January 11, 2007 at 10:47 am · Filed under Blogging
Alright, after reading Oilman’s post about his success with the WordPress Plugin Akismet, I figured I would test it out. I closed off comments a while back as I was sick of monitoring the blog spam. I had held off using Akismet because I thought it wouldn’t work / would take a bunch of tweaking to work properly. I have now installed it and comments are back on! Akismet was pretty easy to get going (just get an API from a Wordpress.com account) and enter it into the plugin on the control panel.
June 15, 2006 at 11:27 pm · Filed under Blogging
One of my online colleagues Kenny Allman has a great post over at his blog about making money with niche blogging using adsense and blogger. Kenny is a master at creating something from nothing, and I know that he has been successful through using free or near free tools. I highly recommend you check him out, and be sure to leave a comment on his blog to let him know where you came from.
April 26, 2006 at 12:06 am · Filed under Blogging
I posted recently that I purchased Andy Wibbels Blog Wild book, and that a review was coming…here goes.
The book is roughly 160 pages long, not including the glossary or index. It uses pretty big font, and small pages, so it is a quick read. An average reader would probably get through it in 1.5-2 hours.
Andy has a good reputation online, and a welcoming writing style. He writes in a down to earth manner that is easy to read and connect with. I believe the book is aimed at small business owners who have just heard the term “blog” and are curious as to how this blogging thing could work for their business. If you look at it through those eyes, it fits the bill.
Part 1 - (Pages 3-23)
Pretty basic stuff. What is a blog? Where can I find blogs to read? How do blogs work. If you are familiar with blogging, you can read this section pretty quick.
Part 2 - (Pages 27-60)
This section is why I purchased the book. I wanted to learn more about how blogs can help small businesses gain market share or online reputation. Topics like how blogs can help your businesses’ search engine rankings, and boosting your online image and authority are covered here.
Part 3/4/5 (Pages 63-160)
These sections of the book disappointed me, as pages 63-140 deal specifically with setting up and managing a TypePad blog. My frustration came in realizing that roughly 50% of this book was useless to me. Now, TypePad may be a great program, but I use WordPress on 4 blogs, and I am pretty happy with that platform. I also purchased a few copies of this book to give to some of the staff at my technology company, Trinus Technologies. They are completely new to blogging, and we are in the middle of changing our website from a pretty static, brochure style site to a dynamic, blog-content generated site. We are using Joomla! as our CMS (content management system), which has a blog plug in that we are going to use. This section of the book is ineffective for them as well. In my opinion, I feel that Andy Wibbels alienated readers by hanging his hat on one platform (even if it is his favorite).
I did enjoy the latter part of this section, as it gets into RSS feeds and Podcasting.
I realize that I was probably the wrong reader for this book, and if I started my blogging journey with this book, who knows, maybe I would be using TypePad 
.
Having said all this, I was able to gleam a few gems from this book, so it was worth the read. Whether it was the inspiring success stories, or the extensive web references throughout the book, I feel like I was able to walk away with a wider understanding of the blogosphere.
If you have read this book, or have some thoughts of your own on this review, feel free to post a comment.
