Beginner’s Blog

Found a way to post only first sentences on the first page. More quicktag!!!

Was mainly working on the new blog. Wrote the first post, did some template customization and added AdSense ads.

Got something like 60 visitors from the submission to Digg and got 6 Diggs for the FeedBUrner article.

First comment on my posts today.

It seems that I it’s not that easy to keep the blog secret on the net. Already got the first vistor to my new project. It came from a blog that I cited in my first article. Apparently Wordpress sent the pingbac/trackback to the blog I was citing. Where’s these pings when I need them!!!!? WHen I need WP doesn’t send anything, when I’m not interested she performs perfectly. Sheesh…

The lesson: Never install x.0 version software, wait at least for x.01 update! (As if I had a chance, my hosting provider did not give me the option to install WP1.5)

Well, since the secret is out, might as well start a little promotion. Wrote a short article about Internal Dell document available on Google and submitted it to Digg. Got 50 hits from that. Tried to claim a blogon Technorati, but it says that the blog is unclaimable. Something wrong with technorati or Semiologic theme?
Today is 1 month anniversary for my first blog - Blogdotes. Will look at the resuilts from that when the day is over.

Nothing interesting in Blogdotes.

Wrote a story on Beginner’s Blog: 7 reasons FeedBurner is a must for your blog. Took me about 5 hours. Sheesh! That’s to long. Maybe with practice will be easier. Lot less spelling mistakes this time. Wrote the whole post on Performancing. The writing and research in the same window is very convenient. Performancing is very good for submitting tags to technorati. But it posted unfinished story on the main page, even then I specifically asked to post it as a draft. Will have to look into that.

Tweaked Beginners template a little. Added a plugin for the sticky first post. Added a sticky post with the disclaimer to the Diary Cat. Didn’t find a way to do that on a single diary posts. So removed links to recent posts and calendar on the sidebar in single post template. Don’t want people browsingh through Diary posts without Disclaimer. Might mess up overall impression from the blog.

Beginners Blog already in Google, in les then a week. Got the first hit for the query beginnersblog. Teere’s only one page for this query, and I’m on it. So beggining bloggers - more Typos PLEASE! I’m nowhere to be find for “beginners blog”. Or use the correct name of the blog “Beginner’s blog”, I’m on the first page there.

Submitted FeedBurner post to Digg and TailRank. More then 20 hits from Digg in 40 minutes. Dugg it myself and got 1 additional digg there already. Go Diggers Go! Digg my story!

Downloaded and istalled Semiologic template for my product blog. Now it’s time to start customizing the template. And some research.

Also 1 hit from Icerocket.

1 hit from Google Blog Search. That was fast. The hit was for “7 reasons feedburner post” . I’m on the first page for the query feedblitz there. I guess I will be there for 10 hours - the latest entry is for 13 hours ago. Few hits from technorati for this post also.

Last week Darren from ProBlogger and Rachel from Cre8d design talked about using a FeedBurner for their blogs. The main reason for using this service - is tracking the stats of your feed subscribers. But there are many more reasons to use it, that go unnoticed by even most experienced Bloggers. I think that FeedBurner is a must for anyone thinking about Blogging career. And it can do much more then track your stats. So here’s the list of reasons to use FeedBurner for your Blog: Read the rest of this entry »

Added FeedBlitz to Blogdotes

Added Blogdotes headlines to Beginner’s blog. Through FeedBurner

It seems that it takes about a week for my posts to get into search engines. Today I got a hit for my post Temptations, which was posted on Jan. 22
It turns out that my articles are pretty long on this blog. And I really hate to have full text of them on the first page. I need only the intro text of 100-500 words there. Trying to figure out how to do that, so far no luck.

Looks like I’m back on Technorati with Blogdotes. They lost me after the first few days, and did not show updates to my blog, no matter what I did (manual pings, repeated pings, etc;). Today I got a hit from Technorati again. Seems that my latest posts startedto appear ther. Mind you, it still says that I had only 15 posts in last 17 days, but at least I’m there again.

Seems that the editor from DMOZ directory reviewed my site today. Maybe I’ll get listed there soon.

Installed Performacing plugin for Firefox. Absolutely love it! Perfect tool for publishing entries to this Diary page. Now I need better FeedDemon/Firefox integration and I will have the ultimate blogging solution.

Will start using Performancing now and then will look at the Flock, when a public beta is released. Comparing these too might be good idea for the post.

Now that I found a way to post entries that do not appear on the main page, I’m considering of applying this to Blogdotes. I’m thinking of adding category of Dirty Jokes, where I will post jokes that are suitable only for adult audience looking for them (with foul language, explicit sex topics, etc;).Know quite a few of these, but didn’t want to have them on the main page.

Also thinking that it might be time to get to business. Considering the launch of my first product blog. No reason to put it further away. The later you start, the later you will get results. Today I did some research, bought a domain and installed Wordpress on it. Will spend next week doing some research, customizing the site and adding content to it. Will announce it here, next Sunday.

Starting to get subscribers to my feed for Blogdotes. FeedBurner shows my live feed circulation at 13 today. The amountof time some vistors are spending on Blogdotes is also increasing. Today the hit count is almost 3 times higher then unique vistors.

Chitika rejected my application for Blogdotes. Well, I expected that - low traffic website with no product related content. Will try again when I have some product related websites.

