Posts Tagged ‘Blogs’
Blogging clearly has arrived and is here to stay, according to the buzzword-slinging set. It’s the “next big thing” or the “wave of the future” – even a “revolution.” Still, most of the people commenting on the blogging trend aren’t sure exactly what it is, how it works or even what the different kinds of blogs are. Blogging already has taken a myriad of forms. Born when dial-up was still the standard, it came of age during the rise of broadband and now its text-based roots are giving way to podcasts and video blogging. To that end, here are a handful of blogging types and what sets them apart from the others.
Type 1 – Classic/Personal
This most basic blog type harkens back to the earliest days of Livejournal. These blogs serve as simple, personal accounts of thoughts and experiences. They’re records of the user’s life, things that interest him or appeal to her. They can record personal journeys both physical and mental, as in the case of blogging an exciting road trip or a reader’s attempt to get through the entire canon of a particular author.
Brand It: The real value of personal blogs is twofold. In our increasingly online culture, people have expressed feelings of isolation and disconnect from society. Thus, the thirst for personal information and details is growing. People want to hear personal stories from folks they are interested in, and these blogs give them a window into the humanity of others. Secondly, personal blogs that persist more than a year or two grow over time, maturing with the author. They change focus and grow more refined as time goes on, allowing the readers to have a sense of growing along with the subject of their reading. Thus, personal blogs can serve to help an established or even a growing brand make a personal connection right with its audience.
Type 2 – The Watchblog
It has been mentioned before, but blogging has some of the greatest potential to undermine corruption and totalitarianism ever seen. During the recent elections in Iran, bloggers brought out stories of abuse and corruption. Bloggers and their quick dissemination of information have exposed stories of police brutality, corporate misconduct and government gaffes overnight. There are entire blogs dedicated to exactly this kind of effort, carrying nothing but stories that expose the indefensible actions of those who cannot abide in a lawful society.
Brand It: The real power of this kind of blog in brand building is in the building up of public trust. Trust is fundamental to all business and branding. If there’s no trust in a brand, people simply won’t buy. Thus, people who expose breaches of this trust gain a certain level of credibility themselves. Similarly, this kind of blog can promote good conduct as well as expose bad conduct, creating a web of trusted providers that becomes mutually validating and prosperous.
Type 3 – Satire and Snark
Laughter is all-powerful. If a man argues with his opponent, he grants that opponent a certain level of respect; obviously the two viewpoints must be equal, or at least commensurate, or there would be no argument. However, if a man can get people to laugh at his opponent, then there need be no argument… ridicule does the work for him. Such is the power of a satirical blog. Whether done through biting and clever writing, simple sarcastic commentary or just posting ridiculous videos of politicians who betray their own ignorance, this kind of blog allows people to laugh at the matters presented and bring out a message by implication rather than overt pounding.
Brand It: One of the most powerful tools available in the world of blogging is the ability to laugh at oneself. People who have a sense of humor about their own failings are often conversely taken quite seriously. Point out a foible or two that popped up in recent meetings. Discuss hilarious absurdities in your industry. Take a famous mistake your advertising department made and have a laugh at it. Harness peoples’ desire to laugh, and you will genuinely have an audience worth keeping.
Type 4 – Interviewing
This is where blogging best shows its roots in classic journalism. An interview with an authority on some subject lends credibility to an article, and builds trust in the publication. As said above, people want to hear what others are thinking; they want that connection with the world around them. Having a more human element, interviews can provide this connection if handled well.
Brand it: The trick with interview-oriented blogs is to keep the material interesting for your audience. If a blog focusing on fashionable apparel were to interview an engineer on the scientific stresses that go into clothing fibers and manufacturing, most of the audience would probably fall asleep. On the other hand, if that same engineer were to explain in simple terms that the use of one fiber allows for thinner thread and thus smaller seams, and show the difference in two fashion photo spreads, that might interest the target audience more.
A Last Thought – It was touched on only briefly, but always remember that the blog is driven by audience expectations as much as by the focus of the brand itself. The brand exists in the mind of the audience or it doesn’t exist, so the blog must reflect that in tone and content. It’s also advisable to pick a type or even mix among the types in order to best capture these expectations, rather than choosing a type based solely on the projections of the brand.
