CIAO9to5

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.

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.

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.

I spent a lot of time yesterday trying to get my W3 validation to pass. It took a while, but I think it was worth it.

W3 standards are the standards that your code needs to abide by. Yes, there are standards code needs to conform to. No, this isn’t some form of a communistic uprising on the web. The W3 standards basically just help your website function better.

By following these standards the browser has an easier type deciding what language and such your site is in. Sure, it has become easier for browsers to figure out that Chinese isn’t English, but that doesn’t mean we want them to have to spend any extra time deciphering our web page, even if it is for just a second. I don’t know about you, but I’m extremely impatient when it comes to waiting on websites to load and it’s highly unlikely for me to stick around if I can find the same stuff(can be done easily, this is the internet) on a website that has a decent load time.

But, telling browsers what language your site is in isn’t the only thing that W3 standards concern. It does concern how fast the browser can read the code and probably some other stuff. I’m not exactly what all it concerns, to tell the truth. All I know is I want my site to load fast so I’m going to try to fix the errors.

Most of the standards can be learned at the W3 website. However, there are a couple I had to find myself that you bloggers might find helpful.

The MyBlogLog script causes a few errors in W3 validation. All that needs to be done to fix them is to replace the &’s to & amp;.  Don’t include the space between & and amp;.  I used that so it would display correctly.  Example: the URL(not entire thing) in my script used to be

…comm2.php?mblID=2007122617090373&c_width=198&…

But it is now:

…comm2.php?mblID=2007122617090373& amp;c_width=198& amp;…

Don’t keep the space between the & and the amp;.

Another problem some bloggers might run into is embedding a YouTube video. The code to embed a video without validation errors is

<object type=“application/x-shockwave-flash” data=“YOUTUBE VIDEO URL” width=“425″ height=“355″>

<param name=“movie” value=“YOUTUBE VIDEO URL” />

<param name=“FlashVars” value=“playerMode=embedded” /></object>

I might write more on this later if I come across other things, that people use, that don’t validate.

Feel free to ask any questions in the comments. Also, if there is something you’re having trouble making valid, let me know, I’ll see what I can do.

I think one of the most annoying things I come across when looking through a blog is the lack of an archives page. I admit, I did annoy people for about 3 days. But, I stopped that quick. Well, luckily for you bloggers without an archives page, it’s easy to implement one.

iDunzo has a very easy to install plugin that will create an archives page just like mine.

Having an archive page is important because it gives your readers more to read. It makes navigation through all your many content page easy. Because you’re a hard worker. You write 10 blog post a day. People need an easy way to navigate through the depths of your information dome.

A lot of times, I find some of the most interesting blog post to be some of the first written. This could be due to the fact that I, myself, am just starting out and I enjoy seeing what and how others did when they first started. Other may have different reasons to read old post. Regardless of the reason readers need to go back in time, the demand is there. So, get an archive page. It’s cheaper than a time machine.

A big emphasis on how well your blog is doing is by tracking your RSS subscription numbers. Are they high or are they low? Either way, you’ll never have too many. Increasing RSS subscribers is something every blogger is always trying to do and it isn’t as easy as it sounds.

A big mistake that a lot of new bloggers make is not being upfront with their want of RSS subscribers. I see little RSS subscription buttons on blogs, way in some distant corner. Don’t be ashamed of your RSS button. It is your friend. Do something like me. I smacked a big ass banner on the top of every single post page and the main page. If that doesn’t get people’s attention, then I don’t know what will. Don’t be afraid to ask your readers to subscribe, either. I’m sure a lot of them come to your site daily anyways but have never gone through the trouble of subscribing.

As your RSS subscription rates increase, so will your traffic and revenue. That’s what we’re aiming for, right?

Some quick statistics about why I believe this will work(don’t take it personally guys, just needed examples ):

http://www.imbloggingthat.com/ has been around since the genesis of January 2006 and has 26 RSS subscribers. This is due to the fact that Katy has her subscription buttons on the bottom of her page. They’re hard for me to find and probably are hard to find for other readers.

http://theblogscape.com/ has been around since August 2007 and has 16(let me know if this is wrong Ben, I got it off your about page) RSS subscribers. I think that Ben could easily increase his numbers by putting his RSS link at the top of his post instead of at the bottom so that it is more noticeable.

