Blog Tips

Mallika’s New Look

I’ve spent the weekend coding up a new theme for Mallika’s Quick Indian Cooking blog.   It was a bit of a team effort.  Mallika and her photographer husband Andy mocked up how they wanted it to look.  I did the CSS and put it all into WordPress (using the ultra flexible Sandbox theme as a base).

It has a bit of a web-magazine look about it - with a slick YouTube video in the sidebar,  and post highlights using custom fields. 

I have a few things on the to-do list left - such as a different sidebar for inside pages and a better archive page.   But overall,  I think it’s a nice new look for Mallika’s blog - and I have a feeling that she is going places with her Quick Indian Cooking.

By Hugh | Comments (1)

Be A Useful Rescource To Get To the Top

There is a lot of talk about search engine marketing these days - and that really means getting to the top of Google. It’s a big topic - sometimes divided into two camps - White Hat and Black Hat. The goodies, who wear white hats, sleep with Google’s Wemastmaster Guidelines under their pillows. The baddies in black hats lie at wake at night thinking up ways to out-fox the search engines.

Here’s my firm belief - - and I suppose that it puts me in the goodie camp. It’s my rule of internet.

Most of the sites that come top in searches are are a resource of some kind.

The most visited page on Storynory is the archive. That’s because it is a repository of children’s stories. In other words, it’s a resource. Our most successful blog client - Quick Indian Cooking - is a resource of recipes. (I hope to bring you developments on the home cooking front in the New Year. )

The Wikipedia is huge because it is valuable mine of information. Other Wikis do well, because they cover their niches and serve as information centres for particular groups Some of the most popular podcasts are language courses.

Traditionally blogs present you with their most recent posts. This fine if they are very topical, and publish often. But I detect a shift out there that tries to put more value on the usefulness of the archive.

My prediction for 2008 is that more and more blogs - and later podcasts - will relaunch themselves in a better organised format that makes it easier to mine for information. Currently there are a number of magazine designs out there that are attempting to do this.

The elements of a blog-resource include:

  1. Longer posts with more educational content
  2. Series of posts on a particular topic - that build up into a step-by step tutorial.
  3. A Semi-Static Front page that highlights important categories and best read posts.
  4. A really well organised archive that is broken down into categories.
  5. Feature pages that highlight certain topics and posts
  6. Category Pages that have their own design and sidebar links relevant to that category
  7. Posts with “If you found this intersting, you may also like….” in the footer

I would be interested in any more ideas for improved organisation, as this is what I’m thinking about most at the moment. You might even see blog relations re-organised along those lines….

By Hugh | Comments (0)

How to make a nest in your niche

I was just reading Search Engine Journal on how to make it in the SEO community. I don’t particularly have any ambition here - I just want to optimize my own little corner of the internet. But I do think the tips are very useful for making it in any niche, and therefore building up your professional reputation and your blog at the same time. The two go hand in hand, of course.

I’ll pick out one quote and some headlines: You can read the original here.

Remember that kid you always used to make fun of in class for asking way too many questions and for sucking up to the teacher for that high grade? That’s what you need to do with the gods of (your niche)…Get out there and suck up to the influencers.

(Well I think that’s why I haven’t made it yet !)

Other tips, slightly adapted to make them more generally applicable

  • Overpower the Forums and Make Friends
  • Dominate your competitors by becoming the Go-to-Guy for ONE Niche
  • Get published
  • Create Your Central Site / Blog and just BUILD
  • Make friends with your rivals
  • Build up High Value Links to your site (by having good content to link to)
  • Create Formulas and Simplified Ideas (of your complicated hard to understand subject)
  • Start Your Experimentations (original research)
  • Passion and Obsession - Go With It

To these excellent tips I would add:

  • Meet people in real life. Go to all the networking events. Press the flesh. Hand out cards. Speak at conferences.
By Hugh | Comments (1)

Optimising Your Blog

I was asked today how you get started in blogging - is it enough just to dash off a few ideas and hit publish? Well here are a few things, apart from actually writing, that I believe will help you get started.

The assumption is that you don’t just want to write your thoughts into a vacuum. The main point of blogging is to take part in an online conversation with other people in your field. You may have lots of reasons for wanting to do this, but most professionals understand the importance of networking.

Find out who else is writing in your area. This means doing so searching around using the leading blog search engine, Technorati.

