Blog Relations

WordPress bloggers should beware of spam right now: Akismet, the integrated spam-catcher, appears to be down, or at least is showing “API Key invalid”. The spammers are running rampant. I would be very reluctant to have barriers to commenting, such as moderation or catchpas, so have just installed the very latest versions of Spam Karma 2, and Bad Behaviour. Also been thinking up a long list of dirty words to ban outright over at our kids’ site, Storynory.

P.S. Instead of reinstalling Akismet, I’ve added this plugin within a plugin to Spam Karma 2. SK2 checks comments against Akismet’s blacklist of bad commenters, giving you the best of these two plugins.

Matthew and I have been cooking a few plans for new ventures, and we’ve quietly launched the first of these today. It’s an Alternative Energy blog called altnrg. We think it’s a good niche to play in, but it’s a bit of an experiment. There is good news-flow, and good click-through rates, but you still need an awful lot of those clicks to make it worth while. We’ll just see how it goes.

Installing a new Wordpress blog is no more than a few clicks away our Bluehost webhosting account. From then on, I always think it’s going to take half-an-hour to get everything ready, and in fact I end up tinkering until the wee hours.

You’ll notice that the design is a development of the blog relations theme. In keeping with most ad-driven blogs, it has a double sidebar on the right. We noticed at Storynory that people click far more on this side.

I wanted to get latest posts, search, and subscribe button clearly above the fold. The comments link is at the top of the post to encourage people to take part.

It relies on tags and a tag cloud rather than categories, as I think these are better for technorati searches, and you can have more of them. The cloud gives a quick overview of what the blog is about.

I’ve installed the latest Ajax stuff, including the great Extended Live Archive and Ajax Comments. Tags are by Ultimate Tag Warrior. For SEO I consider the sitemaps plugin essential (together with Webmaster tools) and I track stats with Analytics. Of course we need a Feedburner account, and have to make sure that the header template directs people to the feedburner feed.

All in all, it’s never a five minute job to optimise a new WordPress blog.

Very nice of someone to write a blog about how you can travel across the USA and always park overnight in a Wal-Mart car park for free – nice for Wal-Mart that is.

I started thinking about all the other amazing things there are to see in this vast country of ours. And then I started thinking about how Wal-Mart — one in every town, practically — lets you park overnight for free.

Pity it reads just like typical PR rubbish. Hold on a minute, it is PR rubbish! It turns out that this idea was cooked up by the Edelman agency – the same Edelman whose boss writes a blog, and that hired a slew of PR bloggers.

Interesting to hear the take on this in the For Imediate Release Podcast. It gives an impression of the confusion this debacle has sowed in the PR World. Presenter Shel Holtz rightly expresses sorrow and regret that Edelman should cock-up like this, then co-presenter Neville Hobson reports on how nice it was to meet Richard Edelman at a blogger meet-up in London last week. Presumably Neville recorded his piece before this news broke.

Edelman reminds me of running journalism courses in various parts of the world. The students nod and say lots of intelligent things in the discussion, but when they go out and do their stuff, they come back with material that does the opposite of all that we talked about. This is exactly what Edelman does in the blogosphere.

Matt Heaton, the founder of Bluehost, writes on his blog that Utah is the place to succeed. Bluehost can keep its costs down in Utah.

I still think that Bluehost offers excellent value, though I’m still reeling from being told by customer service that they can’t sell me any more bandwidth because they lose $25 per month on their package as it is.

We’ve put our latest post to our Storynory podcast for children on Libsyn. I note from their blog that they all work at Libsyn without any salaries at all.

It seems to me that the publishing revolution that is blogging, video/picture hosting, and podcasting has made the hosting business very competitive indeed. People are actually using the bandwidth that they buy, instead of leaving it redundant. This is costing the host providers real money – even if they do live in Utah where you can buy 3000 sq ft home for around $200K.