Only custom hosted domains are exempt from the change. Why is Google doing this? According to a recently added help page to “continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law”. Google explains the move with greater content removal flexibility as they can now manage those removals on a per country base to limit the “impact to the smallest number of readers” as content removed “due to a specific country’s law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD”.

The company notes that users who want to visit the original domain name can do so by accessing blogspost.com/ncr for that. It is not clear if this can also be attached to deep links, or if it only works to access the root domain of a particular blog.

It is definitely a confusing move both from a webmaster and site visitor perspective. Especially site regulars may think that something’s not right with the site if they are redirected automatically. Some may even believe that they are redirected by a hacked site or computer virus.

What’s your take on this development? Lets discuss it in the comments. (via Techdows)

It is also not clear if users who are locked out of the country domain can access the ncr version of the site, or if they are blocked from accessing that version as well. It is however likely that Google will first check the country of origin before making the redirect, which would suggest that users would be blocked from accessing ncr versions if the blog is blocked in their country.

Blog owners on the other hand may fear that the change will impact their search engine rankings or visibility. Google will make use of the rel”canonical” tag to prevent search engines from indexing different country versions of the same blog or post. It is however still possible that some webmasters will notice negative effects of the change.

More than three years have past and looking back, I can firmly say that this was the best decision of my life. It was not always easy and I’m still struggling at times. This post is about the good things, bad things, and advice that I would like to share.

Full time blogging is not for everyone. You are from that moment on responsible for your well being, and that of your family. You need to get up and write. I write 365 days a year which may be an extreme case.

I learned to reduce my output at times to recover and gain strengths. Regular Ghacks reader may have noticed that I started to write less on weekends and holidays. Those are my recovery periods. I still write between one and four posts on these days, but the reduced output gives me time to concentrate on other things.

I have not been on a lot of holidays in the past three years, my trip to Israel and Vienna have been the two exceptions. I try to write and schedule articles in advanced to enjoy those trips. Still, I have to spend at least an hour or so per day to check the blogs, websites, servers and emails.

I met lots of great people, fellow bloggers, entrepreneurs and companies, and even more charlatans and thiefs. When I began blogging in 2005 I read all the posts of the self-proclaimed problogging gurus. This stopped when I realized that they had nothing to offer but self-promotion.

I started concentrating on the business aspects and learned a lot about SEO and business marketing at that time. It took me more than two years to get there, a process from noob to someone who knows what he is doing online, what works, and what does not.

Being a fulltime blogger has other implications. Bloggers can make money in two ways: Advertisement or writing content. If you have your own website you usually combine the two. Managing the advertisement side of business takes lots of time, especially if you have a blog with visitors from all over the world.

Advertising wise, you usually make use of Google Adsense, because it can deliver ads to a world wide audience. Banner advertisements on the other hand are usually limited to a few English speaking countries. Some companies use low paying ads for the rest of the world, the majority tends to ignore it.

Another advertising related problem is that you often get emails from new companies who want to sell your ad space. You know have the option to try them out to see if they perform better than your current company, or deny the proposal outright. If you try them out you may end up with a big dip in revenue if they perform not as well as your previous advertiser. It seldom happened that a new company outperformed my active advertisers. I suggest A-B tests for those cases which give you better comparison options.

Then there is the webmaster side of things. If you run your own sites, you are responsible for your websites and servers. You need to make sure that they are accessible, that the contents are up to date, that they load fast enough, that bills are paid, domain names renewed and so on.

It is possible to automate a few of the things. I’m working with a company that monitors my websites and servers 24/7. If anything that is monitored goes down, I get an SMS no matter where I’m. (see Monitor Your Servers With Livewatch).

But you cannot automate everything. I spend about 30 to 60 minutes per day for webmaster related tasks. Fix broken links, moderate comments, update scripts, make changes to the pages, design or structure of the site, check web statistics and reply to users and companies who contacted me.

This can become a fulltime job on some days, for instance if a site goes down, if a site is moved to a new server or if I have made the decision to change a site’s theme (never change a running system).

You think that being a writer, webmaster and marketing expert is all that you need to be to be an independent full time blogger? Think again. Enter SEO.

Search engine optimization, love it or hate it. Still, it is one of the essential skills that you need. You could outsource your SEO, but believe me when I say that you will have a very, very, very, hard time finding a reliable SEO company that does your SEO for acceptable rates.