Packt’s "Drupal for Education and E-Learning" by Bill Fitzgerald consists of clear step-by-step instructions, which help create blogs, online discussions, groups, and a community website using Drupal.
To learn more about creating a student blog, read an exclusive chapter here:http://www.packtpub.com/files/drupal-for-education-and-e-learning-sample-chapter-6-creating-the-student-blog.pdf
Social media in the classroom provide unique opportunities for teaching and learning. This book helps you break through the hype, and shows you how to build a site in Drupal that incorporates the Web in your class, on your terms, to achieve specific learning goals.
It provides the essential details to get the most out of your Drupal site. In clear, step-by-step instructions, you will learn how to build a site that is easy to use, easy to navigate, and supports the teaching and learning you want to emphasize.
Drupal for Education and E-Learning provides a step-by-step overview of how to work with Drupal to build a feature-rich learning environment. It will help you learn how to configure the default Drupal installation, and how to extend your site to include social bookmarking, a podcasting and video sharing platform, image sharing, and interactive discussions around rich media content. You will also learn how to organize your site so that, as learning occurs over time, you and your students will be able to track their work history.
It also focuses around creating educational activities in Drupal, with lots of examples of realistic courses and classroom ideas – and how to implement them.
This book is for anybody looking to use Drupal to support teaching and learning; more generally, the examples given in this book can also be used by anybody looking to use Drupal to publish social media. This book is not a developer’s manual; you do NOT need to know code, or HTML, or CSS, to benefit from this book. People new to Drupal will find clear examples describing how to set up their site. More experienced Drupallers will find tips and tricks for extending their site, and step-by-step instructions on how to make the most out of Drupal’s flexibility.
To read more, visit http://www.packtpub.com/drupal-for-education-and-e-learning/book
WordPress bloggers beware because you can be attacked and hacked due to vulnerabilities in the WordPress platform. This article covers what’s happening and then gives you 12 ways to avoid it from happening to you.
That’s right my friends WordPress blogs are being attacked, hacked and redirected to other websites without the owners of the blogs being aware. Sounds scary doesn’t it? Imagine if you had a blog or website earning you hundreds of dollars daily!
Let me back up for a moment for those that aren’t in the know:
It all started for me on June 11, 2009 when I received a desperate call from one of my friends that runs a very successful, well-known and profitable wordpress blog.
They were almost in tears because the wordpress attack and hacker used a loophole in their self hosted blogging platform to accomplish two tasks:
1) Re-direct the traffic away from his wordpress blog to another website that was full of links to different affiliate products
2) Replaced all of his static websites using Iframe redirection to ED drugs and other pharmacy type websites.
How did the blog owner find out? One of their readers clicked on a link in the blog to read a post they were interested in and they were taken to an affiliate website that had nothing to do with the topics being discussed on the blog.
Thinking it was just an error they tried again and was taken to a completely different website than they were directed to the first time. That sent up red flags for the reader and they contacted the owners of the blog.
The really sad part is that by the time the owners of the blog were able to correct the wordpress attack and hack they had lost approximately 0 in sale that day alone. What’s worse is that here we are exactly a week later and they are still working on repairing the damage done to their static websites.
What can you do to protect you name, brand, reputation, revenue and WordPress blog from being attacked and hacked?
1. Secure Your WordPress Database -
Create a database for WordPress. WP uses only a few tables but creating a whole database just for the blog is more likely to limit its access.
Create and grant limited access to a database user. Create a user to access this database only and grant limited access to SQL commands in the database (select, insert, delete, update, create, drop and alter).
Pick a strong database password. Make it as random as possible since you don’t have to remember it.
2. Populate wp-config.php Properly – Use WordPress secret key generation tool to generate random WordPress cookies. These keys are used to insure better encryption of information stored in WordPress user’s cookies.
You also want to modify the WordPress table prefix to something other than wp_ by adding random characters and numbers to the end of wp, such as wp64mlm_manual.
