blogging

Like many bloggers, I have been using SiteMeter’s free counter service for quite awhile now.  A couple months ago they had an outage, which brought down thousands of blogs.  Now they have “improved” their services and people aren’t very happy about it:

5XMom.com - “Sitemeter has changed its format and it sucks! Whatever happened to those stats? Plus it takes a million years to get the information.”

TechNudge - “As you can see if you click the image, it’s turned into a steaming pile of useless crap.”

AftNews - “I have also paid accounts at sitemeter. Probably i’ll cancel them.  Even statcounter is better than new sitemeter.”

I’m TOTALLY DONE with SiteMeter.  Once a site starts acting assinine like eBay, I’m done.  Another reason to leave them is I don’t trust them.  Does anyone ever stop to think about what they are doing with all of that search data?  Hmm…. I’m sure it isn’t helping you, that’s for sure.

Goodbye Sitemeter.  For those interested, here’s a link providing some alternatives to SiteMeter.

I wonder what would happen if you wrote a blog post discussing various other blog posts you have seen throughout the day?  Would you get trackbacks and a nice boost in traffic?  This is assuming your post is somewhat relevant to what you’re talking about, right?  I dunno, but let’s see what happens.

One post that first comes to mind is a post on Abundance Highway where Suzie wonders if it is a good or bad idea to have a blog with an abundance of different topics.  Hmm… this blog is sort of like that and I’ve wondered this myself.  Problogger Darren Rowse left a massive comment on her blog and basically says that you will get plenty of search traffic, but may irritate your readers.  Personally, the search traffic is all I care about… for now… :)  Darren’s comment should make you realize that if you write a detailed and relevant comment on another blog it makes other readers happy and will probably bring you a bunch of new subscribers at the same time.

Google stock was up today, but don’t be fooled.  Countless adsense publishers are reporting drastic declines in revenue of at least 50% or more.  I predict they may have enough to show a good first quarter, but their second quarter report will not be so good.  I think they will be laying off people this summer and have a stock price of around $200 or less.  How low do you think it will go?  Meanwhile, Microsoft and Yahoo are still in talks.  Whoopdee doo.  The Internet sure is getting lame.

Yes, gas prices are still high.  Good thing I didn’t buy an SUV last year! 

Well, not much else going on and this is getting pretty boring.  Time to get to some “real blogging”… I’ll post again here in a few months.  haha

For the last few months, one of my blogs has been the target of a splog attack, or whatever you want to call it when an idiot steals every blog post you make. Of course, his splog (combination of spam and blog) has no contact information and if you look it up in the whois, the contact info is anonymous.

Today I came up with an idea to hopefully make this idiot scrape someone else’s RSS feed instead of mine. Basically, I make a degrading post that will make his splog look really ridiculous. An example is above. The splog in question is using a WordPress plugin called Auto-Blogster that checks RSS feeds of other blogs every so often with cron and automatically posts those posts to his blog.

I don’t want to keep the crazy post on my blog very long, so what I do is post the degrading article on my blog and click on the script located in the plugin folders on the splog site. If you have the same problem, look on their site… it should be somewhere like: theirsplog.com/wp-content/plugins/auto-blogster

Look for a script in that folder called: ajax_auto_blogster.php and click it.

This should then post the embarrassing post to their splog - and now you can delete it from your real blog. Good times, eh? I don’t expect splogs to go away any time soon. Email spam is still around. Comment spam is here to stay. There will probably be more and more splog problems like this - so be sure to bookmark this article in case it happens to you! If anyone out there knows a better way to combat splogs (with WordPress), please leave a comment!

UPDATE!  Check out this article… this technique seems to work.

Well, I finished the first version of My Awesome Blog and it is ready to be filled with posts. Video plugin working… check. Cheesy masthead made… check. I’ve got a system going to make it easier to start new WordPress blogs - I’ve saved the default template files to a folder as well as the plugins I typically use - upload those after installation and I’m pretty much good to go except for a few minor changes.

I loathe making mastheads, but a custom one looks much better than the default one that comes with the install. One of these days, I’ll try using a different theme, but it’s tough to change when you have a good system that works!

I do have an idea in mind I want to try soon. I’m thinking of making a search result page similar to what they are doing on Mahalo. Seems like if you made a REALLY good serp, you could get some decent traffic - and Mahalo has done half of the work already. So, you look there to see what the popular search terms are and then proceed to research and build your own competing serp and in the long run make more money than the $10 to $15 one time fee they pay you. Hmm… I could make money off of adsense, text link ads and more? It’s a thought. I will be posting one soon, but tonight, I’m too tired. To be continued….

Ahh yes, finally I have decided to start my first real personal blog. A blog where I can say anything I want, whenever I want without worrying or thinking about traffic, money, whether it is interesting or not… etc. A blog fer me. I’ve been trying to figure out what my personal blog would be called and out of nowhere I thought… “my awesome blog”. I went to GoDaddy, checked whois and it was available! I then registered the domain and then MyAwesomeBlog.com was born. By the way, I saved $2 off my domain registration by using the Godaddy coupon code “diggnation”.

It will be interesting to see what becomes of this blog. Will it be accidentally successful like some of the blogs out there and make me a six figure income? Or will it be a loser blog? Who knows? I don’t really care as I plan to use it to basically get stuff off my chest, vent, post cool links, images and videos and experiment with SEO a bit.

Well, time to do some annoying household chores and other stuff… hopefully I can come back later and spiff up my awesome blog and add another post or two.