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.

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.

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.

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.

…will they come?

I finally reached the point where I could submit my new baby to all the major search engines and indexes (using the nifty submission tools at SelfPromotion.com), which I figured would be more productive than screaming “Notice me, notice me!!!” at the top of my lungs to anyone who’d listen. But at this stage it’s like a drop of water trying to get attention in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Of course, there’s always the hope that I’ll experience the “Field of Dreams” effect, and people will come from all four corners of the globe just to see me play b… err, blog.

Yeah right.

Then there’s the matter of what the hell I should be writing about to begin with. I have several ideas, but for the moment I can’t seem to put them into words. It’s like turning a hunk of metal into a smokin’ hot rod, and then not knowing how to drive after you finished building it.

Maybe it’s the heat. For the past few weeks it’s been nothing but lovely 100º+ degree weather combined with an even more lovelier 200% humidity index. There won’t be too many moments of inspiration when the heat and moisture is busy sucking the life force out of you, even when you’re hiding under the bed with the AC on full blast.

Ah well, I’m sure this dry spell will end once I get enough shuteye to make up for the lack of sleep I’ve been missing out on for oh…the past month or so, and maybe once the weather cools off just a wee little bit. Oy, this summer can’t end fast enough.

And so it begins.

After 32 days of hair tearing, head banging, and extended bouts of rip roaring insanity, my blog is now officially online and ready to go. I still cannot fathom the reality that it took me well over a month before I could finally put the finishing touches on this new work of blogging art. It began with an idea that may or may not have been drug induced, and a subsequent hunt for the perfect blogware that would be given the esteemed honor of publishing my most intimate of thoughts online for all the world to see and revel in. It wasn’t long before I settled on Wordpress, and in spite of the absolute FITS it gave me, I don’t regret making that decision. It’s certainly not as polished as MovableType is, but it’s just as powerful, if not more so. The ability to write private and password protected posts, for example, are to this day features that are still missing from MovableType’s blogging solution. The plugin support is also amazing, even though it sucked up a good two weeks of my time before I finally finished scouring the Net for nifty and cool plugins to install and play with. By the time I was finished I had over 70 plugins installed, and the fact that they seem to be getting along with each other without blowing things up was a small miracle unto itself. The widget features were also way cool. It meant having the ability to move my sidebars around nilly willy, while adding all sorts of wild features without ever having to look at code (which I imagine is not the case with MovableType).

But now I understand why most people would just as soon rather open up an account with Blogger or Xanga and get straight to it than build a blog from scratch, even if that meant having far less control over its look and feel. Building a blog from the ground up while having only a rudimentary knowledge of PHP, XHTML standards and CSS styling was not an endeavor for the faint of heart to undertake, but I wasn’t scared. Stupid, maybe, but never scared.

I was however, reintroduced to wonderful things such as whitespace, XHTML validation, PHP syntax errors, and other frightening critical errors that so abruptly stopped my blog dead in its track that I thought the Rapture was about to occur. Then there was the very long fourth of July weekend where my PC box suffered from several viral infections, effectively taking it out of commission for days before I finally got everything working again.

For weeks, working on my blog became a daily ritual of adjusting some code, saving the file, uploading it to the server, then refreshing the blog in my browser to view the results. Adjust-Save-Upload-View-Repeat. Ad infinitum. There were some nights where I stayed up till 4 in the morning wrestling with some code until I either passed out or emerged victorious (usually the former). Some things just ended up being lost causes (such as getting skins to work right).

If that weren’t enough, I had to deal with the headache of making my blog look consistent across different browser platforms. I cannot tell you how many times I had things looking just fine and dandy in Firefox, only to see Microsoft’s Internet Explorer projectile vomit my blog all over the monitor screen. I’m forced to bastardize and invalidate my stylesheet with some ugly snippets of javascript all because IE to this day is still not standards compliant. Beautiful. Then there was the CSS standard itself, which makes it bloody near impossible to include a decent footer at the end of your blog. If this were a perfect world, my footer would be placed under all three columns here, not just the middle one. But because of either gross oversight or sheer stupidity (or both), this is virtually impossible to do without resorting to using floats (whatever the @#$% that is) or some other wacky means. On the plus side, the way my blog is set up now makes it far more search engine friendly than it was before, because the sidebars are absolutely (permanently) positioned on either side of the screen, which means search engines only need to crawl the header of the site before getting to the real meat of the blog. In other setups that don’t involve absolute positioning, search bots may have to sift through a crapload of code (involving the header AND the sidebars, and maybe even other superfluous data) before it finally reaches the main content of your site. I noticed a lot of blogs seemed to be set up like this too. Bad for them, good, however for me.

As if all this grief weren’t enough, my original hosting provider apparently had a fetish for rebooting their servers on a regular basis, which meant searching for a new hosting service, and then dealing with the agony of canceling my account, signing up for a new one elsewhere, moving all my files to the new server, etc., etc., etc.. Overall, the amount of work I was investing to getting this blog up and running was bordering on the absurd. For weeks I would stumble into the office at work in a daze after getting only 3 hours of sleep the night before, only to find myself logging into my work PC and getting right back to where I left off before I passed out. And why not? It’s not like my job was important or anything.

Eventually…finally… my work was at long last completed. So what happens now that the dust has settled, and I’m ready to move on with my life and start blogging for real?

I get writer’s block.

For the past month I had a million ideas and thoughts I wanted to put down on blogging “paper” and make known to the world (especially with what’s been happening in the Mideast), but when that moment finally arrives, I’m now drawing a complete blank.

Maybe I just need to get some sleep. Maybe I need a real life. Or maybe I just need to hurt somebody. Probably all three…