Tag Archives: blogging

Six Improvements For Your Blog

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From lifehack.org

Interested in a few basic blog improvements? Chris Brogan’s article should give you some ideas.

From Six Improvements to Your Blog on lifehack.org:

I’ve done a lot of blog surfing lately, in search of new (best) blogs. What I found often, however, was that there are things people could do to improve the relationship and interaction value of their blogs, which would in turn build a better bridge between blogs and their readers.

Chris’s six tips are extremely basic, with advice that includes formatting posts to make them more legible and making it easy for readers to contact you. I don’t agree with everything said — for example, the contact advice doesn’t work for me and I don’t see anything wrong with captchas if they prevent comment spam — but it’s a good look at some things you may be able to do to improve your blog overall.

Does anyone have any other tips they might want to share with readers? Use the Comments link here.

Tips for Becoming a Good Blogger

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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.

Getting Regular Blog Readers

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What good is blogging if no one reads what you write?

The Zero Boss has written a good article about how you can attract and retain readers for a new blog. Lots of good advice.

Read it here: http://thezeroboss.com/2006/11/05/so-i-have-a-blognow-what-how-to-get-people-to-read-
what-you-write/

In the same vein, Connected Internet has a great article specifically for WordPress users that lists four “engagement” plugins — that is, plugins that engage the reader and encourage visitors to read more of what’s online. I’ll be adding at least one of these plugins to my site soon.

You can read it here: http://www.connectedinternet.co.uk/2006/11/04/1022/

Redirects with .htaccess

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I may have come up with a solution for the RSS errors I’ve been seeing.

When I combined Maria Langer, the Official Web Site* with my personal WebLog and LangerBooks.com, my book support site, into one site at www.aneclecticmind.com, I soon realized I had a problem. A bunch of people who were accessing the RSS feed for my old Mac OS X VQS book support site were still looking for it at the old address. Trouble is, it wasn’t there anymore. So these feed readers were looking for something they’d never find. And rather than give up and get on with their feed reader lives, they evidently kept looking, day after day, week after week. The people following the feed were probably either too overwhelmed by other content to notice my absence or had the silly idea that I just wasn’t writing anything new.

I discovered this, by the way, by checking the Users Online feature of my site. If I had a bunch of users online, I’d pop over to that page to see what they were looking at. I noticed that some of them were looking at my Oops! Page Not Found page. And when I pointed to the URL link, I saw that the page they were trying to get was the feed page for the Mac OS X books.

What could I do? I didn’t know. But the problem always bumbled around in the back of my mind. I figured I’d resolve it sooner or later.

Today, while waiting for a friend I’d taken to the doctor’s office, I killed some time listening to podcasts on my iPod. One of them was a podcast I’d only recently subscribed to: Podcasting Underground. In one episode, the host brought up a problem he’d experienced using redirects in his podcast feed. Although I didn’t have the same problem and his solution didn’t apply to me, it got me thinking. Redirects. Of course!

To those of you who don’t know, a redirect is an instruction that tells the visitor to Web content that the content isn’t available where he’s looking but is available elsewhere. It redirects him to the correct place.

There are at least two kinds of redirects — at least two kinds that I know about, that is.

One is extremely basic and uses an instruction in the head element of a Web page to send the visitor elsewhere, occasionally with a timer. Whenever you go to a Web page that says “We’ve moved to http://blahblah.com. Click this link if the new page does not appear automatically in five seconds.” That page has a redirect with a five second delay. It’s an easy redirect to create (if you have HTML knowledge) but it does waste time and effort by letting the visitor go to the wrong place in the first place. It also requires an HTML document at the wrong location. Not very smart, if you ask me, but it does have its purposes.

The other redirect requires rolling up the sleeves and editing the invisible .htaccess file that can live in a variety of places on a Web server, including the server’s root directory, a Web site’s root directory, or a specific directory within a Web site. This file can contain all kinds of instructions, as you can learn about in the Comprehensive Guide to .htacess or elsewhere online. (Just Google .htaccess and don’t forget the leading period or “dot.”)

The only instruction that interested me was the redirect command. It uses the format:

Redirect olddirectory/oldfile.html http://www.newsite.com/newdirectory/newfile.html

So I composed a command string that I think should work, stuck it in my .htaccess file, and resaved the file to my server. The new file location is set to the RSS feed for this entire blog. I figure they can always come back and change their subscription for the specific content they want.

Now it’s wait and see. I’ll keep peeking at the Users Online page to see if there are any people on the error page, then point to the URL to see what they were trying to find. If it’s the old RSS feed file, I’ll tweak my .htaccess entry accordingly. So far, I’ve only had to tweak it once…it looks like it might actually be working.

And if you know any other good online resources for .htaccess information, please use the comments link to share their URLs with readers.