter how well you structure your blogging schedule, you’re eventually going to run up against a wall where you just don’t feel like posting. Note that this is a different wall where you draw a complete blank when it’s time to write something. That’s an entirely different after school special, and one I’ll probably write about in the future.
If you do take the time to create an editorial calendar, so you know what you’re going to post about, try and write two or three posts at one time and schedule them in WordPress to go live on their regular schedule. And then, take a day or two off. Obviously you’re going to need to check in on the day the post goes live to submit it to BloggingZoom, but other than that, go do something else. The world won’t end if you take one day off, so long as you’ve got two or more posts ready to drop in the future.
I actually took the last weekend off, and I have to admit to being a little more fired up with what I want to get accomplished and written for the next two weeks or so. As long as I’ve got posts ready to go, I don’t feel guilty about taking the time off at all.
Because there are definitely times when it’s better to step away and refocus on what you want to say. A little time off can help in ways that you won’t realize until you actually do it.
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Posted in Blogging 2 Comments »
January 6, 2008
A month ago I posted my stats and information on what I’d gone through in writing my first month of BloggingNotes. While the site has still experienced a great amount of growth, it has slowed down a little, which may be due to it being the holiday season and all. I guess time will tell in early February when I look at my stats again to see what I need to improve upon. I don’t think I’ll publish another “look back” post like this one till I get to six months, though.
So how did things go? Here’s a look:
As usual, the majority of my traffic came from BloggingZoom - no surprise there, although I didn’t seem to have as many highly zoomed posts as in the first month. This may also have been due to the time of year. We’ll see again in a month. Of my posts, 59 of 64, or 92% went “hot”. up from 90% in the first month.What were the hottest posts in the last month?
Finally, the top three commenters on the site last month?
- Brian at Elite By Design
- JBlu at Fresh Geeks
- Grizzly at How To Make Money Online for Beginners
Thank you very much to everyone who commented on the site, though, and hopefully you’ll keep reading, especially with the changes that you’ll see around here in the next little while.
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Posted in Blog 4 Comments »
January 4, 2008
According to the Weblog Tools Collection, the decision has been made to cease all work on WordPress 2.4, which was scheduled to be released in about 3 weeks, and focus development on version 2.5, which should be released in March. This is “because of the holidays and the amount of changes that will take place in the codebase as well as the admin section”, according to the site.
Well, I guess I’m going to have to scrub plans to post about the upcoming changes due in 2.4 and work on getting information on what’s going in to 2.5. Ah well, not much I can do about it, and complaining won’t change anything.
So now you know.
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Posted in Blogging 4 Comments »
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