Don’t even think of hiring a SEO on a webmaster forum. If you frequent there you may have seen the packages that they offer. 20k visitors for $x, Mininets, 10,000 backlinks for $49, profile links, web 2.0 links, comment links, autoblogs, private blog networks and more.

The core problem with the majority of offers is that they can hurt the site’s rankings, besides that the majority of them rely on link building that many would call outright spam.

SEO is in my opinion the hardest part. If you do something wrong you can crash your site, get it banned in the search engines. If you want to do it right, you need to monitor every move which takes lots of time and effort on your part.

Without SEO on the other hand, your site won’t take off. Sure, you may get lucky and see an article of your site promoted on sites like Slashdot or Reddit, or constantly mentioned on popular blogs like Lifehacker. But that’s an exception, not the rule.

Traffic does not automatically come even if you have the best content about a certain topic. That’s where SEO comes into play, to get that content into the open, recognized.

You can do a lot of SEO groundwork on the site, onpage optimizations, good internal linking structure and so on, but you eventually come to a point where you need to add offsite SEO. If you can affort it hire a reputable SEO company. Most bloggers, including me, cannot affort that on the other hand.

One of the options that I want to explore in the coming months is guest blogging on other sites.

Lastly, as a blogger you are also dependent on others; Especially on search engines, referring sites and your visitors of course. Ghacks experienced two huge drops in traffic after recent Google algorithm changes. A false positive so to say but nevertheless extremely hurting. both financially and mentally. It was never that bad that I thought about quitting, but it was close. The site recovered each time after three months.

The lesson I learned from that? Diversify your traffic profile. Get a newsletter, a Facebook page, Twitter. Get the word out on sites like Reddit, Yahoo answers, become a brand that people know and trust. You cannot be dependent on one main source of traffic.

I would do a lot of things differently if I would have to start all over again starting with the domain name. Should have picked .com and not .net. It is not a major thing so.
Still, blogging is fun and while it is stressful at times it is also very rewarding. I can work from home, and every other place with an Internet connection.

The post has gotten a bit longer than I wanted it to become. I apologize for that. If you have any questions about blogging, or Ghacks let me know and I try my best to answer them.

WikiLeaks has now revealed that in 2008 the US State Department was in discussions with President Mubarak’s government about unblocking an Egyptian blogger who had apparently been trying to expose police abuses in the country.

In the cable, an extract from which you can see below, the US describe the blogger as a “Human-rights activist”.

The Egyptian police have had particular criticism in the last week because of the heavy-handed approach they took with protesters.  This is unlike the Egyptian army which said it would not interfere with protesters and would restrict itself to protecting important buildings.

The cable doesn’t reveal why the two videos were removed, though given that the US State Department had to contact the Egyptian government we can probably guess.

While the US and Egypt have been close allies for years now, efforts are still being made to restore full Internet and other data services to the country but companies such as Google and Twitter have stepped in to allow some people to get messages out of the country in recent days.

Remembering might work for a few ideas or someone with a photographic memory but most bloggers need to write down their ideas and findings somehow. Some simply bookmark the pages but that leaves the ideas behind because they obviously cannot be bookmarked.

Others use a text editor to post the ideas and websites. That’s an option but not a very sophisticated one. Last but not least there are note taking applications online and for the computer desktop.

BlogIdeas probably falls into the latter category although it has been designed to provide bloggers with a blogging software to store their blogging ideas.

The multi-lingual program (German and English) stores ideas that are added by the user. Each idea consists of a category, title, sources and text. They are added to the main interface after creation from where they can be accessed individually.

There is also a random button that supposedly picks one of the ideas randomly so that the blogger does not have to select one.

Ideas that are listed in the main interface can be edited directly in there which is great for adding new content or revising old.

BlogIdeas is an interesting blogging tool. It could use some further development so that for instance additional elements like photos or videos can be added to the ideas. And integration with popular blogging software scripts would also be very nice to directly move the idea and information to the content there. But that’s also possible manually right now by simply copying and pasting the contents.

BlogIdeas can be downloaded from the developer’s website over at Stevie’s Website. The program displays a language selection screen on first startup. It should run on most Windows operating systems providing that the Microsoft .net Framework 3.5 is installed.

1. Comment moderation and spam

Comment moderation and spam are two of the most time consuming aspects of a webmaster’s workday. A high profile blog can get thousands of spam comments a day which are then queued up in a spam folder somewhere. Even the best antispam tools do not offer a 100% protection against spam. Another trade-off is that false positives tend to increase with every new antispam plugin and script installed which can frustrate visitors so that they either stop posting comments or leave the site to never come back.

