Introducing Prologue. This is Matt Mullenweg’s answer to a Twitter alternative. Of course Matt had some help, that’s where the clever software developers of Automattic come in.

Twitter is a self-confessed inspiration for this new semi-platform. It’s really just another WordPress installation with a new undertone.

Here’s a screenshot of Prologue:

If you click on that screenshot, you’ll be taken to a demo.

Prologue allows you to post messages, tagged n all about what you’re up to. There is RSS feeds for everything: posts, comments, tags and authors.

I have personally never used Twitter.

Not out of choice just never actually been bothered to go on there, know of it. Will check it out now I’ve seen this new launch which was inspired by it though.

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Each month from now on I’ll be posting a round up post so to speak. I’m calling it the ‘Internet Babel Round Up’ not to conclude a round up of this blog but just a round up of interesting links or things that I think are… interesting! … interestingly enough!

These posts will basically just be random things I’ve found, heard or seen as well as anything interesting that may of happened on here recently.

So, welcome to the very first one! Here’s the round up…

Shoemoney vs Danny Sullivan - SEO Debate

This is nice. Shoemoney recently blasted so called SEO experts in a post for being similar to used car salesmen. I totally agree, I have never payed an SEO but based on seeing the services they offer for the prices they offer and knowing how fast and vaguely and randomly SEO, not only changes but does and does not work. I think it’s a very fickle industry and I would agree that they would tend to promise what they cannot deliver.

Anyway, Danny Sullivan stepped up to defend SEOs and had it out with Shoe on Webmaster radio. Here’s the show:

Webmaster Radio
	Dislike of SEO Show: Shoemoney Show

StumbleUpon Voted Most Popular by ProBlogger Readers

Darren Rowse aka ProBlogger recently held a reader poll to determine the most popular social bookmarking site among them. So, here are the results…

1st Place - StumbleUpon

2nd Place - Delicious

3rd Place - Digg

(the rest don’t matter, 1,2 and 3 are what counts! come on people!)

So looks like StumbleUpon has been crowned king of social bookmarking by ProBlogger readers! I would definitely vote SU too. I just love the idea, even now. Just thinking about the core idea of SU, it is brilliant. Type of idea you wish you’d thought of.

Although I don’t use social bookmarking sites often or… lets say not as actively often and proper as I should, but the experience I’ve had with SU has far overwhelmed that of Digg or any others. I’ve no doubt a front page Digg article would yield incredible bummed server time and huge bounce traffic but… I’ve yet to have that privilege.

PayPerPlay = Pain in the Ass

This is a new ad company that has launched. Basically… audio ads. Already sound awful? not surprised!

I think this was launched with good intention to be innovative and clinch something that has not been fully exploited but… pay per play audio ads, just really terrible in my opinion. One reason for them being so terrible though is because they autoplay, probably could fiddle with the java to have them not autoplay but I just cannot see this working.

Anyway, just a very bad idea to me. I think the creators maybe thought

“This hasn’t been done yet! it’s going to be huge!”

When sometimes, you have to think to yourself… why hasn’t something been done. Maybe it’s not because somebody hasn’t thought of it but more toward the possibility of the idea being so bad that it’s been thought up… then thought down… then trashed!

Featured on Shoemoney and John Chow, in 2 Days!

A recent post I wrote titled Big Bloggers, Bad Grammar that of which mentioned Shoemoney and John Chow for having noticeably bad grammar at times, got mentioned by both of them!

Which I was really happy about. As you can imagine!

You always write about big bloggers and blogs but never really expect them to mention it or even see it. So many blogs out there, so really chuffed and surprised the post got mentioned on both blogs. Only other big blogger I mentioned not to have mentioned it on his blog is ProBlogger… Darren, care to make up the numbers ?

That’s all for now boys and girls!

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Getting hacked could happen to anyone. No matter how savvy you think you are or how good you are at avoiding things, unless you actually use decent security to stop hackers getting into your WordPress database, you could be next.

You’ve seen it happen to Shoemoney. Twice.

There are some very simple steps you can take to protect your Wordpress blog. Lets take a look at a few basic methods:

Back up Your Blog

King of saving yourself from a database tragedy? back-ups! make regular back-ups and you’ll always be insured of your own safety with your precious blog content and structure. Someone could blast your entire database but it doesn’t matter if you have a back-up right.

One click auto back-up: Download | Instructions

Protect Your Admin Area

A lot of amateur hackers will try to get into your Admin area simply by using a password cracker to second guess your password. These crackers go through every alphabetic combination you could use and slowly crack your password. If of course you have a very nice, complex password with letters, numbers, capital letters and other characters. These crackers won’t be able to crack it. So one way is to simply do that.

But some still can as far as I’m aware. Plus there are still other holes hackers can pick simply by getting access to this area. So how do you stop them from getting to the admin login or admin area completely?

1. Password protect your admin folder: Simple, just do this in your cPanel. Protect your WordPress admin folder with a password, there’s one layer of protection.

