Recommended Web Tools Archives

How to maintain your blog when life gets busy

Writing a website or blog part-time is full of hazards. The number one hazard is time. Time to write, time to read, time to think, time to design.

The last few months have been tremendously busy and stressful for me. As I headed into this time of busyness, I thought I was prepared to continue to maintain this site. I failed. A post here, a post there. Nothing consistent.

So what makes the difference?

How can a part-timer maintain a blog even when life is bursting at the seams?

As I reflect on the last few months, I found at least three main ingredients necessary to maintaining this blog.

First, is organization. Are you organized? Do you have a list of things you want to write about? Do you have a list of things you want to read? Do you have a plan for your blog writing? If you attempt to sit down and write everyday for your blog and do it from the top of your head, you will fail. When the busy times come, your efforts to maintain your blog will be severely hampered. Knowing the NEXT topic to write about helps tremendously. Even if you know you cant write every day, at least you can be working on the next post until you have it written. If you are organized, you know what the next post after that one will be, and the next. This makes blogging so much easier!

I was organized. I have all my stuff categorized and planned out for the most part. But I still failed to maintain a good writing rhythm.

Enter commitment. Are you committed to your blog? Seriously. Ask yourself that question. If you are committed, then you will get yourself organized. You can see where I am headed. However, you can over commit. I thought I would be able to maintain at least 5 posts a week. I wasn’t able to do it. I ended up writing nothing because I was paralyzed by my over commitment. I should have lowered my goals to once a week. I could have done that easily.

My big downfall though was not on the commitment front. Tired from work, then stressed by my personal life, I found I lacked one thing: energy. I would sit down to write, gather my notes and thoughts, look at the screen and…nothing. Blah. Zippo. Nada. I found it easier to surf than write when I was tired. Now sometimes there is not much you can do when you find yourself at the end of the day and you have no energy. However, go back to the commitment issue for a moment. What if I had committed to writing just one post a week but I “scheduled” some time to do it? Instead of waiting till the end of the day to write, I could have schedule a lunch break once a week. Lunch is in the middle of the day. I would have energy. I would even be awake! The best way around the energy issue is to schedule your writing time during a part of the day when you HAVE energy. Plus, limiting your goals makes attaining and meeting your scheduled times much easier.

So here is to organizing and committing around a time of day where you have energy…cheers!

When to apologize for an absence away from your blog

I have been away from my blog for several weeks now and before I wrote an “I’m Sorry I’ve Been Away” post, I decided to be more constructive and write about the appropriateness of such posts.

If you have been taken away from writing your blog for ANY reason, consider the following:

1) Are you a part-timer or a full-timer? Full timers have a larger responsibility to their readership. In most cases, full timers probably plan for their absences with fill-in writers. Part-timers should not feel compelled to apologize for an absence. You can if you want to, but I feel it is not necessary. It just matters that you are back writing quality content.

2) Do you have a large readership or a small readership? Blogs with a large readership require extra effort to communicate with their audience. Blogs with a small readership still have a responsibility to their readers. However, this can be simply accomplished by saying “Hey Im Here, did you read about _____? (Fill in more thoughts here)”. Readers appreciate your back. They appreciate it more when you write something useful.

3) Do you need to give a detailed account for your absence? A lot of bloggers do. Frankly, I could care less about the details of their lives. I don’t read their blogs for that reason. Some blogs quickly become less about the topic and more about the soap opera of the writer’s life. Spare me! A simple note indicating general personal reasons should suffice. In the end, it really is not anyone’s business. You need to chose the level at which you want to share.

4) Were you away from your blog because of reasons that are either related to the topic of your blog or could be used as posts on your blog? If you write about technology and spent two weeks in the desert investigating how techology is helping the Masai, that is very relevant. If however, you spent two weeks on the beach playing volleyball and nothing whatsoever occurred that could relate to technology then skip the long posts about oceans waves and evening sunsets.

5) Finally, use your absence to create content. Maybe your absence gave you a renewed mind and a fresh perspective. Use that to your advantage. It is always a good thing to step away from your blog anyway. Use your absence as a reminder that breaks are necessary to success.

Developing a blog versus a standard website

Sitting down and determining the format (or structure) of your website requires a little thought. With the introduction of blogs, developers have multiple options when consider the structure of a website.