3. Replace the Default “admin” Username – Fantastico users are able to pick admin user and password as part of the installation process. Replace the default so that “admin” user name is now myadm instead of admin.
4. Pick Secure WordPress Password for “Admin” – Your password should combine uppercase and lowercase characters and include numbers.
5. Use Secure Login via Encrypted Channel – WordPress bloggers who have SSL enabled for their domain should use that encrypted channel to access their WordPress Dashboard. You can force admin sessions over HTTPS by setting the FORCE_SSL_ADMIN variable in wp-config.php file to TRUE.
6. Upgrade as New Version Becomes Available – WordPress bloggers should upgrade once newer versions are issued because the upgrades address know security vulnerability issues.
7. Update Word Press Plug-in’s – It only makes sense to do so once you upgrade to a newer version of WP.
8. Backup Your Database and Files – Install a plug-in or use cronjob to create backups of your wordpress blog database and files on a regular basis.
9. Disable Directory Browsing – By default in most hosting, indexes of directories are shown in web browsers revealing any content of a directory that has no index.html or index.php. You can modify this behavior with Apache by adding a line of code into the .htaccess file in the root directory.
10. Protect WordPress Administration Files – WordPress administration files reside in wp-admin directory of your WordPress blog. You may use .htaccess to restrict access or allow only specific IP addresses to enter this directory and file. You may also allow access from a range of IPs by way of mod_access.
11. Restrict File Access to wp-content Directory – The wp-content directory contains your theme files, uploaded images and plug-ins. WordPress blogs don’t access the .PHP files in the plug-ins and themes directories via HTTP. Restrict wp-content by way of .htaccess so only the following files can be accessed image files, javascripts, and CSS preventing people from accessing any other files directly.
12. Hide The WordPress Version in the Header Tag.
These practices are nothing new and WordPress has been telling their self hosted bloggers that they should be implementing these tactics since day one.
Now the wordpress attack and hack is in full effect and millions of bloggers are going to wake up one day and find that all their hard work, efforts and revenue is gone.
I beg all WordPress users to take emergency steps to protect themselves starting today! While I have listed what can be done in this article there is so much more that wasn’t covered so I highly recommend that you take the time to research the resource I will mention in my bio below because it is how my friend and I are now protecting ourselves from the WordPress attack and hack.
Whether it’s a corporate blog, a news-type blog, or even a personal blog, optimizing your blog for the search engines is a must. There are some simple changes that you can make to WordPress and Moveable Type that will make your blog more search engine friendly and make the search engines beg for more (more post and content, that is!).
Optimizing a blog is just like optimizing any other website. The content and pages (posts) must be unique, they must be search engine friendly, and it needs links from other websites. If it’s a new blog, then you first need to make sure the blog software you’re using is set up so that it takes advantage of all of the possible optimization features. Then, announce it to the world, work on getting some links to it, and start making posts.
WordPress Optimization
If you’re using WordPress for your blog software, it’s important to make sure that your site is search engine friendly, meaning that it can easily be spidered by the search engine spiders. Just like optimizing a website, it’s important to have good title tags and meta tags. Keep in mind that blog software usually uses the title of your post as the title tag, so include keywords in your titles as much as possible. It’s important to set up your blog’s software so that the URLs don’t contain a lot of variables. Instead, use URLs that include the post title or post name in them. For example, if you’re using WordPress you’ll need to set the permalinks so that it uses %postname% in the URL. You can also set up a specific category for the post archives, and you might consider using a keyword that’s related to your blog instead of the default, which is typically the word “archive”. Fintan Darragh of www.dech.co.uk has a great blog post called “Ultimate WordPress SEO Tips” (http://www.dech.co.uk/2005/11/ultimate-WordPress-seo-tips/). Mr. Darragh talks about permalink optimization and says, “The goal: stick more keywords up into the URL and remove the faff which nobody uses, to make the URL search engine and people attractive. Having keywords in your URL is an absolute must, especially when it’s as easy as WordPress makes it.” He also goes on to talk about getting rid of useless tags like the month, day, and year, as well as one important detail: whatever you do stick with the site structure you choose—otherwise you might end up with a lot of useless links to your site. Other tips that Mr. Darragh mentions are optimizing your page titles and your post titles–and installing a few plugins that are useful such as the “Related Posts Plugin” and the “Technorati Tag Generator”.
