Blog Flak

There are many, many different reasons why people start writing a blog. Generally the number one reason I hear is that “It looks like fun, so I’ll give it a try”. This is probably the best reason to start one, but rarely does it remain the #1 reason why they continue writing after a period of time. It’s easy to become hooked on writing a social blog, especially if you achieve some small level of popularity. Eventually though, most people come to see it as a sort of popularity contest to see how many readers they can acquire, or how many comments they can get on a daily basis, often using their hit counter as a measuring tool of their success as a blogger. There’s nothing wrong with looking at it that way but too often I see that they’ve become so caught up in the popularity contest aspect that their writing begins to suffer. You can’t please all the people all of the time!

The best way for the average, beginning blogger to become popular is to be interactive in a community of bloggers. I’ve found that if you give good comment, you will receive good comment. Leaving comments on others blogs is the best way for a newbie blogger to become known, otherwise no one will “find” you. You can’t realistically expect to just start writing and sit back and wait for people to come to you, there are millions of social blogs out there, your’s is just a tiny molecule in a galaxy of other bloggers all seeking the same thing that you are. If you want people to find you, you have to explore the galaxy and find them, take an interest in what they are writing about, then let them know you are there by leaving relevant comments. This is the #1 way to get started on the road to success.

Finding like minded blogs is not that difficult, you can try blog surfing at places like Blog Explosion or Blog Clicker or Blog Mad and search thru their listings, and do a lot of reading to find people that you think are interesting. Become friends, act like a good neighbor, be friendly!

Usually though, you won’t find the most popular blogs out there to be running their site in a blog surfing rotation, because they don’t need to. They’ve already become popular for a variety of reasons. Often they aren’t looking for new friends either because they are having trouble keeping up with the ones they already have. Life interferes! And staying truly interactive within a circle of friends can take a fairly large investment of time and effort, they may not have any left to give to newcomers. It can sometimes be difficult to break into and become popular within an established blogging community because of these reasons. Often it’s best to start your own.

Getting started can be difficult for the beginner blogger and often it won’t seem worth it because no one is reading you. Don’t let that discourage you! Generally within 2 months most people come into their own and if you venture out from your blog and seek out friends by leaving friendly, relevant comments, people will find you! People will track you back thru the comments you leave, follow you back to your blog and talk to you! When they do you may have a backlog of well written posts for them to catch up on, especially if you’ve written about interesting topics. This is what builds great blogging communities!

1. Be Interactive. Get out there and comment all over the place!
2. Don’t be bashful. Speak up but stay on topic.
3. Be friendly. Think about what you’re saying, and say it nicely.
4. Think before you type. Sounding insensitive is very easy in written text. Emotions and voice inflection don’t come thru like you might expect!
5. Write about your favorite subjects. You will come across as well informed.
6. Use spell check!! Misspelling words is just plain bad, you don’t want to come across as uneducated.
7. Don’t get discouraged. Stick with it, perseverance will pay off!
8. Write about fun and interesting topics. Of course people will wan’t to hear about the lousy day you had, but not every day, in every post!
9. Encourage people to be interactive at your blog. Ask questions!
10. And finally, have FUN! If you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong!

Technorati tags: blogging, newbies, social blogging, interactive, sport

Eric over at Evil Genius Marketing has a great post up called Blog Like A Rock Star which makes for some great reading. He makes some excellent points in the article which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. I think you will too! I tend to think everybody has a little rock star in ‘em, don’t you?

Technorati tags: blogging, tags, tagging, blogs, Technorati, bookmarking

I’ve put up some very cool new tutorials the past couple of days. You can check them out on the sidebar Blog Help button as well. The two latest ones are for putting your archives and previous posts into drop down lists for Blogger and archives for Wordpress. These are very simple to accomplish, they look very cool, work great and save tons of space in your sidebar area if you have long lists. In the future I’ll be putting up a tutorial on how to do the same thing with links lists, as well as lots more stuff to customize your blog.

For the Blogger flavor click here….

