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Archives for April 2008

The Blog Platform War – Not Over Yet?

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I while ago I wrote a long series of blog software reviews here for performancing. Time has flown, as it does, and I was wondering if the same sorts of results would be found now as then.

Back then Drupal and WordPress came out strong. There were also a good number of well known and not-so well known names.

Between then and now I have concentrated purely on WordPress after giving up trying to keep abreast of the Drupal goings on (those guys really crank out some code!).

Each have been given several iterations, the software is both familiar now and new from back then.

Recently MovableType had a resurgence of interest since going back to open source.

So is it a one-horse race or is there still everything to win for any one of the platforms out there?

Would you re-score any of those results knowing what you know now?

Performancing Stream of Consciousness – Tues Apr 8, 2008

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Reading links for Tuesday.

  1. Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett have both just announced their book, ProBlogger – Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income. Darren says it’s the worst kept secret, but I’ve been trying to collaborate with Chris as well and I didn’t even know what he was up to. The book is published by Wiley – so it’s in print – and is available for pre-ordering through Amazon and Barnes & Noble. (By the way, Chris, if you didn’t know, is one of the original founders of Performancing.) Sounds very exciting, though I’m guessing they didn’t get $300,000 for their book.
  2. Darren and Chris aren’t the only ones with a book deal. Hugh MacLeod, creator of the highly entertaining net comic strip Gaping Void has landed a deal for his How to be Creative series.
  3. Loren Baker, editor and owner of Search Engine Journal, has just announced a guest blogging competition. There are over US$9,000 in prizes from a number of vendors. If you have an understanding of search marketing and related topics, go check out the rules asap, as the contest only runs for one week, starting today. [via DailyBlogTips]
  4. Earlier I summarized the new features in WordPress 2.5. Not everyone wants to upgrade, and I don’t blame them. However, due to deliberate efforts to hack blogs, Technorati has announced that they won’t index hacked or vulnerable blogs. That means that if you don’t upgrade to some safe platform and version, you might lose any benefits of being indexed by Technorati. Even if you feel uncomfortable upgrading to WP 2.5 (I hate the new admin panel), at the very least, start changing your blog admin password regularly – even weekly. And check for any unusual outbound links on your site. Just because someone has hacked you doesn’t mean they’ve changed your password.
  5. I wrote about what’s wrong with the blogosphere, and the health issues and deaths of some bloggers. My colleague David Peralty has a different take on the issue, which I only partly agree with. It is NOT as easy to make a living blogging as he seems to suggest, but that doesn’t mean some people aren’t doing it. Though I’m actually suprised that David said, “you don’t need to do a million posts a day to bring in a reasonable income,” because I know how hard he works. My point is that most bloggers are not making a living and for that reason might be spending more time in front of computer, gaining weight and burning the midnight oil.
  6. One other problem with earning below your potential income is setting your rates too low. Neal Shaffer writes at Copyblogger about how to price freelance writing. (Though be warned that not every blogging client will negotiate. They don’t have to – not yet anyway.)

Crunch Time—Blogging Under Pressure

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Some of us work well under pressure, some of us thrive on it, and some of us absolutely hate it. I tend to thrive on it, and the reason for this is really unknown. Perhaps it is my source of motivation to get things done. Regardless, a deadline is a deadline, and it must be met. This means shifting into overdrive.

Some of you might never experience what it feels like to be a writer for a large publishing machine. It can be exciting and stressful all at the same time. However, if you do get put in a situation where you just have to get a blog post done quickly, here are some tips to get it done without wasting time:

Settle on an Idea Already

The idea for the article in question, in most cases, should already be known. However, if you are writing a news article or are asked to come up with something on the fly, this is where creativity and common sense come into play. Too often in life we are afraid to just go with what we have to work with, this is where it is time to just go for it. This will lead to the preparation stage of an article, but be sure that the idea makes sense.