Both of these are good blogs. They are both well written and informative. However, due to some bad placing, they’re not maximizing their amount of RSS subscriptions.

And now for my stats.

I’ve been open for a little over 5 days and already have 21 RSS subscribers and seem to climb everyday. At the moment, I should hit my 100 goal easily. Why? Big ass banner.

As your blog grows and you begin to cover more and more subjects about your niche, there comes a time when you need to update your old post.  I don’t mean to go back rewrite all of your old post.  I mean as you gather more articles about the subject you’re preaching about, go back and create trackback links in your old post to the new articles.

When you first started your blog, you probably had a lot of things that were the first things for you to post about(they had to be at some point).  Well, as you build on these concepts that you talked about in the past, you can go to your old post and link to the new ideas that you’ve formulated.  This helps keep the reader reading.  They’ll get a lot more information out of your post too.  This is a lot easier than your reader finding one thing to read on your blog then having to search for a new one to build off of what they learned.  Keep the reader hooked, keep them on your blog.  They shouldn’t need another blog for information, you should give them all the information they need.

Also, always make sure that the links are trackback links, not regular links.  The trackback links help the readers find your old post, also.  It is probably a good idea to mention that you have already written related topics about the subject and give links to the articles, too.

The main focus here is keeping the reader interested in your blog.  You want to strive to keep them coming back for more.

I’ve been noticing that some beginner bloggers don’t take advantage of the permalink options that Wordpress gives you. Permalinks are the things that make the addresses of your articles look like mine do. They take out all the “.php” and ID numbers and such. These are a must if you are striving to have good optimization for search engines. It makes it easier for spiders to crawl and indexes the pages better. This in turn gives you a higher rank in search engines and more people will see it.

To use permalinks, go to your Wordpress admin, click the options tab and the Permalinks sub-tab. You can customize it any way that you want. I use /%postname%/. I thought that this would be the easiest for spiders to crawl and would provide the most optimization. I could be wrong. I don’t know. This will probably mess something up if I name two post exactly the same. But, that’s just a chance I’m going to have to take. Hopefully I can remember what I named my post.

I’ve listed all the avaliable structure tags below so that you can customize however you want:

• %year% - the year of the post
• %monthnumb% - the month, in number form
• %day% - day of the month, in number form
• %hour% - the hour it was posted
• %minute% - the minute it was posted
• %second% - the second it was posted
• %postname% - the name of the post
• %post_id% - the id of the post
• %category% - the category the post was placed in
• %author% - the person who wrote it

More information can be found at Wordpress’s official site.

I thought about making a list of goals for 2008 and try to complete them, but the more I thought about it, the more that sounded like a bad idea. You see, I have a problem of trying to finish everything I need to have done during the last minute. Well, I’ve decided how to fix this. I’ve decided I’m going to set goals for each month during 2008. This way, I have more last minute deadlines to meet, making me work more(It sounds good in theory). At the beginning of each month when I list my goals, I will also talk about my past month’s goals. Did I achieve them, why didn’t I achieve them, et cetera…

Well, here are the goals I have, for my blog, for January of 2008:

1. Have 100 RSS subscribers
2. Have 100 authority on Technorati
3. Make $100.00 - this will be hard considering many ad networks won’t accept a site so young.
4. Improve my post quality

I’m not sure if these goals are modest or not. I suppose as time goes on, I’ll get a more general idea of what my blog is capable of. But, I didn’t want to set myself up for failure.

Since it is the beginning of the year, I’m going to make a couple of new years resolutions as well:

1. Make all A’s at school
2. Improve my French and Italian
3. Become fluent in C++, PHP and either Python or Java
4. Start up another online business
5. Manage my time better
6. Become more self-disciplined
7. Make a habit of waking up at 6:00 everyday

Well, wish me luck for January and the new year!