Monthly Archives: December 2004

Review: A Trio of eBooks on Blogs and RSS

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Running a blog, I’m always interested in reading more about the subject, especially when something promises to improve my site. Over the past week or two, I’ve had a chance to get my hands on some of the more popular books on the subject (due in part to the SantaDealTime package). So I thought I’d share my opinions, and give fellow bloggers some inside news on the products.

‘Marketing Rampage With Blogs and RSS’, by Brandon Hong, is an interesting product. It’s actually part Acrobat PDF and part on line video (Flash), which you view on your web browser. With a background as a teacher, Brandon is well suited to narrate step by step how to do various blog functions. For example, how to set yourself up on Bloglines.com or Blogger.com, using AdSense and FeedBurner, even how to FTP – all are explained with tutorials.

The eBook itself complements the tutorials, providing a good grounding for beginners to get into blogging. The tutorials are quite a bit of help in this regard, and I think it’s this package’s strongest point (so much so, I think Brandon should put a sample video on his web page as a selling point). In fact, of the three eBooks here, I think this one is best targeted to newbies, especially those who don’t want to dig into blog internals, but just ‘get to it’.

Adrian Ling’s eBook ‘RSS Made Easy’ is a good intermediate discussion. It covers both blogs and RSS topics (for instance, with the chapter entitled ‘RSS and Blogs – What’s the difference?’). His focus is on Blogger.com, and examples refer to that site, which can be handy if you’re using that product (or planning to).

His middle section of the book is the real meat, with tips for quick writing of content (which I plan to use sometime soon). His discussion of RSS (as opposed to blogging) may prove useful for websites looking for the benefits of RSS, without the time investment of running a blog. And of course he mentions how to get seen on Yahoo through RSS feeds.

The package also includes other reports, such as RSS and Yahoo, using FTP, and the a discussion of the instant Blog tool in the Google toolbar. As a collection of writings about blogs and RSS, it is quite comprehensive, albeit a bit Blogger-centric.

Mani Sivasubramanian’s eBook ‘How to Profit From Blogs and RSS’ is a tips book rather than a tutorial. In about 35 pages, he gives 41 tips on benefiting more from your RSS feed and/or blog. For instance, in one tip he discusses the need for quality, pointing out that one bad post can lose you readers. This is important to remember (and have him remind us) – like a TV show, people can get bored and channel surf, so it’s important to focus on quality at all times.

His tips primarily focus on three areas: how to manage your blog, how to generate advertising for it, and different ways to make RSS feeds work (especially if you’re using them apart from a blog). I found a couple of tips that really grabbed me (and I’m going to look into further), so I consider the product well worth it. While this isn’t a book for a newbie, it can be a good tip guide for a veteran blogger, someone wondering ‘where do I go now’, and also for businesses that are wondering if an RSS feed (rather than a blog) could benefit them.

All in all, each package was informative in its own way. For beginners, I’d recommend checking our Brandon’s first; for those moving along in blogging, Adrian’s should fit the bill; and for those wondering how to monetize their site, Mani’s will give some unique ideas.

Of course, reading all these eBooks makes me itch to write my own on blogging – or at least co-author one. So if anyone’s interested….

WordPress’s Latest Upgrade – Or My Morning With FTP

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So today Matt Mullenweg released WordPress 1.2.2 – and I had a chance to see if I could install it without a fight.

Short answer – yes. Long answer: take your time, go very slowly, backup everything, check and double check, and you’ll have no problems.

According to the documentation, a minor upgrade like this should be quick and simple to do. True, but I’m always looking for ways to complicate things, so I had to give it a try here as well.

The basic instructions are simple, just backup everything, delete everything, copy the new files over, and then copy back any files you’ve modified in the past. By keeping multiple FTP windows open, I was able to compare copy dates, and make sure I didn’t delete or overwrite any of my changed files. Tedious, but the result was only the unchanged files were replaced, with minimal impact.

But there was a problem with this plain vanilla solution – while I’m updating, my site is down. So instead, I set up alternate subfolders (wp-admin2, wp-images2, wp-content2, etc.), copied the new files over to them, and added any changed pages from my current site. As a final step, I copied over the newer ‘top level’ files (like index.php), and renamed the subdirectories, thereby swapping in my new update rather quickly.

Of course, it would have been easier to place my whole WordPress setup in a subdirectory, and then swap that single directory in, and I recommend that for any new installation. I didn’t for two reasons.

Firstly, because this site was a dedicated blog, a subdirectory seemed redundant. After all, why force people to type www.BigBizBlog.com/blog instead of just www.BigBizBlog.com? There’s nothing else here…

Secondly, I’m already listed in Google and Yahoo, and didn’t want to fiddle with these listings (or with my .htaccess file to handle redirecting).

So, do as I say, and not as I do – but I do recommend performing an upgrade, if only to get comfortable with the procedure. There may come a time when you’ll have to do it (like an emergency security update), so why not be prepared?

Bad Ad! Bad Ad!

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What’s a bad ad? Here’s one I recently came across – guess how popular it was:

SINGLE BLACK FEMALE seeks male companionship, ethnicity unimportant. I’m a very good looking girl who LOVES to play. I love long walks in the woods, riding in your pickup truck, hunting, camping and fishing trips, cozy winter nights lying by the fire. Candlelight dinners will have me eating out of your hand. I’ll be at the front door when you get home from work, wearing only what nature gave me. Call (404) 875-6420 and ask for Daisy, I’ll be waiting…

If I told you that this ad got almost 350 phone calls a day, would you consider it a good ad?