2. Email Support

Most websites have a contact form or other means of contacting the webmaster or a person responsible by email. These emails can contain tech support topics, requests (either for new articles, help, guest blogging or advertising), comments, spam or rude remarks. Tech support questions are usually the most time consuming to answer especially if it is not possible to test the problem locally. Webmasters obviously do not have to answer emails but it is good behavior if they do in a timely manner (except for spam and the rude remark emails). It is still a time consuming process especially on high traffic websites.

3. Updates and Security

It is of uttermost importance to run the latest version of scripts and software on a website. Old versions can contain security or memory holes, incompatibilities or missing features. Many hackers wait for security releases and start searching for websites that still run an older version on the day the new releases get announced. Updates on the other hand are only one part of the security concept. Scripts on the server side can improve security by preventing brute force attacks or notifying tech support. Webmasters do not necessarily have access to these features especially on shared hosting but some security add-ons and features can be installed by them as well. This includes setting the right access rights for directories, making sure to use non-standard usernames, directories and database prefixes or installing scripts and plugins that increase a website’s security.

4. Features and Plugins

Webmasters have to keep an eye on the development of new plugins and features. WordPress webmasters for example have thousands of plugins at their disposal that get constantly updated. Additions are posted in the dozens daily and it can be quite hard to keep up with them. There is however always the possibility to find a plugin or script that adds a new interesting feature to a website or is able to replace an existing script by providing an increase in performance or functionality. One of the main reasons why many webmasters stick with one content management system is that it is easier to keep an overview of the advancements (and other things including security) that are made.

5. Design

Not all webmasters have to be design-aces. It is perfectly possible to download templates and themes for many different types of content management systems or websites and use these with little modification. Another option is to order a custom theme from a designer. Small changes on the other hand are usually performed by the webmaster. This includes changing a logo, adding a graphic or other elements.

6. Performance

A slow loading website does not necessarily mean that the server the website is hosted is not capable of delivering the performance the website needs. Other things can play a role here including scripts and plugins installed. External scripts, like advertisement or third party widgets, can slow down a website tremendously. Even more so if the domain the data is loaded from is experiencing technical problems as well. A webmaster needs to make sure that the website can be loaded as fast as possible. While third party scripts are usually in the top list of elements that slow down a website the problems can also be caused by large multimedia contents like unoptimized images, broken scripts, not optimized loading sequences or not making use of compression techniques or image concatenation.

Many tools can help in the analysis including the XHTML Validator over at W3C, Firebug or YSLOW.

7. Testing and Compatibility

A website has to be tested with various web browsers to ensure that the user experience is similar in all cases and that it is possible to connect to the website with all popular web browsers. Webmasters also do a lot of testing that include testing advertisement, plugins, scripts or element positions on their website. A classical example is to test various advertisement positions on a website to find the one that is yielding the highest earnings for the webmaster. Other possibilities include testing various positions for content to increase pageviews or decrease the number of visitors who leave a website on the first page without visiting a second one.

8. Advertising

Not all websites and blogs run advertisements. Webmasters who do place ads on their websites open a new can of worms. Statistics have to be checked regularly to make sure that the ads perform well. Ads need to be tested (if possible) in various ways including different positions, color schemes and even different advertisers. Monitoring various webmaster forums and blogs for new advertising opportunities and tips is a must do.

9. Hosting, Domain and Billing

Webmasters using free webhosts do not have to worry about these. But webmasters with their own domain name and web hosting account need to keep an eye on a few things including expiration dates and paying subscriptions in time. This is usually not a big issue and not that time consuming unless hundreds or thousands of domains are hosted at dozens of different web hosters or web servers.

10. Networking

Networking is probably the most important aspect of being a webmaster. You tend to get the best tips from a network of webmasters who work in the same niche. I consider the day I met Everton from Connected Internet one of my luckiest days in my life. Not only have we exchanged information that helped us get rich (haha) and improve our websites; No, we also decided to run a joint project which turned out to be very profitable.

Not everything is about being profitable of course. Some tips are only passed around in close circles because many webmasters do not post their findings and experiences on forums or websites. This can be a better way of placing ads on a blog, a new plugin or script that a website benefits from or general tips.

Verdict:

I’m not sure if this article covered all the aspects. There are probably more including tax reports, law suites and the like. Please post a comment if you have something to add or would like to voice your opinion on the subject. Being a webmaster is more than meets the eye.

