What’s in a number? (Blog Post 500)

October 30, 2011 By 18 Comments

(Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes)

It’s not quite 3 years since Website In A Weekend kicked off, at a Stirfry Startup. By my count, this article is the 501th blog post on Website In A Weekend, but I started writing a few days ago, so I’m calling it the honorary 500th blog post.

What’s so special about the number 500 anyway? I couldn’t really say for sure, but a whole lot of other people think 500 is really cool:

  • Indianapolis 500: Skinny cars with fat tires roar ’round and ’round.
  • 500 Days of Summer. Ok, it’s a movie, and I haven’t seen it, but Zooey
    Deschanel can sing to me any day of the week. Sundays even.
  • The Fortune 500. You know, the top 1% which is doing 99% of the business. But let’s not go there…
  • The card game 500. Related to Euchre. But we were a Pinochle family ourselves, so scratch 500 The Card Game.
  • 500 AD. The Year of the Consulship of Patricius and Hypatius. As (maybe) chronicled by the absurd Thrillpeddler’s Theodora She-Bitch of Byzantium. (←NSFW, probably). Also, the beginning of the reign of Fergus the Great (when scots became Scots).
  • And of course San Fran’s own 500 Club. I can’t do better than quote, so why try:

    A neighborhood dive that has seen “The Mission” through the beatnik, hippy, hipster, and dotcom growing pains; it still remains everyone’s favorite corner bar. Pull up a stool…..

500, what a cool number. And now Website In A Weekend has joined the illustrious ranks of the 500.

I feel special and you should too.

Our Next 500 blog posts

I won’t (can’t) say for sure what the next 500 blog posts here on Website In A Weekend are going to be written about. Based on search queries, sales, and what you, the reader, have proven to find useful, there will be more of the following:

  • There will another edition of Blog Post Engineering coming around mid-March 2012, possibly sooner. Some parts are going away, there will be new material. If Google+ doesn’t follow Wave and Buzz into /dev/null, expect some in-depth material covering Google+ from a content-strategy point of view. This edition of BPE is being developed in coolaboration with Operation Nightfire.
  • Operation: Night Fire. Like art? Stay tuned…


    Time for another unreasonably ambitious project with @ #mastery
    September 28, 2011 1:12 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite
    @websiteweekend
    Dave Doolin

  • More WordPress plugin and development articles, some of which may be rather technical. Expect the same sort of in-depth treatment received by the Broken Link Checker Plugin.
  • More content strategy for small business bloggers, and digital publishing for small businesses. Expect to see case studies.
  • More cool guest posts, from cool guest post authors.

You. Guest post. Yes!

Website In A Weekend remains open to guest posting, and it’s even easier than ever before: send a draft article. If it’s accepted, you get your own WordPress account here on Website In A Weekend. This means you get your own byline as well, which ultimately means authorship credit on search results.

Your favorite 500

500 blog posts. 500 miles. 500 years. 500 Club. Such a wide variety of 500s.

What’s your favorite 500? Do you have one? You must share below.

And if you have your very own 500, definitely share.

Filed Under: Blogging success

Time or money, there’s no other blogging currency

October 26, 2011 By 10 Comments

(Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes)

Sooner or later, ya gotta REALLY sweat

As previously noted, cranking up a self-hosted blog with absolutely NO blog tech knowledge is an exercise in digging holes, and digging holes makes one sweat.  At some point digging holes gets old and you are left with three choices:

  1. You can take the easy road, default to a BlogSpot or Blogger site, and let someone else do the lifting…just remember, you get what you pay for and you aren’t paying anything.
  2. You can dig a little deeper…in your pocket…and pay someone who knows what they are doing to put the site together for you.  Hell, if you have deep enough pockets you can even pay for content creation…I’m not all THAT expensive.
  3. Your third option is where the post title comes into play…Sooner or later ya gotta REALLY sweat.

Face it, a blog costs SOMETHING and there are only two kinds of currency in the world…and I’m not talking about dollars or francs or euros or yuan.

We only have two things we can spend… money and time… and that is our only currency.

Let me stop here for a second and dispel a myth.  Some of you think your knowledge…education, experience, etc., is currency, something you can “spend” to benefit yourself.  It’s not.  It’s an asset (think factory equipment) you use by spending your time to benefit yourself.  Your time is the currency.

So, back to the three options.

You can be cheap…spend neither time nor money…and go with option one, and get what you pay for.

You can look at the currency you have available and decide which you have more of, and if you decide your bank account is bigger than your time account there are plenty of folks who will lighten your money load.  Some of them will even do a good job for you.

Finally, you might be like me…far richer in time than in money.  It helps, in my case,  that I also happen to be a control freak and HAVE to know what is going on.  If this is the case, get ready, because…

Now is when ya gotta really sweat!

You can dance around it all you wish…I did for 17 months…but, at some point, you will accept the fact that an OK blog can be done using tools like the WordPress GUI , but if you want a REALLY kick-ass blog, you need to learn some…er…extras, and that will make you sweat.

On some you will sweat a little.  Scrounge around Website-in-a-Weekend.net and you’ll find some good info…for free, except time…on “toolchains” and which WordPress plugins are basic needs for a quality blog.  The web is full of blogs that claim to teach you all about SEO, and a few, VERY few, will actually help.  You’ll stumble across tools that will help you track your progress, like Google Analytics and Alexa, and you’ll be feelin’ pretty good about the whole blogging thing, and then…

And then you are gonna hit a wall.  In my case it was an inability to get a video to run on my site.  It looked good when I ran it on my computer, but it was too big to upload to my blog using the WordPress GUI, and when I tried to get it on my site through YouTube, YouTube trashed it, running it at quad speed…a 6 minute video running in 1:44.  Uh-oh.

My wall was videos… yours may be something else… but if you want a truly kick-ass blog, one that stands out, you WILL have a wall… and that’s when you really start to work.

There are some things you will need to learn that a non tech savvy type wouldn’t think of.

Robert Hayles is a semi-retired Luddite, who actually wished Y2K had been as bad as advertised. Bob's hobbies include fishing, homesteading, alternative housing (yurts), cooking, annoying politicians by constantly asking them, "Is that constitutional?", reminding them who they work for, and suing them when they don't get the message. In his spare time, Bob blogs while hoping to someday take us back to 1850. Meanwhile he's happy cramming sharing his opinions with everyone. Visit Bob at Juicy Maters.
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