photograph by Dani Simmonds

So I went ahead and joined Twitter, and I am currently quite twitterpated with it. I’m always a late adopter of social media and online social network sites, as I am with this 140 character restricted micro-blogging sensation. This is mostly because I don’t always assume the latest cool thing is actually going to be of any use to me. After plenty of waiting through, Twitter seemed like a mature enough idea to join in on the fun. Not that I’m saying Twitter is used for anything mature, but at least it has all grown up as a platform for fun.

(Read more…)

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

FeedBurner, now part of the Google universe, is a service to enhance and manage RSS feeds that is used by many bloggers. Not being comfortable with hosted services myself, I had written a guide to using some WordPress plugins as FeedBurner alternatives which continues to be one of the most visited articles on this site.

Edward de Leau found his way to that article, and being the proud owner of one of the longest running blogs out there, he brought up an interesting question: What if you not only want to use FeedBurner RSS feeds for your blog, but you want to use FeedBurner for all of the feeds your blog/CMS spits out?

(Read more…)

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Blog ads are in some ways the ultimate solution to monetizing your blog. All the big guns use it, and the fact that someone is willing to shell out moolah to specifically display an advertisement on your site lends a certain amount of credibility to your online presence. While making money has never been the main focus of this site, I do like to try out various methods of menetization to offset hosting costs, satisfy my mercenary tendencies, and just for the fun of it.

Trying out direct advertising has always been on the cards, but I’ve never gotten around to it. One of main stumbling blocks with blog ads is the fact that, unlike contextual advertising like AdSense, you need to do all the hard work of finding the advertisers and getting them to pay your asking price for a lucrative spot on your (hopefully) much viewed sidebar — or where ever else you wish to stick those ads. That’s where ad networks often come in, and for those of us wanting to try our hand at banner advertising on our blogs and web sites, PerfomancingAds might have just come to our rescue.

(Read more…)

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

If you think I’m a lazy delinquent blog writer, you have no idea how delinquent I’ve been as a blog administrator. Web site software updates are really an essential activity for the smooth functioning of the site, and for security reasons. Any software, open source content management scripts in particular, are constantly issuing upgrades for both improved functionality and improved security. WordPress, which runs this site, is no different. Until today, however, I hadn’t upgraded my WordPress version in many months.

There were enough good reasons to not upgrade software, even beyond laziness, of course.

(Read more…)

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

A couple of weeks ago I submitted the first article in my series on personality in blogging titled The Face That Launched a Thousand Ships to a few blog carnivals. Since then the post has been included in some carnivals. I’d like to thank the bloggers for the link love and pay them back in kind, so here goes:

• Diana Bajenaru of 134u.com linked to it in the 1st edition of the Resource for Bloggers Carnival.
• Sandra of Free Cash Quest linked to it in the 11th edition of the Free Cash & Making Money Online Carnival.
• Satish Talim of Blog Me Cash linked to it in the 11th edition of the Blog Me Cash Carnival.
• Tommy Smith of Online Income Project linked to it in the November 19, 2007 edition of the Carnival of Online Income.
• Liz Fuller of More Than We Know linked to it in the edition #27 of the Carnival of Small Business Issues.
• Anthony of The Lives and Times… of Anthony McCune linked to it in the the first Surfer’s Paradise HULLABALOO! Carnival.
• Butanido of Butanido-Autoblog linked to it in the November 27, 2007 edition of the Blog to Earn Carnival.
• John W. Furst of E-biz Booster Blog linked to it in the December 03, 2007 edition of the Webmaster Articles Carnival.

Thank you all!

Samir

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Luciano Passuello over at Litemind recently put up the final list of entries in his Lists Group Writing Project. I had thrown in my hat into the ring with my entry about procrastination.

Now it’s voting time, and as I have done before on similar projects, I decided to look though all 66 entries and list those that stood out and those I would like to recommend to my readers:

• Six Savvy Reasons Why You Should Travel Light by Sheila Beal
  I happen to be a whole-hearted believer in travelling light, and Sheila builds a very clean and convincing case for it filled with many practical insights.
• List Of Why Blogs Are A Female Gender by Domtan
  In a single blow, Domtan produces a list that is at once deep, depraved, and utterly hilarious!
• Best 101 Lists by Pearl
  This is a list of 40-something lists of 101 things. One even leads to a list of 1001 lists, and I’m sure many of the others also have links as part of their 101 listing. Pearl deserves a round of applause for just giving me a happy information-overload high as I try to contemplate the geometrical exponential explosion of it all!
• 100 Resources To Improve Your Career, Relationships And Money by Lawrence Cheok
  A monster list of useful links. Good work Lawrence!
• 100 Sites I Seek Inspiration From by Iain Hamp
  Like all grab bag-deals, this list of 100 inspirational websites is bound to have its fair share of duds that just don’t do anything for some of us, but the rest is pure gold and Iain deserves a pat on the back for putting this together.
• 40 ways to make your mind your playground by Fier
  This article is the result of three hours well spent by Fier. It is a listing of fun games and intellectual challenges, all designed to enhance your mind in some way. There’s something here for everyone, everyone who likes using their mental equipment on occasion, that is.
• Ten things I didn’t know until last week by Blaiq
  Blaiq proves once again that you can never know too many pieces of interesting trivia. Educational.
• 8 Habits of Highly Successful Salespeople by Daniel Sitter
  Simple and useful are by buzzwords when judging any content praise-worthy. This post by Daniel is both.
• 21 Punching Tips On Social Media Marketing and Social Media Optimization by Etienne Teo
  A great collection of links on the topic of social media that together form a very comprehensive tome on the subject. Excellent stuff by Etienne, and close to my heart because my old post on taking photos and even my Litemind entry on overcoming procrastination have greatly benefited from social media traffic.
• 10 Ways to Survive the Writers’ Strike by Cynthia Boris
  Cynthia obviously loves her subject matter, and it shows. I love geeks … and I use the word in the most complementary way, of course.
• 15 Tips to Prevent Repetitive Strain Injury and Carpal Tunnel Syndrome by CSS
  A simple and straight-forward post of tips on a truly useful subject, with enough appropriate links for further reading. Perfect.
• 12 Wordpress Editors you can choose by Karthik
  I’m a big fan of comprehensive resource posts. They take a great deal of effort and research to put together, but the end result, if done well, is always worth the trouble. This roundup of editors for WordPress blogs from Karthik is a prime example.

Enjoy these wonderful entries, and I wish all the participanats the best of luck with the competition.

Samir

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Always being up to a million different things is one of the perils of being me. An unfortunate side-effect is that some things tend to be neglected for a while, like this blog. One of the reasons is that I’ve been trying to research the availability and implementation of free online survey tools for WordPress.

A friend of mine wants to setup a complex survey on her WordPress blog. The idea is to ask some questions on a topic, study the reader response, gather some statistics and arrive at some conclusions — your bog standard survey stuff, really. The challenge and boon of doing an online survey is that a more complex system can be setup to get more out of the process. Ideally, the software tools should be able to gather data, compile statistics, provide some immediate feedback to the participant, and possibly interface with a mailing list or auto-response sequence to allow further contact with the reader. With these lofty goals in mind I set off on my own survey of the available tools.

(Read more…)

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!