Posts in category "blogging"

I have upgraded this blog to the recently released WordPress 2.3. However, I have deep rooted concerns that the new tagging functionality will simply overload my tiny brain.

The WordPress upgrade went smoothly enough although the editor now reports a missing table (wp_post2cat) which is slightly irritating.

Also, I sense increasing disquiet amongst some long standing, intelligent and loyal WordPress users so I took the precaution of installing YABP (Yet Another Blog Platform). Please put your hands together and welcome Typo (powered by a delightful lady called 'Ruby on Rails').

Update: The Google Sitemap Generator plug-in was causing the error. The problem is resolved in the latest version.

I'm not normally a sucker for these free, pyramid style, link exchange schemes to drive more traffic to your blog but as simply everyone is not just talking about it but actually doing it, I thought I'd better add BlogRush to this blog.

Now, I must hurry into town and join the lengthy queues at Northern Rock to withdraw my 1 million pounds life savings. To be honest, I think this media fuelled panic is a little overblown and as I have a contrarian investing style, I have just purchased £5,000 worth of NRK shares at £3.10 waiting for the 'dead cat bounce'.

The shares are currently trading at £2.93, £2.80, £2.69...

I like Robert Scoble. While I don't always agree with him and I have a love-hate relationship with his laugh, his blog is worth reading and he posts some varied and interesting videos but one thing is obvious.

The guy has a real passion for technology and writing. On occasions, he is subjected to vitriolic comments, hurtful criticism and abuse that is completely unjustified but he calmly takes it all in his stride and rarely retaliates.

Scoble is a family man and has a lovely wife. Indeed, he is a very lucky man. As I recall, my wife didn't have the forethought and love to buy me an expensive digital camera hours before she went into labour. Inevitably, Scoble will be posting live updates of his wife's lengthy and arduous labour via Twitter. I'm surprised he isn't live streaming the whole event.

Another 'A' lister recently admitted to hospital was Dave Winer. Unfortunately, Dave repeatedly broke rule two, regaling us all with updates on his state of health.

3 September - The saga begins...

'Had to take a break, I got a really bad cold, the flu, not sure what -- but it knocked me down. I had a fever, nasty cough, wheezing, and it was getting worse so fast that I went to the emergency room at a Berkeley hospital, where they gave me something to control the cough and help me sleep, and today I feel much better.'

6 September - Our hopes are briefly raised. Don't laugh. This is a disease !

'Yesterday was the first feel-good day after a horrible bout with whatever it was that hit me and dragged me under. But Naked Jen, who said she had the same disease, warned against believing you're better when you start feeling better.'

8 September - Our hopes are dashed but at least Dave received my email of support.

'I've gotten email from people who are concerned. Thanks for the concern. Yes, I have seen a doctor, even went to the hospital to get chest x-rays. I don't have pneumonia. Just a realllly bad cold. A monster proportioned cold. It attacks everything but my sense of humor.'

9 September - My diagnosis is that this is not merely a heavy cold. This is a life threatening bout of man-flu.

'It's been a really interesting morning, in a sick kind of way (that is, I'm still really sick, coughing and wheezing, rasping and sneezing).'

10 September - Dave manages to summon the strength to type a blog post with no mention of his health.

11 September - A nation sighs with relief.

'Feeling much better today. Health is beginning to return. I owe it all to patience, lots of sleeping, drinking fluids, and not trying to be healthy before I actually am. Today I'm going to take a 20 minute easy walk in the sun.'

Winer by name. Whiner by nature.

One of the reasons I decided to put AdSense on this blog was out of sheer curiosity. There are plenty of Google sponsored case studies available from American shoe shops that significantly increased sales and revenues using AdSense.

Successful blogger John Chow is totally and refreshingly transparent with all his various revenue streams but I didn't have a clue what income (if any) a small-time blogger might expect.

