That’s good because the new version introduces new system requirements that webmasters should make sure their server supports, before they upgrade. WordPress 3.2 requires as a minimum MySql 5.0.15 and PHP 5.2.4. That’s a big step from MySQL 4.1.2 and PHP 4.3. Contact your hoster if you are not sure if you server supports the minimum requirements.

Experienced webmasters can also create a php file with <? PHPINFO(); ?> as the content and upload it to their server. The file displays the information, among many others, in the browser when opened there.

The highlights of WordPress 3.2 in 40 words or less: WordPress comes with a refreshed admin design, a full screen editor for distraction free blogging, a new default HTML5 theme and an extended admin bar.

There are other things, largely under the hood that will make webmasters happy. This includes faster page loading times, dropped support for Internet Explorer 6, additional performance and speed improvements and caching of admin dashboard widgets to reduce the site’s memory footprint.

The new admin interface seems to use new typography as well, at least in some parts. Especially the font in HTML editing mode feels strange with its white space between words and a new line height. Editors who switch to the visual mode on the other hand seem to get a default font (does anyone know if it is possible to change the font in WordPress admin?)

The update notifications are as usual available right on the admin backend of the blog. Webmasters can update their blogs from within their, if configured this way. This is the fastest update option. An alternative is the download of the new version from the official website and updating via ftp or sftp.

I have updated five blogs yesterday evening and the update went well without difficulties. I will now continue to upgrade my other twenty or so blogs, such fun..

That alone should be reason enough to update WordPress to the latest version. The post mentions performance improvements without going into further details. It is therefor not clear if the improvements are measurable, and which areas of the platform have been improvement. The remaining changes list fixes for IIS6 support, taxonomy and pathinfo permalinks and various “query and taxonomy edge cases that caused some plugin compatibility issues”.

Update notifications are not displayed on all WordPress blogs yet. Webmasters should click on Dashboard > Updates to force WordPress to check for new updates. The WordPress 3.1.1. release should be listed on that page then. It is then possible to update the WordPress blog automatically from within the admin interface, or to download the new release and update the blog manually by uploading all files to the server and running the wp-admin/update.php script afterwards.

I have just finished updating 20 different WordPress blogs and the automatic updating worked on all but one without errors or problems. The one blog is a special case and it is likely that a plugin or special script interfered with the update.

The latest version of WordPress can be downloaded from this page.

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.

The update is not a security update which means that there is no rush to install it directly.

Among the new features is the option to link to existing content easier. This is done via the standard link button in the WordPress writing panel and the selection of “Or link to existing content”.

It is possible to search for related content or select one of the most recent items. The writing interface has been overhauled. The developers have many interface elements that were shown by default of the screen which should be beneficial to new users. All writing elements can be added again via the Screen Options at the top of the page.

Another addition is the new admin bar that is displayed to WordPress administrators when they navigate the WordPress frontend. The bar is actually not displayed on all of my blogs right now. I’m not sure why that is the case (likely because of CSS minifying or merging) but there is thankfully a way to disable the admin bar.

Open Users > Your Profile and locate Show Admin Bar near the top.  Remove the checkmark from “when viewing site” to disable it.

Other noteworthy features are:

• post formats, meta information used by themes
• network admin, moves the Super Admin menu out of the regular admin interface
• list-type admin screens, now sortable by column, better pagination
• exporter / importer, was overhauled.
• advanced queries, again something for developers
• custom content type improvements, again developer related
• refreshed blue admin color scheme

Interested users can visit the WordPress Codec for an in depth overview of all the features that have been added, improved or changed in the recent release.

WordPress administrators can upgrade their blog to WordPress 3.1 either directly from within the admin interface or by downloading WordPress 3.1 from the official website and installing the new version manually.

One such tool allows me to blog to my various blogs quickly. I want to introduce you to this tool so that you are quickly blogging from your GNOME desktop.

