This is to announce the addition of the MyBlogLog widget to the sidebar. Woohoo! If you are a member of the MyBlogLog blog community site, your username and avatar should show up under the recent readers list in the sidebar when you visit this blog.

For those of you who don’t know, MyBlogLog is a blog community site like Technorati but with some additional tracking functions. There is also a very strong community building component, including the ability to see a public list of recent visitors to the blog as you can see at the bottom of the sidebar, and also a sort of private message board per author where other MyBlogLog members can leave comments and shoutouts. Check out the MyBlogLog page for Samir Bharadwaj dot Com.

I actually signed up for the MyBlogLog service quite some time ago, but I never got around to implementing the widget on the site. Since I was a member, I did show up on other people’s blogs when I visited, which was a plus. During this silent time, one person has already taken the trouble and done me the honour of joining the MyBlogLog community for this blog. Jon Anderson of SucessPart2.com has not only been kind enough to include many of my posts in various editions of his wonderful blog carnivals in the past, but now he has also set the ball rolling on my MyBlogLog community. For all that I am thankful, and for his efforts he wins a FREE toaster! … well, a “virtual” free toaster actually, in the form of the new and extremely prestigious Free Toaster Award! *applause*

Congratulations Jon, on winning the innaugural Free Toaster Award! Feel free to save it and do with it what you will — use it as a bumper sticker, a snazzy ID tag, a sexy tattoo, or whatever suits your fancy. If you want a print a large wall to wall poster of it you might need a better version, which I will be glad to supply.

All you other wonderful people out there, you know you want the Free Toaster Award, don’t you? Maybe I will make this a semi regular feature and give these out to some deserveing people once in a while. Meanwhile, if you enjoy reading this blog please join my MyBlogLog community and leave a comment or two on my author page. It will be good to know who my readers are. As far as you keeping track of me, you have already subscribed to my full feed RSS haven’t you?

Samir

A couple of days ago Vishal woke up in the morning to find that one of our computers wouldn’t start up. In that monochrome text graphics limbo world of PC BIOS screens, it was deciphered that one of our hard drives was missing. Well, not physically missing, because it couldn’t disconnect itself and walk off for a stroll now could it? But it wasn’t listed in the hardware detection screen that shows up when a computer does its initial starting and beeping (POST). That meant trouble!

Drive Errors

My first reaction in situations like this (at least in my head) is to run around screaming while throwing my arms into the air in utter despair and panic. I have a lot of por… err documents and work files stored on all our drives and losing one can be quite disastrous if I haven’t backed-up for a while (which like all human beings is most of the time). So after doing a silent mental panic run, to which I added in the elements of being naked while in a class room taking an important exam just for maximum effect, I settled down and decided to get on with the rest of my morning business and come back to the computer issue in a while.

“When in doubt, use a screwdriver”, is my motto when it comes to anything mechanical or electrical that dares to malfunction on my beat. I opened up the old tower and stared into the abyss. Being a very small box very far from a window, it usually gets very dark in there, but even in that darkness I realised after a bit of wire shifting and cable moving that I was looking into a disaster zone. I quickly forgot about the malfunctioning hard drive because I was mesmerised by the tenuous tangles and enough accumulated dust to fill a small desert. When I tried to blow away a little dust and was greeted by a storm of fine fluff that cover my head, I knew this was going to be a long day.
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From the moment that first BBS user looked at his glowing login screen and decided to type gandalf14 as his name, there has been a bit of an illicit relationship between personal identity and the online world. Suddenly there was a whole new existence where who you really were didn’t matter, and you could be whoever you wanted to be. This need for a sometimes false anonymity grew to a point where people considered this to be the norm rather than the aberration. Fast forward to today, when the blog has taken on the mantle once owned by the BBS as the de facto top medium for digital discourse, and we can see that the trend has not only continued but flourished. There are tens of millions of mostly anonymous blogs read by hundreds of millions of mostly anonymous readers. In this faceless mass the online entities that win the greatest following are the ones with the most personality. So ask yourself this: Is my secret identity costing me my readership?