Gbutts displays a huge list of Google services after installation which can be used to select the Google services that should be displayed in Firefox. The services that have been selected are then available as a toolbar that has to be dragged and dropped to a Firefox toolbar. It can for example be placed next to the address field in the Firefox web browser to provide one click access to the selected Google services.

The selected services can either be displayed as buttons in the toolbar so that they can be clicked on instantly or as a dropdown menu which would save some space in the toolbar if more than a handful of services are selected. The dropdown menu would increase the click count to access one of the Google services to two however.

GButts (that means Google Buttons actually) could be an interesting add-on for users who work with multiple Google services throughout the day and want to access these services as comfortably as possible. Everyone else is probably better of using bookmarks or creating keyboard shortcuts to access the Google services.

So, what is BloGTK? BloGTK is an application that allows you to easily blog from the comfort of your own desktop. “But wait!”, you say, “I can blog already from my desktop, with the help of my browser.” Yes you can. But with BloGTK you can blog off line, save drafts, have multiple accounts, and more.  So, let’s take a look at how you can start using BloGTK as your desktop blogging system.

Installing BloGTK

Before we get into connecting to your blog we have to install the application first. This is very simple. You can install BloGTK from the command line with a command such as:

sudo apt-get install blogtk

or

yum install blogtk

Or you can open up your Add/Remove Software utility, search for “blogtk” (no quotes), select the resulting entry, and click Apply to install.

Once BloGTK is installed you will find the menu entry in the Internet submenu of your Applications or Main menu.

Making the connection

As I mentioned earlier, BloGTK doesn’t offer as many connection types as some of the other tools. But it does connect to:

• Blogger
• MoveableType
• MetaWeblog API

Now from the last listing you would think that BloGTK could connect to Drupal, WordPress, and many more types of accounts. As of the current release (1.1) BloGTK doesn’t handle the MetaWeblog API well. So for the purposes of this article I will show you how to connect to a Blogger account with this software.

Figure 1

The first thing you need to do is go to the Edit menu and select the Accounts and Settings entry. When this new window opens (see Figure 1).

Notice the Server URL. For Blogger this is the exact URL you need to use to connect. Other than that you will enter the username and password for your Blogger account and make sure Blogger is selected from the list of Blogging Systems.

Once you have this done click Save and then click OK.

You should notice, at the bottom of the main BloGTK window (see Figure 2) the instructions telling you to use File/Connect to connect (or re-connect) to your server.

Figure 2

You do not have to connect to the server right away. You can create your blog entry first and then connect to the server and post your entry. Or you can create an entry and save the entry for later posting.

To save an entry you go about creating and, when you are ready to save, click the File menu and select “Save Post As…”, give the draft a name, and save the draft. You can then open the saved post for editing later.

If you want to post immediately you only have to create your post, connect to your account, and click the “Post Entry” button.

In order to connect to your account you go to the File menu and click “Connect”.

Gotchas

Outside of the seriously lacking account types you can use, there is a gotcha you will find when using Blogger. The Blogger system is using a newer API and the current iteration of BloGTK can not make use of all of its features. For instance, you can not add a title to your blogs with this release. You also can not use the Extended Entry or Excerpt features as well. Outside of that, BloGTK works just fine.

Final thoughts

When the 2.0 release of BloGTK hits the repositories this application’s usefulness will be extended quite a bit. All of the Blogger features will work and, hopefully, more APIs will be added so more accounts can be used. Until then BloGTK can be thought of as a quick and easy way to add basic entries to your Blogger account. If you don’t want to wait that long, consider helping the creator with the updates. I look forward to being able to use BloGTK more often in the future.

Someone who wants to earn money from blogging needs traffic more than anything else. It is not hard to put Google Adsense on a blog and earn money with it. The ad might not be optimized but it will still earn money if the blog receives traffic. Without traffic, there will be no money no matter how optimized or clever the ad units are.

Blogging for a period of three years teaches a lot if you are eager to learn. Bloggers learn about search engine optimization which is a profession in itself, about monetization, about the blogging plattform, how to interact with visitors / customers / fellow bloggers and more.

It’s a steep learning curve but if you master it you will be successful. Here are a few blogging tips that helped me a lot:

• Keep Going: That’s the most important part of it all. Many bloggers give up after blogging for a few weeks because they cannot see that traffic comes in. No visitors equals low motivation and that’s usually the point when they decide to quit.

