Due to my hectic program during most of the week, activities related to blogging (not just writing, but administration work, stats reviewing etc.) have pushed me to get an arsenal of tools and gadgets to help me do that on the go. In this post I’d like to share some all of those with you.

1. Option’s USB GlobeSurfer iCON HSUPA

This thing rocks! Together with a 3G+ Mobile Internet Connection (in my case from Orange, but many operators offer something similar) it enables me to blog, browse, administer and in one word be online as long as the batteries on my laptop hold out. Works anywhere (read: anywhere not on the peak of a mountain) and because it is quad-band I could use it in any country on Earth, given I change the SIM card with one on a subscription plan in that particular country so the roaming traffic charges don’t kill me.

If my WiFi router at home allows me to be online even on the toilet (read that somewhere, found it hilarious), this little guy allows me to be online when I’m on other people’s toilets as well…

2. My laptop

OK, don’t kill me, I write on a Dell. I didn’t get a mac because it would’ve cost me a fortune and I wouldn’t have been able to run any of the apps and connect any lab equipment I need at University. Systems Engineering is, for now at least, done on PC’s.

I’m pretty pleased with it, nice battery time and cooling system… no mechanical problems yet, since it’s only 5 months old. It’s a power horse, has 2 gigs of RAM and I can use it for a lot of stuff, from gaming to neural network simulations. Blogging is somewhere in there too

3. My Nokia E70

We Europeans are crazy when it comes to cellphones. I got this thing because of its qwerty keyboard (flip it open - wham) and WiFi capability. In theory I could blog from my phone without any problems, although I never tried it… I still prefer my WUXGA laptop screen to the 352 x 416 of my phone.

4. Odds and ends

Ok, let’s see here: memory stick, memory cards and MP3 player with voice record function for when I get what I think are ideas that’d make good posts. Co-workers can sometimes see me walking along the hallway on our office floor talking into that thing going: “Note to self: write about this or that tonight.”

Right, that’s about it. This is my mobile office that fits into a backpack and still leaves room for a sandwich or two… hope you found it interesting.

Photo author: mollyeh11

Assuming your blog has more than one page of posts you’re going to have some links at the bottom of each page reading to navigate to older posts or to newer ones. They are an essential part of your blog’s navigation and can be useful when trying to keep a visitor on for more.

I have seen my share of instances when those links read something like “Next” and “Previous”, or something similar, which can be pretty confusing at times for the reader. As an example, Josh is reading page 4 of your post index. He worked his way down from the 1st page, trying to take in all the useful info he can get from your blog. He reached the end of page 4 and wants to go to page 5, but isn’t sure any more which link to click,”Next” or “Previous”… he clicks the wrong one and ends up on page 3. Of course, this is frustrating for Josh. Now he’d have to go back to page 4 and click the other link to get wher he wanted to be.

Many times the Joshes reading your posts simply decide it’s not worth it and simply leave, to find the information they need elsewhere. You just lost a few potential page views. Want to avoid that? Of course…

[Read more]

Photo author: fullo

Numbers. As large as possible, as many as possible. This is what ultimately all bloggers need. Whether it’s visitors, RSS subscribers, pageviews, indexed pages or god knows what else, the more the better.

But what do you do when you’re nearing maximum expansion on your extremely tight-niche blog, for example? When it seems there are, physically, no other people in your target audience than the ones currently reading your work? If you can’t build up any more, build to the sides. Expand in other niches and build a blog network.

But how do you expand into other niches most effectively and with the least technical hassle? I can think of a few ways…

Take for instance Darren Rowse’s b5media blog networks, one of the largest and most successful ones out there. B5media covers a lot of broad topics from Beauty to Video games, with multiple blogs covering various smaller niches within each topic.

Now, the way all these blogs are built strikes me quite squarely. Browse the b5media homepage a bit, expand a few categories and open a few tabs with several blogs of your choosing. Do you see it? The same basic template, with other colors. Darren found something that works and went with it over and over again. It saves time and a lot of money. But I’d go ahead and standardize more than just the template. This brings me to the first tip:

1. Pick a way: the old-school way or the WP Mu way

To think of it, you should do this first… I would favor the old-school way of one WordPress installation for one blog. The upside of this would be that your blogs would be totally independent. Anything going wrong would hit only one of them, whereas having one big WP Mu installation just begs for something to go wrong and bring your whole network down all at the same time. It’s also easier to have your blogs on different hosting accounts, servers or even webhosts, all for the sake of network safety and de-centralization.

On the other hand, a WordPress Mu install holding many blogs would most likely take up less resources and be easier to configure and modify in case you want something changed (for example if an ad needs to be moved from one place to another on all the blogs in your network). In spite of this obvious advantage, I’m still not convinced that Mu is stable and ripe enough to be trusted with your whole blog network. Moving on to another tip: [Read more]

Photo author: atomicshark

Word of mouth promotion is one of the easiest, most effective and cheapest (actually free) ways to promote ever. All you have to do is get the word out, and if what you’re promoting is interesting to your target, it has the potential of turning viral.

For example, I accidentally stumbled upon a site, yougetsignal.com, that has a few very useful network tools. I found it useful, so I told some (maybe 15) of my colleagues and friends from work and university. I assume some of them told their friends and the ball kept rolling until about 4 days later when my roommate (which works for the same company as I do) came to tell me that he heard about this great tool - you guessed it - it was on YouGetSignal. I hadn’t told him because he doesn’t care much about this sort of thing, but somehow he found out and thought he’d tell me, since he knew I’d like it. I can’t help but think that the word I set out circled back to me… that’s awesome.

Take for instance this rather plausible scenario with very conservative numbers: you have a blog, you tell 10 friends you feel might be interested. They check it out, 8 of them actually find it interesting and tell about 5 of their other friends each. They check it out and each of those tells 2 of their friends. That would make the visitor count to your blog from this alone rise about 130 and who knows how many of those would become regulars.
Again, note that this is an attenuated, conservative example. It might actually be much better and it might not die down on the 3rd tier.

“So what’s the big deal? If you tell them, they will come.”

The first time I tried this I got a rather unexpected result. I was down at the pub with a few friends (5 of us, I think) and over the first round of beers I casually told them I had started blogging (about t-shirts, that was my old blog). It had dawned on me on my way to the pub that this was the perfect opportunity for me to do some promotion. I was getting ready to write down the URL on their beer coasters so they could check it out later, but I didn’t have the chance to get to that - one of them, whom I later found out thought blogs were a means for “the establishment” and “the corporations” to push products onto people (he’s a bit of a 21st century hippie), said something along the lines of:

“So what are you going to try and sell us? Do you want us to click on your ads now?”

I sat there, just shocked about what I heard. I didn’t even have the chance to explain in detail what it was about. The others we were with seemed to be more impressed by the inquisitive attitude of this guy than with my attempts to defend my work. The herd effect strikes again. Soon the conversation drifted to other topics and I hadn’t even had the chance to get beyond “You know, I started blogging about t-shirts”…

Very disappointing, especially since these were my friends, some of which I had known for years. But any kick in the butt is a step forward, so I tried to learn as much as possible from this experience: [Read more]