So, here - drum roll, please - are the revenue figures for this blog for the first 3 months

• July - $8.31
• August -$8.33
• September - $8.77

Not a massive amount but certainly more than I expected and enough to cover my hosting costs with Bluehost. This is from a blog with around 100 daily visitors (mainly one-hit wonders from Google). I used a simple wide banner (Leaderboard) with 3/4 adverts and blended the background into the theme. Initially the banner was on the footer but after a few days, I moved the ad to the header section ('above the fold').

What is quite interesting is that, for various reasons, I hardly posted to the blog in August (5 posts versus 25 and 23 in July and June respectively) yet the revenue (if you can call it that) was consistent for each month. Also, the trend is upwards for each month - just !

I briefly experimented with a 'AdSense for Search' box but it didn't integrate well with my current theme (plaintxtBlog) so I abandoned it.

Another fun element was watching the Google AdServer try to present suitable adverts based on my content. Because I don't really signpost things with flashing lights, at times Google displayed a fairly bizarre and esoteric mix of (in)appropriate banner ads.

Some more facts and figures:

• Most clicks in a day: 4
• Most lucrative click: $1.64
• Least lucrative click: $0.01 (yes, 1 cent)
• Best day: 5 June 2007 ($2.16)
• Worst day: $0.00 (too many to mention)

My name is Norman and I am a blogoholic.

Two years ago, I started this blog purely as an experiment to see what all the fuss was about.

Two years ago, I didn't even know what blogging was. I certainly didn't expect that I would still be doing it two years later.

I didn't anticipate that I would subsequently play with themes, plug-ins, spend money on a domain, migrate to my own WordPress blog and eventually add Adsense.

During the first year (honeymoon period), I enjoyed monitoring the traffic statistics for my hosted WordPress blog.

Much to my surprise, I discovered that I actually enjoyed writing. Initially, I thought I might be capable of creating a technical blog about Siebel and/or Oracle but I soon discovered that I preferred to post anecdotes from my tedious life as a IT consultant.

As a consequence of creating the blog, I learned about various blogging platforms (Blogger, WordPress, Movable Type, Drupal, Typepad, Habari and Google Pages)

I also learned about RSS, various Web 2.0 tools (Bloglines, Reader, Netvibes, Blinklist, Feedburner) and signed up for various social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn).

Most importantly, I made a handful of new friends that I am still in regular contact with.

Then one night, I sat in a Dublin hotel room, staring at a pint of Guiness and mindlessly pressed 'Publish'. Seconds later, I then immediately stared at this particular vacuous post and thought 'What am I doing ? Why am I doing this ? What is the point ?'

After two years, I was blogging purely because of the self-imposed pressure to create content. Content that was valueless, worthless and pointless.

So, suddenly and spontaneously, I decided to take a break because I simply couldn't be bothered any more. Blogging just wasn't fun any more.

After one day, I still checked for comments, scanned the Web server logs and reviewed my precious Adsense revenue.

After two days, I read my RSS feeds for blog comments and examined my pretty Google Analytics charts.

After three days, I strongly resisted the urge to check anything.

After five days, I didn't do anything. I didn't feel obliged to write a blog article. I didn't feel obliged to comment. I didn't feel obliged to scan any of my 167 feeds.

After seven days, I forgot I had a blog. I actually talked to friends and family. The feeling of liberation was surprising.

After nineteen days, I realised blogging was an addiction. An addiction that didn't fit well with my obsessive personality.

After twenty eight days, I realised my blog was now two years old (I started my blog the day after WordPress launched). An interesting experiment which had now naturally drawn to a close.

So I was sorely tempted to close the blog down.

But then Doug said he liked 'Prince' so I had to start all over again.

Create tables, resize, add rows and columns, preview the output and add the finishing touches in Google Docs.

Then simply paste the HTML into the WordPress WYSIYG editor.

Less than two minutes to index a new article. Impressive.

A minor irritant with uninteresting email cluttering up my Inbox has resulted in some minor changes to my Web 2.0 first-team squad.

Akismet, the popular and widely used anti-spam solution, was letting an increasing trickle of irritating comment and trackback spam through. As I had configured email notification for all blog comments, this was generating pointless, tedious, worthless emails that simply had to be deleted. A complete waste of time and energy.