There are several other places where you can get specific tips about setting up WordPress in a search engine friendly manner, including: * SEO at Aleeya Dot Net – http://www.aleeya.net/category/WordPress/seo/
* The Best WordPress SEO Possible – http://WordPress.org/support/topic/49168
* Search Engine Optimization for WordPress – http://codex.WordPress.org/Search_Engine_Optimization_for_WordPress
* Search Engine Optimization for Blogs – http://www.blog-maniac.com/blog-seo.htm
* DYI Search Engine Optimization – http://lorelle.WordPress.com/2006/01/15/dyi-search-engine-optimization/ One of the best tutorials out there is one called “DYI Search Engine Optimization” by Lorelle VanFossen. Specifically, Lorelle (lorelle.WordPress.com) has some great tips, including how to optimize your code, develop strong intrasite links, write with strong keyword usage, use categories and tags, and how to use ping services. Lorelle says that “the goal is to help search engine crawlers move through your website collecting information to be stored in the search engine’s database. The key to your blog’s data making it successfully into a search engine’s database is to: 1) Make sure there are no road blocks in the path of a search engine crawler.
2) Make sure the crawler can move through your blog, examining all your web pages.
3) Provide adequate keywords and key phrases which clearly help categorize your content.
4) Provide clearly labeled tags and categories recognized by tagging service crawlers and many search engines today.
5) Take advantage of pinging services.” There are several WordPress Plugins available that will help you take advantage of internal linking (like the Related Posts Plugin) which will link to other posts in your blog that are on the same topic.
Other plugins that might be helpful are plugins that automatically generate a Google Sitemap file as well as plugins that help you categorize the site such as the WordPress Subdomain Plugin (http://www.webguerrilla.com/WordPress-subdomain-plugin/).
Movable Type Optimization
If you’re using Movable Type for your blog software, then it’s also important to make sure that your site is search engine friendly and can be spidered by the search engine spiders. Just like optimizing a website, it’s important to have good title tags and meta tags. Keep in mind that blog software usually uses the title of your post as the title tag, so include keywords in your titles as much as possible. Miles Evans (http://www.webpronews.com/expertarticles/expertarticles/wpn-62-20060310Movable TypeSEO.html) says that “Movable Type is optimized quite well out of the box, but there are a few quick tricks to easily providing the spiders with some dynamic content.” He goes on to say that you need to optimize your template. “For my main home page and category index pages I hardcode most of my meta data. Your meta tags will be at the top of the template within the tag. You can get fancy on your index pages but I cannot really see why. Optimize these two templates by hand for whatever keywords you are targeting site wide.” Mr. Evans also has another article titled, “Best Movable Type Plugins” (http://www.webpronews.com/expertarticles/expertarticles/wpn-62-20060310BestMovable TypePlugins.html) that talks about his favorite plugins that help him get great search engine rankings. His favorite Movable Type Plugins for SEO are Dashify, MTPaginate, MT Blogroll, MT InlineEditor, MT-Textile, BigPAPI, as well as Ajaxify (a set of plugins that adds several ajax/javascript widgets into the Movable Type interface), CheckLinks, FormatList v1.0, and Better File Uploader for uploading files. Nicholas Carvan (http://www.nicholascaravan.com) has a great article about Movable Type optimization called “Optimizing your Movable Type blog for Google” (http://www.nicholascarvan.com/blog/optimizing_your_Movable Type_blog_for_google.html). In it he talks about PageRank (and how it relates to your internal linking on your blog), having keywords in your URL (which is important for all blog optimization) and blogrolling. He defines the term blogrolling very well, saying, “Blogrolling: Inbound links are gold, but in Google’s eyes, not all links are equal. In particular, Google isn’t wild about links contained within JavaScript – apparently they can index them, but that doesn’t mean they always want to.”