Create the Outline

The most important thing you can do to save time and headaches down the road is to create an outline for your content. I can not stress the importance of this quite enough. It is important to note that this is even more true if you are under pressure to complete your article—you have such little time to change and edit content once you get started. Even five minutes of preparation will payoff in the end, but some people completely skip this part of the writing process.

Research on the Go

Research is something that, for me, takes up the most time in the grand scheme of things. I would never suggest starting an article before doing any research, but if you got to get something done fast, then you have to improvise. You should have the resources you use to perform research (like Wikipedia and Google) already accessible so that if you need to look up something, it can be done quickly. Find what you need and get back to writing, but ensure you have your facts straight. Use this time to add links and various media to your content as well.

Get It Write Now

If you have your outline prepared, you should already know what you are going to write about, and this means you can jump right in as usual. You should start with the content or introduction first, and then work from there. Depending on how knowledgeable you are on the topic in question, the amount of research required can be adjusted to compensate. However, be sure to take your time to get things right as editing a rushed post might be even more time consuming.

Edit Efficiently

Editing can be a time consuming task, so you should make your best effort to reduce the amount of times you need to fix up your work. I previously touched on this subject, but there is no getting around this part of the blogging process. If you skip this part, you risk making yourself look unprofessional. It is where you patch things up and post the finished product.

The Finish

If you made it this far, then hopefully your article will be complete. It might not be your best work, but it will hopefully get the point across. Time to move on to bigger and better things.

If you have any tips for getting things done during crunch time, be sure to let us all know.

Make Your WordPress Category or Tag Pages More Interesting

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By default, most WordPress themes come out of the gate with really boring Category and Tag pages. Most of the time they are just bland lists of posts in temporal order.

Over at PopCrunch, thanks to the prodding of my good friend Ahmed Bilal, I’ve decided to spice up the category pages a bit to make them look more professional and presentable (yes, Ahmed, the new site design is coming soon;-)

So some of my friends noticed that the category pages over at PopCrunch were ranking for very popular search terms like “Britney Spears” but that the page that visitors were presented with was butt ugly and completely non-sticky. In other words, people might find the page, but there was nothing captivating about it at all to make people stay.

So the first step in my adventure was to prettify the page a bit. To do this, I downloaded the Category Icons plugin for WordPress. Category Icons allows you to associate a unique image with each of your WordPress categories. By placing a little snippet of code on your category.php theme file, you can then have a big, bold image come up that will make your category pages look better than 90% of the category pages out there.

But I wanted to do more than add a simple image. While an image ads visual impact, my vision for each major category was to create something like an “expert hub” – to give visitors something more than a list of articles.

So the next thing I did was use the category description field for some of my major categories to write up a few descriptive (and hopefully witty) paragraphs about the category topic. I then displayed this descriptive paragraph at the top of my category pages. In addition to create unique editorial content, this step also introduces permanent, static content which helps stabilize the indexing of the category page in the search index. Dual benefit. Two birds with one stone.

But I didn’t want to stop with just a picture and a short editorial bit. The next step I took was to link to the three best articles on PopCrunch about the category topic. By doing this I help the reader find the most interesting content first. There are several options here. I personally chose to go the manual edit route. However, you could easily use the Popularity Contest plugin and have an algorithm decide your best content.

So far, that’s all I’ve done to improve my category pages. And so far, I’m very happy with the results. You can see an example of how things are going at the Britney Spears Category page.

Some Inspirational Quotes To Keep Us Motivated

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When I have a down day, I find that it is not because I am lazy or tired, but there is a lack of inspiration and motivation. I attempt to feed myself from others that have done great things before me — those that have been willing to give up the normal life to achieve greatness. I won’t lie, I hope to achieve greatness as well in the future; we all do. But, it is up to each one of us to find things that motivate and inspire our minds, and these following quotes are a few of my favorites (of many others) from some great people in the past.