Get Google Reader. The art of blogging is to link to other bloggers - so you plug into the online conversation and build your network - to do that you have to read other blogs. How do you follow lots and lots of blogs when you have hardly time to read the newspaper? Simple get yourself an RSS Reader and subscribe to their feeds. That way you can read all the blogs in one place. Google Reader is probably the one these days.

Burn your feed with Feedburner. Feedburner makes your feed easy to subscribe to - so rout your feed through it. You will also find a host of useful stats and online tools come with feedburner.

Make your feed easy to find These days browsers auto discover RSS feeds - so make sure that the header of your blog points to your new Feedburner feed.

Get on top of categories and tagging Categories and tagging make your blog easy to navigate, they also help put your posts into the general mix of other blog posts on similar subjects. People will find you in places like Technorati. A good idea for WordPress bloggers is to get the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin.

Make your archives friendly In a similar vein to tagging, people will stay with your site better if they can naviate your achrives well. WordPress users should consider the Extended Live Archives plugin.

Fend off comment spam This is partly about making sure that the settings of your blog do not allow people to dump loads of links in a comment, and its also about getting some good anti-spam tools such as Akismet.

Make Your Blog Google Friendly Again a plugin comes to the rescue - Google site maps which helps Google find all your pages, but it’s also about making sure that your blog follows some basic Search Engine Tips, which I’m going to write up soon.

Monitor Traffic You are soon going to want to know all about your visitors. There are an array of tools to help you including sitemeter, Google analytics, and Google for webmasters.

There is more, much more I could write here - but I think that’s a enough tips for now. I’ve got to get on with optimising a blog for a client - and as you can see, it’s rather time consuming.

By Hugh | Also posted in Blog Home | Comments (1)

Akismet Down

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.

By Hugh | Also posted in Blog Home, Blogosphere | Comments (1)

Setting Up A New WordPress Blog

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.

By Hugh | Also posted in Blog Home | Comments (6)

Wal-Mart Edelman Blog Blunder

Walmart 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.

By Hugh | Also posted in Best Practice, Blog Home, Blogosphere | Comments (8)

Web hosts struggling?

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.

By Hugh | Also posted in Blog Home, How? What? | Comments (1)

Just say no to Microsoft

There’s a book called “Just Say No to Microsoft” (thanks Scoble). A few years ago I tried out Linux. Loading it up was easy. I enjoyed using my computer in a different way from everybody else. But overall, it was a huge time-waster. Getting it to work with the scanner, the printer, the digital camera - all the other things you use with a computer these days - could mean staying up till 2 a.m. and still I couldn’t get the damn thing working. Eventually I did the sensible thing and threw in the towel. I don’t care what anyone says about Windows, generally you plug in the printer and it works.

But I am ditching all the Microsoft applications that I run on my computer - Word, Excel, etc… They all have one thing in common that I don’t like - you have to pay for them. The fact is, there’s so much stuff these days that’s free, legal, and good. There are a lot of innovative and interesting things that aren’t Microsoft. It’s hard to argue that Microsoft has a monopoly these days, though the European Comission is trying.

Microsoft will be around for a long time making an operating system. Windows Vista will work with the TV - you’ll plug it in and that will be great - and then you will download your movies from Google.

By Hugh | Also posted in How? What? | Comments (1)

Talkdigger new look

I dropped by at talkdigger this morning to do a narcissistic check on who is linking to our sites (I think I’m going to make a new year’s resolution to only do this once a week, it’s too distracting).

Talkdigger has a new look and, it seems, is faster and more convenient than ever. It runs through all the major search engines in a flash. This very useful and addictive tool has been developed by Frederick Giasson from Quebec. It goes to show that an individual can do very cool things on the web these days. No need for a huge team back by venture capital.

By Hugh | Also posted in Blog Home, How? What? | Comments (2)

Sony Sound Forge

Sound Forge

When I started editing audio - and truly, I’m not talking about pre-World War days - we used quarter inch reel-to-reel magnetic tape, a crayon to mark the spot, and a scarily sharp razor blade to slice the tape. We would then piece it back together with sticky tape. In the digital era, I’ve used a variety of computer based sound programs, and I’m prety confident in my assertion that the best by a mile, is Sony Sound Forge.

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By Hugh | Also posted in Blog Home, Podcast Tips, Reviews | Comments (7)