Compatible blogs

Naturally you can’t expect GNOME Blog to handle every type of blog in the blogosphere. But it does handle:

• blogs.gnome.org
• Blogger
• Livejournal
• Avogato
• Self-run WordPress
• Self-run Moveable Type
• Self-run Pyblosxom

Obviously each type of blog will have different setup requirements. Let’s examine how to connect GNOME Blog to a self-run WordPress blog.

Configuring WordPress

Figure 1

In order to blog to WordPress from GNOME Blog you have to enable remote publishing via XML-RPC. Without this set, you will not be able to blog from outside of the web interface. To configure this option you must first log on to your WordPress blog (with administration rights) and then click on Settings > Writing. In that section (near the top) you will see the spot where you can enable this (see Figure 1).

Once you have checked off the box associated with XML-RPC, scroll down and click Save Changes.

Now let’s install and use GNOME Blog.

Installation

Installation is simple. I will demonstrate the installation on a Ubuntu 10.10 desktop. Follow these steps:

1. Open up the Ubuntu Software Center.
2. Search for the term “blog” (No quotes).
3. Click the Install button associated with GNOME Blog.

That’s it. You will now find the tool in Applications > Internet > Blog Entry Poster.

Using GNOME Blog

Figure 2

When you fire up GNOME Blog click on the Preferences window so you can choose the type of blog you want to write to. From this new window (see Figure 2) select “Self-Run WordPress” from the Blog Type drop-down and then fill in the rest of the information.

You will not be able to select the Blog Name from the drop-down until you have configured the URL, username, and password. Once you have done that click Lookup Blogs and select the blog you want to post to from the drop-down.

Once you have selected your blog, click the Close button, and you’re ready to begin.

Posting

Figure 3

Posting with GNOME Blog is simple. From the main window (see Figure 3) you can enter a title and the body of your blog. You can also add a link into the body of the blog by clicking the Add Link… button and entering the link title and url.

Upon completion of your blog entry, click the Post Entry button and your blog post will make its way through the ethernet to your blog.

Final thoughts

It should be obvious that you can not do much as far as formatting, adding images, and the like. But for simple text-based blog posts, you can’t beat the simplicity and ease of use of GNOME Blog.

The Spaces migration to WordPress.com will be automated and easy, ensuring the movement of blog content, integrated media, comments and links is simple. 8.5% of all web sites on the internet are now powered by WordPress, which represents over 26 million publishers who use WordPress to power their blogs and web sites. About half of those sites – 13 million – are hosted by us on WordPress where they attract one of the largest audiences on the internet: of over a quarter billion people every  month.

Windows Live Spaces will be formally closed next March and users who do not want to be moved to WordPress will be given the option to download their blog in HTML form or simply delete it.

Windows Live Spaces is, like I said, one of the least used blogging platforms primarily because of its simplicity and a lack of good customisation options.  As a compliment to the other Windows Live services it worked well, but was never as popular as it could or perhaps should have been given Microsoft’s huge user base.

The move comes as Microsoft streamlines the Live services and introduce new ones to stand alongside the existing main applications and services such as messenger, which has been around in one for or another now for twenty years.

Now more details have emerged and the BBC have reported that it was indeed the FBI who ordered the services’ closure because of a “link to terrorist material” and an al-Qaeda hit list”.

BurstNet, which hosts the service said that Blogetry.com had also posted “bomb-making instructions”.

The question remains though if the FBI acted within reason and within the limits of its powers in closing the service.  It stands to reason that not all of Blogetry’s 70,000 users were terrorists or support terrorism.  It’s far more likely that there were no more than a handful of blogs using the service that could have been considered as directly supporting terrorism.

The Centre for Democracy and Technology has also expressed concern about what happens to the 70,000 plus bloggers who have had their blogs terminated.

“As a free speech advocate, I certainly think it is unfortunate that what I assume are many thousands of perfectly innocent blogs were taken down here,” John Morris, the head of the Centre for Democracy & Technology’s free expression project told BBC News.