Of course, you may have heard about this one – the punch line is that the phone number takes you to the Atlanta Humane Society, and the ‘Single Black Female’ is a black Labrador pup named Daisy!

Since I’m writing about business, I had to ask myself – was the ad worth it? After all, we’ve often heard about ads that start with ‘Sex – Now That I Have Your Attention…’. Just how effective was the Humane Society’s ad?

So I did some research. And found out a big problem – there never was a Daisy, there was never a personal ad placed from the Atlanta Humane Society – in fact, this is an urban legend.

But that’s not to say the ad wasn’t effective. Whenever it surfaces, men call. And despite the punchline given in the ad, men still telephone – on one occasion about 650 over two days.

So let’s ignore that the ad was fake for a moment, and focus on the results, which were real. First off, it got attention using sex. And it was popular – several hundred calls a day (and not coincidentally, the Atlanta Humane Society no longer uses that number).

If you’d listed an ad like that, you’d have gotten a great response. Unfortunately, you’d have to handle over 300 phone calls a day to do it – which would waste a person’s time for most of the day.

And don’t forget that the men would be very annoyed. Getting people angry is a sure prescription for a P.R. disaster – and angry lovelorn men are even worse. Obviously, this ad was not a ‘best of breed’.

So why mention it?

Because there are people who really try ads like that – and for the few sales they get, the bad blood will likely hamper future sales efforts. Of course, some people like to make a sale and move on (and burn their bridges), but for most of us, building a relationship with each customer is the key to growth – and gimmicky ads just won’t cut it.

So although there seems to be no Daisy, her plea for a companion can still give us a few pointers about how not to write an ad.

(If you want to know more about the Daisy story, an excellent article is found here at the ‘Urban Legends Reference Pages’)

WordPress & Ultimate Spam Control

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While commenting on a fellow business blogger’s page, I noticed his great spam control – a little image is displayed containing text that you type in to verify the comment.

And then I noticed he was using WordPress – so of course my main job for the day became ‘how can I have it’.

The AuthImage plugin is made by Keith McDuffee of www.gudlyf.com, and involves just a little tinkering with the code. Here’s my experience setting it up:

  • Follow the directions EXACTLY. On my first try, I found out I’d placed the files in the wrong directory – ouch.
  • Although the instructions mention shell access is necessary, you can cheat – set up the code, and see what breaks (and then restore the appropriate php files). If you get a message mentioning a function failure, you likely don’t have the right library support. You’ll need both GD (graphics) and FreeType support – if you have GD but no FreeType, there is a comment on the page for a workaround here.
  • In step 2, be sure to make changes to both ‘wp-comments.php’ AND ‘wp-comments-popup.php’. There’s also a small typo in the instructions – the quote after:
    get_settings(‘siteurl’)"
    should be a semicolon.
  • You’ll also need ‘my-hacks.php’ – if you don’t know what that is (and you don’t already have a ‘my-hacks.php’ file right alongside ‘index.php’ on your blog site), then just take his file ‘authimage-hacks.php’, upload it, and rename it (and if you do have one, just add ‘session_start();’ to yours). Don’t forget to enable hack supports (the ‘my-hacks.php file support’ entry in the Options/Miscellaneous panel).
  • And of course, test!

Once this is enabled and working, you can go ahead and reduce your filtering – if you’re approving comments before posting (Options/Discussion/Discussion Options) you can turn this off, and you don’t need to use the spam word filtering, either. Of course, you may wish to, for other non-spam reasons.

The end result? Now if you want to post a comment on my page, you’ll have to type in the random text shown on the graphic. Machines choke on this, meaning I can avoid worrying about junk comments – at least until spammers get smarter…

AdSense News – Or How to Get Paid Doing What You Love…

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In an ideal world, we all could write pages and pages on topics that interest us, and support it with banners and other website advertising.

Google’s AdSense helps in that. Free to join up, you can place a banner (or three) on your site’s pages, and have instant advertisements (and advertising revenue) with little effort on your part.

But if you really want to make any advertising pay, the key is tracking. With tracking, you’ll know what website sections are advertising best – and where to put most of your efforts.

AdSense has provided tracking for some time now, called Active Custom Channels. This week, Google announced a variation, called Active URL Channels. Both work by monitoring clicks from your site’s ads, and then organizing them for you into reports. In the case of Custom channels, you have to add channel code to the html on each web page. With URL channels, you can do the changes directly from the AdSense user page.

However, there’s problems – you only have 60 entries at this point in time, not enough to monitor each page. As well, while you can track a single webpage, or a whole directory (and its subdirectories), there seems no way to monitor just a few pages together. So while URL Channels are a great idea, you’ll still need to combine them with Custom channels.

If you’re wondering how to use the new AdSense URL Channels, here’s some possibilities:

  • Use it for small cases. If you wrote a few web pages on a subject, track those, with one URL channel for each.
  • Use it for special pages. You might want to set up up for index.html on each site. Since that page often gets more traffic that other pages, it might be useful to monitor its advertising by itself.
  • Use it for directories. For instance,www.ActiveBits.com would track all pages on the site, whereas www.ActiveBits.com/info would track just my articles. So if your site is grouped into subdirectories, this can be an easy way to see which one generates the best ad revenue.

Whatever format you use, this is a great feature for Google AdSense users. My hope is that they continue in this direction of more details – I’d like eventually to see the performance of each and every page on my sites (quite a bit more than 60 pages!)

But until then, The Channels tracking can help you out, and it’s well worth a look.