Apr 6, 2008
I always like it when I’m using software and I see a little humor mixed in with honesty. A great example of this would be a small line of text I just saw in the new 2.5 version of Wordpress regarding having to manually update your site for daylight savings time.
I like this type of approach from developers of software. It shows that they recognize this issue, they explain what to expect from the current version of the software, and they humble themselves in the eyes of the users all in one shot. It even got me to chuckle a bit.
Good stuff.
Oct 10, 2007
I pretty much am just gonna call myself out here and say that I need to pay more attention to this site. I’m not saying it’s a bad site. I like to add content to it, it will mature. I’m not there yet. I’m realizing that few things are gonna probably need to be attended to.
- There’s no about page. I’m not sure if I just turned it off or deleted the content. But that’s a problem. I’m sure there’s gotta be at least a couple readers of this site that have dug around trying to find more info about the site, beyond the somewhat daily articles.
- Categories change every couple of weeks. I’m still not liking the category structure, but I don’t want to change it anymore, and I feel what is there is fine. I also dealt with a bad early site setup decision by including category names in the perma-links, which was a bad idea.
- Easier way to browse the archives. I need to make it easier to browse posts by title once you hit the archive section of the site.
Either way, I’m already working on improvements. Web sites are interesting digital beasts. I’m posting this here so that some might learn from my mistakes and save themselves some trouble.
Aug 16, 2007
If you blog at all, you write headlines for your articles. Have you put much thought into how your word your articles? The headline can be the most important part of your blog post. You need to spend time on your headlines and put thought into your headlines.
Over at RSS Pieces there is a great article about how to go about writing different types of headlines. A short quip from the article:
No matter how good your content is, if you don’t’ get people to read it, all that information that you are providing is lost to your audience.
If you haven’t put much thought into writing smart headlines, you are wasting a lot of the potential of your articles and posts. You gotta sell your information, and the best way to start selling your thoughts and info is with a well though out headline that grabs the reader by the shoulders and shakes them, saying “You want to read this, you must read this, you need to know this”. And then conversely the reader agrees, grabs their sore shoulder, and trudges on into your article.
Aug 14, 2007
If you are maintaining a blog, you probably like or at least want traffic. There’s a lots of smart ways to boost your traffic.
Here’s a great list of a bunch of seemingly random ideas to get more people to read your blog. I’d recommend checking it out for sure.
You’ll see some things that make you think “Gee, didn’t this guy just contradict himself?”. But, that is kinda the point.
Often there are many ways to interpret whether or not a particular idea is better than it’s opposite. Yes, I actually tried to say that, I’m pretty sure it makes sense but it’s late at night and I’m out of it in general.
The main thing seems to be that when trying to drive more traffic to your blog it’s like throwing spaghetti at a wall. Some of the stuff you throw will stick. A bunch might not, but it’ll leave a mark. And a bunch of stuff will end up on the floor. Some ideas will stick and start bringing in some traffic. Get some links to your site, write good content, and become part of the web community.
Maybe a certain link to another site end up getting a nice link back to your site. Suddenly you have lots of traffic flowing through your web gates. Awesome. That might be all that it takes to jump start your blog, a couple good quality links back to your site.
Keep digging for tips about how to drive more traffic to your blog and you’ll have enough blog-traffic-driving spaghetti to piss off your roommates and stain all the carpets and walls.
Aug 9, 2007
I’ve been searching around the internet for good WordPress plug-ins to try out, hoping that some might end up making my life easier and the user of WordPress just that much more enjoyable.
When you start to dig around for plugins, you start to realize that there are A LOT of plugins. There are there is a large sea of wordpress plugins, but then there are the ones that are so useful that many people include them on their list of top/essential/must-have plugins.
There’s lots of essential WordPress plugin lists
What I’ve ended up finding, in my search for some good plugins, is a bunch of good lists of essential plug-ins for WordPress.
If you are looking for the most popular and most respected WordPress plug-ins out there, as claimed by their users, here’s a great place to start.
And now, the list of web pages containing lists of essential WordPress plug-ins:
That list should give you a good idea of what other WordPress users are using for their plugins.
I’m not going to go into too much about what plugins are listed. I’m going to make you dig through those links to learn more for yourself. Click away. Then start installing and trying.
Maybe you’ve already got some of these, but hopefully you find a gem or two that really benefit your needs.
I’m not going to post an essential WordPress plugins list on this site
At first I also considered putting together my own list of essential wordpress plugins, but I opted out, as there are already many good ones.
I opted more for compiling some of those lists, so enjoy the list of lists.