2. .htaccess IP restriction: You can stop any IP other than ones you define from getting to your admin login panel. To do this simply open the .htaccess file in your wp-admin folder to edit, if you don’t have one - simply create one in there.

Place in that file the following:

order deny,
allow deny from all allow from xx.xx.xx.xx
allow from xx.xx.xxx.xx

Obviously replace the x’s with what your IP is. You can specifically deny access to a single IP or multiple IP’s or, of course - only allow access to your IP.

Now if you have a dynamic IP you might not be able to do this if your ISP gives you a different IP address everytime you connect.

Luckily I have a static IP so it never changes.

In Closing…

So as you can see, protecting your blog from hackers is a very simple process but could save your archive from getting blasted, the easiest way is to simply back-up your databse. Which you should do regularly anyway incase anything unexpected happens.

Not to be ignorant though. As if a hacker is a good hacker, they will get into your database regardless of how many little obstacles you put in their way. It’s just like jumping a few hurdles to get to the finish line. You can in theory almost completely wipe out the possibility of getting hacked even by the best of the best, but it takes a lot of good php security.

That said, prevention is still a good thing. Average hackers or so called hackers, more like people who just use automatic password decryption tools to get your admin password won’t get past these preventions. So why even give them the satisfaction of doing it to begin with.

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For the rest of this weekend I’ll be posting purely on WordPress. I say it ‘begins’ as in now but realistically it began with my last post - WordPress Users: Backup Your Blog.

I just decided to make it into a little event since I have some more posts to come on it.

That’s anything from cool new plugins to top themes to security leaks.

So from now until Monday, if you’re WordPress user which I imagine most of you are. Look out for some great posts on WP!

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Today was the first time I’ve actually ever backed up this blog.

Backing up your blog should be done on a monthly basis, just incase anything unexpected happens to your database.

Most issues can usually be fixed anyway but imagine something drastic happened and you lost all of your posts.

All those hard written articles… gone!

I’m lazy when it comes to things like this, type of thing I can never be bothered to get round to doing. But since I also upgraded today thought I may as well get it done.

Went with the easiest possible option for backing up as couldn’t be bothered with the manual method… even though that’s easy to. Anyway…

Check out this plugin - it’s one click download backup:

Download

Clickidy Click Click!

Installation

1. Download zip folder.

2. Upload and extract in the plugins folder in your Wordpress directory.

3. Activate the plugin in the plugin menu on your Admin Wordpress panel.

4. Go to Manage and click Backup, then it’s just a case of a one click download.

Simple as that!

You can either download to your desktop or you can save it to your server for you to grab later.

You can also configure it to send the backup to your email address. You can have scheduled times also, so you could even have a daily backup if you’re paranoid

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I think you need to experiment and continue to experiment regularly with your blog. Your ads, ad networks, placement, just try different things continuously.

Try and improve your blog everyday. Look at successful blogs and think ‘what do they have that I don’t’ emulate things to a degree but ultimately try and create your own unique brand.

Posts / Content

You can always improve your posts. I’m sure if you’ve owned a blog for a while and have over 100 posts on it - you have looked back on now and then and been surprised and how rubbish you think an old post looks!?

I have done this a few times. Make sure you always experiment with your posts to constantly provide fresh content, fresh views, advice and standpoints.

Use bigger images, smaller images, bigger headings, color texts. Be provocative, leave questions unanswered. Try what you can to increase reader interaction and constantly try to improve your grammar and most of all. Presentation. Make things easy on the eye.

Subscriptions

This is for me, the most fickle aspect of a blog. Changing one thing can increase subscriptions a lot. Always experiment with where you place your subscription options, how you present them, how visible they are etc.

Generally, the more visible they are the better. You want people to know

• Here is my RSS subscription
• Here is my Email subscription

Which brings me to my next point. Make sure you always offer an email subscription option! whilst most don’t like email updates, well most bloggers. Due to obvious reasons. It’s still another option for people who may like it and can do nothing but expand your subscriptions.

RSS makes it so easy to flick through blogs in seconds and it’s so convenient and neat. I love RSS and would never subscribe via email personally. Don’t see much point. But still, make sure it’s there and people can see it.

Advertising / Revenue

Very subjective topic. If you’re absolute only purpose of a blog is to make money. I don’t think you will get very far. You need an undertone, something which makes your blog great. Whether that be simply an amazing logo, so be it. Overall though, great content, obviously.

But if you are trying to grow a blog or even static website based purely on re-written or purely ripped content, surrounded by Adsense blocks… give up now!

What you should be doing is writing pure original content. That’s right - from scratch. It’s good to get inspiration but make sure you don’t copy people, develop your own train of thought on a subject instead of borrowing somebody else’s.

That being said, this will then provide you with a good surrounding for ads. People don’t mind ads nearly as much if the content is good. Just look at John Chow - he has said a lot of time his blog doesn’t look like it’s full of ads, well… John, hate to break it to you but it does. A lot but we don’t care because your content is great!

Make sure you follow in John’s footsteps if you need a stepping stone example. Great content surrounded by targeted advertising = revenue.