There are three basic formats: Website as blog, Website incorporates blog, and website with no blog. I realize these are somewhat general. A problem exists when the word “blog” is mentioned. It can connote multiple meanings in people’s minds. If I mention that I have a blog, some people react by stating “How can you share your personal life on the web like that!”. In their minds, a blog connotes something that is inherently personal, an online diary. In actuality, the connotation is really a usage of format one above (and maybe number two).

What are the fundamental differences between these general formats?

The last is the easiest to explain since it has been around the longest. It is a website as it has existed since the web began. It is multiple web pages organized for accessiblity and usability to communicate content or a message.

A website that incorporates a blog meets the above criteria as well. However, a portion of those pages are organized as a blog. My website falls into this category. Click on “Blog” on the nav menu and your taken to the blog for this website. The blog does not form the structure of the website, rather it is part of that structure. Blogs used in this manner are either used to update individuals on newsworthy items or as a manner of creating ancillary content.

Websites as blogs are structured by the blog itself. Typically the homepage of the site is the main blog page which contains summaries of the most recent posts.

Which format is right for your site?

Most company and product website typicall fall into the “website incorporates blog” category. The blog should be used to keep visitors up to date on the latest news and updates. All other content is more “static” (which is a poor term to use but I can’t find one better) describing the nature and service of the company or product. Typically this content does not exist as part of the blog.

Consider the following three examples. I link to the main page, then to their blog. When looking at the main page look for a link in the nav bar labeled “blog”. In each of these cases, the blog is used to keep people up to date about the content and topic of the website at large.

1. Napping Book / Nap Blog
2. Great News / Great News Blog
3. Virtual Handshake / Virtual Handshake Blog

Smaller information websites don’t need a blog. These typically are not updated on a regularly basis or require the kind of updates that would necessitate a blog. They usually don’t have a need to connect with a particular readership. It could be argued that some of the below sites could benefit from a blog. However, it could be counter-argued that an email newsletter would better suit there needs to connect with an audience.

1. Playsets
2. Get rid of snakes
3. Rain Chains

Sites which comment regularly on newsworthy events or a niche topic are best structured as a pure blog. The blog, in these cases, gets the front and center attention. The blog itself appears on the homepage of the website. Typically when we mention the term “blog” we think of these kinds of sites. You are probably familiar with many, here are three examples.

1. SEO Book
2. Winds of Change
3. Small Dogs

It is hard to put into words something that is often a nuance. However, by looking at the examples provided you can get a picture of the general ways websites are differentiated. The point of this post is to help beginners consider the basic kinds of structure before they begin creating their own site.

Performancing for Firefox Blog Editor

Tired of logging into your blog website every time you want to make a post?

Doesn’t it suck to flip back and forth between the site your writing about and your blog editor?

With Performancing for Firefox (soon to be ScribeFire) you can have a built-in blog editor directly into your Firefox web browser.

Here is a screenshot. It is easier to show you then to describe it with words.

The top half of my browser window displays the ScribeFire website.  I have PFF open and it is displayed in the bottom half of the screen. You can see that I have begun writing this post.

Setting up PFF for you blog is easy.  Settings included the type of blog (WordPress, MT, etc.), the URL for your blog’s API and your username and password.  Once setup, PFF will display all available categories from your blog as well as a history of your prior posts.  The editor window is similar to most blogging platforms. You have the choice of either WYSIWYG or source code mode. All the typical formatting buttons are included as well.

Publishing to you blog occurs at the push of a button. You can set publishing options to either publish live or publish as draft.

It really is as simple as it sounds.

Why use PFF?

First, is efficiency. Because of the nature of my topic, I am always looking at a browser window when I write. I either have to flip back and forth between a website and my blog admin screen or arrange my text editor in such a way so that I can see browser window alongside it. With PFF, I can easily view both the browser and the editor.

Second, easier to write spur of the moment posts. A lot of times I put off writing something off the cuff because I don’t want to login to my site. Open PFF with a click and you can be writing the very next second. Even if you are not comfortable posting live from PFF you can always post to draft and login later to do more editing.

The Future of PFF

While PFF is supposed to become ScribeFire, I do have to wonder what will eventually happen. Performancing was recently bought by SplashMedia and that purchase only includes the assets of the Performancing website and community as well as Performancing Metrics. I do hope that PFF (ScribeFire) continues to have a lifeline.

