I am Karthik dot com » Blogging

Getting back from a Blogging Vacation

Karthik — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 18:30:54 +0000

Yes, I’m back.

Its been a long time in coming, but I decided enough was enough and that I had to give this blog some attention now. I’d say that this is one of the most difficult things for bloggers to do if they stray off schedule – making that first post that announces their return. It has to be perfect and anything less than that will remain as a draft for eternity until they wake up to face reality as I have now.

I’m sure many of you would have experienced this already, or will experience it in future – so here are a few tips that will help you out of such a situation.

If its a planned vacation, start ahead by reducing your posting frequency so that your readers don’t feel an abrupt void. If you normally post everyday, reduce your posting to a few days a week during the first few weeks and reduce it further to once a week or so in the following weeks. Your readers are less likely to notice your absence if your posting frequency is low.
Follow the golden rule of stocking up some posts as drafts so you can publish them during the course of your vacation – the more the better.
You could also adopt the tried and tested rule and rope in some guest bloggers to post for you if your stock of posts dry up. On one hand, it will keep your blog updated with fresh content and on the other hand, it will give your readers more variety.

Of course, the tips that I mention above are only if you’re going on a planned vacation. If you’re forced to go on an unplanned vacation like I was, you’ll just have to make do by publishing that perfect return post. Here’s how.

Start by reading up on the blogs you used to frequent before you went on vacation – it helps to give you a general idea of anything new that’s happening in the Blogosphere.
Read some of your older posts so that you get into that rhythm you’ve been missing for so long – this post was an inspiration that I had after I read a couple of my older posts, so you can be sure it works!
There is no such thing as a perfect post, so whenever you get an idea, keep at it and you will find that the idea develops into a post almost as if by magic – like this one has.

Who can’t use a couple of tutorials?

Karthik — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 14:16:58 +0000

I’d recently participated in both Monika’s and Courtney Tuttle’s group writing projects with my post on how to upgrade your theme to use Wordpress 2.3’s tagging features. As always, the projects were received well and attracted quite a few entries. Today being the last day to submit the picks, I wanted to share my favourites with you.

Sarah, who has gained considerable experience in her stint of 3 months in the Blogosphere, shares her tips on how to attract comments on your blog. The mere fact that this post has attracted over 40 comments as of writing this, is testimony to the fact that these are tips you don’t want to miss.
HackWordpress.com is very good at providing quick hacks to improve your blogging experience if you are a Wordpress user. They’d submitted their article on how to add edit buttons to wordpress themes and in keeping with their reputation, its a well-written article. I had followed the same steps earlier for my own theme and I’m sure its something I don’t want to do without.
Although this one’s a bit off-topic, it makes for some very good reading and since we all go on vacation at some point of time, I’m sure you could use a few tips on planning your vacation online.

In appreciation to all those who participated, here’s the full list:

Megan Bayliss: How to Respond To Disclosures of Sexual Chile Abuse
Rishi: Tips to Get Best Out of Product Related Ad Networks
Karthik: Upgrading Your Theme to Wordpress 2.3
Aseem Kishore: How to Find Good Ideas and Content for Your Blog
Adam: Adding a Blog to Flickr
Sumesh: How to Add Plugin Function Calls Without Breaking Your Theme
Simonne: How to Get Your Favorite Stumble Upon Pages in Your Feed Reader
Shivaranjan: How to Move Self Hosted Wordpress Blogs Across Webhosts
Jacob Share: Obnoxious Guide to Environmentally Safe Job Hunting
Terry Didcott: How to Install A Self Hosted Wordpress Blog
Doug Woodall: How to Thwart the Barbarian Spyware
Joanie Raisovich: Tips for Getting Through Nano
Kryistina: Environmental Tutorial
David Rogers: How to Solve A Problem
CSS: Simple Photo Editing Using GIMP
Dee: Making Friends with A Neighbor or Co-Worker
Gal: The Best Excerises You Might Not Be Doing (Series)
Jen Lawton: How to Set Up An Online Fundraiser
Fred: How to Set Up the Wordpress Pinging Service

How would you like a guest post on your blog by a ProBlogger?

