On Monday my blog decided to ruin my day by throwing a complete hissy fit and vomit my content onto people’s screens instead of rendering it properly, so I decided to take a personal day so I could get it resolved before it spun completely out of control.  I rang up my peeps at work:

“Yeah hey Mick, listen I’m going to have to take a personal today.”

“How come?”

“It’s personal.”

“Why do you always have to be a smart ass?”

“Do I do that?”  I smiled innocently even though he couldn’t see me.

“Whatever man.  Did you call up front to let them know?”

“No, gonna do that now, can you switch me over?”

I got transferred and spoke to payroll.

“Hey Obie, I need to take a personal day.”

“How come?”

“It’s personal.”

“Why do you always have to be a smart ass?”

“I seem to be getting that a lot lately.”

Thank God I took the day off though, since it took me 10 hours to figure out what the flip was going on and get it running smooth as silk again.

Oh, and I added new advertising banners underneath each post.  You won’t see them though as they’ll only appear to visitors who came in via search engines like Google.  That’s how awesome I am. 

Tags: advertising, blog, God, google, personal day, search engines, work
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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Today marks the one year anniversary of the Habitation of Justice. I should say something profound, so here it is:

The chocolate moose is not in season.

If you can figure that out, let me know. On a more serious note, as far as blogs go, this has been a pretty quiet year for me. There were times when I literally would get only one visitor a day, and sometimes I’d let weeks go by before blogging another post. I had been focused on other things, (like going to law school), but as soon as it became clear that my life wouldn’t be going anywhere any time soon, I started to pay more attention to my blog. The last few months were all about promoting my site and optimizing it for search engines so I could bring in more traffic. Now I’m getting upwards of about 100 visits a day, which is still nowhere close to my goal, but at least it’s much better than what it used to be.

Sooooo, now that it’s been a year, where do I go from here? What direction should I take this blog in? Ever since my law school dream bombed out, I’ve been entertaining fantasies on how I could make a living out of blogging instead, quitting my dead end job and hitting the road, living the life of a nomad as I moved from place to place, finding ways to help people I encountered in my travels, and experiencing exciting new adventures that would endlessly provide great writing fodder for my blog.

Could it happen? Not unless I can find a way to monetize my blog so that it brings in a full time income, a feat that only one half of one percent of all bloggers on the Internet have been able to accomplish. And usually those types of blogs have the kind of niches where they tell everyone else how THEY can make money off their sites. Either that, or it’s rife with affiliate marketing and other business related themes that I simply can’t get into. I just don’t have the mentality for it. I can only tell a story, and telling stories through this particularly venue has not proven to be an especially profitable one for most people.

But…. it’s all I got. After racking my brain trying to come up with a niche suitable for me, I decided that it had to be something that I could always love doing, rather than delving into a niche only because it might prove to be more of a money maker. I loved to write, but not about products and marketing and technology and business and whatnot, but about life in general. About what’s real. About my deepest emotions, hopes, and despairs. About my life experiences, and how readers could relate to it. But I realized in order to blog about life, I had to first HAVE a life.

So I guess that’s what will define my second year: finding a life worthy of blogging about, and telling a story that could immerse the reader in my riveting world. Well… at least as riveting as I can possibly make it.

Only time will tell if this will be my breakout year (both online and offline), and whether I’ll be able to generate the kind of readership that I’ve been looking for.

So stay tuned, it’s going to get very interesting from here on out.

Tags: affiliate marketing, anniversary, blog, bloggers, blogging, fantasies, fodder, full time, habitation, job, law school, life, mentality, monetizing, niche, niches, nomad, search engines, story telling, time income, traffic, travels, writing, year anniversary
Categories: Blog Fog, Lincoln's Personal Log
 
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Look people, how much effort does it take to download an image from my blog, upload it to a Photobucket or ImageShack account, and then hotlink it from there? 30 seconds worth? If you’re going to hog my bandwidth and directly link my images (without credit mind you), could I not at least have the flipping courtesy of a backlink, you bunch of lazy leeching butt balls? Sheesh.

This has been an ongoing issue for me for some time now, and initially I had been using .htaccess to block visitors from hotlinking my files. The only problem with this approach is that my images don’t show up in online feedreaders, and despite the hotlinking abuse, I still wanted Google and other search engines to index my images. Image based search engines are often an overlooked source for SEO purposes and bringing in more traffic to your site, so I wasn’t quite ready to toss in the towel just yet.

Interestingly, Blogstorm came up with a novel way to offset the damages of hotlinking, by designing a plugin that stops hotlinkers from right-clicking and grabbing the image’s url. Instead, when they right click an image, a window will pop up with a snippet of alternative code that they can use to link the image. The code actually wraps the image in a link, providing a legitimate backlink that hotlinkers can use for… whatever. The more savvy Internet user can find ways around this of course, but it seemed to be an excellent way to encourage backlinking and thus boost your site’s search engine rankings.

