Jun 4th, 2007 | Blog Building | 8 Comments
The “retreat” in Montreal is over, now I am back in the Prairies. During all the mess of packing, travelling, unpacking and getting settled at home I didn’t check the contact mail. Today, to my greatest surprize, I discovered several email messages sent through the contact form on this site, all asking for WordPress support.
I need to clarify this about WordPress related support: quite often I am posting to the WordPress Support Forums, helping users for free. Sometimes I post a lot, other times, if busy with other projects, maybe less. All the free support I can offer to WordPress users is done through the forum. (The rare exceptions are when I ask somebody in the forum to contact me privately with their login info to take a look at their blog or site admin panel. Sensitive information cannot be posted in a public forum and, if a problem seems to be too difficult to be solved by “remote”, sometimes I offer help outside of the forums…)
However, this is not a WordPress support blog. While I appreciate your trust for contacting me for help, please be aware of the existence of my web design site specialized in WordPress - Prairie Design. However, if you contact me for support on that site, that’s not free: I am for hire. You are welcome to send me a message from there and see if we can agree. On this site, however, I’d prefer to be contacted with issues regarding the topic - my upcoming WordPress book.
Thanks for the understanding.
P.S. I’ll try to reply to the messages sent till today, but I will ignore any support related email in the future.
Tags: Share This
May 24th, 2007 | Blog Building | 3 Comments
I have read earlier about the “i-follow” idea and planned to implement it on my blogs. Unfortunately, other things came up and I completely forgot about it. If you wonder what the I follow movement might be, here is a short history: With the increasing number of spam comments almost all of the blogging tools (including WordPress) include a code snippet in their files that tells search engines not to follow the links to the commenters sites. It seemed a good idea to punish the spammers seeking some SE “juice” - but in the same time it was disadvantageousfor legitimate commenters. If they take the time to stop at your blog and post a comment… why should they be “punished” by cutting the backlink to their own blog/site?
The other day I have visited my fellow moderator, HandySolo’s blog and read about his implementation of the dofollow plugin. Actually, I went to read that post because I noticed the “You comment - I follow” logo in the sidebar. You can see a similar one on the right under ETCETERA. It is from Randa Clay’s blog.
Later I will install the plugin on my other blogs, too.
About Contact. Unfortunately, I put a wrong email address in the contact form when I set it up in a hurry. Which means, if you tried to send me a message before yesterday, that never arrived. Please, re-send your message, the form now works (has been tested). If yoou have any questions or suggestions regarding the book, and you don’t want to comment here, don’t hesitate to contact me personally through the form.
And now back to keyboard…
Tags: dofollow plugins wordpressShare This
May 14th, 2007 | Blog Building | No Comments
Usually, I keep the number of plugins on all my blogs to a minimum. I don’t feel I have to use a plugin just because it is “cool”, however, I am very grateful for those plugins that provide exactly the features I often need in different setups.
In this blog presently I use the following plugins:
For the mandatory spam protection Akismet that comes with the WP download and Bad Behavior by Michael Hampton.
The Contact page is made with the help of the secure mailform by Dagon Design.
As you could notice, Alex King’s Share This plugin is also activated.
For the tags I am using the popular and very versatile Ultimate Tag Warrior by Christine Davis.
As for the stats I decided to give the new wordpress.com plugin a try. Till now it was available only for the wordpress.com users but recently it was made into a plugin for the self-hosted WP blogs, too. (I am following the blog’s visitors with the Analytics tool as well.)
Tags: plugins wordpressShare This
May 8th, 2007 | Blog Building | 3 Comments
This blog is on a brand new domain having installed WordPress a day ago. And while the main purpose of it is to document the progress of the book titled WordPress 101, it can also serve as a demonstration how to build a blogging site from scratch.
After reading so many clever blog posts about making money with blogging, I’ll use ads and other ways to monetize this blog. Of course, I’ll post the results (or failures), so you can learn about those, too.
For the moment I have some Adsense ads and my affiliate referral link to Text-Ad-Links. On my other blogs TLA ads worked quite well. I didn’t have much luck with the Google Adsense, maybe this blog will change that. I’ll keep you updated.
Later on I’ll add some existing affiliate links as well, I just have to find their right placement
Although I have designed many blog themes, for this particular blog I decided not to waste time with the design (my OCPD would keep me back from writing!) and went with a ready-made theme that was advertised as ready for monetization. I removed all the references to the original site for the simple reason that in the downloaded package there was a huge number of hardcoded ads and referral links. I think for novice users it is quite hard to find and remove them, so all those ads would make money for the theme designer. I consider this an evil practice - so my response is equally evil: removed every reference to them.
Tags: adsense blog building monetize theme TLAShare This