Traffic

Why put this one last? because it is the most important silly!

Traffic to your blog or any website is the foundation for EVERYTHING. No matter how crappy your content may be, how spammy your ads may look, everything escalates with traffic.

With crappy content surrounded by ads but A TON of traffic. The bad content ironically becomes a good thing. People will want to get out of there and if your traffic isn’t savvy to these things, they will click ads. All the time. Which equals? big revenue!

But. I wouldn’t want this. I’d much rather try and build a quality content source with highly relevant ads. Advertising then becomes less of a hindrance and more of an alternative source for the user. If they don’t like what you’re saying and are going to leave anyway… you may as well get payed for it.

Big Traffic Equals

1. A lot of people viewing what you say and do!
2. A lot of potential buzz!
3. A lot of potential revenue!

It’s just all about how you utilize these qualities that decides how much money you make and how successful your blog becomes.

Final Thoughts

There is obviously other criterea also important to your blog such as; Design, Backlinks, Impact etc.

But I have sort of covered all those a lot in previous posts and things like backlinks and impact can be easily related back to traffic so in some areas it’s not worth expanding. Because I’ll go on forever… maybe another time…

Remember above all though. Neve be satisfied *Never be satisfied

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This applies mainly to Internet marketing blogs. Which is mainly my target traffic anyway but can also apply just in general to any blog that could even remotely have a face to it.

I think putting a face or a name to your blog helps establish it as more of a brand and less of just another blog in the mix.

Promote your name and face along with your blog to help give it a personality.

So how can achieve this?

• Use your real name when commenting on other blogs. Obviously linked.
• Have an author page. Instead of having an about page that is just about your blog, have a seperate page about you - the author. If not have an ‘About the Author’ section on the about page.
• Get to know other bloggers within your niche.
• Use your real name as the author of your posts. People will soon associate this name.

People like a character and a personality to associate quality things with. They like to see the mind behind the creativity.

It also allows people to put more trust in you. In a sense. It’s sort of trivial with this aspect as somebody putting a picture up of themself doesn’t neceserraily mean anything to me.

Content and reputation is what’s important.

So if you have a nice unique blog. Make sure you promot yourself along with your blog.

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I recently held a mini competition here giving away 3 free logos to 3 lucky readers.

I gave this competition a little boost with a John Cow review. That combined with quite a few backlinks resulted in about 70 entries.

People had to subscribe by email to enter so this took my subscribers from the 60 ish mark upto around the 130 mark.

This stayed steady until… guess when ? yep! after the contest ended. No surprises. As I said in a recent post - contest subscribers can be temporary as a large amount of the time they subscribe, check result and say bye bye!

With RSS this doesn’t happen so much assuming the content is good but with Email subscriptions, I would imagine a lot more people unsubscribe as it is quite annoying getting constant email updates.

Anyway, subscribers now down to 107 and I would imagine will continue to drop!

Farewell Temporary Subscribers…

Next time I’ll make people subscribe by RSS!

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It’s quite amazing how you would think that logically, one of the biggest factors to contribute to the success of a writer would be their grammar. Considering it’s what they’re doing as a living and putting out there on a limb.

Now, bloggers aren’t necessarily writers but still. They do write. I don’t mind bad grammar, I couldn’t care less but it’s quite annoying when you see small time bloggers get hassle about it from what little readers they have. Yet big bloggers like Shoemoney and John Chow have really bad grammar. Understandably John Chow’s first language isn’t English so that’s fair enough but Shoe seems to be openly sloppy. Like, childlike sloppy with his grammar.

My grammar is far from perfect but I at least spell basic words right! come on Shoe, how hard is it to use Spellcheck!

Problogger Darren Rowse also makes a lot of typos and grammar mistakes. Which is quite surprising considering he has nearly 40,000 readers and his blog is about perfecting pretty much every aspect of blogging. Including writing and content. You would think with all those readers he would triple check his posts. I know I would.

Wish I had all those readers!

Ironically the 3 bloggers I just mentioned for having or sometimes having bad grammar are probably my 3 favorite bloggers and some of the only blogs that I actually read on a regular basis. They all tell it like it is, all do what they preach and are all very successful.

Content is more important than the actual grammar of the content anyway.

Pretty pointless post and I’m not having a go at those bloggers. Just pointing out quite a surprising fact that I noticed and I’m sure they’re all aware of anyway. I know Shoemoney is and he doesn’t care. Who does care, why did I even write this!

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For some reason, the shout feature on my Digg account is not and has not been working for a long time now.

I can submit, Digg and do anything else.

It’s when I go to shout my friends now - I try it once and get no response at all. Try again and get an invalid CAPTCHA error:

Even though it isn’t as I’ve double checked and re-typed about 100,000 times. This has been happening for a long time. I even tried it from another computer.

Must be on my account specifically as I haven’t seen any other mentions of it.

Anyone else experiencing this or know why this might be happening?

PS. If you don’t have a solution or answer for this could you Digg this post so more see it and I could possibly get a solution or answer! Thanks!

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