For almost all of you reading this, the answer will be a very definite yes. Unless your blog deals with the highest order of secret or personal information, which for whatever reason you think you must still share with the world, there is absolutely no reason to push your online anonymity to the point where your online output is faceless, headless, and characterless. To blog well and get the kind of reader response we all hope for in our serious blogging endeavours, it is essential to infuse a large dose of your own personality into the content and the presentation of the blog. This personality and identity will get you the three kinds of reader response, which are must-haves for any successful blog:
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Ever since blogging became the exciting new “serious” thing to do on the internet, it has turned into a bit of a rat race. Granted that blogging is not exactly like the 9 to 5 carousel. After all, you blog because you want to blog, because you’re passionate about something, because all your friends are doing it, or simply because you want to be famous! Sounds nothing like employment to me, but in the world of blogs the rat race I’m talking about is the pressure to post often. If you have ever been serious about your blog you have definitely felt this pressure looming. There is an important question you must ask yourself when you experience this familiar pain: Is my posting frequency dictated by the publish or perish hysteria?

Most of us who read up all the material we can on blogging and hope to take our blogs to new heights of hotness are very much in the grasp of this phenomenon. It is natural considering everything we’ve been told, because the common wisdom is that a higher posting frequency automatically means more readership and a more popular blog. That makes some sense, in a brute-force sort of way, but it is not necessarily the only answer. In the long run blogging is about consistency. So before you decide to take on posting at least ten articles a day to ensure that your popularity is in the bag, here are some things to keep in mind:
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Here’s an interesting project. Blog Action Day aims to form a mass movement of bloggers who will blog on the same topic on a particular day of the year. The day in question is the 15th of October, and this year the chosen topic is the environment.

It should be interesting to see what kind of response this gets. There are already hundreds of blogs signed up to this event, including this one, and there are probably thousands of others who will join the list as the big day looms closer. What I’m looking forward to seeing is how the various blogs adapt the topic to their own particular niche and style of writing.

There is also the issue that the topic in question is simply the environment. While we all automatically assume that this will prompt people to write wonderful odes to nature and how human beings are the evil destroyers of this paradise, there is a large popuation who either see things differently or simply doesn’t care. Are we going to see plenty of articles about how all this stuff about human being destroying the biosphere is pure fiction? That is not something I agree with, but it is a popular spin on the topic. The resulting drama on the blogosphere should be entertaining in the least, and hopefully it will “raise awareness” … although I’m beginning to wonder if anyone who is in the mainstream enough to be on the internet has any excuse to not be “aware” of the very existence of environmental issues. But what do I know, the depth of people’s ignorance is a constant surprise to me.

Blog Action Day is a great idea and while hundreds of such initiatives have been done before, it’s nice to see someone taking a very high profile, marketing savvy approach to it. If you have your own blog I encourage you to sign up, or at least keep track of your favourite participating blogs and how they cover this. The Action Day Blog has a nice article on Why Bloggers Will Change the World, and How You Can Help that makes some good points, in case you are looking for inspiration. Meanwhile, please subscribe to my full RSS feed to remain updated about what I do whith this on Samir Bharadwaj dot Com. I haven’t really decided what my great October 15th posting is going to be, but I hope to make it a good one.

Samir

Today I loaded a 50 Kg drum of glue into a Porsche 911. Yes, you read right, I mean a real live Porsche 911 sports car, not an old beat up Toyota with a bumper sticker that says “My other car is a Porsche”. And no, I’m not giving up on design and writing and going into the manual labour market any time soon, but this is an interesting story anyway.

My Dad works in the field of industrial chemicals, and being the overly conscientious worker that he is, it is not unheard of for us to sometimes take a detour during his off hours to make some small but urgent delivery to one of his clients. It’s usually a bag or a few bottles of some of the more harmless stuff he deals in. This evening we set out on the mission to deliver a drum of food grade glue to a guy whose factory would come to a stand still without it. We arranged to meet him somewhere convenient and set off. I’m used to seeing some guy in a pickup truck or a normal saloon car take the delivery at these meetings, but this time was different. The person we were meeting was new in town and unfamiliar with the place, so a few quick exchanges on the phone later we were told to look for the Porsche in the parking lot. That piece of information didn’t really sink in until we pulled over next to a metallic silver Porsche 911 and the person at the wheel waved out to attract our attention.

