Art of Blogging

Obviously, I have hit the end of my rope with WordPress.

However, I am not ready to go work at some fast food place, so I have to come up with something.

I looked into Habari again and rather deeply. I have to say, it looks like they are doing some really good work and trying hard not to make mistakes that have been made before. Unfortunately, their ideas for what a blog should do are not the same as my ideas. Mostly, this is just a matter of taste, except for one major detail.

It seems they think it is a bad idea for blogs to be indexed by Search Engines and do some things to stop the SE’s from coming along and indexing. One of these things is stopping the blog from pinging Google et al. While I can see their point, I vehemently disagree.

I think unless you are making something truly private, EVERYTHING should be indexed.

One reason is because I am a marketer, and not a blogger. I want new people to find my stuff and not just the established blog community.

Another reason is due to how I use the web myself. For instance, for right or wrong, I do not go trawling Digg and the like for stuff to read and learn. I use Google. Every blog I have ever found has been through either Google or link travels.

Why would I want to do something that would make my personal methods of travel no longer work?

OK, I may very well be missing the point and have failed to do my homework fully, but this isnt my major reason for not trying Habari out at this time… my major reason is this blog network we are on right now.

I have a few such networks and Habari isnt set up to handle them the way MU tries to.

This isn’t a flaw with Habari, just a different set of priorities between what the developers want and what I want.

Again, I briefly looked into what it would take to roll my own blog script… I am pretty sure I could hack up something that would do what I needed and be fairly secure. I could even get it up and running in a fairly reasonable amount of time… say 6 months or so and it would do what I needed.

Seeing as how this blog network is easily a YEAR behind schedule due to personal reasons and dicking with WordPress and their inanities, that is not an option.

I started looking again at other options available to me in the pre-rolled realm.

The old school big hitter in the blog network arena is Movable Type. Sorry, I am not going to pay for it. If I wanted to pay for a blog engine, I would roll my own.

This sounds awfully callous of me, I know, but it is actually more a matter of cynicism. I have no real confidence in any code I didnt write or control the development of. There is always *something* that other devs do that I do not approve of. This means I have to hack and slash the code. If they make me pay, the license is far too restrictive for my purposes.

Also, I “pay” for the use of code by teaching others how to use it. This is my personal business model and ethical thinking… and I also am not unknown to make a donation to a project out side of my normal writing.

If MT was open sourced and free, they would get me as a user and would get far more value than their licensing fees… and odds are, they would get more actual cash out of me too.

On with the body count.

I looked at several other alternatives as well, but none of them even remotely looked like they would make me happy. Since most of those reasons are personal bias and NOT my thinking they were junk I wont go into the big long list.

What I am about to install and try out is LifeType.

LifeType is an Open Source multi-user, multi-blog platform.

It is not a hacked up abortion like WordPress MU is. LifeType is designed out of the box to run either one blog or hundreds of blogs.

To me, this is the proper approach to making a script of this nature.

A minor but important point is that the group doesn’t seem to have a problem saying they made a mistake.

For example, their current release comments are:

“Lifetype 1.2.6 is the latest maintenance release of the 1.2 branch and though we said that 1.2.5 was “as rock-solid as it gets”, there continued to be a number of improvements and at least one significant bug fix.”

Guess it wasn’t quit as rock solid as they thought.

That is the problem with bold words like that…. too much code to be able to say anything is perfect.

Least they ate their serving of crow and did the right thing rather than sweeping it under the rug until the next release version.

It seems that I can migrate the existing WP DB over to LifeType. If so, I will be publishing the slew of back logged articles I have here on WP and WP MU purely for archive purposes (and to not waste the content that I created) and we will continue as previously planned at this blog.

At this point, I have only uploaded the code to a test location and not started the installation, so this post itself counts as bold words on my part.

Wish me luck, I am going in!

A lot of people look at things a bit off from my perspective. They think that getting traffic to a site is the end all be all of web mastery. It isn’t. Getting traffic is a fairly straight forward procedure. You can even buy the stuff, how hard is it really?

The trick is not to get traffic, but to get it to come back, tell it’s friends and most importantly: buy your product.

You have to not just get traffic but get it to convert. This means you have to hook your traffic’s attention.

You start by determining what your hook actually is.

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I was reading a blog the other day about blogging (go figure) and I was reading about a different opinion than I have about how important commentators are.

I was going to link her on up here for your review because what works for me may not for you and so on.

Different opinions at the very least cause you to think.

This blogger explained that commentators only represent about 1% of your traffic on the whole and therefore are not important. As I am sure you have read, I think Blog Comments And Commentators Are Important.

So, why didn’t I give her that link?

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I was looking at a colleague’s Analytics report the other day on her new site and I noticed something typical. There were large blooms of traffic hits from certain areas.

As people pass a link around, it will typically concentrate in specific geographical locations and then branch out into other areas as the last two friends tell two friends.

This is how guerrilla and viral marketing work.

How can this be worked into a real traffic spike?

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Now that AdSense ads are actually running, I might as well explain how it was done.

Yeah, I know, these Howto’s are boring and not much fun. Trust me, they aren’t much fun to write either. Soon, I will be done with most of them and will get down to the real work.

They sure do take out a lot of the guess work on setting up a new blog though.

The purpose of this article is only to discuss the actual installation of this plugin on my WordPress MU site. Actually using the AdSense plugin is the subject of other articles.

The first one I am using is AdSense Deluxe. Unfortunately, their site seems to have been deleted, so I wont add a link. I did find a copy of this plugin for download that is a patched version. Unfortunately, I closed the window too soon and I lost the link. Sorry to the author of the patch. If you contact me, I will give you credit. I am such a bad blogger.

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I have mentioned comments are important and should be encouraged before, right? Pretty sure I have said something or another about the importance of comments and how to make you commentators feel special at least once or twice.

JohnTP has a list of the Top 5 WordPress Plugins That Help Increase Comments. I already use a couple on this list and agree with the rest.

I won’t go into a lot of detail here but I will run down the list quickly since they are all aimed at normal WordPress and I use WordPress MU (at least for now).

I will add a couple to the list though.

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Want a way to ping Google?

Yeah, I thought that would get your attention.

Go get the Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress plugin and put it in and within minutes, you can be pinging Google every time you make a post.

As a bonus, Yahoo! and MSN use the same sitemap structure. Anything that calls Search Engines to index your sites is a good SEO tool.

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Since I started using Ultimate Tag Warrior 3 I have been very pleased with this plugin for creating Tag Clouds.

Of course, there are things I would like to see added or changed, but I didn’t spend the time writing the plugin or its well laid out documentation. I have no complaints!

What I do have are a couple of pointers for its’ use for a new user.

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Tag Clouds according to Wikipedia: “A tag cloud (more traditionally known as a weighted list in the field of visual design) is a visual depiction of content tags used on a website. Often, more frequently used tags are depicted in a larger font or otherwise emphasized, while the displayed order is generally alphabetical… Selecting a single tag within a tag cloud will generally lead to a collection of items that are associated with that tag.”

For a live example of them, take a look at the end of this post and also on the bottom of my sidebar.php.

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I will speak regularly on the importance of comments to a blog, I am sure. Today, I am going to keep it basic.

Comments are part of what makes blogs such a successful method to convey ideas. They are also a major part in that new-fangled Web 2.0 stuff.

Since blog comments are important, the people making them are important too, right?

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