Unfortunately the plugin only worked sporadically on my site. It didn’t work at all in IE7, and in Firefox the window containing the alternative code would always pop up at the top of the screen, so if the image in question was located at the bottom, visitors would have to scroll up again to see the window. There were also some unexpected issues when an image was lightboxed, and it also caused some weird things to happen with my AdSense ads. Alas, I had no choice but to uninstall the plugin.

This project is still in its infancy though, so I’m hoping the developers will be able to build on this idea and work out whatever kinks there might be to create what would be surely be an extremely popular plugin. After all, if people are going to hotlink images, we might as well derive some benefit from it. Savvy?

Update: In the meantime, it looks like Thiefinder has a cool little PHP script that can save considerable time in checking your logs for hotlinking. If it works it would be a godsend for me.

Tags: adsense, backlink, backlinks, balls, bandwidth, blog, blogstorm, damages, google, google image search, hog, hotlink, hotlinking, htaccess, IE7, image, images, imageshack, novel, photobucket, plugin, rankings, search engines, seo, snippet, traffic, weird things
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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I recently noticed Windows Live Writer evidently doesn’t give two flying leaps about XHTML validation, judging by the code it’s been outputting every time I write a post. (Ironically enough I’m writing this post using Live Writer as well.)

Really, is it too much to ask that the break tag be outputted as “
” instead of “
“? I mean seriously, is that just too @#$% much to ask???

All the blog experts tell me how important it is to validate your posts. Validation will make it easier for search engines to crawl my site. Validation will lighten server load and make my blog run faster. Validation will make all the ubergeeks running Konquerer on their Linux boxes smile. Validation will clear the skies and bring out the sunshine. Validation will cure cancer and find me the girl of my dreams.

Screw this.

Tags: blogging, cancer, konquerer, konqueror, leaps, linux, screw, search engines, server load, smile, sunshine, validated, validation, windows live writer, xhtml
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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As I travel around the blogosphere, I’ve come across numerous tips and advice on how to successfully blog and develop a strong readership. Some of it involves developing a community of friends on social networks that could potentially bring an onslaught of massive traffic to your site. This can be done once you establish a mini-network of friends who can collectively Digg, Stumble or Reddit your blogging content, with you of course agreeing to do the same for them in return (sort of a you scratch my back, I’ll shave yours arrangement).

Some people can be really good at this for whatever reason. Me on the other hand… I can’t make friends in real life, I’m supposed to do it on here? My ass. I begged just ONE acquaintance of mine to stumble my blog so I could get a boost in traffic and of course I got blown off. Obviously this isn’t going to be a winning strategy for me right now. Ahhhhh, if only I were a hot babe, how easier this would all be…..

But anyway…

A few of the blogging experts I’ve encountered also recommended getting an outside web designer to develop the look of your blog for you (and also assist in optimizing it for search engines). Look, I don’t want no designer touching my private goomie gammies, capice? The thought of a third party having access to my code like that just doesn’t give me any warm and fuzzy thoughts, ya know?

But I can understand the rationale behind it. Blogging, or rather, professional blogging is HARD work. You’re basically doing the work of three people largely because it’s a three pronged process: promotion, maintenance and content building, all of which can be full time jobs unto themselves. And because I spent so much time on the former two for the past couple of weeks, I left myself little time for the latter.

Obviously, that will have to change as I try to find a way to balance these three aspects to blogging. But now I’m sorely tempted to just say “You know what? Screw it, it’s time I started BLOGGING, PERIOD.” It doesn’t matter that I still don’t really know who I am as a person, much less what the hell my niche should be. I think I need to just get up and go, and let the words flo’. Maybe this way I’ll somehow be able to create something coherent and interesting enough to attract a readership larger than the 5 people who regularly visit the NPR website.

Tags: acquaintance, blog, blogger, blogging, blogosphere, content building, friends, full time, hot babe, little time, maintenance, networking, onslaught, problogging, promotion, rationale, screw, search engines, social networks, success, third party, three aspects, traffic, web design, web designer
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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I don’t know why Technorati no longer seems to be indexing my site, but it’s getting on my nerves. I know I know, I said I would focus more on blogging and less on trying to get traffic to my site, but I should at least be indexed, dammit. Is that too much to ask????

Anyhoo, I’m hoping that by claiming my blog, the Technorati-bots will start showing up again, so I’m doing this post in order to complete the claiming process:

Technorati Profile

Will that fix it? Probably not, and this will probably mark the last concerted effort I make to optimize my site for the search engines/indexes.

Tags: blog, blogging, indexes, nerves, search engines, seo, technorati, traffic
Categories: Blog Fog
 
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