CIAO9to5

Do blogs contain the community momentum to start a forum about their blog?  A lot of big blogs seem to have a pretty decent following that comment on their post.  Wouldn’t it be helpful to push this discussion to a forum or something?  It doesn’t even have to be a forum about your blog.  Maybe, just about a related topic.

I don’t know.  I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while.  Wondering if it would be benefitial and worth the trouble.  I mean, I know I don’t have enough people coming yet to start it.  But, people like John Chow haven’t even taken the opportunities given to them.  He has tens of thousands of people coming to his blog everyday.  It seems that a forum would create a sense of community that would be harder to break from.  Such as someone who has grown tired of his post but sticks around because of discussions proposed by others at a forum.

Just some food for thought.

Well, it’s been a while since you guys have heard from me, eh?  Probably wondering what happened?  Where did all your great tips about money go?  Well, I’m back to tell you they didn’t go anywhere.  They just took a break.  1) because they’re lazy and 2) because I couldn’t sign up to most ad networks until I was three months old and 3) because of school.

A mesh of those 3 factors are what went into me being gone for so long.  I even thought about shutting the blog down from time to time, but I’m glad I didn’t.  Some kinda crazy stuff happened while I was gone, though.  I made money and I got visited by a decent amount of people.  I’m not going to lie and exaggerate and say I become rich while I was gone, because I didn’t.  I didn’t make much money at all.  However, the amount of people that visit my site has been growing daily for some reason.  It did take a huge drop when I stopped posting, but since then has been growing.  I guess it all goes to show you that I knew what I was talking about ;).  I even have a couple of stats to proove it.

Feb. is currently higher than March.  But, that’s because Feb. got to finish it’s days off at 29 while March is still at 14.  At the rate it’s going, it should overtake Feb. easily.

Other stuff I wanted to mention:

I’ve decided to post once a day.  Only once.  No more.  This way it is easier to be consistent and stuff.

And, one more thing:  when you come back to your blog after a couple of months, you have a crazy amount of spam in the comments and wordpress doesn’t let you mass delete them all.  I checked on google and couldn’t find an addon or anything.  I have a solution to this problem though, if you want to delete everything that is in your comment moderation quickly.

1. go to www.yoursite.com/cpanel
2. find “phpMyAdmin”
3. find the table that holds all of your Wordpress databases.  If you used fantastico to install it, it will be something like wrdp0.
4. click “SQL” at the top.
5. type DELETE FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `comment_approved` = ‘0′
6. hit ok and it should delete everything in your comment moderation page

If you don’t have cpanel or phpmyadmin, post a comment.  Let me know what you have and I’ll see if I know what to do.

Well, that’s all for now.  Hope you’re all excited to see me again

LSU 38 OSU 24

Well, I’ve finished the new design.  There are still a few touch ups and such that I’ll need to work on, but for the most part it is finished.  Sorry that I haven’t been posting much the last couple of days, but I really wanted to get this finished.  I hope you like it.  It is the first thing I’ve ever done in CSS and the first Wordpress theme I’ve ever created.

Also, if you’re not using Firefox, I’m not sure if it’s looking right for you.  I’ve heard that different browsers don’t render CSS code the same.  I assumed that as long as I stay away from absolute divs I should be fine.  However, I only have Firefox installed and can’t see what it looks like on different browsers.  If something is messing up in your browser, let me know.  I will install the browser you use and try to fix the problem.  Any suggestions to the design will also be taken into consideration.

Some thought about CSS, now that I’ve learned it:  I enjoy it and will probably use it for everything else I ever do.  I enjoy coding in tables but I suppose they’re of the past now.  CSS will only get more powerful and more supported as time goes on.  That being said, I’m going to start up a new section of the blog dedicated to tutorials.  I will have some CSS ones.  The tutorials won’t be solely focused on web development languages, but also desktop languages.  I will also start writing some design tutorials.  There will also be some general tutorials such as Wordpress theme development.  You should start seeing a couple of tutorials going up within the next week.

PS:  The $25.00 USD that I put into Google Adwords has still not been used up, hindering me from the ability to post anything about it.  I’d say sorry, but it’s Google’s fault.

New layout up.. I’m still working on it(whole lot of work to be done, sigh). I’ll post more when I finish fixing all the stuff that is wrong with it. If you come across a bug, let me know. Thanks.