SE traffic for Blogdotes is increasing. Today got 6 hits from Google and 2 from msn. Checked the queries that brought people to my site:

• “Joke gratitude“- Today Blogdotes is a number 1 result on google for this query. It’s a shame that it’s such and obscure word combination.
• “parrot in toilet joke“- Google, top of page 2
• “humor sin jokes” - Google, middle of p1
• “Jokes and anecdotes” - Google, middle of p3, 2 hits
• “gratitude anecdotes” - Google, bottom of p2
• “2006 jokes” - #1 on MSN Search, btw. it was the first query that brought SE visitor to Blogdotes
• “joke stories ” - MSN Search, p1

Got problem sending trackbacks from Beginners blog. Couldn’t ping ProBlogger.net on a Feedburner post. Posted a question there, asking whether I was violating some comment policy, but it turned out that it was a problem on my side - with WordPress 2.0. There’s discussion thread on WP site about the problem: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/54145 . It seems that I will have to wait for WP update to fix it. Meanwile I will use manual pingback services like:http://kalsey.com/tools/trackback/ and http://www.aylwardfamily.com/content/tbping.asp

Replaced WP plugins for Delicious and e-mail on Blogdotes with Feed Flare. Couldn’t get e-mail plugin working properly anyway, except on homepage.

Post ideas: expand on FeedBurner plugin, LT of Blogging (needs serious research).

Reread my feedburner post. Will definetely have to work on my writhing style. 14 variations of “you” in one 7 sentence paragraph !!!!!

Last few days I noticed that readers of Blogdotes are spending more time on the site. Before, they usually viewed 1 page per visit, so my number of hits and unique visitors was usually pretty close - 15-20% differnce. From Thursday the number of hits got significantly higher then before. Yesterday the number of hits was more then 2 times bigger the UV. Today its about 80% higher.

Today I installed Wordpress FeedBurner plugin to add some flare to my feed. And learned a great lesson about blog promotion while doing it!

This plugin lets you redirect and track all your feeds through Feedburner. It even allows you to place AdSense ads on your feed items, if you have enough readers. One of the best things about FeedBurner is their FeedFlare feature. It lets you add some interactivity to your feed. When you install FeedFlare, small links appear on your feed where you can add the post to Delicious, e-mail it to a friend and do some other nifty things. You also can add these features to your site. FeedFlare provides a script for your blog template. After adding a script, all the above mentioned features can be added to your blog posts. Read the rest of this entry »

Today I got 3 hits from Google. Loked up the queries and the pages that pointed to my blog and Blogdotes was on 3-5th page of these queries. So people really had to dig to get my blog. Can’t wait till some of my posts get to the first page of some queries.

Few days ago I installed plugin that allows to send a joke to a friend from my blog. Today the first joke was e-mailed by a reader. Let the viral narketing begin!

Yesterday I got a request from the owners of new project Frogpress to use my content from Blogdotes.  Rather interesting project of off-line magazine of online news. Since I’m posting all content on Blogdotes under Creative Commons license, I don’t see problem with that. Actually they didn’t even need to ask my permission for that.

Let’s see how that goes.

Great! It worked like a charm.

What I wanted to do, was the posts from the diary to appear only on this page and not to make it to the front page. So I went looking for plugins.

The first one that I found was ShowOnFrontPage plugin by Richard Goodwin. Downloaded, installed, activated and tested it.

It worked great. However there was a problem with my feed. The posts from diary still appeared  in the main feed of this blog.

This prety much defeated the purpose I installed this plungin in the first place. I only want the readers who look for this diary, to access it. The posts here are very raw. I do little or no editing and proof reading here. I want to be able to post quickly and anything I want here. If these types of posts appear in the main feed, it will get crappy and cluttered pretty fast.

So I went looking for another fix - how to exclude Diary category from the main feed.  Browsed through various plugin directories and did not find anything. Then, through BloggingPro I got onto Semiologic site and found another great plugin - Opt-in Front Page. I deactivated ShowOnFrontPage, installed, activated and tested this one.

Problem solved.

Well. Almost. Now there’s no feed for this Category at all.

Oh well, I think I will get to go and look for another fix. This plugin might help, but user instructions are in Spanish. I installed it and tried to see what it can do, but did not find anything. So I deactivated it for now.

I’ll see what I can do about the separate Diary  feed later.

This is my diary archive!!! Here I post whatever comes to my mind at the moment. The posts here are more a collection of random thoughts and observations, then a complete posts. Posts here are not meant to be part of the main blog and are more like description of my thinking process, while I work on my blogs. Posts that are here, have not undergone any editing, proof reading and spell checking. You can expect a lot of bad grammar, spelling mistakes and everything else that should not be a part of good blog posts. If you are not interested in my random blabering, please go to the MAIN PAGE. Otherwise, please read-on.

This is part 2 of the Q&A with myself, where I talk about my first blog - Blogdotes. You can find the first part, about my goals and motives for starting Beginner’s blog here.

How long it took you to do your first post on this blog?

Too long. I hope it will get better with time. It took at least two hours to write the interview. Another couple of hours to polish it, add back links and trackbacks and post it online. Then, at least an hour, to edit it some more.

How’s your first blog – Blogdotes - doing? Read the rest of this entry »