“I hope our society is able to figure out a way to address one bad apple in a pool of content without collateral consequences for the innocent speakers. This (case) highlights the fragility of speech on the internet when thousands of speakers have their speech removed.”

As of right now, twenty four hours later and there’s no word on whether these perfectly legitimate blogs will be restored and what, if any, rights the users of Blogetry might have.  Unsurprisingly the FBI have only said that they do not comment on current investigations.

Update: Blogetery blogs are online again. The service is offering free blogs and pro accounts based on the WordPress blog system.

We here at Ghacks are currently running nine WordPress plugins. That’s not a lot when compared to most other websites. Our sister site Windows 7 News for instance is using 17 plugins which is almost twice the number installed on Ghacks.

You will find some plugins that most WordPress webmasters have installed and some that only a few are using. Here we go

Akismet

WordPress blogs need an antispam plugin to protect the blog from spam comments, trackbacks and pingbacks. Akismet is shipped with every WordPress installation and it feels only natural to use this plugin. We are not very fond of it on the other hand but the lack of a solid alternative is what makes us use it.

All In One SEO

One of the SEO plugins that are available for WordPress. Another highly popular plugin that optimizes some aspects of the blog to increase its search engine visibility. There are other plugins like SEO ultimate out there that we are testing on some of our other websites but we stick to All In One SEO here at Ghacks.[link]

Contact Form ][

One of the many contact form plugins that are available. It was very easy to setup (by simply integrating the command on a page or post) and has been reliable all those years.[link]

Google XML Sitemaps

It is not only compatible with Google but also with Yahoo and Bing. It creates a sitemap regularly and pings the search engines to notify them about the updates sitemap.[link]

Internal Link Building

This is the first plugin in this list that not many WordPress webmasters are using. It makes use of a similar concept that can be seen at Wikipedia: Internal Linking. It allows the webmaster to define keywords and urls they point to. Blog posts are then automatically scanned for those keywords and if they exist they are made to link to the url defined in the plugin’s options. The main purpose of this is to improve the internal linking to push relevant keywords but it can also be used for other purposes like advertising.[link]

Subscribe To Comments

Provides the option to subscribe to the comments of a post so that a notification is received whenever a new comment is posted. It is an alternative to comment RSS feeds that are automatically enabled on the blog.[link]

W3 Total Cache

A few caching plugins fight for dominance. We have been using WP Super Cache for quite some time until we discovered W3 Total Cache. Back then we had to use other plugins like one for compressing CSS files to optimize the loading times of the blog. W3 Total Cache combines not only caching but also minifying of scripts (JavaScript and CSS) eliminating the need for the CSS Compress plugin. It also supports CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) and is more complete than the other caching plugins. Takes a bit longer to configure but is well worth the troubles.[link]

WP-PageNavi

This is the only plugin next to Akismet that we have been using since the creation of this blog. It allows the webmaster to display numbers at the end of each index page instead of the Next Last navigational elements. [link]

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

This one supports caching and displays related posts beneath each article and also in the RSS feed if desired. We had some troubles with it because of the large number of tags but once we disabled tags from being included in the calculation it worked fine. [link]

The huge amount of traffic that we get every day has forced us to optimize the blog and get rid of some plugins that we would be using otherwise. We have for instance removed social bookmarking icon plugins which reduced the page loading time and did not prove to be as effective as we hoped they would be (meaning that not many visitors clicked on them).

Are you running similar plugins on your website? Let us hear about them in the comments.

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.

Scheduled posts would not be published at the time configured by the user but appear as missed in the list of posts forcing the webmaster to reschedule and hope for the best or to publish it manually.

WordPress 2.9.1 fixes this annoying bug and 23 others that are listed in WordPress Trac. Five of the bugs listed have been rated high while the majority received a normal rating. Several updates fix installation and upgrade issues that webmasters might have experienced. Webmasters with those issues might want to install or upgrade straight to WordPress 2.9.1 which might fix the issues experienced by those webmasters.

