Life, the Universe and the Internet

My ramblings about making a living on the internet and life in general

Archive for the ‘Blogging’


Text Link Ads, Making A Little Extra From Your Blog

Published March 18th, 2008 in Blogging, Making Money | No Comments »

A while back I signed up to a service for my blog called, Text Link Ads. It’s basically a service that tries to sell text adverts on your blog posts on your behalf. After signing up and getting approved you get a plugin (wordpress in my case) to upload to your blog, they then spider all your pages and see if they can match them up to advertisers.

I had the service running for a while and almost forgot about it, but just recently in the last few months they’ve started to sell a lot more ads for me. Now they do take a huge 50% commission on any advert they sell, but I think for now at least they are earning me more than if I was to try and hunt advertisers myself.

The amount they charge advertisers per link depends on the popularity of your blog, so if you make your blog bigger and better you can earn more off it. Right now it’s a nice little extra income for me, so I am happy to keep going with it and if your interested why not check it out yourself.

New Blog Template And Some Behind The Scenes Changes

Published August 7th, 2007 in Website Promotion, Blogging | 6 Comments »

I’ve made some significant blog changes, some of which are obviously apparent and some which are more behind the scenes changes but very important for anyone who might comment or link here. So here is a list of the changes I’ve implemented:

  1. Template change: This one is of course blatantly obvious to anyone who’s been here before but I have changed to a completely new template. I hope you agree with me that this one is better, apart from looking better the programming code excerpts are now much easier to read and/or copy out.
  2. Dofollow plugin: It was only recently that I found out that by default wordpress does a “nofollow” on comments. So anyone who linked to their site in the comment would not have got the pr for it. So I’ve enabled this plugin and now all links on this site are set to pass pr onto the linking sites.
  3. Top Commentors Plugin: I’ve added a plugin that not only shows the top ten commenter’s on every page of the blog, but also the last five comments that are posted. If your interested in the plug, the authors site is here. Remember guys those links now also pass on pr.

I hope you like the new changes as much as I do, feel free to comment away.

So I Finally Have a Page Rank

Published May 14th, 2007 in Website Promotion, Blogging | 5 Comments »

I noticed just a few days ago that Google has finally given this blog a page rank. I had guessed a page rank update was coming as they tend to be roughly quarterly. So I know have a page rank of 4, which for a first ranking I am fairly happy with. Now I know most people discount page rank as not being very important any more, but at least is seems better to say that I now have a PR 4 site instead of saying my site is unranked.

So now that I have a page rank I feel a little more qualified to ask, if anyone reading has a blog based on similar subjects to mine and would like to exchange links either in the blogroll or some other way, just let me know.

Keeping up to date with Blogs

Published May 10th, 2007 in Blogging | 2 Comments »

If you’re anything like me then you probably follow a lot of blogs, I certainly have a whole set of blogs that I keep up with on a regular basis. So I thought it might make an interesting discussion to find out how people keep up with the blogs that they follow.

Personally I have tried many different ways of keeping tracks of blog feeds, lots of different online services and also windows applications. However I have now settled on Googles iGoogle home page to track them. It has a nice clear interface that allows me to track up to around 12 blogs easily on one tab, (1280 x 1024 monitor) and I can use as many tabs as I need. It’s nice and quick to load and I can use it anywhere once I log in.

It also becomes very easy to subscribe to a new blog if you also have the google toolbar, because you get a nice subscribe button on the toolbar that will automatically add it to your homepage. Below is a sample of my current google homepage.

iGoogle Home Page

So how do you track your blogs, feel free to post a comment and let me know.

My god! It’s full of stars

Published March 15th, 2007 in General, Blogging | No Comments »

Do you like my new starfield header for the blog, I designed it myself in photoshop and I’m quite proud of it. I did take some basic pointers from a few tutorials but I think it came out really well. I wish I had more time to research photoshop more, it’s an incredible tool and even a total novice like me can come up with some good images with a little time and knowledge.

Wordpress, Windows and Permalinks

Published February 16th, 2007 in Programming, Blogging | No Comments »

I’m still fine tuning my brand new shiny blog and one thing I decided to try and do was use permalinks. For those of you that my not be familiar with the term I was just going to describe it here but I realized that a much better description is available from wikipedia. So here is an excerpt.

A permalink is a URL that points to a specific blogging entry even after the entry has passed from the front page into the blog archives. Because a permalink remains unchanged indefinitely, its use avoids link rot. Most modern weblogging and content-syndication software systems, including Wordpress, Movable Type, LiveJournal, RapidWeaver, Pivot and Blogger, support such links. Other types of websites use permalinks, too, but the term itself is most common within the blogosphere. Permalink is a portmanteau word made from permanent link and is often simply stated so as to be human-readable.

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