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What Does a Pink Limousine Have to do With Blogging? (It’s the Week in Review!)

December 18, 2009 By

(Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes)

It’s time for another one of those darned Week in Review blog posts. Sure, the bottom half is all boiler plate links from the previous week. But this top half is free form, I write about anything. Which is what makes it hard. Which is what makes it fun!

By the way, Website In A Weekend is really, really close to having its first 1000 comments. Be comment #1000, win a $15 gift certificate from Amazon.com.

I’m sure you can find something to say. How would you spend an evening in a pink limo? What’s your blogging equation? Are you on Foursquare already? Why or why not?

Be commenter #1000, I’ll add your name and a link to your site right here as well as sending you an Amazon gift certificate.

Lisis from Quest for Balance has comment #1000.

Odds

I don’t do so well collecting up odds and ends. Extreme John does though. Check out 13 of the Best WordPress Blogging Tips of the Week. Extreme John finds Website In A Weekend among the best he can find, and he finds a lot. Thanks, John!

pink_h2By the way, if you’re in the Tampa Bay area, be sure to check out John’s fleet of exotic limos. Now, I’ll be at Sea of Dreams this New Years Eve (Bassnectar is spinning), but if I were in Tampa Bay, I can’t think of anything more fun than cruising around in a pink Hummer H2 limo. Call me remarkably… superficial… but I know fun when I see it!

Foursquare

foursquareRemember that snarky footnote I left a few weeks ago about the cool new social media application as yet unspoiled by the likes of internet marketers? No? No big deal. I was reading along at In Over Your Head and it turns out Julien Smith is a fan of Four Square for the same reason I am: simple game mechanics get me out of the house trying new stuff.

Now here’s the interesting thing: more men seem to be using Four Square than women. Now I may be totally biased, but I have as many women friends on Four Square as men friends. It could be that they set their checkins as private, totally understandable.

(iTunes Buzzoutroom channel just kicked in with Pitch Black “Ape to Angel.” Sweet! We live amazing lives.)

Here’s something else really cool: Most of the men tend to orbit pretty tightly around the same spots, day in and day out. But the ladies are all over the map. I mean this literally, Four Square is location-based so when I say “all over the map” that’s exactly what I mean.

Sods

Picking up the thread from last week on quid pro quo, let’s take a look at a Confident Writing’s Blogging Equation:

Quality content + regular posting + engaging style + social media engagement = increase in readers

This is all well and good… but it doesn’t scale!

Once your blog finds real success, your time becomes too limited to continue doing those things that garnered the success. A conundrum to be sure.

The author, Joanna Young, takes another crack at the problem with Solving Tricky Blog Equations. She proposes a range of solutions from reducing posting frequency to shortening responses to simply eliminating comments.

These two articles are really good, and the community at Confident Writing is different than my community of regular readers (you know who you are). I left a couple of comments over there myself, and will be following along in my RSS feed. Check it out and let me know what you think.

New articles

Here’s what went down this week:

The Week In Review Series

Last WIAW Week in Review
Watering Holes and Quid Pro Quo – WIAW Week in Review. Great breakdown on writing a killer weekly review post, and some notes on how to deal with implicit quid pro quo (how many comments do you owe?).

Next WIAW Week in Review

Stay tuned…

Near as I can figure, pink limos don’t have squat to do with blogging. But if you read this far, you gotta admit, it was killer headline. And every blog post deserves a killer headline!

Filed Under: Building Traffic Tagged With: , , , , ,

Holiday Season Kicks Off – 2 Weeks in Review!

December 6, 2009 By

(Reading time: 6 – 9 minutes)

Another Week in Review!

It’s more like two weeks in review… Friday after Thanksgiving was a day off. In fact, between Startup Weekend and Thanksgiving, it’s been a bit slow on the blogging front around Website In A Weekend. This is by design. Insiders: expect a newsletter with some details.

The irony of it all

Poking around in my RSS reader this morning found me reading Extreme John’s latest Sunday Smash. John linked back to my “cave exploring” article (see below), along with an article on Smashing Magazine entitled “The death of the boring blog post?” Normally, I don’t link to Smashing, because their comment policy is draconian: they do not allow any linking from comments. This means no URL linked from your name. Simply put, there’s no return in commenting at Smashing, and you can’t easily visit other commentator’s websites.

Now here’s the irony: List posts have been correctly identified as some of the least valuable material on the web, for good reason, but Smashing Magazine is basically founded on list posts. Granted, nobody writes list posts like Smashing. They’re the best, by far. In any case, I read a bit of the “boring blog post” article (link above), then scanned the rest of it very quickly.

Because it was too hard to read.

V51 cover featuring Demi Moore.Yes, the article is beautiful, like a high fashion magazine. But no, I’m not going to write any articles like those. I’ll just continue to buy Vogue or V Magazine when I want my design fix.

Smashing wasn’t the first to bash on boring blog posts, and they won’t be the last. But it’s largely irrelevant. What people don’t realize is that having lots of boring blog posts, published regularly, is rewarded with traffic and search ranking. That’s a fact.

I’ll have more to say about Smashing soon. [Update 12/11/2009: In the meantime, @drawar has plenty to say in "Smashing Magazine Killed The Community (Or Maybe It Was Me)."]

I’m such a spammer

I’m going through my blog post draft queue, looking for stuff to delete. Here’s one: “WordPress Gotcha! WP SpamFree.” This is what I have so far:

Here’s the deal: I write decent, if not good comments, always. When WP-SpamFree pop ups it’s smug little “Hmmm… Your comment seems a little spammy, go back and try again.” I leave.

And I don’t return.

Feel free to provide me with advice for better commenting.

By all means, point out what is unacceptable.

Patronize me and I’ll forget you exist.

I was going to write a whole “Gotcha!” on this plugin, but it’s not worth the effort. Much better fodder for a Week in Review.

So I poked around the web a bit, to see what I could see. Due diligence and all that. As it turns out, WP-SpamFree has had a mixed reception. Some people love it. Other people have complained about it, whence the plugin author usually shows up to explain they have misconfigured it somehow. I wonder if he’ll show up here? Find more information by searching Google.

I’ve tried leaving comments on several blogs and had problems. Now, when I see this plugin, I don’t bother with leaving comments, and I don’t put the blog in my feed. It’s nothing personal at this point, just more time effective to visit someone else.

What’s your experience? Have you used this plugin? Been accused of being spammy?

For what it’s worth, Website In A Weekend uses Akismet, NoSpamNX and Cookies for Comments. Each of which use “no-configuration” configuration. Seems to be a killer combination, and I haven’t had any complaints from people unable to leave comments.

If you do have a problem leaving comments on Website In A Weekend, by all means let me know. I’ll get it handled ricky tic.

WordPress 2.9 is coming!

I’m keeping an eye on the development news, and you should too. If you haven’t been following it, there’s a lot of good stuff coming.

If I understand correctly, one of the most important new features will be extending content types past the usual “post” and “page.” This is something I’ve wanted bad enough to talk to Deacon about implementing myself… which would have meant hacking the WordPress core. I’ll have more to say about extended content types once I get a chance to look at them closely.

The latest and greatest

Here’s the last two weeks on Website In A Weekend. Did you miss anything?

The Week In Review Series

Last WIAW Week in Review
Where goes Website In A Weekend? Another Week in Review. Website In A Weekend continues to evolve: new material and products are in the pipeline, find out how you might be able to help.

Next WIAW Week in Review

Stay tuned…
Filed Under: Website Maintenance Tagged With: ,
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