Karthik — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 12:25:03 +0000

Yes, you read that right, its your blog we’re talking about here. Don’t believe me? Chris Garrett is offering a guest post on your blog if you link to him in any which way possible. Quoting Chris himself,

What I propose to do is offer you, my lovely readers, a free guest post. To get a guest post you need to let me know that you want one and to be eligible you only need to meet one requirement and that is your blog must be confirmed to be indexed by Technorati. You can link to me with a post or if you are sure any links from your blog will show up write a comment saying why you should get one of the guest posts. That’s it

As well as the guest post itself you will get a link from this blog. Some great content and a link, all for free! Win-win. Seem fair?

Now, I’d already made a post linking out to him so I didn’t really have to do anything to qualify! Also, I’m really not one to make a post to get an entry into a contest, but this is not a contest and I honestly think it would be a very good thing to happen to this blog as well as yours. Chris is overloaded with offers as I’m writing this, so you’d better hurry up and reserve your place!

My Picks for the DBT Group Writing Project

Karthik — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 08:09:55 +0000

Oops, I did it again.

I’d mentioned how participating in two group writing projects had increased traffic to this blog tremendously. I’ve also posted my picks for the same that was conducted by Bluejar. What I forgot was that today was the last day to submit my picks to Daily Blog Tips too. So in due haste, I headed over to their site to pick out the final entries to settle for my 5 picks. It always helps to be a bit ahead of schedule (such as storing posts as drafts for a ~~rainy~~ sunny day) as I had already read up on a few of them. Imagine wading through 120 posts in a matter of hours!

I came across some well-written posts on blogging that were in keeping with this blog’s topic, so I thought you would enjoy it as well.

I am sure you’ve come across countless tips for bloggers who are new, but despite reading all of those, if you still think you’ve put the wrong foot forward, you might want to see if you’ve done everything that is listed in the Top 7 tips for brand new Wordpress blogs. If you have, and are still unsure, maybe blogging is not for you – but do subscribe to my full feed to stay updated!

If you decide to continue and give it your best shot, its a good thing to be a part of the blogging community so that we can all help each other. Although its not recommended to spend all your time at forums (you do want to blog, don’t you?), you can pick one or two of them from 10 Forums to Make You a Better Blogger and be an active member. Who knows? You might end up making a few friends in the process too!

When you are upto it, the 10 Tips for Writing Bookmarkable Content will help you write great articles that bring in a lot of traffic.

The most important metric of a blog is its traffic, by way of daily page views and RSS subscribers. You should not only write great content, you should also know how to attract new readers. Steven explains how it can be easily done in his article on How to Set Up a Domino Effect of Traffic.

Now, one of the best representations of traffic to a blog is in the number of comments each post attracts. Jordan gives you the Four Ways to Encourage Comments on Your Blog.

There were a lot of other participants who’ve commented and linked to my entry for the project, and now its my turn to return the link love. Some of the entries really made for some interesting reading, do make sure you read a few.

Bluejar Group Writing Project: My Picks

Karthik — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 06:45:49 +0000

Today is the last day to turn in my picks for Bluejar’s Group Writing Project to which I had submitted my post on the 7 Steps to creating a successful community. I’ve been doing quite some reading lately and thought that a few articles that relate to this blog may interest you too.

If you are the blogger who aims to make some quick cash by posting ReviewMe or Payperpost reviews, you might want to follow the checklist provided by Adsense Tracker on How to review a blog. It makes it easy for you to review blogs and it may well have a point or two that you’ve probably missed in your earlier reviews.

If you have a new blog, I’m sure changing your theme doesn’t make you twitch in the least. But in about a year or two down the road, you are sure to end up making so many modifications to it that the mere thought of having to redo all the changes will give you the jitters. Fear not, Steven has posted a comprehensive article on How to Successfully Switch Your WordPress Theme Without Throwing Your Computer Through the Window to make sure you do it smoothly.

The common consensus in the Problogger camp is that an average blogger only lasts 3 months. Most bloggers tend to get dis-illusioned within their first three months and quit the blogging scene for good. But that’s what makes you and I tick – we are here to stay. It is normal to get the occasional depression when you feel like you are talking to yourself. That’s where Romance Tracker steps in with his Top 5 ways to romance your blog. He puts forth an analogy of being in a relationship to maintaining a blog and suggests 5 things to keep you going.

To thank all the participants who’ve voted for me and linked to me, I’ll list them all here. They are all commendable posts and certainly worth a read.