Our blogs have not picked up the new version of WordPress yet but it is likely that this will happen in the next few hours.

WordPress 2.9.1 can be downloaded at the official WordPress website. The list of bug fixes is available here.

According to Mashable there are two clues that your blog has been successfully attacked by the computer worm:

There are two clues that your WordPress site has been attacked.

There are strange additions to the pretty permalinks, such as example.com/category/post-title/%&(%7B$%7Beval(base64_decode($_SERVER%5BHTTP_REFERER%5D))%7D%7D|.+)&%/. The keywords are “eval” and “base64_decode.”

The second clue is that a “back door” was created by a “hidden” Administrator. Check your site users for “Administrator (2)” or a name you do not recognize. You will probably be unable to access that account.

Webmasters are asked to update their blogs to the latest version of WordPress immediately. Those that have been hit by the computer worm should backup all files, export their settings, and do a clean install of WordPress. More help is offered at the WordPress website.

Rant:

It’s Sunday and it is time for a little rant. Webmasters who do not update their blogs as soon as a new version of their blogging software is released are acting stupid. A WordPress update usually takes less than ten minutes and ensures that the blog and server is protected from attacks like these. Webmasters who do not have the time to perform these updates should consider switching to a hosted blogging platform like that at Blogger or WordPress.com. The automatic update option that has been introduced in recent WordPress versions makes it even easier to update the blog as soon as a new version is released. Webmasters who cannot do this should not operate a self hosted blog, period.

One interesting application for that purpose is RightThumb for the Windows operating system. It is a portable application that can be integrated into the Windows Explorer context menu to offer the option to create a thumbnail from selected images.

Several parameters of the thumbnail creation can be configured upon startup including the output format for the thumbnail image, the maximum dimension for the image, the quality of jpg images, compression of png images, the resample filter and if desired a prefix identifier for the image. The image will be automatically sharpened after resizing and it is possible to select a different output folder for the thumbnail image.

The program can be closed after the initial configuration and is from then on accessible from the Windows context menu if that option has been selected. Right Thumb (via Barry’s Computer Tips) is a free download for the windows operating system.

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.

Some changes that WordPress admins will notice right away are speed improvements in the admin interface and the ability to change more aspects of the layout than before. WordPress will for instance automatically adjust the layout according to the screen size of the web browser window with options to change the amount of columns and what is being displayed on the screen.

It is now possible to remove or add information when viewing posts, pages or comments in the admin interface with the additional option to change the number of items that are displayed on the screen. It is now therefor possible to change the default number of comments that are displayed on screen which could have been achieved before only by hacking system files.

Other improvements include a new theme installer which allows the webmaster to search for and install themes right from the WordPress admin interface without leaving the website. This is a similar feature to the automatic plugin installation that was added in earlier versions.

The WordPress Codex contains a list of all changes and additions that have been added to WordPress 2.8. The new version can be downloaded from the main WordPress site.

Once you have it all set up you can either enter your site URL or enter the location of your sitemap XML. If you use WordPress the Google Sitemap Generator plugin will create and maintain this file for you, so you can just add the location of that.

You can then generate a report which will take a while, depending on how many links there are. I found this tool handy, but there are many drawbacks. The main one is that it checks del.icio.us, Hatena and Livedoor. Since the developer is Japanese I am guessing it is aimed at the Japanese needs, but delicios is something most of us use, so it’s still handy to have.

The bigger problem I had is that it took me 10 tries to get it to display a report for my blogHack Your Day, which now has 380 links. The bar just froze at a number between 75% and 82% and refused to move. I would like to add however that the actual application did not freeze up, which is something I rarely see.