For the Wordpress flavor click here…

There’s also a new tutorial on how to quickly move your complete Blogger blog to an entirely new URL with just a couple of clicks! For that one click here…

Technorati tags: tips, Wordpress, Blogger, tutorials, blogging, drop down lists, archives,

Mozilla announced quite a number of bug fixes for its Firefox browser, with many of them marked “critical”. They’ve also included a number of bug fixes for earlier versions of Firefox, but as always they urge everyone to update to the latest version available. Some of the fixes involved repairing Javascript vulnerabilities and also a few fixes for stability problems. At this writing the latest version is 1.5.0.2. I downloaded and updated mine this morning and so far haven’t noticed any problems.

They do of course warn that some of your extensions or addons may not work properly after the upgrade, but they can be fixed by downloading newer versions that are compatible with the latest update. I was very happy to see that all my web developer toolbar functions and extensions still worked properly after the update!

Get the latest version here: Firefox Update

Technorati tags: Mozilla, Firefox, browser, safe surfing, bug fix, blogging, news

My favorite image hosting service, Photobucket, just announced a new service for uploading video to your photo albums. I gave it a whirl and was wowed by how simple and easy it is to use. There are a few limitations though, free users can upload single videos that will run no longer than 1 minute and premium upgraded users can upload single videos that will run no longer than 3 minutes. No apparent limit on the number of videos that you can upload though. Who wants to watch half hour long videos of your boring trip to the Grand Canyon anyway?

The service transforms your video into Flash format during the upload process and getting the code to display it in a post is a snap! A simple copy/paste to your post editor is all you need. Virtually all video formats are supported and I noticed that the videos load very quickly, most likely because of the Flash video compression used.

From Photobucket: Video hosting is now available for all Photobucket users! Premium users can host videos up to 3 minutes in length while free users can host videos up to 1 minute in length. Start hosting your videos today by clicking on the “Video” tab in the upload section of your album. You can then link these videos to all your favorite sites including MySpace, eBay, Xanga, and LiveJournal. Thanks for your loyalty and support and we look forward to bringing you more great features soon!

They don’t mention that it will work on Blogger or Wordpress or many other sites, but I can verify that it works just fine with no problems! To see a very short sample I uploaded, click here… It was taken while sitting in the Cafe Du Monde in New Orleans not long after Hurricane Katrina.

Technorati tags: video, file hosting, Photobucket, blogging, Flash, image hosting

MySpace has apparently had enough media bashing and negative attention of late and has decided to hire in a security expert to help allay fears that it’s online blogging service has become a safe-haven for predators and pedophiles. Hemanshu Nigam, who is currently serving as the director for Microsoft’s consumer-security outreach and child-safe computing strategies will become their new “crime dog” as of May 1. The announcement came the day after MySpace began running public-service ads warning bloggers on their service about the many dangers posed by sexual predators on the ‘net. It remains to be seen how well the millions of users will take to being watched over with closer scrutiny than ever before.

I can’t help but wonder whether there will be even more controversy involved in this decision by MySpace to put a “watchdog” on their team. Even though a blog is in full public view to be read by anyone that wishes, many people choose to stay semi or completely anonymous by using pen or nicknames only. I wonder whether invasion of privacy issues will come into play in this situation. Too soon to tell!

Will it be “high noon” with blazing guns for predators? I say hangings too good for ‘em!

Technorati tags: MySpace, sexual predators, McGruff, pedophiles, blogging, privacy,

I thought that now would be as good a time as any to tell you guys a bit about myself and my mission involving Blog Flak. I’ve been a ‘net junkie for nearly 10 years, done a lot of gaming, building websites, researching, writing, learning to build and repair computers (I build my own machines). It’s only been the past couple of years that I’ve gotten completely serious about web design, culminating in a webmasters certification thru Delgado University here in New Orleans. I started blogging about 1.5 years ago and although I was an experienced netizen I was a total newbie when it came to writing or customizing a web journal or “blog”.

Being the kind of guy that loves to know what makes things tick (like hot cars, screaming PC’s and fast motorcycles) I dove headfirst into learning what makes blogs go. I just can’t resist looking under the hood of almost any kind of software or hardware and try to figure out how to make it work even better. When I first started out I lamented not having a place to go where I could find all sorts of detailed information at my fingertips to get me headed in the right direction or just for quick reference. Now with this website I intend to provide just such a place where everyone can visit, share, participate and learn, not just the basics but more advanced stuff as well.

