Entries Tagged 'Blogs' ↓

So you’ve got a blog. How do you market it? How do you get people to subscribe to that RSS feed you have? How do you keep them coming back?

I looked around the web and found some blogs that give tips and techniques for marketing your blog. Here’s are a few links:

• Lee Odden gives 30 Tips of Marketing Your Blog. And on the same site Jolina covers the 8 Tips to More Effective Blogging from Aaron Wall’s session at SMX West.
• Heidi Cohen offers some Blog Marketing Strategies (especially for corporates) in this 2005 post.
• Blog Marketing Journal has good collection of posts on different techniques for marketing and promoting your blog. They cover SEO, email surveys and more.
• A lot of online marketing techniques can be applied to promote your blog. Check this Wikipedia article for some basic tactics in the right column.

How do you promote your blog? Or do you?

I never consciously marketed my blog, but I think I could use some of the tips in links above

I have a hard time managing comments on my blog! There are a few popular posts, and I keep getting hundreds of spam comments everyday. Interestingly the blog features in top 5 results if you search for entrepreneur on Google.

I have used many anti spam strategies over the years. I used to manage comments by moderating them all when I started in August 2005. When that became too much, I opted for WP HashCash. WP HashCash puts in an encrypted key in each comment message and checks for its validity on submission. This allows browsers with JavaScript alone, leaving most of the spam bot attacks.

But somewhere the spammers got more intelligent and WP HashCash didn’t quite stop all the spam.

Tarique suggested moving to Akismet. So around September 2006 I did!

Around December 2006, Akismet couldn’t catch a lot of spam, but I lived with it. Over the last 1.5 years, Akismet stopped some 1,60,000 spam comments.

But then now, it was getting too much. A lot of purely spam comments were not detected by Akismet, and I had to find something else.

And I think I got the best solution to stop spam comments so far!

Math Comment Spam Protection + Simple Trackback Validation!

Essentially, the Match Comment plugin asks the users to enter sum of two digits on the comment posting form. We assume only humans can understand and answer this. Comment spam bots will not. So you get comments only from humans.

The Trackback validator checks the IP/Domain of all trackbacks you get, and also the page that generated the trackback. It checks for the link to your site / post and if found, marks it as valid comment. Everything else is spam.

I have Akismet on top of it, so if there are humans submitting spam comments, Akismet will catch that.

These three plugins combined, have stopped all spam comments! I now have zero spam!

There will be time when bots will become more intelligent and circumvent the current system. And then I will find something else!

What are your experiences with spam comments? What do you use to protect yourself?

Shantanu told me about a new Firefox add-on he has written a while ago. He also discussed it during the Mozilla Indic meet we had. It’s quite nifty, and I thought I should share it with

1. Create an account on Mozilla if you don’t have it. Login to your account.
2. Check Show Sandbox in Profile and Save.
3. Click on Sandbox on upper left.
4. Search for “girgit”. You will get this page.
5. Install!
6. If you want to checkout the source code, follow the “View the source” link on the page.

Try it out!

I have WordPress 2, Gallery 2, and the WPG2 plugin to insert Gallery photos in Wordpress.

And I am bugged by a problem with this setup for a long time!

window.opener.document.forms[g2ic_form] has no properties
insertImage (form#something.JPG.hidden_form g2image.php)
onclick(click clientX=0, clientY=0)
insertAtCursor(window.opener.document.forms[g2ic_form].elements[g2ic_field],im…
Happens in functions.js (line 133)

The only link that comes up when I search for “window.opener.document.forms[g2ic_form] has no properties” on Google is a forum post on WPG2 site. The post does talk about the same problem, gives a few alternates to solve the problem, but no final solution.

I figured out the pattern in the problem. Here’s what happens:

• You go to write a new post. Write something, and click on the WPG2 icon in the visual editor to bring up the Gallery 2 Image Chooser.
• If you select an image from the root of your gallery, it will insert well into the post.
• If you navigate into any albums / sub-albums, and then select an image, it will not insert into the post, and you will get the annoying JavaScript error. Non techies may not even realize there is a JavaScript error, and will just get confused why the image does not insert.
• If you close the Image Chooser window, come back to the post, and click on the WPG2 icon again, it will open the Image Chooser in the place you left it - the same album / sub-album that you were last on.
• If you now click on an image, it will insert in the post without errors.
• My theory is that the Image Chooser is not able to (somehow) retain the window.opener over page refreshes. When you navigate inside albums, the Image Chooser page is refreshed. At this time, it just forgets who opened it. And throws out the error. When you reopen it, it does know which window opened it, and can insert the image well.

Hope this helps some worried souls!

Was going through the recent sites from where people come to my site, and saw The Daily Slurp! Was surprised to see it featured there, and would like to thank the Fresh theme creators for doing such beautiful work. Looked around The Daily Slurp and was very happy to see many impressive and fresh designs. The way they have made the site is also good - especially the mouse over preview. That saves so much of going around for the visitor. I am sending this to my design team. And if you are into design, would recommend you slurp some fresh designs as well!