For those of you who have great big blogs this is a bummer, I mean gHacks has well over 5,000 posts now, that’s just 5,000+ links for the posts, so generation would probably not work at all. Despite all this, I would welcome any additions and improvements as this would be the tool for a lot of bloggers! Also, if you know any similar tools, especially ones with Digg, Stumbleupon and Reddit can you let us know in the comments?

Apart from the reason that content is weighed most heavily by Google, all other so called “methods” are temporary. In the beginning there was the “fill your site with invisible keywords” method. The point of this was to create a huge chunk of text containing keywords, and setting its visibility to none. This means its still in the code, so Google sees it, but users don’t. Try that now and you’ll get a ban in seconds. Then came the meta tags period where people used to give huge-long descriptions and lengthy meta keyword lists. While not such a ‘sin’, it won’t give you what you’re looking for.

My point is that everyone wants to cheat search engines and while it is of course a possibility, its only a matter of time before they get ahead of you. If you’re lucky you fall back a few hundred places, if not, you’re banned. As with every other business you have to work at it. I mean gHacks has 4,851 posts right now, over almost four years, that’s about 3.5 posts every day. Not all are written by Martin nowadays, but I bet he started the blog alone, and up until not too long ago he had a day job.

So if you want to go instantly to number one, you really need a great idea, like Twitter, Remember The Milk and so on. Otherwise you will have to keep at it. if you’re passionate about what you’re doing, you’ll find so many little successes on the way. When I started my own blog, Hack Your Day after about a 5 days if you typed “Hack Your Day” into Google I was at number 8-9, Hack a Day, Lifehack and so on were in front of me. After a month or so I was at number 1. This is of course of no use at all, but still a small victory, showing I’m doing something right.

If you’re doing a project on the web, especially a blog, keep in mind that you won’t be successful in a matter of days, it will most like take years if it ever happens at all. Hey, if it was easy, where would the challenge be?

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.

See the problem is that I never really “got” Twitter… I tried, I really did. I signed up and followed people and Twittered regularly, but it never really did it for me. Eventually I just forgot about it.

Enter Plurk.

Considering micro-blogging isn’t something I’ve really got into you may be surprised I wanted to introduce you to this service. Some say it’s just a better featured Twitter clone, but I think it has a great deal more potential then that.

It’s got a wicked name for a start.

No seriously, the name is actually brilliant. It manages to sound suitably web 2.0 without taking a killing the consonants and even works perfectly as a verb. Check out how they explain it:

• Plurk as stalkerati central: People + Lurk = Plurk
• Plurk as an amalgam of Play + Work: Play-Work. Plurk is what scientists do. It is the enthusiastic, energetic application of oneself to the task at hand as a child excitedly plays; it is the intense arduous, meticulous work of an artist on their life-long masterpiece; it is joyful work. (credit)
• Plurk as acronym: Peace, Love, Unity, Respect, Karma
• Verb potential: “Oh I googled this –> Oh I plurked it” Easy enough to wrap around in any form. Plurked, plurking, plurkers, plurks. Little p, big P, it’s catchy, snippy and sweet.

I agree.

It also demonstrates the sites tongue-in-cheek sense of humour, something which actually works in this case… *ahem* Sphinn (“Stop right there! We’re going to have to see some ID”). In fact the Plurk blog is quite entertaining and worth a read.

You’ll find a nice attractive UI which features a colour scheme very similar to the WordPress dashboard. Here is an image of what to expect:

As you can see I have no contacts so it’s not very fun at the moment, I would like to test drive the service properly so so why don’t you join up and try it out too!

One particular element I’m liking is the horizontal orientated timeline, rather then the vertical focus of most services. I’ll be interested to see how it’ll handle a lot of contacts because having to scroll across and down to view “plurks” will be a pain.

Anyway, this isn’t just a Twitter-plus-more-features start-up, it’s a whole new take on micro-blogging and social networking in general.

Expect it to be big soon!

(If not, just expect it to be in TechCrunch’s Deadpool by early next week)