I know that a lot of my articles and tutorials will be slanted toward the total newbie and that’s entirely intentional, but I also plan on showing people how to do much more advanced stuff as the site develops. I’m going to try to balance the mix as much as possible and of course a lot of visitors will see stuff that they already know. That’s good for you, but there are many that don’t know all the little details. Technorati claims that there are 75,000 new blogs created every day, and I’m sure a lot of them are newbies! That’s a helluva lot of blogging!

A little about me, my personal blog is called se7en… I usually have some really nice template designs on my blog, I mostly write about anything that pops out of my head, generally humorous. Occasionally not. I also have my blog template design site at Blogs Gone Wild! and my commercial web design site Fire Site Web Designs and a couple of free blog skins sites where I put up free downloadable skins that I’ve designed when I’m on a creative binge. I do all my own graphics in Photoshop and I also have a fair amount of experience in Flash. You can find those free skins thru the “Free Blog Skins” button in the sidebar.

The nickname “se7en” was given to me a few years back by some cajun buddies and it sorta stuck as a ‘net nickname, not my real name of course. If you want to know my real name you can email me and ask! LOL I hope this site will be a useful resource for many, not just for my visitors and friends but also for me. Setting up and writing to this site has been a real learning experience and yet, I know I still have a lot to learn!

Thanks and enjoy the site!

I’m often asked the question: “Why is my sidebar showing up all the way at the bottom of my blog?” Generally, there are two reasons for this to happen and I’ll try to explain it using a couple of images I created to help you visualize how your blog layout works. Read the Tutorial….

This is another how-to article that can also be found in the Blogging Help section linked in the sidebar here at Blog Flak. Be sure to check out the whole line up with lots more to come!

Technorati tags: tutorials, tech help, blogging, links, image editing, blog

I’ve put up a couple of new free blog skins / templates over at Free Blogger Skins in the past couple of days. These two new ones are for the guys out there looking for something a little more exciting than the usual stuff. I know the girls usually get all the attention when it comes to free blog skins but I’m planning on coming out with more in the near future, just for guys!

Need help with installing, backing up or editing blog posts, don’t forget, there’s plenty of info available here at Blog Flak in the Blogging Help section!

Technorati tags: skins, templates, blog, blogging, free, downloads, blogger

While Blogger Buzz sings the praises heaped on it from a recent PC World article, Google still seems to be using the “no follow” protocol to stop their own search engine spiders from indexing Blogspot addresses. This is totally unfair to the majority of blogs hosted on Blogspot. There are many, many highly rated blogs on Blogspot but they certainly don’t get any search engine loving from Google. A few quick searches on several different search engines will easily display the disparity in page rankings for a particular blog address. If it’s hosted on Blogspot, you’re lucky to find any listings for it at all on Googles search engine. The same exact searches on MSN or Yahoo will give you some eye opening results. Try it yourself and see! This seems to be Googles “dirty little secret”.

Most blogs are legitimate as opposed to being a spam blog or “splog” created by the hundreds and thousands by automatic software and used only to dump thousands of links to boost search engine rankings. Unscrupulous users of these automated programs are certainly ruining the experience for everyone else but ultimately the blame lies clearly at Googles feet. By not implementing anti-splog measures early on to stop the use of automated blog creation programs they let the situation get out of control. Their knee jerk reaction of wholesale removal and blocking of blogs using their own anti-splog bots has caused quite a few legitimate bloggers to be locked out of their own blogs. And then instituting a “no follow” to block their spiders from properly crawling and following all links originating from any Blogspot address has caused a devastating effect on their own blogging community.

Blogspot has certainly become the “red-headed stepchild” of Googles own making, yet people still love it for its easy to use interface and features and it’s many great long time communities. Yet they continue to advertise it heavily everywhere you look, too bad they don’t tell you up front that your blog no matter how ultimately popular it becomes will be shunned by their very own search engines.

A new article today on Blogger Buzz claims they are making “progress” in the war on spam blogs but I say it’s not enough. They should give back the respect to the many legitimate Blogspot communities by removing the “no follow” rule and giving all the great blogs on Blogger the spotlight they deserve!

Technorati tags: Google, Blogger, Blogspot, blogging, no follow, Blogger Buzz, splog, spam bot