"Murphy was an optimist!"
WordPress Convert March 13, 2008 12:14 am
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Cool Sites, Of Interest, Software, Technology, WordPressKari the Herbalist, of The Lifted Lorax Show fame, has moved from iweb to using WordPress! Head over to YurtTrash and check our her story and a very well designed blog.
As a reminder, my standard offer is that if you get yourself some inexpensive hosting, and want to setup a WordPress site, I will happily help you. If your site is personal, you can also find volunteers to help you install from install4free.
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Thinking about hosting your own blog? November 24, 2007 10:01 am
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Blog, Publishing, Software, Technology, WordPressI am a huge advocate of getting your blog away from 3rd party solutions like blogger.com. If you have blogspot in your blog’s address then you need to consider getting some hosting and using a solution like WordPress.org (note: wordpress.com is a 3rd party solution just like blogger.com and while I advocate every wordpress user having an account at wordpress.com for statistics and askimet key, you really need to use the open source software found at http://wordpress.org) WordPress is not the only content management system out there which is great for blogging. You have a ton of choices! If you have trouble setting up a WordPress blog, just contact me and I will help.
One negative in hosting your own blog is that you have to pay a host for server space. That is akin to renting a building to run your business. In the Internet business, like so many businesses, you get what you pay for. Free hosting will likely have problems but it is available. I have personally found 1&1 hosting to be very reliable with great customer service despite its low cost. I highly recommend 1&1!
The postive of paying for hosting is that you get full control over your content. If Blogger’s robots determined that your blog suddenly appeared like a spam blog, they could take you offline instantly and lock you out of your account. You could find yourself unable to access your posts and drafts. If Blogger suddenly went out of business or just quit, you’d be out of luck. Does this happen? Ask anyone that hosted their photos at Yahoo. Yahoo bought Flickr and did away with their photo hosting. Anyone that failed to move their photos by the deadline lost their pictures. All links to those pictures are now 404 pages. We personally came within minutes of failing to get our pictures moved. By paying for hosting, you get backups of your data, control of your site, and the ability to handle exceptions (like 404s) in a way that can benefit your audience rather than drive them away. Plus with your own domain name, you can virally market your blog by using the address in your emails. You can’t send an email from blogmaster@someblogname.blogspot.com but you can send an email from blogmaster@myowndomain.com and everyone who gets that email has the chance to say, "I wonder what myowndomain.com is?" Each email sent becomes a subtle advertisement for your site.
1&1 has a great deal right now! Since Uncle Danny is testing the limits of my webspace and monthly transfer volume, I thought I should review the limits on my account. When I did, I discovered that 1&1 is offering their Business shared hosting at only $5.82 per month! (normally $9.99) This is for the first year only with a 1 year commitment. It’s worth it! Their standard packages are still month-to-month (no contracts; no commitments) if I am not mistaken. They are $3.99, $4.99, $9.99, and $19.99 for shared hosting with increasing benefit respective to price.
Full disclosure: The 1&1 links in this post are associated with an affiliate id. If you purchase hosting from them by using one of those links I do get a payment but the affiliate link does not influence my decision to recommend 1&1. I genuinely like their service! This is also not pay-to-post. I just did this of my own inspiration.
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Anyone want to do a group project? October 5, 2007 10:26 am
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Programming, Software, Technology, WordPressI’ve never done an open source project before. Here’s my proposal. We write a WordPress plugin that helps create a blacklist of known content thieving IPs. When an IP from the blacklist requests the RSS feed or direct link from the WordPress blog, we deliver an anti-theft of content notice instead of the actual content. The plugin will have the ability to deliver a custom message allowing people the personal choice of making the payload as obscene or marketable as they like. I have some thoughts on implementation since the splog delivering the content might have a different IP than the scavenger. For instance, the plug could alter the comment interface to include a check to mark a comment or trackback as potential content theft. The plugin would then have to examine the server logs to try to draw a correlation between when the real content was posted, the IPs that requested the RSS or post, and the time the stolen content was posted. With large samplings to a single database I think we could be very effective at blocking the thieves. Now, what’s the abuse potential here?
After getting this working on WordPress, I think we could extend it to other platforms.
Update: Looks like Owen Winkler (Antileech) has already written this! Kudos! Lorelle gives an overview and also recommends Digital Fingerprint Detecting Content Theft WordPress Plugin.
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WordPress Plugin Updates March 12, 2007 2:02 pm
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Announcements, Blog, Of Interest, Publishing, WordPressFYI for the WordPress peeps: TimeZone has been updated to 2.2 and Subscribe to Comments is now 2.1
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Pretty, Ugly, Layout January 5, 2007 2:02 pm
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Blog, Daily Life, Publishing, WordPressTo the non feed readers, I threw up a new theme. Looks nice in FF. I haven’t checked in IE anything but James has reported that it looks terrible in IE 7. I’ll have to fix it later.