Once you’ve set up and configured your blog’s software, it’s important to make sure that you leave it alone—if you change your page URLs then any links that you’ve received from other bloggers may not be valid anymore. If you need to change your site’s structure (perhaps you’ve been blogging already and wish to use the tips from this article to optimize your blog), then you might want to take a look at the Objection Redirection WordPress Plugin(http://WordPress-plugins.biggnuts.com/objection-redirection-WordPress-plugin/) if you’re using WordPress. The Objection Redirection Plugin gives you a simple interface to redirect users (and search engine bots) to the proper page, especially if you’ve changed your site’s structure.
Start Blogging
The best thing you can do is to start blogging. Go ahead and post to your heart’s content and write, write, write about your topic. The more content you can provide the better—and it seems as if adding content on a regular basis really helps, as well. Feel free to link out to other blog posts that are related to the topic you’re writing about. For example, before you publish a post, go on over to your favorite blog search engine and find another recent post on the same subject—and link to the post. Linking out to other bloggers will get their attention, and hopefully they’ll end up linking to you as well. If other bloggers have trackbacks turned on then their blog will link back to your post. Some trackbacks are moderated, so it might take some time before your link shows up on the other blog. And some bloggers have trackbacks turned off, so a link back to your site might take some manual intervention. Categorize your posts as much as possible, and feel free to add categories as you blog—it will help the internal linking structure of your site, and help the search engines and users find on-topic posts.
Promoting Your Blog
Whenever you make a post in your blog, your blog software will attempt to ping certain sites to let them know that you just updated your blog. There are many blog ping services out there, including Ping-O-Matic and Pingoat. Your blog software can be configured to ping sites automatically, and I’ve posted a list for WordPress of ping services on by blog (http://www.corporatewebsitemarketing.info/cwm/WordPress-ping-list). If your blog is new or you would like to get some more links, you can submit your blog to blog directories as well as other sites that will list your blog (don’t forget to submit to DMOZ.org, Yahoo! Directory, and the Best of the Web Blog Directory). About.com has a great article about promoting a blog (http://weblogs.about.com/cs/blogpromotions/a/promoteblog.htm) and even Biz Stone has great tutorial about promoting your blog (http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=1060). Lastly, don’t forget to turn on your blog’s RSS feed. And if you’re looking to promote your RSS feed, try searching your favorite search engine for “promote rss” to find a lot of good tutorials.
Promoting your blog is just like promoting a website—you need good spiderable content, links to your content, and you need to set up your blog software to take advantage of all the great features. There are also plugins that will help make blogging easier for all of us.
Many
start online business entrepreneurs who understand the power of blogging. With blogs, you can be in contact with people much like social sites. There are many ways you can earn income online with blogs. Let’s talk about five ideas on how it is possible to make money blogging. 1 Promoting your website Although blogs are more casual and laid back
, there is nothing wrong with promoting your website or a new product from time to time. If you have a short message on a promotion you are running, or a special product that will benefit the people can make, you can generate an extra income with your online business. If you already have such a good reputation can be a very effective way to earn money. 2 Promoting affiliate programs In addition to promoting your own online business website
, you can also earn online income through the promotion of affiliate programs you are involved with. With blogs you with people who have similar interests can interact as you. Tell people about your programs. You can inform them about the benefits of the programs and why they should participate. 3 Writing blog posts Then start to build more and more people
blogs, continues to increase the need for blog writers. Whether entrepreneurs do not have the time or if it is missing the necessary skills to write blog entries every day, there is a need for blog writers. You can make lots of money to just by writing blog entries for people online. 4 Advertising While it is possible
that people pay to advertise on your blog, this typically occurs when your blog has a heavy traffic flow. If your blog does not receive enough traffic, you can make money with pay-per-click advertising. As people click on the ads on your site, you can make money here and there. 5 Flipping blogs The last method that you can make money blogging is by flipping blogs. As with websites, you can also flip blogs. All you do is set up a blog and then a variety of strategies to drive traffic. Once there is enough traffic, you can sell the blog and make hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Blogging can make very effective tool against money online. This online business ideas in this article are listed, can help you to make money. As long as you have the right attitude and determination, you can make money blogging today.