Password Protect your website with Sentry Login

I had, in the past, tinkered with the notion of creating membership based websites. While there are plenty of CMS’ that could accomplish this, I have often wondered if there was a way to convert an established website into a password protected one without having to re-engineer the whole thing.

Well it looks like there is a way: Sentry Login. Sentry Login turns websites (or portions thereof) into member’s only password protected websites.

I have not yet tried out their service, I currently don’t have a need to but I always wondered what I would do if I decided to have member’s only kind of content. Re-engineering this website would be daunting. The prospect of dropping in some code sounds great.

Why would you want password protected content?

- some sites offer exclusive content to paying members
- maybe the websites content is free, but the tools and software need a password into order to enter and use.
- you want to create a special portion of your website for members to interact
- you may want to create some sort of space for private consulting or forum or the like

Sentry Login is intriguing enough to try. I would appreciate any comments from those who have tried it.

Are blogs archived history?

In a profile of 15 people who use social media, Time magazine highlighted the work of a military blogger. Captain Lee Kelley writes about the Iraq war. The quote below proves interesting:

Unlike generations of soldiers before them, they’re writing for history. “If they are archived, blogs will give the best account of this war,” Kelley says. “No one knows what’s going on better than the soldiers on the front lines.”

Are blogs the new kind of history keeping?

I remember White House historians complaining during the Clinton administration that even though we had entered an age of technological competence, we also lost a part of history. Clinton’s administration was the first in which his “papers” where documented electronically. This posed a problem especially in the area of email. With the emergence of email, things like memos and documents were electronically filed and in some cases lost/deleted/etc. There was no paper trail of events historians could later gather and organize.

Do blogs offer a solution to this problem?

Can they be an archive of history?

First there is the problem of archiving, the big “IF” in Captain Kelley’s quote. Individual users may make backups of their blogs, but that doesn’t mean they are part of a communal repository for historians to shift through. Blogs that track historical events may very well be lost. Sites crash. Backup data is lost or corrupted. Bloggers don’t necessarily need to share their own archives if they don’t want to. Indeed, history is still trying to cope with the new electronic nature of historical data.

Second , most blogs are also highly personal. Opinion pieces mainly. Does this multitude of opinion serve the cause of the historian or does it make their job that much worse since they could potentially have to wade through larger mounds of data?

I am curious, too, about news sites and the archiving of their news articles. Several times over the last month I have come across a link to an article that was three months or more old. Following the link I came to the new’s sites “Sorry, could not find this page” page. Dynamic linking, as done by major news websites, is often temporary. Are the pages associated with these temporary links stored in some version somewhere else?

It seems to me that Digital Libraries are in order. A digital library would be an accessible and duplicated collection of our digital media. In the current “book based” library system, history is indeed backuped/replicated/copied at the thousands of libraries across the nation. If one library burns down, history is still preserved because chances are the books and documents held in that library exist in several other libraries. I know this doesn’t always hold true. Some books, especially rare books or local collections are not replicated. Do digital libraries exist such as the ones that house our books?

Is the web itself a digital library?

No. Not in and of itself. Not every website is preserved in the same manner or accessible to all.

Maybe I am off base here and there is a systematic approach to gathering and organizing the digital data of our day (and please don’t say “Google”!).

Review Me Review: Sponsored Posts on all topics

Do you have a website/product that you wish to submit to the critique of others in order to create name recognition/traction/buzz?

Use Review Me to find people willing to review and critique your resource.

Do you often blog about products or services and critique their value and benefit?

Use Review Me to find websites willing to pay you for a review.

With ReviewMe, sponsored posts come front and center to the blogging world.

Now, I know what your thinking. Paid reviews?? Seems like someone is going to heavily weigh the tables in favor of deep pocket advertisers.

Heres the thing: Bloggers are paid for a review, they are not paid to say good things. They are not paid to say bad things. Review Me has set things up in such a way that two key elements must happen:

1. Advertisers must be willing to submit their site/product to the scrutiny and critique of others. They are buying critique and exposure not necessarily goodwill.
2. Bloggers MUST disclose the paid nature of the review. They can be honest. They can be direct. They can tear something apart if they want. They are being paid for their opinion. Its that simple.

When I first read about Review Me, I was excited about the possibilities. My site is all about reviews and recommendations. It seemed like a natural fit for me. Of course I had concerns. Would I lose credibility? Would people not listen to a paid review?