Public Speaking Made Easy by Cedric
Enter a How-To Contest for Cash by Matt Gibbs
How To Promote Yourself (When You Don’t Want To.) by Dee
How to create a post in Wordpress by Roberta Ferguson
How To Nail That Job Interview In The First Thirty Seconds by Martin Stoddart
How to speed up WordPress easily by Marco
Simple way to Track Downloads by Shrihari
How to Speed up your Torrent downloads by Felix
How To Be A Flamer by WishBone
How To: Add Copyright Notices To Your Blog by Kyle Eslick
7 Steps to creating a successful community by Karthik
Contains Zero Trans Fat – Truth or Creative Advertising? by JoLynn Braley
How-To Guide: Increasing Your Sphere of Influence by Steve Belt
Beginners “How to” Guide for SEO by Steve
Add social bookmarking buttons to your blog by Girish Bhaskaran
How To Deal With Angry Customers by John
How to Have a Great Movie Experience by Em Dy
How To Make Your Wordpress Blog Safer by Simon Ward
Lock Folders without using any Software by Madhur Kapoor
Testing Lessons – Top 5 Secrets to Bug Hunting Success! by Debasis Pradhan
How To Track New RSS Subscribers Google Analytics in 3 Easy Steps by Rhys
How To: Install WordPress locally(on PC) by Sumesh
How To Pull In Quick Cash With a Myspace Resource Site by Levi
What the hell is a column inch: How to advertise in a local newspaper by Angela
How To Prepare For The Perfect Date by Shaun Low
How To Ride a Bicycle in the City by Roger Green
How do you track your comments? by pelf
How to become a better writer in 30 days by Writing Nag
Don’t You Want To Be An Internet Marketing Rock Star? by YC
3 Ways On How To Create A Buzz With Social Web Widgets I.E MyBlogLog And Blogrush by Jonathan Kok
How To Get Approved for PayPerPost With A New Blog by Karol Krizka
Tips and Tricks: How to Write, Send, Reply, and Forward E-Mail by Lillie Amman
5 Tips To Enter Sweepstakes Online by Monika
How to clip a cat’s claws without getting nailed by Mary Anne
Mind Map Tutorial on Blogging by Monika
Eating Crow by Susan Wingate
How to Become a Human Calendar by Luciano Passuell
The Client Cycle Explained by James Mitchell
How to Sleep on a Plane by Sheila
Screensaver for Promoting Your Company by David
Trick To Rename Internet Explorer Titlebar by Haris

Setting the best Permalink Structure

Karthik — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 22:26:23 +0000

I must admit – I gave Wordpress less credit than it deserves. If you haven’t noticed, I’ve recently changed my permalink structure – if you are too lazy to follow the link or were overwhelmed by it, here is the relevant bit:

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to refer to your article (or section), or how you might send a link to your story in an e-mail message. Especially when they are used to link to individual postings, once a story is posted, the URL to it should be permanent, and never change. Hence.. permalink.

Structure Tags

You can use the structure tags to customize your permalinks.
%postname%
A sanitized version of the title of the post. So “This Is A Great Post!” becomes “this-is-a-great-post” in the URL.
%post_id%
The unique ID # of the post, for example 423

My earlier permalink structure was /%postname%-%post_id%/ which means that it includes both the post’s id and the title. According to this structure, this post would have the URL of iamkarthik.com/setting-the-bes t-permalink-scheme-15/ (15 is the id of this post). Can you imagine the confusion it would cause if I were to make a list post? If I were to post an article on the “21 Best Wordpress Themes” and the post id were to be 25, the URL of the post would look like iamkarthik.com/21-best-wordpre ss-themes-25/. Now I don’t know about you, but it looks very silly to me. Then why did I include the post id in the URL? The logic behind it was that in case I would ever need to change the permalinks, I could redirect the posts based on the id. I was also taking a precaution against duplicate post titles – its easy to make two posts with the same title (post titles such as “Weekend Reading” are most likely to be created every week) and I didn’t want to set my blog on fire by having the same URL pointing to two different posts.

But Wordpress is smarter than I thought.

Now I’m one of those guys who likes to see some proof before they believe what they are told. To do that, I setup a test blog and set the permalink scheme to /%postname%/ (Go to your Administration Panel–>Options–>Permalinks). Next, I posted an article which we shall call “test post”. If you’ve been paying attention, you would know that it would have had a URL of /test-post/, after which I renamed the post to point to /new-test-post/. To complete the test, I typed in /test-post/ in my browser’s address bar and I found Wordpress giving me a sly grin and showing me /new-test-post/!