“A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.”—Richard Bach

“Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.”—Italian Proverb

“He who begins many things finishes but few.”—Italian Proverb

“It’s a funny thing about life. If you refuse to settle for anything less than the best, that’s what it will give you.”—W. Somerset Maugham

“A superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions.”—Confucius

“If you think in terms of a year, plant a seed; if in terms of ten years, plant trees; if in terms of 100 years, teach the people.”—Confucius

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”—Thomas Edison

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”—Albert Einstein

“Never again clutter your days or nights with so many menial and unimportant things that you have no time to accept a real challenge when it comes along. This applies to play as well as work. A day merely survived is no cause for celebration. You are not here to fritter away your precious hours when you have the ability to accomplish so much by making a slight change in your routine. No more busy work. No more hiding from success. Leave time, leave space, to grow. Now. Now! Not tomorrow!”—Og Mandino

Have any inspirational material? Please, feel free to post a comment and help fellow bloggers that might need that boost of motivation to keep them going. I also would love to see some great inspirational quotes.

Performancing Stream of Consciousness – Sun Apr 6, 2008

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Some more weekend reading:

  1. Andrew G.R. asks how far you’d go to thank a blog reader, pointing to Georgia Getz, blogger at I Am Bossy, and her plan to drive 10,000 miles in total, in order to meet and thank her blog’s commenters. She’s doing this in five weeks, and Saturn has provided her with a hybrid car. But she’ll be crashing each night at the homes of over 260 bloggers who have signed up to participate. Andrew asks the question: would you let your fave blogger crash on your couch? My answer is yes – one of my faves, who is a colleague, is tentatively scheduled to crash on my couch once I manage to find an apartment in Toronto and move back there. But he’s one of few who I’d allow to do that.
  2. Do you blog for business or pleasure, asks Alan Johnson, at Copyblogger. That is, even if you are making money blogging for hire or on your own, is it in a niche that you enjoy? Or have you picked the niche because of the income potential? I have to agree with him that you have to write about topics that you enjoy, else the dislike will show in your writing – which ultimately harms your personal brand.
  3. Mark Seall, a guest poster at Problogger, asks who cares how many subscribers you’ve got. He explains why he thinks we bloggers obsess over statistics, and offers a diagram of various ways we can measure our site’s success. This is a must-read article, but I have to disagree with one part of his diagram: “Things you can’t influence directly – don’t worry about.” The advice is sound, in general, but you CAN influence inbound links, search results, repeat visits, new visits, subscribers and comments. It’s just a harder than many of the other factors he diagrammed. Though he did say “can’t influence directly,” and I’ll have to concede that for most bloggers, this is probably true.
  4. David Peralty asks, are you blogging naked. That is, are you just blogging, or do you have a sense of purpose and direction. I’m surprised to realize that, despite my extensive writing background, I started off blogging in 2005 with little purpose – something that continued up until about January 2008. I now have a blogging purpose, though I’m still not entirely sure I can make a living from it for a few years, without other regular blogging gigs. But unless I plan and try, I’ll never know – and trying is more important to me than not succeeding.
  5. Ali, a guest at Daily Writing Tips, recommends keeping a writer’s notebook and writing in it every day. I couldn’t agree more. I know from long experience that I am more productive and creative if I sketch out ideas on pen and paper. Just don’t buy a fancy notebook or you might feel compelled to write only your best work – which will ruin your creative juices.
  6. Running a forum has its pros and cons, but if it’s something you want to do, Kevin Muldoon discusses a number of ways that you can integrate a forum with your WordPress blog.
  7. Darren Rowse points to a post by Suzie Cheel on her Abundance Highway blog, about how many topics a blog should cover. Darren left a detailed 6-point comment there of his own thoughts about the topic. Personally, I think that you have to decide what net result you want from your blog. If you want to be a generalist, fine – don’t expect it to be easy to monetize. If you want to be considered an expert on a topic, then write only about that topic. (And no matter how much you think it’s okay to do so, don’t stick in posts about your cat or a recipe you just had to share if neither really has anything to do you with your professional blog. On the other hand, if you can think up a way to make them relevant, great.)