Interesting Blogger Posts For 19th September 2008

Posted by Steve Kinsey on September 19, 2008

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I’m afraid I’ve rather neglected this blog this week. I’ve been so busy with other projects one of which was tweaking the design here, that I’ve only made one post since my last roundup. However since I really want to make this a regular Friday feature I will continue even though it may look a little odd having two so close. But hey I am a little odd so maybe it works well.

Blogging

Superbloggingtips.com ran a post that I found very interesting, regarding how often one should post on your blog. I see many people saying that you should post something every day. However this post argues that posting less can actually increase your membership and traffic. I have to say I find some sense in this article, I personally would much rather see a thoughtful and useful post every few days or even once a week than see a blogger struggle to upload something every day. In fact I see some blogs that update several times a day and I find them almost impossible to keep up with.

I saw this post over at Copyblogger, a kind of how to guide on building a good blog post. The 7 step guide contains some very solid advice if you are struggling with writing your blog posts and I think writing for websites in general.

For windows developers I wanted to mention a post over at blogfodder.co.uk about BlogEngine.Net. This software is a windows based alternative to wordpress for those like me who develop in ASP.Net. I’ve just started to use this software on one of my sites and so far I am very pleased with it. Lee has put together a community site to discuss this software so if your interested in using this platform I recommend you visit blogengineforum.net.

SEO

There was an article over at SEOBook titled Black Hole SEO discussing my favourite SEO rant subject the nofollow mess and link hording. The article discusses some of the major sites that are switching more and more to setting all outgoing links to use “nofollow” so that they are not passing any link love onto anyone outside their own walls, however they are still happy to accept links in. I think this quote sums up perfectly why this practice has to stop eventually:

If this problem becomes too widespread, Google will move to counter it. If Google’s results aren’t sufficiently diversified, then their index will look stale. If you search for a site, and get third party information about that site, rather than the site itself, then this will annoy users. Once confidence is lost in the search results, then users will start to migrate to Google’s competitors.

Incidentally I signed up with SEOBook myself about two months ago and I cannot recommend this site enough. It is a private members site and forum, that contains a wealth of information on making your site(s) as successful as possible as well as a forum full or real SEO gurus. It’s not cheap at $100 a month membership, but for me it has been worth every penny so far. Take a look at the free parts of SEOBook and see what you think.

Affiliate Marketing

This is a little bit related to the SEO subject above but there was a post at Lammo.net about using outbound links to increase your affiliate conversions. This is a well balanced article and definitely worth a read.

And Finally

I like to finish a little off topic, so first I saw this post over at Quality Nonsense about the ultimate travelling office. It’s a highly customized RV, a great accessory for the home worker on the move (yes a contradiction I know).

Lastly I saw this over at themovieblog.com, this video supposedly shows the car KITT from the new version of Knight Rider being stolen while in a publicity event in Toronto, Canada. The whole thing looked iffy to me and I read later that it was indeed a publicity stunt. It’s amusing though and a very good example of effective viral video.

As always all comments welcome.

Some Minor Alterations To The Blog Layout

Posted by Steve Kinsey on September 18, 2008

If you’ve been here before you will no doubt see that I have been working on the blog layout a little. I was not entirely happy with some aspects of the layout, in particular the sidebar. So I’ve tweaked it some and added another column to the sidebar and I think it flows much better and is easier to navigate, plus it gives me another two 125×125 banner spots.

I say tweak but in actual fact this is a whole new theme, I took some guidance form another theme I downloaded to see the best way to organise the sidebar and I built this one up again from scratch. Now that this is the second version of this theme I think I am beginning to understand how wordpress themes work much more, in particle with the CSS stylesheets.

So I hope you like the minor alterations here, I think I have tracked down all bugs. If you do see anything that isn’t working correctly feel free to comment here or send me feedback with the contact me option from the top menu.

Interesting Blogger Posts For 12th September 2008

Posted by Steve Kinsey on September 12, 2008

I thought I’d try and start posting a weekly roundup of some of the more interesting posts I’ve found around the blogosphere, most of these will be useful resources but I may also include the odd off topic posts that I found interesting or just made me laugh.

First lets start with this posts over at Quality Nonsense, a great example of a real world company that puts the customer experience over everything else and how this philosophy should be used by far more web sites. Next we have an interesting and honest post over at Smarter Wealth asking the question which I think is often on the lips of many starting online, Is Making Money Online A Scam?

There was a controversial post over at Rae Hoffman’s Sugarrae blog that really highlights the current mess of the whole nofollow debate. As I’ve mentioned here before I have deliberately taken the step here to allow link following on my comments as I find the whole nofollow situation ridiculous.

In the world of affiliate marketing, Kieron at here.org.uk posted about a report by E-Consultancy on the worrying downturn in the UK market. If you’re an affiliate marketer in the UK, it’s also worth adding Affiliate Launch to your RSS list, it’s a new blog that lists the new programs coming up on all major UK networks.