Initially, I toyed with the option to simply disable comments on articles older than 90 days which accounted for 95% of the spam but would block authors with valid contributions.

A little research revealed a possible alternative - Spam Karma. I was loosely aware of Spam Karma from the footer in Tim Hall's excellent blog

This blog is protected by dr Dave's Spam Karma 2: 23182 Spams eaten and counting...

as well as Andy Beard's positive review and useful tutorial on configuring Spam Karma. Initially, the Spam Karma interface was a little confusing. With Akismet, you literally set and forget whereas Spam Karma has a configuration page with a plethora of different options. Anyway, after deciding to start out with the default, out of the box settings, I just activated Spam Karma and waited.

Sure enough, the never ending barrage of spam trickled in and the vast majority were correctly marked as such, valid comments were allowed through and I couldn't detect any false positives.

The moderation mechanism wasn't quite as obvious as Akismet which emailed me whenever a comment was held for moderation. However, Spam Karma was actually better as moderated comments are held in the Spam list and can be quickly moderated from there. In addition, Spam Karma can email a daily/weekly digest summarising recent activity.

I have been running Spam Karma for almost a week now and not a single comment/trackback spam has got past the barriers yet. A truly impressive and valuable piece of software.

A few features in Spam Karma I really like:

• All comments are assigned a score depending on various criteria.
• Comments on older articles get penalised...
• ...but older articles with recent (valid) comment activity score higher.
• Instant comments within seconds of viewing get penalised.
• First-time commenters are presented with a captcha.
• Established commenters are recognised and scored accordingly.
• Trackbacks without a valid reference URL are penalised.
• My comments score higher than anyone elses :-)
• A detailed breakdown of the score assigned to any comment is available.

-12.5
0: Encrypted payload valid: IP matching.
-2: Browser doesn't support Javascript
0.5: Comment has no URL in content (but one author URL)
-2: Flash Gordon was here (comment posted 8 seconds after page load)
-9: Entry posted 7 months, 3 weeks ago. 0 comments in the past 15 days
Current Karma: -3

I was so impressed I donated $20 to the author and that doesn't happen very often. Another source of unnecessary email was valid blog comments (albeit much fewer). The solution for this was obvious. Subscribe to my own comments feed and read them in Google Reader.

Another source of Web 2.0 irritation was that the Firefox extension for coComment broke some of the drilldowns in the revamped Google Analytics reports so I reluctantly stopped using it. This was a real shame as coComment was one of these Web 2.0 applications, I actually used on a daily basis.

Again, I looked for an alternative and installed co.comments (yeah I know - it's a Web 2.0 domain with an embedded period) which works fine. There is a Firefox bookmarklet (not an extension) so the author has to remember to mark any comments posted whereas coComment automatically tracked these 'conversations'.

The other advantage of the coComment extension was automatic notification whenever a comment was added to a tracked conversation.

Again, the solution for this issue was obvious. I simply subscribed to the RSS feed for my tracked conversations and read them in Google Reader.

No one ever asks me: Hey, Norman - why haven't you installed Movable Type 4 (beta) yet ?

Well, I just did. The product is pretty impressive but I have invested too much time and effort in WordPress to switch blogging platforms.

After a promising start, the recent introduction of AdSense on this blog is seriously floundering. I am bitterly disappointed with the financial returns in June and my wife is seriously doubting the wisdom of my decision to resign from a highly paid job in IT consultancy in favour of professional blogging on the kitchen table.

Consequently, after an extraordinary board meeting, I have decided that desperate measures are necessary. I have cashed in my £12.50 Adwords vouchers bundled with my Bluehost account and launched a brilliant, inspired, marketing campaign aimed at driving traffic to this site, increasing e-commerce sales and boosting the click through rate.

So, if you see the following Google advertisement on your travels through the InterWeb, please be sure to let me know.

The world's worst blog

Ramblings from a certified madman

The wit and wisdom of Mr Brightside

www.nbrightside.com