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Think Twice Before you post
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Are you a blogger? I am. The popularity of social networking sites, such as Myspace, YouTube, Facebook, etc., is continuing to grow. Blogging allows us to express ourselves in new ways. Oftentimes it may be easier to write what we are feeling for total strangers to read than to verbally express ourselves to someone that is close to us. The end product, people are posting content and pictures that may be embarrassing, inappropriate, upsetting to others, etc. Until recently, the general public was generally unaware of the real consequences of what they write or portray – even if it’s done simply in the spirit of fun or as a joke.
The December 10th CNN article, “Young women drink, party, post” (http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH
So, here is the straight and narrow. Blogging has real consequences. There are legal liabilities. Yes, you can be sued for such acts as releasing confidential or proprietary information (deliberate or not) or defamation of character. You may be admitting to illegal activities on your blog, such as drinking underage, illegal drug use, fraudulent activity, shop-lifting, etc.
Another thing you may not realize is that corporate employers are checking! They are requesting your blogger profile, just as they do background or reference checks. And guess what, they will not hire you if you reveal undesirable activities online – this can be anywhere from inappropriate behavior to not portraying the corporate image they wish to project to simply appearing irresponsible or immature. And even after you are employed… Yes, they can fire you for your blog content! The substitute teacher that was fired not once but twice for his band/video content is only one such case. There have been cases in all walks of life that have resulted in termination of employment or serious fines; and in some countries, individuals have been imprisoned for openly sharing their online views!
The bottom line, think twice before you post. Think about your professional image, not just your personal one. You may think your personal life is not your employers business, but then you would be wrong – according to numerous corporate actions, court cases, convictions, etc.
You’re faking it and we can tell, Bloated RSS Feed numbers
So you are looking at other sites and you notice their RSS Subscribers are in thousands and yours are in the hundreds, and you feel bad. How did that ugly little site get so many RSS subscriptions you say? Well its easy, they faked it. Many people believe readers will only subscribe to blogs they think are popular, thus the fake numbers on really insecure blogs. Of course you too can do this, but if other fellow bloggers have found ways of finding out how many subscriptions you have whats the point? One way is to view the trends in Google Reader, Google will tell you how many people are subscribed via Google Reader which a good number of readers will be using. Another way is to compare the sites Alexa rankings, Technorati link backs, and Pagerank with your own chances are from these stats alone you can tell if they are faking it. Another way as reported by friedbeef is to Sign up for Netvibes and install the SK Feedburner Stats plugin which will show you feedburners numbers.
Get FREE OpenSource Heat Map Stats for your Site
Stats are nice but sometimes you just need to see through your readers eyes. Where are they clicking, what are they drawn to, and what ads my readers will click on. The difference in ad placement or article placement could be the difference between $10 and $100 a day so getting it right the first time can not only save you time but make you money too. Heat maps are the best way to get the full picture but they can be costly, there a couple of big players out there like FuseStats and CrazyEgg but they all charge for their service ($9.95 for 40000 visitors at FuseStats and $9 for 10000 at CrazyEgg just to start). They do have versions that allow you to have free tracking for lower traffic sites but the problem is sites of that traffic level rarely care as much about heat maps until the their traffic gets large enough to start tweaking ad placement.
The good news is there is a great solution and its the free heat map creator ClickHeat, they are even opensource. Just upload their code to your site and follow the simple instructions on screen to install. Ok maybe a little more nudge could be given in the help section. Make sure you are CHMODing the directories it asks you to in the install.
AKA If you get a red X in the setup for any section go to the directory in your trusty FileZilla right click on the directory and enter “777″ into the file attributes section, this should do it. Otherwise its clear sailing, log into your page and just like the high priced guys you get a pretty usable free heat map. You may want to wait a while to check your stats because you want to gather data for about a week to get an accurate picture of your click traffic. The best part is all this is free and its not cutting into your ad revenue to get a better idea on where your visitors are going.
Writing Blog entries around Top Paying Keywords
Writing articles on your blog using certain keywords that are profitable has it’s faults…
Somewhere there is a super hairy Yahoo using guy with super bad credit, a hundred school loans, searching for information on how to get Best Buy Gift cards. He plans to drive there in a crappy lemon car that he will crash and need to sue because it caused his acid reflux to flare up. Bet you can’t wait for these guys to show up to your site?
Add MyBlogLog or Gravatar Avatars to your Blog’s Comments
Looking to add avatars to your site? Why make all of your readers re-upload their avatar to yet another site when you can just use the one they have. MyAvatars is a WordPress plugin that uses your Gravatar or MyBlogLog avatar and puts it next to your post. If you have neither MyBlogLog or Gravatar avatars clicking on the avatar silhouette cause the plugin to open up MyBlogLog so you can register. Adding MyBlogLog or Gravatar avatars to your site is a really nice feature and will have your users asking “how did they know”?
Oh and the Avatar above is NOT me.
htacess file creator with htaccess generator
Have you ever had to create a .htaccess file for your web server? Sometimes even the most seasoned web veteran needs to look up how to create a htaccess file for special occasions.
There are so many different things you can do with a htaccess file, such as limit people from looking at the files in a directory, Stop hotlinking, allow only users of a LAN to access your site, customize error messages, change default page, redirect users, limit bandwidth, require authentication and hundreds more.
There are many cheat sheets on the web for creating a great htaccess file but I was able to find a htaccess generator to create a htaccess file for you.