Here are my thoughts:

• credibility is maintained by disclosure
• credibility is maintained by being fair, honest and direct. That means my reviews should be like they have in the past. I gear my reviews towards beginners. I generally lean to the positive edge anyway. I tend not to review items which I simply don’t like or won’t serve my readers. I don’t waste my time on items that aren’t worth a mention.
• credibility is maintained by writing quality reviews.
• people will listen if all the above are in place

Questions advertisers should ask themselves before using Review Me:

• Do you feel your website/resource/product will meet the quality standards of the Review Me blogging audience?
• Are you willing to accept ALL kinds of buzz, good and bad?
• Are you willing to pay for that buzz, whether good or bad?

Remember, advertisers are not even buying a link. A reviewer may decide the product isn’t worthy of a link. A reviewer may even decide to link to something with the anchor text “dont buy this crappy item”. This means advertisers must be willing to submit their products to the purifying fire of opinion and review. Why pay for something when there is no control over the PR? Quality products should have nothing to fear. Whereas products that straddle the fence of usefulness should think twice about promoting themselves with Review Me. Quality products will get quality links.

Questions bloggers should ask themselves before using Review Me:

• Will you be willing to disclose the paid nature of the review? Disclosure is a big issue and I am currently writing a more complete disclosure statement that discusses not only paid reviews, but other advertising and affiliate relationships that exist on my site.
• Are you willing to write and have an opinion? Are you willing to write, have an opinion AND get paid for it?
• Are you willing to write review posts of value? Personally, I think Review Me should increase the word limit from the current 200 words to 500 words. This would enforce better quality reviews.

The key for Review Me will be attracting advertisers. Over the next weeks and months it will be interesting to see if companies are willing to pay for this kind of exposure. I am writing this review a few hours after Review Me has gone live. It is way too early to tell if even bloggers are signing up. I will try to post as those kinds of numbers can be ascertained.

Other concerns:

Review Me has a 48 hr time limit once a blogger accepts a review. It is not clear whether this time limit will be the standard for all reviews. This time limit might not work in a lot of cases. I recently reviewed a web statistics program. It took about six weeks (if not more) from the time I signed up for their free trial to the point where the review was written. Maybe it is just me, but I don’t feel comfortable writing about something I haven’t had time to use/play with/try to break.

I do wonder whether advertisers will take the risk of review. Text link ads are one thing. Advertisers can control quite a bit in that transaction (not just the publisher, BUT ALSO the anchor text of the link). However, with a review, a lot is out of their control.

While I do hope Review Me will end up generating quality content not only for advertisers but for readers, I wonder whether the concept of fully disclosed paid reviews will catch on. It seems to me it could see a similar fate that the concept of “newsmastering” has. The latter faced ethical (and legal) concerns over the monetization of other people’s RSS feeds. Will ethical concerns over the paid review seal Review Me’s fate? (even IF the nature of the review is fully disclosed?)

Disclosure: This is a paid review. What does that mean? Simply, I received money to write this post. I was not paid to be positive nor negative. I wrote this review because I wanted too, not because I had too.

UPDATE 2010: Been a few years since I wrote a paid review. I think I only wrote five. I no longer write paid reviews.

What does it mean to be pinged

Here are a few definitions of ping, pinged, pinging as they relate to the world of computers and blogging:

First, a general definition:

A protocol that sends a message to another computer and waits for acknowledgment, often used to check if another computer on a network is reachable.

ping. Dictionary.com. The American Heritage? Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=ping (accessed: September 06, 2006).

Ping is also a reference to a computer program which accomplishes the above:

A program written in 1983 by Mike Muuss (who also wrote TTCP) used to test reachability of destinations by sending them one, or repeated, ICMP echo requests and waiting for replies. Since ping works at the IP level its server-side is often implemented entirely within the operating system kernel and is thus the lowest level test of whether a remote host is alive. Ping will often respond even when higher level, TCP-based services cannot. The term is also used as a verb: “Ping host X to see if it is up.”

ping. Dictionary.com. The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, Denis Howe. http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=ping (accessed: September 06, 2006).

In the blogging world, a ping is a message sent from the blogging application to other services to let them know the blog has been updated. For example, my blog can be set up to “ping” Technorati every time I post a new entry. The blogging application, in my case, WordPress, sends a message to Technorati letting them know that I’ve posted something new. Technorati updates their own records about my blog and lists the post.