  Some search engines apply an automatic filter to new websites (some call it sandbox) that prevents them from ranking for popular keywords to avoid spam. It is natural that new sites will not rank well for terms like business or credit cards while they will have lesser problem ranking for long tail keywords.

• Keywords: Speaking of which. Keywords are the essence of a blog. Search engines analyse blog posts and pick out keywords that they think the blog post is about. They then give the keyword a score and compare it to other sites that rank for that keyword and place the new website on a specific rank in the search engine for that keyword. Other factors may weight in like the new blog filter but that’s basically how it works.

  If bloggers are serious about traffic generation they need to understand the keyword concept and how they do keyword research. Keyword research meaning to find profitable low competition keywords that the blog can most likely rank well for.

• Long Tail Keywords: Long Tail refers to keywords that are very specific and usually consist of a few words. Blog is not a long term keyword while How To Create A Blog is. Long Tail keywords receive less traffic than their more generic counterparts but that traffic is usually targeted.
• Build a Network: If you blog on your own you will miss opportunities. It is impossible keeping up with all the news and trends related to blogging. A network of bloggers that target the same niche can help each other in several ways. If they come upon an interesting topic or option they will inform their fellow bloggers about it. They can also promote the blogs of other network members in their own blogs.
• Don’t read the Chows: Don’t read the blogs of those so called probloggers. The only thing they usually care about is their own bankroll. The products that they promote will earn them money because other bloggers will join or buy them because of their recommendations but there will be no or small gain for the little guy who bought the product. Their sites are about an image that they have to keep up and about upselling products to newbies. Stay away from them. Look at my link list for recommendations.

Here is a short link list:

• Make Money For Beginners
• Internet Marketing School
• Seo Zombie
• Google Adwords Keywords Tool (Keyword Research)
• Wordtracker Free Keywords (Keyword Research)
• SEO Quake (Firefox Extension)

If you read the three blogs posted above you will learn a lot in short time. Those are honest bloggers who do not try to sell you yet another “make money in no time” product that only works for them because they can sell it to you.

Seo Zombie is a site that I discovered a while ago and the guy does a good job as well, his Keyword Sniping Case Study sounds interesting and might be a great way to learn if he continues posting updates.

The keyword research tools are essential to discover keywords that can be target that pay well and have enough traffic to make them worthwhile.

Seo Quake finally is a Firefox extension that displays all kinds of “SEO” information like Pagerank, links and domain age on the screen.

If you have any questions about blogging let me know and I try to answer them.

Zoundry Raven is a portable blog editor that I discovered yesterday at the Download Squad (Welcome Back, btw). It’s compatible to multiple blog plattforms including WordPress, Typepad but also Blogger and LiveJournal. A total of 24 different blog plattforms are supported currently and chance is that yours is included.

Zoundry Raven asks during installation if it should be installed as a portable blog editor. This would mean that you could install it on a removable drive, for example an USB stick, and use it from there no matter where you go.

Before you can start using it you need to add at least one account to the application. All that needs to be done is to enter a url which will automatically be analyzed by the software. It will detect the blogging plattform that is being used and request login credentials.

After that all (!) posts, images, links and tags get downloaded and it is possible to look through them and open them online. Each post can be edited using the available WYSIWYG editor. One thing that I think is missing is the ability to check all links for broken links, that would be a very valuable feature.

The editor creates a tag cloud that displays all the tags used. A click on a tag loads the articles related to it which can be edited. It is for instance possible to add or remove tags that way as well. (removing tags is not really recommended because the search engines will have a broken link in their index)

The most important part of a blog editor is obviously writing and publishing new blog entries. That’s pretty comfortable as well. You click on the Write button, pick a website, categories, type in title, tags and start writing the article.

Writing an article that way is pretty comfortable and has the advantage that it can be done offline. Publishing the article on the other hand lacks the feature of scheduling that article which is a pretty important feature in my opinion.

Several media storage providers can be added to use additional space for files and images that are embedded in the article. They range from custom ftp accounts to Picasa and Flickr.

Zoundry Raven is a nice and clean blog editor. If you just publish and edit articles you will probably like it. I already mentioned the features that are really missing (link checker and scheduler) which keep me from using it. The link checker would be a huge selling point in my opinion and I believe that many bloggers would install the software program just for that feature alone.

There is no information about compatibility. It runs fine on Windows XP Service Pack 3.