In other news, WordPress 2.0.6 was just released and claims to be the last batch of security fixes before WordPress 2.1.
Update: Regulus2.0 seems to hold fairly well in FF1.5, FF2.x, IE 6, and IE5.5. So far the only big difference I have seen is that the two columns on the right degrade to a single column in the IEs. IE7 still unchecked.
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Plug me in – Enhancing WordPress November 13, 2006 11:57 am
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Blog, Publishing, Technology, WordPressFor anyone interested, these are the plugins I currently use. I’m experimenting with one not listed but it has to prove itself before it gets any credits.
- Spam Karma 2 (absolutely incredible, occasionally some trackback spam gets through but this just makes it all manageable)
- Audio Player (slick way to include audio on the site)
- Live (for the stat addicted, it shows the ip of someone on your blog while they are there, whether or not they are on the site or rss, if they are leaveing a comment etc) (Note: stat addiction can be cured. Don’t judge the success of your blog on "stats")
- Flickr Photo Gallery (adds a tab on the upload box that allows you to easily paste several size pictures from your Flickr account)
- Subscribe to comments (gives your readers the ability to request an email when someone replies to a particular comment thread)
- Time Zone (automates daylight savings time adjustments so that the times on your posts are always correct) (wonder if it will break in 2007)
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Oops! That’s not private October 18, 2006 2:37 pm
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Blog, Daily Life, Publishing, Technology, WordPressNote! If you are going to use the private status on a WordPress blog and you hit "publish" it will NOT be private. That’s dumb. My apologies to Suresh.
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21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic September 1, 2006 10:52 am
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Blog, Of Interest, Publishing, Technology, WordPressSEOmoz Blog has a must read article for bloggers interested in traffic. Let me add that traffic is also something that will come with consistency and time. A lack of comments does not indicate a lack of readership. Many "counters" are inaccurate and do not accommodate readership through news readers (RSS, Atom, etc).
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Testing Flickr Photo Album August 11, 2006 7:36 am
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Daily Life, Evan, Family, Software, Technology, WordPress
I am testing tan tan noodles’ Flickr Photo Album plugin. It should create a gallery at http://blog.siliconholler.com/gallery/ and make adding flickr photos to posts easier.
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Subscribe to comments August 4, 2006 9:18 am
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Daily Life, Technology, WordPressHave you ever posted a comment somewhere and thought, "I need to come back and see the followup comments" only to never return or return too late in the discussion? Comment subscriptions help you stay abreast of dialogs that interest you.
I have added Tempus Fugit’s Subscribe to Comments plugin for WordPress to Reality Me. Now you can subscribe to comments for specific posts that interest you. Enjoy!
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Keep those posts coming! Some of my blogging tricks. June 26, 2006 6:31 pm
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Daily Life, Software, Technology, WordPress
I enjoy blogging. I enjoy both the writing side of blogging as well as the reading and interacting side of blogging. I personally think it is more pleasureable to read a blog that has a steady stream of information rather than bursts of quantity followed by silence. I believe that is one aspect of Instapundit that makes Glen Reynolds (and his rumored ghost writers) stand out. Like dead air on the radio, several days or weeks of no posts can cost your blog readership.
I collect links and tidbits as I work. When I’m researching and see something interesting I open a tab in Firefox and hold the link. My goal, of course, is to write something substantial and correlate to other sources and similar tidbits but rather than Pulitzer I often end up with a couple of sentences saying, "check this out!" I also have friends that instant message or email interesting links which go into the pool of possible publishings. And my browser homepage for Firefox is the Geek Crack site http://popurls.com/ while Internet Explorer retains the news portal iWon.
My trick to steady posting is to devote a bit of time each Sunday to making non-time sensitive posts into the future. This was a feature that Blogger lacked. On blogger, posting in the future made the information immediately available but with a future date. As you can see in the picture, WordPress handles future posts correctly! The screenshot shows my recent posts today but also reveals seven scheduled posts already written which will appear whether or not I’m frantically working, or even away from my computer. The next one arrives in 16 hours then another in 20 hours, three post in 2 days, and finally two posts 4 days from now. These non-time sensitive posts come from the links I’ve collected over the week. The scheduled posts may only be a couple of sentences but if time permits over the week, I can improve the information before their scheduled time (and being what a blog is, I can update them at any time but my style is typically to leave a post alone once it publishes).
By using scheduling features of your blog publishing software, you can have posts appear while you are at the office of a business that has a policy against blogging at work. You can keep your readers satisfied with a steady stream of good writing. By spreading your material out over time, you avoid turning your readers into skimmers because of information overload. Write steady!
Update: Swap Blog also offers bloggers some good advice.
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