The advertising experiment isn’t going quite how I planned.  For one, it took about 2 days to get approved by the ad networks.  I didn’t know that was required.  And two, Google Adwords are expensive, ineffective and unenjoyable.  I could be doing it wrong, though.  I hear JohnChow is a fan of Adwords and he must be doing something right.  I’m hoping that the money I spent on Adwords will be exhausted by tomorrow so that I can write something up on it.  I believe the next thing I will try is Stumble.  I haven’t decided yet.

You heard write, I’m working on a new design for the blog. The blog has been growing and it’s about time it has a custom theme. Who knows, I might even put a couple of drawings with my mouse(not bad, eh?) like I did on this one. Only time will tell. But, while designing I got to thinking. I thought to myself, “I should incorporate some programming and design tips in the blog.” Time will only tell on this also. I haven’t decided if I want to do it or not. But, I enjoy both so I think I would enjoy writing about them. Let me know if you’d enjoy reading about them.

I might cut down on my daily today and tomorrow. By tomorrow the design should be finished, though. I’m industrious. It’d be done sooner, but all the sudden everybody wants to code in CSS. What’s up with that? I was enjoying tables just fine. Well, be that as it may, I hear CSS is more efficient and faster. Sucks for me, guess I’ll have to learn it. I should of kept up with it when it came out instead of waiting so long. But, I didn’t have any sites at the time and HTML was the least of my worries. C++ was where it was at.

Well, you can look forward to a new design.

Oh yeah, I’m sorry about the big mess ups on the current design yesterday, for those of you who saw it. I completely destroyed the entire layout. I didn’t mean to. It’s fixed now, I think. Comment if you find something that’s broke. Yeah, I already know it’s not W3 validated.

Hurray! I’ve finally joined the 6 digit Technorati ranking club. Not exactly sure what this does for me. I guess I can get found easier and stuff. Well, whatever it does, it is a better status that my blog has obtained. Better status is never bad, I assume.

Also, don’t forget that if you’re looking for people to add your blog to their Technorati favorites, I will add you quick.

That brings me to anther point:  I’m always looking for link exchanges.  Just click the link exchange button on the top and you can find my email.

One of my new year’s resolutions was to start posting more quality articles. This includes a lot of revamping of my original quality. I have too many grammatical, spelling errors and I don’t think they “flow” like I’d like them to. That brings me to my current article subject: proof read your post.

If you write all of your articles a day early, like me, then this shouldn’t be a big deal. By writing the articles a day early, you also have a day to make sure they’re well written and make sense. If you come across new information or find out that you’ve been writing wrong information, you have enough time to correct yourself.

When you’re proof reading your articles, there are a few things you should be on the lookout for. First you should take the time to put your article through Microsoft Word(or, preferably, OpenOffice). This will check your article for spell and grammatical errors. If you want, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to write your entire article in your word processor and then export it to WordPress.

The second thing you should check for is the “flow” of your article. Does it sound good or are you jumping all around the page trying to make a point that nobody will ever be able to find? I can’t really tell you how to make your post flow because that is you. I can, however, set a general rule of thumb. You don’t want to make it read like a poem from Emily Dickinson. You want it to read like good poetry(I don’t read poetry, so I can’t help you out with a name).

Another thing to look into is word length. This is not as important as the former two, but it is still important. If you’re only able to come up with a couple of sentences about the topic you’re talking about, you probably shouldn’t be making a post about it. You should, instead, be reading up on it a little more so that you can write a better post later.

Try to make your post more in depth so that your readers will get more out of it. That’s what I’m going to try to do from now on. If you find any errors in my grammar or have any suggestions, post them in the comments.

Writing all word smithy feels weird. Seriously, let me know if this article is better or worse than others that I’ve written.

A lot of times I find myself having to hold back from making too many post on one day.  I don’t want to overwhelm my readers and I never know when I might not be able to think of anything to talk about.  The latter isn’t likely, though.  I read all the time about things in my niche.  I’m always reading about how to drive more traffic to my site.  How to get more incoming links.  What are the best advertising networks?  PPC or CPM?

All of these things are what encompasses my day.  Sounds boring?  Maybe to you, but I enjoy it.  It’s also paying off very well.  I always have something the post and they seem to be things people enjoy reading.

When you’re learning about your niche, make sure that you’re enjoying it.  If you aren’t enjoying what you’re learning about, then it’s all a waste of time.  Eventually you’ll quit the site and go on to do something that you feel is more worthwhile.  This is a big reason why I try to learn so much about making money online.  I enjoy it a lot.  It’s one of my favorite things to do.  The more enjoyable it is for you to learn, the more you’ll do it.  Eventually you’ll start to make a name for yourself as the place to go for your niche.