Dec5
What do you do when things get busy and your creative energies are being focused elsewhere? You cut back on things that aren’t as important or as interesting. I cut back on my online reading and playing with new start-ups – and, well here we are 1 year to the day and no posts. Maybe you are in the same boat as me? You like having a site and like that you’ve written some things that people still find useful, and have a few things you’d still like to write about?
What can you do to breathe a little life back into your site?
- Set the bar LOW: Once a month is a crappy goal when you were cranking out 5 posts a week, but better than once a year!
- Set a specific day: Put it on your calender, think about your post during your commute, type some notes on your break at work, have lunch at somewhere with wi-fi and crank out that post.
- Get a buddy: Know someone else that is still posting away or even that isn’t and wants to get back to it? Have lunch with them and talk about posting or even write together
- Reward yourself: Pick something small as a reward for yourself when you finish a post
I’m sure that there are a number of other things that people have done to get the ball rolling again and if anyone is still out there that has succeeded I’d love to hear about it.
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Feb9
Are you getting human spam on your blog? I am.
If you are running Disqus right now and have some pages with page rank there is a good chance that you are getting hit with human spam from site owners trying to accomplish some bargain basement SEO requiring the bare minimum of work. This isn’t limited to Disqus, but since Disqus continues to leave NOFOLLOW off of the link to the user’s website in their username they have become a specific target.
It’s pretty trivial to mark these guys as spam and the worst of them are easy to recognize because they’ll move from page to page leaving the same worthless comment, but there are a few that have an interesting perspective on what they are doing and it’s worth thinking about before you start blowing away all the comments that they leave.
In comments left on my blog and on a thread I started about this problem on Disqus’s forums I’ve seen an attitude of entitlement from the Spammers that put the smallest amount of effort to customize their spam comment to the content of the page. Their logic (?) is that comments add value to a site and by leaving a comment that is somewhat on target they “earn” the link and the SEO value that it instills.
There is some truth to this perspective, comments mean a lot to a blogger. They add new content to a page and keep it active and updating something that Google likes to see, they can also provide new search terms and enhance the keyword usage on the page, helping it rise in the search results.
What human spammer’s fail to take into account, and where their perspective diviates so far from that of mine, is that comments are encouragement and validation of a bloggers work. That engagment is worth more than all the SEO benefit a spammer can offer me and why I take such offense at their half hearted attempts and sense of entitlement and why so few of their comments will be allowed to stand here.
That’s my perspective – what’s yours?
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Jan22
Before the end of last year I had started playing with a cool new piece of technology called Triggit that made adding advertising and affiliate links easy to do without spamming them all over the place. As my blogging decreased towards the end of the year, I was mainly focused on quick pieces and didn’t touch Triggit.
You may have noticed the blue search bar at the top of my site (if it’s loaded yet, I need to track down what’s been slowing my load times lately) That is called the Sitebar and Triggit has switched gears and is focusing on this new tool. What does it do? Well, right now it only searches but I’ve boon told to expect more functionality soon, I’ll update more as I get the information 
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Jan21
I suppose that someone knows because I saw one today and it was the first time I’ve really noticed one and thought about it. So for today’s Wednesday Whim I decided to add one for the Knetwork. All you need is an animated gif, scaled down to the recommended 16×16 pixel size, uploaded to your existing favicon location. Then add a html line to your header. Just copy your current favicon code, paste it below itself, and alter the file name to your animated gif.
FYI – mine is a little knight hacking away at something…. it’s probably dead by now. I’ll probably replace it or remove it but lemme know what you think!
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Jan14
This is the first of my Whimsday Wednesday posts. My latest whim was inspired when the little proxy server I was hosting became overrun. It turned out I didn’t hide it as well as I thought, and people sucking down 40GB of bandwidth in a few hours can have a negative effect on all your other sites loading. Once I tracked down the culprit and shut it off, I put up a quick note (see it @ KnightKnetwork.net) saying that I had not intended it to be a public proxy and I added a google search and a small adsense unit to make it easy for folks to find another proxy and maybe make a couple of bucks.
Well, that worked out well enough that I’ve made enough to pay for a domain name and some cheap proxy hosting so I launched LiteProxySite.info this week! I still need to do some work on it, but it’s functional. If you need access to your sites that are blocked by your current network then this can help, but cheap hosting means low bandwidth so I’ve restricted the file size that it can pull down and may have to block some sites myself if it get’s overused.
I hope you find it useful!
Lite Proxy Site
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