Maria’s Guides

• Sifry’s Alerts: State of the Blogosphere, October, 2006
  An interesting article that provides good statistical analysis of top blogs on Technorati. Interesting reading to learn what makes successful blogs successful.
  (tags: technorati articles blogging blog metrics statistics stats web blogosphere blogs)

I do a little end-of-year cleaning.

I decided the other day that some of my blog’s categories were too similar to others (for example, Flying for Hire, Flying for Pleasure, and Flying Lessons) and that I wanted to trim down my category list to make room for new categories in the future. So I combined a few categories and added one.

When I combined Writing for a Living and Writing for Pleasure into one category (Writing), I did it the hard way: I edited all the posts in Writing for Pleasure to use the Writing for a Living category. Then I changed the Writing for a Living category’s Category Name to Writing and the Category Slug to writing. I renamed Writing for Pleasure as a new category called On Blogging with a category slug of blogging. This was extremely time consuming, since I had to modify each individual post and was working from home, with a miserable 256Kbps connection.

For the three flying categories, I decided to get fancy. I changed the name and slug of Flying for Hire, which had the most posts, to Flying and flying. Then I changed the default category (Options > Reading) to Flying. Then I deleted the Flying for Pleasure and Flying Lessons categories, clicking OK in the warning dialog that appeared for each one to allow the default category (Flying) to be assigned to each. This was certainly a faster way to get the job done, but it gave me quite a scare when the number of posts in the Flying category did not increase and the total post count decreased. Had WordPress actually deleted posts? I had to check the contents of that category to make sure I had posts from all three categories in it. I do, but the inconsistent count has me worried, so I don’t necessarily recommend doing what I did to combine categories. Ask me in a week or two and I’ll let you know what I think.

Of course, changing category slugs isn’t a good thing to do when you’re using one of the permalink options (Options > Permalink) to make “friendly” URLs. My changes affected five categories; any links to the old category slugs would break. So I opened my .htaccess file and added the following lines near the top:

Redirect permanent /category/weblog/writing-for-a-living/ http://www.marialanger.com/category/weblog/writing/

Redirect permanent /category/weblog/writing-for-pleasure/ http://www.marialanger.com/category/weblog/writing/

Redirect permanent /category/weblog/flying-for-pleasure/ http://www.marialanger.com/category/weblog/flying/

Redirect permanent /category/weblog/flying-for-hire/ http://www.marialanger.com/category/weblog/flying/

Redirect permanent /category/weblog/flying-lessons/ http://www.marialanger.com/category/weblog/flying/

Keep in mind here that all of the categories I changed are actually subcategories of the Maria’s Weblog category, which has a slug of weblog. Each of these lines automatically redirect the old category URL to the new one. You can learn more about .htaccess at one of my favorite online sources: Stupid .htaccess Tricks.

The net effect of all these changes? Five categories have been combined into two and a new category has been created. My links should continue to work as they did.

Now let’s just hope I didn’t lose any posts or screw up that .htaccess file…

From MPDailyFix.com.

Tim Jackson at MPDailyFix.com wrote an article back in November titled “What Does It Mean to Be a ‘Good Blogger’?“that I just stumbled upon. In it, he provides five tips for better blogging. Here they are with my take on them; you should read Tim’s article for his take.

• Know your topic. You really shouldn’t write authoritatively about a topic when you don’t know enough about the topic to do so. Opinion is one thing, but if it’s based on facts, get the facts straight. That means doing your homework. These days, that’s easy — you’re sitting in front of a computer connected to the Internet, aren’t you? Use Wikipedia, Google, or your favorite search engine to find articles that explain things you aren’t sure about. This really hits home with me today because just yesterday I was blasted for not knowing off the top of my head that Apple sells a “two-button” mouse. I was familiar with the Mighty Mouse product but did not know all of its features. I corrected myself in the very next post, but that wasn’t enough for some readers. Ouch!
• Know your audience. This one is extremely difficult for me, primarily because this site covers so many topics: support for my books and articles, stories about flying, information about writing, opinions, articles about travel, and stories about the things that go on in my life. Exactly who does this blog appeal to? I have no idea. But I can use stats or metrics to learn more about what people are reading when they come here. For example, yesterday’s article “Apple’s ‘Two-Button’ Mouse” was a huge hit with visitors, getting hundreds of page views and nine comments in a matter of hours. (Huge numbers for this site.) Articles about blogging and statistics also seem to do very well. Is that what my audience wants? Perhaps I should deliver more. But I’ve also decided to install polling software that asks readers which topics interest the most. That might help, too.
• Read other blogs and leave comments on them. This is something I’ve been working hard to squeeze into my schedule. I’ve found that RSS reader software (I use Endo) is very helpful because it delivers articles or summaries of articles right to one central location. I can spend a few minutes browsing through the inbox, then follow links to the original articles. That’s how I found the article I’m discussing here. This is time consuming but it has three major benefits: (1) I learn a lot about the topics I’m following, (2) I get fodder for articles on this blog (or at least links for my automated del.icio.us links posts (see This just in…), and (3) I’m able to become part of the blogging community. (More on that in a moment.)
• Follow the links. This isn’t a huge deal for me, since I don’t have many incoming links. Yet. But it is important to see who is linking to your site. Sadly, many of the incoming links appear to be from sites trying to up their Google ranking by linking to other sites. But when I do follow a quality link, it’s good to see that someone else has appreciated what I’ve written. And that brings us to Tim’s last tip.
• Say thanks. This is a great way to become part of the blogging community. When someone has linked to one of your posts, it’s always nice to say thanks. Not only does this make the person on the other end feel good about sharing your work with other readers, but it builds community. This morning provided a great example of this in my e-mail inbox: I had a thank you note from the author of one of the articles I’d blogged about yesterday. She’d spent a few moments on my site and had some positive things to say about the Contact Me page, which has always been a sore subject. It was nice of her to take the time to write and even nicer to get some positive feedback about my rather strict contact policies.

Again, this is my take on Tim’s five tips. To read Tim’s take and the comments left by readers on his site, read his article.

And I’d love to get some comments about this topic here. Use the Comments link.