Now, most of you are thinking, “Wow! A Porsche!”, but that was not the thing that had my attention. One of the sad side effects of living in Dubai is that you see too many super cars too often and seeing a Porsche is not really an occasion for surprise any more, at least when you drive around as much as we do. No, my concern was more in the area of, “How in blazes do you fit a drum into that car?”. We stopped, said hello to the young guy at the wheel and then things got more interesting: the drum we were carrying was not the smallish plastic 25 Kg version I was accustomed to seeing during these deliveries, instead it was a double sized 50 Kg model!
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How many of you have dreamed of making money off your blog and retiring to a nice medium-sized tropical island? Don’t be shy we are all friends here … There, that’s more like it. The thought has obviously crossed many minds. That is the double edged sword of the success of any new field of endeavour. Once a particular kind of work, or hobby, or activity grows in popularity to a certain critical mass, it is in the natural progression of things for someone to think up a commercial angle to it. Blogging is no different. Once one person succeeds at raking in some dough everyone else obviously thinks it is a piece of cake and then tries to follow suit. I say tries because more often than not the followers are only after the money and they copy exactly what the forerunners in the field did, thinking it will guarantee them riches. So for those of us who want to sign up for that tropical island at the earliest using our blogging earnings, there would seem to be only two choices — Either start a blog on making money online, or one on the latest geeky gadgets. If you just shouted, yeah!, at the mention of those two topics or you were nodding in agreement with that last sentence, you need to ask yourself one simple question: Do I actually like what I blog about?

For a large number of starry-eyed internet moghul wannabes out there, the unfortunate answer will be: no. Why? Simple logic really, if so-and-so big shot web person who is World Famous on Digg made money by writing about pink lace thongs with pictures of TV superstars on them, that is exactly what you should write about on your blog to make money. Right? … Wrong! Because more often than not, the person who made it big wrote on that topic because they actually liked pink lace thongs with pictures of TV superstars on them. Heck, they probably even have a collection! What do you have? Nothing, except for dreams of grandeur which are soon to be dashed if you continue trying to be successful at blogging in a purely copy-cat spirit.

To have any measure of success in the blog world you really need to like what you are blogging about. After all, the majority of blogging is in the writing and a common piece of writing advice given to one and all is to “write what you know”. To blog well and to blog your way to success, you need to blog what you know. Better yet, blog what you like. The reasons for this are numerous and they all involve you blogging better when you like what you’re saying. But more specifically, blogging better comes down to three essential elements that will go your way when you are a fan of the subject of your blog:
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Who doesn’t like a pretty face? A show of hands please … anyone? … I didn’t think so. We all love a pretty face and most of us are willing to do just about anything for one. Helen, from the Greek myth of Troy, is said to have been one of the most beautiful women to walk the Earth, and people were willing to go to war for her. She was the face that launched a thousand ships. Now quickly snap back into our current age and ask yourself the honest answer to this question: Would the face of my blog inspire that kind of dedication?

Unfortunately, for the majority of the blogs out there, the answer would be a resounding NO! Why should you care? Because, in spite of everything you were told as a kid, the fact remains that we all judge books by their covers. I go a step further and take pride in the fact that I can spot a good book by its cover with a fair amount of accuracy. Appearances and “what lies beneath” are often more in-sync than the political-correctness-brigade would like to admit. People’s faces are not just window dressing, they are a big part of who they are, and the same goes for your blog. You cannot completely separate content from presentation in human beings, books, or blogs because we are very visual animals, and visual animals read a lot into what they see. What they read is often right.

To understand what you can do to make your blog theme a stunner, you first need to understand what the theme of a blog actually does for the reader. The reason I’ve been rambling on about human faces so far is because it’s something we can all relate to, and because many of the same reasons faces are important also hold true for the layout of your blog:
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It is that time of the month again. Three months on in this personal site experiment, and it has been a bit of an adventurous month, even if a slower one on the traffic front.

Traffic

Traffic levels reduced even further this month. There were no sudden spikes or surges, but the steady trickle continued for my ever popular article on Taking Professionl Photographs. Other articles got some action too, most of which are mentioned in the Best of SamirBharadawaj.com list in the sidebar. Check them out.

Over all, my traffic reduced by half from last month’s average, but that statistic is very skewed by the fact that the first week of June had my higest traffic figures by many magnitudes, as compared to the weeks that followed. It has really been more of a gradual decline rather than a dramatic crash. Also, part of the traffic reduction might have to do with the server troubles I had during the month of July, which I will talk about shortly.

