Written on October 26th, surf zone.at 01:10 pm by Darren Rowse
34 Tips for Finding Readers for Your Blog
One of the first series of posts that I wrote on the topic of blogging was on the topic of Finding Readers for your blog.
I originally wrote it way back in 2003 on another blog and transferred it to enternetusers in 2004. While it’s from my very early days of blogging there’s still some relevant tips in it. Here are the four parts (containing a total of 15 tips) of the series:
For a more updated post on ‘finding readers for your blog’ you might also like to check out this post (with 19 tips - and yes some double up on the previous 15) that I wrote on the topic as part of my Blogging for Beginners Series.
Written on October 26th, surf zone.at 12:10 pm by Darren Rowse
Posts from the Archives that You Might have Missed
Over the next few days V and I are taking a few days break down the coast - a long weekend away of sorts - after what has been a rather full on few months.
So in my absence I’ve decided to run a little series highlighting some posts from my archives that newer readers to the site might not have seen (our house sitter didn’t feel like keeping my blogs going as well as watering our plants for some reason).
These are the posts that I regularly give the links to when readers ask questions via email. They were all written in 2004 (I’ll do another series of posts from 2005 in the future if this works out OK).
Some of them are slightly dated in some aspects - but all of them still contain ‘gems’ that will helpfully help new readers and old reader alike. Please feel free to add your own tips and ideas on each of the posts.
I hope you enjoy this series - I know I’ll be enjoying the chance to take a few days off!
Written on October 26th, surf zone.at 12:10 am by Darren Rowse
Ten Grammar Errors that Could be Haunting Your Blog
Do you ever get the feeling that a blog post is written directly for you?
While I’m not sure this one is written with me in mind - it could well be!
Top Ten Grammar Errors that Haunt Web Pages
- it’s = it is
- Web site (or page) vs. web site/page vs. Website/website (page)
- Periods and commas: do they go inside or outside of quotation marks, or does it depend on the sentence?
- E-mail vs. email, plus what is the plural of e-mail?
- SEOs or SEO’s
- Spelling spot check
- Hyphens
- Additional spot check
- Singular vs. plural (getting close to ad nauseam by now)
- Commas
Written on October 25th, surf zone.at 04:10 pm by Darren Rowse
moo offers 10 Free Skype Calling Cards
moo printing have done it again. Last time they offered 10 free minicards in conjunction with Flickr - this time they’re doing it with Skype.
Get in quick to be part of their 10,000 free 10 pack give away. I just ordered mine (it says ‘Call Me’) on the front and have my details on the back.
I got my flickr free ten pack the other day and they are very cute. I opened the pack in my local cafe and in the two minutes that I was looking at them I had three people come up to me and ask me where I got them from - very cool.
Written on October 25th, surf zone.at 08:10 am by Darren Rowse
Chitika ShopCloud$
Chitika have announced a new product today - ShopCloud$
You can see an example of it below - but basically it is a tag cloud that highlights ‘hot products’ as well as a search box with an AJAX option that suggests products as people add letters into the search field.
When readers click on one of the links in the cloud readers are taken to a shoplinc page (if you have one it’ll take readers to yours, if not it’ll go to Chitika’s own shoplinc) where readers are given information on the product and opportunities to click on CPC ads.
There’s nothing actually in this ad unit that directly generates money but it is an interesting way to get people into your Shoplinc and I can see it working well at the bottom of posts/blogs.
Below is an example of a live ShopCloud (hopefully it will fit here on enternetusers). If it’s not working in your browser (seems to be some issue for some with the way WP displays this) you can see one live in action here.
Written on October 25th, surf zone.at 08:10 am by Darren Rowse
Speedlinking 25 October 2006
- A List Apart has a good tutorial on creating Print friendly versions of your pages
- Loren has decided to use Google’s new Custom Search to power the Blog Search Engine - submit your blogs to it today.
- Brian writes a great post on using Bullet Points in your posts
- Aviva Directory has 21 Tips for a Successful Blog Launch
Written on October 25th, surf zone.at 03:10 am by Darren Rowse
WordPress MU 1.0 Launches
WordPress MU 1.0 has been launched today.
This is a ‘Multi User’ blog platform (it’s what is behind WordPress.com) and is designed to run many blogs on the one install rather than just one - something I know many bloggers will be interested in.
It does sound like it is more complicated to set up than a normal WP install but from what I’ve heard it’s pretty stable and should help a lot of bloggers with multiple blogs keep their blogging in better order.
If you give it a go - let us know how you find it.
Written on October 25th, surf zone.at 12:10 am by Darren Rowse
Introduction to WordPress Resources
I’m sure I’ve seen some good resources on this previously - but has anyone written (or seen anyone else write) a good free and easy to comprehend Introduction to Using WordPress that talks beginners through the basics of things like:
- Posting
- Uploading Photos
- Creating Categories
- Making Drafts
- Changing Timestamps
- Moderating Comments
- etc etc etc
I’m particularly thinking about the very basic stuff that most of us who’ve been using WordPress for even just a few months don’t give a second thought to.
Obviously WordPress have a great support forum with sections in their Codex for beginners (like this one) but I’d also be interested in seeing any other very beginner oriented learning resources that people can point to.
Written on October 24th, surf zone.at 03:10 pm by Darren Rowse
RSS News Reader Reviews
I missed this earlier in the month but CNET put together a review of some of the more popular RSS readers at Make your own headlines.
They looked at Bloglines (rated 7.7), Rojo (rated 6.7), Google Reader (no rating given), FeedDemon 2 (rated 8.0) and Newsagator Inbox 2.6 (rated 7.5).
What RSS/News Reader/s do you use?
found via a Feed is Born
Written on October 24th, surf zone.at 03:10 pm by Darren Rowse
enternetusers Community Search Engine - Submit Your Sites
So Google’s Custom Search Engine service is now live and I thought I’d give it a go to see how it works and have a bit of fun.
I’ve created a enternetusers Search Engine which you as enternetusers readers are welcome to contribute sites to.
There’s a link on that page where you can volunteer to add sites to the search engine (I get to approve you or reject you from what I can tell).
At present it only searches enternetusers.net but you are welcome to submit sites to it also and hopefully by doing so we’ll create a little search engine out of the blogs of the enternetusers wider community (keep the sites submitted family friendly please.
To search the enternetusers Search Engine either go here or enter your search term here.
update: While setting it up is quite easy I have to say that when you allow others to volunteer to participate that it’s rather ‘odd’.
- For starters people can volunteer without giving you any details (name/photo). So you end up approving a nameless faceless person.
- Secondly you don’t get any notification that people have volunteered (I was waiting for a notification only to log in just now and find 20 or so of you had volunteered over the last few hours).
- Thirdly - it seems people can submit any sites they want without your approval once you’ve approved them. To me this seems the wrong way around - if I can’t identify who is who and have to approve people blind then it’d make sense to be able to moderate the sites they submit. I can see this system being abused considerably.
- Lastly they list volunteers horizontally across the home page. When you have 20 volunteers this means you need to scroll horizontally to see them all. I can’t imagine what it’ll look like in the morning when another 50 of you have applied to join in! It all seems very unlike Google in terms of design - ie their homepage is very minimalistic!
Update II: Ok - it’s the next morning and I’ve just approved another 50 or so volunteers. there should be 70+ listed on the home page but they seem to have limited what they show to 20 (or is 20 the limit and all others are not accepted?)
Another reflection - it takes a long time to manually approve 50 volunteers - where’s the ‘approve all volunteers’ button?
Lastly - has anyone submitted any sites? To this point the only sites included are the ones I manually added….
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