It’s been a while since I’ve had the chance to update here, but I wanted to take a moment to wish everyone a safe and happy holiday season. I’ll be back later today with some news that I at least, find very exciting.
Happy holidays, everyone
Can you think of anyone who wouldn’t want a box of chocolates? I’d be hard pressed to. I don’t know many people that don’t like chocolate, and of the people I know that do (and that’s most of them), many have started moving into the realm of gourmet chocolates over your basic grocery store bar chocolate bar.
So, it’s the holidays, you need a gift, or maybe just some energy for an all night writing session. Grab a box of chocolates from Fannie May Candies, wrap it up, or just nibble s you write. It’s a better boost than coffee. (But best served with coffee in my opinion.) Just make sure not to smudge your keyboard while munching chocolate truffles.
Sorry for the lack of posts over the past few days. I’ve been dead in the middle of a site redesign that I want to have finished by Christmas if possible, and all my time has been spent up to my ears in PHP code and CSS tweaks. This doesn’t mean that I haven’t been looking at my normal tech blogs or industry blogs, just that I haven’t had time to comment on them. I’ve been paying special attention to anything related to the “Great Google PageRank Scare of ‘07″, and I’ve come up with a few interesting tidbits in the past week or so that I thought were worth sharing.
First of all, let’s just say this. If you’ve had your PR decimated by Google, you are guilty, at lest as far as they are concerned. If you are forced to ask for re-inclusion, you’ve got to promise them that you won’t make the same “violation” again. So just face it, you’re guilty, they’re never going to adopt a lenient policy and there’s no reason to expect them to. they made the rules, they helped to create the industry, and now they’ve “adjusted” their policy because they feel that people who get paid for advertising links are “polluting” the results.
An example of why they feel this way can be seen in this post from Matt Cutts. In this particular case, I agree with him. What Matt doesn’t seem to realize is that not all bloggers who write paid posts fail to do research on the topic. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons that I like Izea and PayPerPost is that I have six hours to post on a topic. I’ve been at this Internet thing for a while (I actually used it when it was still ARPANET), and I can come up with quite a bit of information in that amount of time. In fact, I’ve rejected opportunities on more than one occasion based on the research that I’ve done on a topic. I personally prefer to know that I’m not representing a snake oil company. I also strive to earn the loyalty and trust of my readers, so I try to have a clue about what I’m writing about.
That having been said, it is true that a great number of bloggers that accept paid posts don’t research at all. They focus instead on getting as many paid posts as possible in a day for as many blogs as they run. While this may translate in anything from a pleasant addition to an income to a full-time income in itself, it also means that there is no effort put into anything other than generating more money. This practice in advertising has been the downfall of print advertisers in the past, and it is my prediction that these practices will eventually be the downfall of those who do so on the web. Time and a lack of respect from readers will see to that.
While Matt is dissecting the reasoning behind Google’s rank slashing, Dustin Brewer has posted a very insightful article on adding nofollow tags to prevent you from being banned for paid links. This post is in my opinion, a must read if you are trying to come back from having your PageRank decimated as I have. Dustin also replied to my question regarding dofollow in comments. After weighing what he’s said and the fact that Andy Beard also allows link juice to trickle from comments on his site, I’ll be leaving my comments as dofollow in my new site revamp. (Be aware, I’m ruthless as far as which comments are allowed, and if you’re giving away followed links in comments, you should be as well.)
(This is just an aside, but Dustin is a mere few hours from me, and I think I may just take a trip to O.K. City if I ever need some help with a site design, the work his company does is pretty impressive.)
In totally non Google PageSlap news, Dosh Dosh put out a post that still has me thinking, titled The Flagship Blog Project: Creating Multiple blogs for Profit in 30 Day Cycles. It’s something I’m going to consider over the next few months, as i do have some domain names just “sitting around” that I might consider using to increase my revenue stream. The system looks like a lot of work, but then so is any project worth doing. I haven’t gone through every aspect of the post yet, there are other things I have to complete first, but when I do get to it, I’ll be sure to let you all know how it goes.
Oh yeah! John Chow changed the car in his header to the new Lambo.
What?
OK he had some pretty interesting things to say as well, but I can’t remember them because of that gorgeous machine’s headlights staring at me.
If you’re a fantasy writer this may just be a great opportunity for you. Carnivah House has given an open call for submissions for it’s “Infinity Swords” anthology. stories should be between 1,000 and 6,000 words. Payment is a flat fee $50.00.
this is a good opportunity if you have a knack for writing very short pieces that tell the whole story. (And it’s not easy to do, let me tell you!) their submission guidelines are prety straightforward, though there seems to be some confusion as to whether the final date for submission is January 15th or June 15th 2008. I think I’d shoot for january, if i were you.
Have Fun!
I’ve mentioned the need for frequent backups here before. If you don’t have your work backed up somewhere safely off of your computer, you stand the very real risk of losing all of it in some strange, one-in-a-million computer crash or hard disk failure. Even those of us using systems that aren’t Windows driven have the problem of hardware failure. Just running a Macintosh or Linux machine can’t save us from that.
Then of course there’s the issue of storage. Backing up to CD or DVD is nice, but if you’re like me and buy in bulk, there’s nothing to protect that fresh backup from scratches, dust buildup of loss. What’s the use of having all your work backed up to DVD if the DVD is lying on the desktop becoming damaged or unusable?
The simple solution is to go and get some attractive DVD storage cases that can be labeled neatly and placed near your office or workspace. think of it as a filing system for your important data, and keep up with it! weekly is best, but even once a month backups are better than nothing.
speaking of which, where’d I put those DVD’s?