Ok, so it won on this count. I still had to know what would happen if I posted two articles with the same title. To test this, I made another post with the title “new test post” which would generate the same URL of that of my previous post. But it was strike two for me when I found out the URL of the new post – it was /new-test-post-2/. Notice the number “2″? WP added that to show that there was a post with the same title already. Neat. So no two posts will have the same URL.

I guess I stretched it a bit too far when I created a page with the same title, “new test post”. I salvaged some of my ego there, because WP seemed to display the page that I created for the URL /new-test-post/ rather than the post with the same title.

Three facts present themselves at this point:

Wordpress is smart.
Its smarter.
It gives more importance to pages than posts (which is why it displayed the page rather than the post).

Well, once it became clear that the id of the post was not required, I set out to find the best permalink scheme for search engine optimization. Search engines give a lot of importance to the keywords in the URL and so its obvious that the post title must be part of it. I decided against adding the category of each post so as not to reduce the keyword density in the URL. It also helps to keep the URL short.

Over 90% of the blogs that I’ve visited/read seem to use a permalink structure of /%postname%/. This is bad for SEO for two reasons, one is that it causes a duplicate content penalty if anyone linked to your blog as /%postname% without the trailing slash. Quoting the above example, iamkarthik.com/new-test-post/ and iamkarthik.com/new-test-post would lead to the same content under different URLs. This is strictly against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. The second reason that this is bad SEO is that, as far as search engines are concerned, the post is on the second level from the domain and hence will be given less importance. Each level can be assumed as a folder, for example, if I have a page called abc.html at iamkarthik.com/subfolder/abc.h tml and xyz.html at iamkarthik.com/xyz.html; abc.html is on the second level, while xyz.html is on the first level thus giving more importance (PageRank) to xyz.html.

So how do we avoid this? We can choose a permalink option of /%postname% or /%postname%.html (or /%postname%.php). I decided to go with /%postname%.html for the simple reason that web-surfers are more accustomed to seeing the extensions of html or php and a page without an extension might confuse them and some may even add an extension of their liking (others may add the trailing slash which would end up in a duplicate content penalty again!). To avoid that, I’m now sticking to /%postname%.html. From the example, the post title would now look like iamkarthik.com/new-test-post.h tml

~~I’m also using this excellent plugin to redirect my old links to the new ones so that I don’t lose any of the links pointing to my old posts~~. Wordpress 2.3 does it automatically.

If you found this article useful or have a different opinion, do let me know in the comments.

Why Group Writing Projects are worth participating

Karthik — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 11:47:50 +0000

One of the popular tips that Probloggers like to give for increasing traffic is to participate in Group Writing Projects. To be honest, I wasn’t counting on much when I participated in my first Group Writing Project at ChrisG.com. I was pleasantly surprised when I learned that my article on 7 Steps to creating a successful community had been accepted. That entry gave the blog some exposure and got me acquainted to Steven(who is now a regular reader and actively gives his feedback in the comments).

As luck would have it, it so happened that BlueJar and Daily Blog Tips were hosting group writing projects on a “How-To” theme. Any article that was written in a tutorial fashion would be accepted and I took the opportunity to submit my article on 7 Steps to creating a successful community to both the blogs.

There has been a significant increase in traffic to this blog since Bluejar and Daily Blog Tips published their final list and a lot of link love among the participants. While this has not given me more traffic than a stumble did, its been a great way to meet other bloggers and find new blogs.

The judges in both the projects are the bloggers who are short-listed themselves. They can vote for each other and the hosts will tally the number of votes for each entry and declare the winner. So I have until the 25th of this month to pick 3 blogs for BlueJar and 5 for Daily Blog Tips. The winners will be decided on the 27th after tallying the votes.

I’ll post my short-listed posts and the whole list to give out some link love on my part, if you are one of the bloggers, why not do the same?

One thing you probably didn’t know about Wordpress

Karthik — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 19:19:03 +0000

As much as we all like to think that we know everything there is to know about Wordpress, we do run into little surprises every now and then. Well, this last one I ran into doesn’t cease to surprise me – more because I don’t think anyone else has encountered it before!

Simply put, suppose you are reading a blog post and want to make a personal comment (or a heads up that you don’t want others to know about) to the blog author, you can enclose them within “<” and “>” while commenting and it can only be seen by the blog author himself!

So if you were to tell me that this was a good finding, it would look like

I’ve been using this technique on a few blogs that I’ve left comments over in the last couple of days – so I’m sure this works on a variety of versions!