Typically a service is used to accomplish pinging. One common service is called Ping-O-Matic. They define their service as the following:

a service to update different search engines that your blog has updated

A trackback is sort of like a ping but it involves blog to blog communication rather than blog to search engine communication. So if someone says they have been pinged, in most cases, they really mean they have been trackbacked. All that means is that some other blog has referenced your blog on their site. However, this reference is more than just a link. A true trackback will show up in the comments of the post that was trackbacked.

For more information visit this article about blogging which includes sections on
pinging and trackbacks.

[tags]ping, pinging, trackbacks[/tags]

Blogging and Balance

There has been a lot said about the frequency of posting on a blog. Personally, I take an in-between approach. Posting 15 times a day would overwhelm not only myself, but readers. The blogs that I subscribe to that post very frequently are often on the brink of becoming unsubscribed because it is simply too much information. On the other end of the spectrum are those that post very infrequently. Don’t take months inbetween posts. People need to know you’re still alive.

MarketingProfs offers an excellent post on blog frequency that will provide some balance to the discussion. Free yourself from the tyranny of having to blog frequently.

Spam Surge

Usually when I look at the number of spam comments that Akismet has caught on my site, it hovers around 80ish. Since yesterday, the number has grown to 550 or so. Whoa! There seems to be some effort going on that is targeting wordpress blogs. Lorelle posted that she not only has seen it on her site, but links to the wordpress forums where others are saying similar things.

The 60 million dollar question: How many spam comments in this latest surge has Akismet missed?

Only one.

[tags]spam, akismet, wordpress[/tags]

Gray Wolf’s Blog News Reporter Series

Interested in blogging about the news? (News being defined as about anything)

Gray Wolf wrote a three part series last fall discussing the essentials of Blog News Reporting.

The series titles and topics breakdown as follows:

• Tools
  • Blog Software
  • Web Browser
  • Bookmarklets
  • News
  • Posting
  • Fair Use
  • Frequency
• Approaches
  • Goals
    • Evangelist
    • Expert
    • Commercial
    • Personal
  • Subject
  • Voice
  • Character
• Promotion
  • Syndication
  • Directories
  • Del.icio.us
  • Networking
  • Podcasts
  • Conferences
  • Interviews
  • Live Blogging
  • Press Releases

Each topic is one paragraph. So everything is short and sweet. Its a great little series to understand the ins and outs of blogging.

[tags]blogs, blogging, beginners, news, gray wolf[/tags]

Akismet Review

Akismet is a comment spam blocker for WordPress based blogs. With the release of WordPress 2.0, the Akismet plugin comes standard with the install.

I began using Akismet when I upgraded this site to WordPress 2.0 earlier this year. I give it a thumbs up!

Akismet works a little differently than other comment spam blockers. Instead of the spam algorithm being based inside code that resides on the host website, all spam detection technology is housed on the Akismet web server. Whenever a comment is left on a website, the Akismet plugin sends the comment back to the home web server. Akismet then performs its detection at that point. Akismet returns the comments back to the website either as a legitimate comment or lists it as spam. Users never need to check the spam. A spam comment is kept around for 15 days just in case. After 15 days, the spam is deleted.

The first weeks after implementing Akismet I kept a keen eye on the comments. In the end, it had only let one spam comment through and there were no legitimate comments caught as spam. Now I hardly pay attention to it, I just let it do its thing.

The advantage of providing spam detection offsite on another server is the collective “learning” that the spam detection software can amass. Instead of learning from just one site what is spam and what isnt, Akismet can learn from thousands of users.

I do recommended users watch Akismet in the first few weeks after installation. Watch and learn what comments it catches and which it lets through. If it makes a mistake, correct it and help it learn.

Requirements for using Akismet:

-WordPress based blog (maybe this is enough for some of you to make the switch!)
-WordPress.com API Key (simply sign up for an account at WordPress.com)
-Akismet plugin installed in the plugin directory of the WordPress installation

Blog Directories – A List to Get Started

I am in the process of developing my own top RSS and Blog Resources. So in the mean time, here is a list of blog directories to get you started. Some of these sites are worth it, some are not. Some sites aren’t on the list, some are miscategorized. Jump in and begin submitting your blog to the directories. At the least, its a link. At the most, a trickle of traffic. Do not expect a large amount of traffic from blog directories. They are simply a way to begin to get a blog out there and “announced.”

Structured Blogging Review