Finally lets go off topic and talk about movies. Themovieblog.com posted news that Ghostbusters 3 has been confirmed by Harold Ramis. The news that it could be co-produced by Judd Apatow and include the original cast in a kind of mentor role, gives me high hopes for this if it ever comes. Just to finish off, over at DigitalLard I posted a link to a youtube video for the First Day On Transformers 2 Set.

I hope you enjoyed this post, if you would like to see it as a regular feature, please feel free to comment and let me know.

Building A New Newsletter List Followup

Posted by Steve Kinsey on September 3, 2008

Following up my recent article on starting building a new newsletter list using Aweber I thought I would mention where I am with it now. First of all I have to say that I love the Aweber system of managing newsletters, it’s definitely the best I have used to date. There are so many tools to help you automate your newsletter delivery.

So anyway the first thing I did after getting my account set up was to set up a few follow up messages. With the Aweber system you can automate emails that go out to the subscribers at set intervals. So for example you can have an email go straight out as people sign up and then you might have a follow up that goes out a few days later and you can set as many follow ups as you like.

The one feature I really liked and implemented straight away was the blog broadcast feature. Would this cool feature can do is monitor your RSS feed and when the amount of new items in your feed reaches a number that you set, it will trigger an email to all your subscribers containing the content of your feedback. This is so great for an update type newsletter because you can just set it up and forget about it.

So now I had my newsletter set up and ready to go, webform on my website but alas no subscribers yet. Thankfully for some time I had been including an opt-in box on my competitions pages to say “Tick Here, To Receive Our Site Newsletter”. So I was able to put together all those that have ticked in a csv file and import then into Aweber.

They don’t get added automatically, they get sent an email asking them to confirm that they wish to subscribe. So you get a nice double opt-in and you know that hopefully they are not going to start blacklisting you as a spammer.

So that is where I am now, I have several hundreds subscribers and a fairly automatic newsletter. Next step is to keep pushing hard to get that subscriber list up and up.

I really can’t recommend Aweber enough, if you’re thinking about a newsletter or wanting to move yours give them a try.

Three New DVD Competitions

Posted by Steve Kinsey on September 2, 2008

We’ve got three new DVD competitions running over at DigitalLard, so rather than make three posts, I’ll just mention them all here in this post. The competitions are for copies of:

• The Two Sides of the Bed - the hilarious follow-up to Spain’s number one box office smash The Other Side Of The Bed, is a slick and fast-paced romantic sex farce that throws sexual conventions into total chaos!
• Vexille - Hailed during its UK theatrical release as a work of ‘stunning futuristic animation’ by the Guardian Guide and by Metro (London) as a ‘superior, elegantly nuanced sci-fi anime’, VEXILLE comes to DVD in September as a special two-disc release in a limited edition Steel Book case and packed with exclusive fan-pleasing extra features that include an audio commentary by Jonathan Clements, an extended interview with director Fumihiko Sori on the making of the film, voice cast and music recording footage, interviews with Sori filmed at the Locarno Film Festival, a look at how 3D animation is made and at Sori’s work as an animation creator, plus bonus footage from Sori’s forthcoming live action feature, ‘Ichi’.
• Cashback - The first feature length film by Oscar® nominee Sean Ellis, deals with the unconventional life of art student, Ben Willis (Sean Biggerstaff), who is thrown into a world of insomnia after being jilted by his long term girlfriend, Suzy (Michelle Ryan).

Good luck anyone who enters.

Searching For Windows Based Blog Software

Posted by Steve Kinsey on September 1, 2008

I’ve been looking for some decent blog software to be used on a windows server with an ASP.Net application. I love wordpress and use it whenever I can, but it’s not so great on a windows server, it works but it’s difficult to implement things like SEO friendly URL’s.

So with a particular site of mine I needed to have a blog that could be linked to the main site which is an ASP.Net 2.0 application and share the same design elements such as header, navigation etc. So not only did it need to have all the features you require in a modern blog software but it needed to be easy to create a custom theme for too.

After much searching I believe I have found the ideal software and best of all, just like wordpress it is free. The software in question is called BlogEngine.Net, you can download it as either a ready to run site or as the source code project. I chose the application version as I really wanted to keep things simple and didn’t want to get into the complexities of compiling or altering any source code.

You can see my implementation of the blog here at my caravan rental site. Once I’d read through the instructions it was pretty straightforward to set up, but you do need to carefully check the user privileges on some of the folders. The only problem I found was that I couldn’t run the software as a subfolder of the main site, I needed to set it up as a separate web with a subdomain. So for example http://www.caravans4let.co.uk/blog was what I ideally wanted but I ended up having to use http://blog.caravans4let.co.uk.

That minor annoyance aside, it was pretty painless to set up my own theme, I was basically able to use my site.master page and CSS file from the main site with just some minor tweaking and after that I was pretty much done.

I’ve looked at quite a lot of .Net blog software including some rather expensive paid versions and I have to say BlogEngine.Net is the best and easiest to set up I have seen so far. If your looking for a windows based blog solution I would highly recommend it.

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