I went about to check if the same was applicable to posts as well. For this, I switched to the “Code” editor while writing the post and added

I published the post and I saw what I expected to see – nothing! Upon editing the post, I noticed Wordpress had “closed” the tag with “”. This suprisingly, doesn’t happen with the comments! My hunch is that Wordpress takes it for granted that any text enclosed between “<” and “>” are HTML tags and attempts to process it as HTML. As to why the same doesn’t happen with comments is beyond me – if you do, I’d love to hear them in the comments. err, just make sure you leave it so the public can read it too.

Need traffic? Try BlogRush!

Karthik — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 20:10:36 +0000

Traffic is a magic word that excites both new and established bloggers alike (apart from $$$ of course) . Unless you chance upon some link love once in a while from the big boys like John Chow, Darren or Shoemoney or get lucky and have some of your posts Dugg, getting new readers for your new blog can be rather challenging. For established bloggers, its about pushing their frontiers even further and egging their RSS subscription up. Even if you are new or a veteran, John Reese and his Blog Syndication Network called BlogRush are here to help.

BlogRush promises a new concept of link and content sharing wherein a blogger can install a widget that displays posts in the same category as their own. These blog links are pulled in from across the BlogRush network and for each link that you display, one of yours will be displayed on another blog in the network.

Oh, so it just amounts to “I link to 5 blogs, 5 blogs link to me”? No.
This is where John wins me over:

See the “Add Your Blog Posts – FREE” area at the bottom of the widget? And the BlogRush tab? Well, if anyone clicks on either of those areas they will be taken to the BlogRush web site where they can learn about the free service and start hosting the widget on their site. BUT that’s not free advertising for BlogRush. Those links serve a powerful purpose…

When someone joins BlogRush, our system knows exactly WHERE they came from. The originating blog gets permanently marked in our system as the “referrer” for that new blog. And as you may have already guessed, the original blog now earns additional “syndication credit” on all the traffic that the referring blog produces — every single day. But it doesn’t stop there. If that new blog refers another user, that original blog then earns credits based on THAT new user as well. It continues through 10 “generations” of referrals with no limit to the number of blogs and/or traffic that can be produced by any level.

This means that if you can get one of the A-listers who get page views of over 10,000 per day to signup to BlogRush from your blog, you could be advertising your blog on 10,000 others on a single day! Being one of the early worms really matter since you would get that much more of a chance to rake in your referral credits.

For the bloggers who are touchy about Google and SEO, the widget outputs Javascript which is invisible to search engines, so you don’t have to worry about PageRank drain or Google penalties. It just delivers you traffic, and if John is to be believed, lots of it!

I hope to be one of the early worms on board, so if you are looking to register to BlogRush, please wait up and join as my referral.

Update: As you can see from the sidebar, I’ve just joined BlogRush. I’ll post an update in a few days of using it, feel free to try it out yourself.

Say No to nofollow

Karthik — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 19:57:40 +0000

When I decided to remove the nofollow tag from comments on this blog, I wondered whether this would be a sound decision to make. The primary reason was that many of the A-list bloggers have nofollow enabled, the fact that Wordpress and other blogging platforms incorporated this by default put me off more. Luckily for me, I decided to dig into it some more and what I learned convinced me to remove the nofollow tag on this blog. Wordpress, Six Apart and the rest of the platforms that enforced the nofollow tags were said to have done so under considerable pressure from Google back in early 2005. Surprisingly, Google is known to follow the links but not to index them. Yahoo, on the other hand, follows and indexes the links. So much for “nofollow”.

The do follow/no nofollow/I follow movement was started by Randa Clay quite recently in early 2007. The movement is gaining quite some momentum now and I was pleasantly surprised to know that Chris Garett has a “do follow” plugin installed. I’m sure more A-list bloggers will soon follow suit.

Personally, I feel its a lot about trusting your readers – there are bound to be comment spammers, but if I can pass on link-juice to a reader who comments on an article that helps the discussion, I choose to do it. That said, leaving a comment with the name “Make Money Online” would really be pushing the limit, so if you decide to leave a comment, it is much appreciated, but please leave it under your real name!

Update: Just found a drupal project that blacklists all sites that add a nofollow tag on their outgoing links. It would be interesting to find a similar plugin for Wordpress!

I am Karthik dot com » Blogging

Getting back from a Blogging Vacation

Who can’t use a couple of tutorials?

How would you like a guest post on your blog by a ProBlogger?

My Picks for the DBT Group Writing Project

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