Blog Carnivals

Due to my increased submission activity over the past month, it was simply not feasible to wait for an entire month to list blog carnival inclusions for articles on this site. So, on two different occasions in July, I posted lists of links to the various carnivals. Those lists can be found here:
Carnivale! July 18, 2007
Carnivale! July 31, 2007

CPU Load Adventures

Towards the middle of the month I got a dreaded email from tech support at my web host Lunarpages that my account was contributing too much to the CPU load on my server. But as was my previous experiences with the support staff, they were extremely helpful and methodical about the issue. They had seamlessly moved my sites to a temporary holding server while I figured out what I could do to reduce the load and bring my account back into compliance with the usage limits.

I host a few sites at my account but all the others are really in the test phase and act more as holding spots for now. I was pretty sure my other sites had no chance of causing the computational load since they got almost no traffic. That meant that this very site, and specifically some element of my WordPress blog install was causing the trouble. The problem was that even back then I knew I was getting the least traffic I had ever gotten and so this was the most unlikely time for the core of WordPress to be leeching on server resources.

I set out to figure out what had triggered the Intel-spasm, with the ever available CPU usage reports and help from the Lunarpages team. My server logs showed no spike in activity, but I knew something had to have caused the sudden change so I dug deeper. Finally, I went to Google’s Webmaster Tools and there discovered that the GoogleBot had come visiting on the day in question. But, I knew that that in itself was not a remarkable occurance. The GoogleBot visited often without setting off any alarm bells, so what was so distressing about this particular occasion?

Ultimately I narrowed it down to the fact that I had the Global Translator Plugin running on my site. The plugin allows a site to be automatically translated into other languages, along with the ability for search engines to crawl that translated content. Like others I too realised the need to enable caching in the plugin to prevent access errors very early on. This meant that the translation was stored on the server rather than carried out dynamically with every request. It made things a bit faster and less intensive for the translation sites, but what about my server? It would all be fine if regular browsers hit the translated pages erratically and the translated pages were cached over a period of time, but when a search bot sequentially looks through hundreds of translated pages which haven’t been cached, suddenly the server has to deal with the mammoth task of reading, fetching and creating cached versions of hundreds of pages at one go. To the best of my knowledge and guess work, that is exactly what happend on the fateful day, and it shot my server CPU usage through the roof setting off all the right warning lights over at Lunarpages.

I removed the translation plugin, and in a few days the Lunarpages support staff reinstated my account into the original server because CPU usage had reduced to acceptable levels. It is a shame really, because almost all of my site including the cumulative mass of thousands of translated pages across many languages had been indexed by Google over the two preceding months. I was even getting a trickle of traffic through foreign language searches which would have increased with time. Now I have been forced to forego that and negatively affect my search engine status due to the large chunk of missing pages.

I might try this or a similar translation plugin again in the future because I still like the idea, but I won’t tackle that untill I have some way to prevent something like this from happening again. In the meanwhile, after the fact I also loaded WP-Cache to run more universal caching on the WordPress site just to be extra safe.

Over all no harm done, other than the search engine set backs that I have yet to fully fathom. I certainly learnt a few lessons in web hosting, and my thanks to the good people of the Lunarpages tech team for all their help along the way.

ToDo

Traffic, traffic, and traffic. The most important asset of any site, and I am in need of plenty of it. That is what I need to work on, along with plenty of new content. I really have given up on any artificial rules about daily posting frequency, because at the end of the day that is simply not the way I work, and forcing myself to stick to that kind of schedule will just make me miserable. Instead I plan on sticking to coming up with truly useful and well-put-together content. That will satisfy me more than anything else and hopefully the readership will follow with a little marketing. Plenty of plans brewing on that front.

Part of the long term plan of growing an interested and engaged audience with good content is to increase RSS feed subscribers. One step I took towards that this month was to convert this site over to a full text RSS feed so that more people might sign up for the updates. If you haven’t done so yet, please subscribe to my full feed RSS to keep track of all the great stuff coming here soon.

Meanwhile, on a more frivolous note, John Chow mentioned a passing glitch over at Technorati that (at least at the time of this writing) was displaying every blog as ranked number 1, and so also included in the Top 100. Woohoo! The requisite screenshot was taken for posterity, ego boosting, and all those chicks I plan on impressing with my little high-resolution photographic glossy-paper print out of my new found faux Technorati success.

Watch out ladies. My Technorati rank is bigger than yours.