Success in Blogging

It is tough to have a successful blog. You need to do a number of things to even have a chance. You should be unique. You also have to get the time to regularly post. Get your own domain name. Then do not change it.

Be original and professional. You blog should have a short bio on yourself. It should also provide a way to contact you. I am not too good in these two areas.

You need to get out in the online community for people to notice you. Do that by becoming active in other blogs. Be active in forums as well. Don’t go for volume. Be active and respected in a few places online.

In addition to having an online presence, you need to meet in person as well. You should attend some live events such as tech events. Then go meet and talk to people. Be direct. Let them know who you are and what you want. It is ok to sell to people. Bring your business cards.

The Google Effect

Google has a lot of great free products. I make use of a number of them. However I just read an article about a dude who uses Google tools all day long. Let’s look at some of these tools.

Gmail is the big winner at Google. You get a whole lot of space. It is free. The ads are not too noticeable. Then we have Google Reader. That let’s me track a number of blogs efficiently.

As you can see and probably know, I use Google AdSense to place ads on my blog. There is also AdWords if you want to pay to advertise. I personally do not buy ads on the Google network. Another tool I don’t use is Google News.

Google Maps is another one of the popular tools from Google. I don’t use it. I also don’t use or know much about Google Talk. I am slowly trying out new Google tools. I love the price. And everything is accessible on the web which is convenient.

Wordpress Basics

Blogging is a mainstream activity. There are many choices of blogging platforms. These include Blogger, Typepad, and WordPress. Today I discuss WordPress. My information comes from a book on being a great WordPress designer. I skimmed the table of contents and read the first chapter. So this will be an overview.

WordPress is highly customizable. Many content management systems (CMS) advertise customization. However almost everything in WordPress can be customized. This makes for an ultra flexible CMS.

WordPress is an open source product. It is written in the PHP programming language. The WordPress.com sight is a hosted version of WordPress. Therefore you cannot do heavy customization of the product on that sight.

WordPress.org is the home for the open source software. Note that WordPress needs MySQL to run. MySQL is an open source database management system. An important plugin for WordPress is Akismet, which is a spam filter.

Themes are customizations consisting of PHP and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) files. Linkbacks are other sites linking to your page. Linkbacks are also known as pingbacks or trackbacks. The WordPress documentation is called the WordPress Codex. It is available online.

The default WordPress installation comes with same posts. Delete them before your site goes live. I exclusively use Blogger. But I like checking out the competition occasionally.

Disclosure Required

The FTC is now requiring that bloggers fully disclose their relationships with vendors they promote. In other words, you had better let people know what type of freebies you are getting before you hype up the company. This can include to gifts that enable you to go to conferences as well. I wish I had such perks myself.

Here is what is strange about the FTC guidance. It only applies online. Print media does not have the same restrictions. So let me get this straight. I can put out a print article where I sell my soul to a company, but I don't need to come clean about it? That sounds like the web is getting a stricter rule applied to it.

This is ok. I don't receive any gifts from anyone. So I don't have to disclose anything. I run another blog where I complain most of the time. Therefore there is no room for conflict of interest. Let's see how this FTC guidance plays out in the year to come.

Google Wave

I have been hearing a lot of chatter in the blogosphere about Google Wave. Like most Google products, Google Wave is a Beta release. It has e-mail, IM, and document editing.

Now I can't be sure, but I think I gave Google Wave a try for a web programming class I am taking. We sampled a couple offerings for document sharing on the web.

Google's main competitor in this space is Microsoft with their SharePoint. Another elderly competitor is Novell.

Team Members Only

There was a blog I discovered today. And I liked it. The post I read was good. So I decided to post a comment. I proceeded to type in my comment. Then I provided my blogger credentials. The blog came back with an error message stating, "Comments are restricted to team members". WTF?

I tried to locate the e-mail address of the blog author. It could not be found. Weak. Guess what? I am not returning to that blog. I am not sure what this team member business was about. Maybe it is just people who are teaming up to write the blog. I don't know. And I no longer care.

Here is some advice to you bloggers. If you do allow commenting, make sure everyone can do it. Otherwise you will alienate your readers. You have been warned.

Writing Clearly

Today was a slow day at work. It is a government holiday. So none of the networks were available. What is one to do on such a day? Some slackers just stayed home. I studied up some topics. One was how to write better by Michasl Covington. Let me share some insights I learned from a deck put together by Michael.

The ability to write is a power. You probably don't need to learn too much more grammar. But you do need to learn how to organize your info. Get to the point is a rule of thumb. The first sentence of each paragraph needs to be the main point.

Ensure you know the meaning of words before you use them. Be precise with you vocabulary. Remove needless words. Use a Roman font for most text. That's about it.