Other Stuff Blog

Nick Bradbury released FeedDemon 2.0 Beta 1 – the new version of the best news aggregator (in my opinion).

I really like the new version! It’s a huge impovement over 1.5. Now we have tree (at first I didn’t like the idea of trees – I liked the original implementation of feed management better, but since now I’m subscribed to lots of feeds, I find it very useful). I also like the updated Surfer style.

Nick, thank you again for great software!

We have new CDs now:

(To add CD to your purchase when ordering, just tick add/remove check box near “Backup CD” item.)

You know what? PayPal doesn’t accept payments from many countries. When you use PayPal’s system to accept credit cards, people from these countries just can’t pay.

For example, I’m in Russia. I can’t pay for, say, Flickr Pro account, since they accept payments via PayPal (even credit cards are processed by them), and PayPal doesn’t accept money from Russia. Or Mint (developer said that it’s not in his plans to accept payments without PayPal).

Now, everyone  (BSA, RIAA) talks that there are tons of pirated software, music and videos in our country. Since I’m a software developer, I know – this is bad, bad. bad. But how the hell we are supposed to pay if you don’t want accept money from us?

I want, I REALLY WANT to buy music from Apple’s iTunes Music Store. Can I? No, they don’t accept my money. Same thing with music stores included in Windows Media Player – we have only one such store, which has only Russian pop music that suck.

Think! – Internet, Visa, Mastercard is all about going global. How are you supposed to go global if you restrict people from buying your stuff?

Think again! – there are tons of credit card processors that don’t exclude countries. Use them. Don’t use PayPal. Or use it as an option.

P.S. I accept PayPal. This is for your conveniece. I don’t want to exclude PayPal customers from purchasing my product. But since I can’t accept it directly (remember, I come from “bad” country), I use SWREG to process my PayPal payments.

I know, Aussies can’t imagine Christmas in winter , but here’s what we have here in Russian village:

I heard that in this year we have the highest snowdrifts in history – 39 centimeters (15.35 inches).

It seems like our children will laugh at us, like we were laughing at people who thought that the Earth was a plain object that laid on elephants. The solar system isn’t what it used to be…

It’s funny that the new planet was called Xena and it’s moon – Gabrielle. Can we then call a few more planets Stan, Kyle, Cartman and (for the dead object) Kenny?

I wish you all the best. Have a happy holiday season!

Darren Rowse wrote today the points he extracted from interview of Performancing with Matt Cutts, Google engineer, where he talks about optimizing blogs for search engines.

The first point was “I wouldn’t bother with year/month/day in blog urls; I’d just use the first few words from the title of the post in the url”.

Great. Now, what if your blog already uses year/month/day in URLs? If you change it, you’ll lose all your permalinks.

I have the solution. Here’s how to switch to example.com/postname.html permalinks AND keep the ability to use old names like example.com/2005/12/13/postname/.

1. Download and open your .htaccess file and remove lines “# WordPress BEGIN” and “# WordPress END” (so that WordPress can’t change your .htaccess file).
2. Add this line: RewriteRule ^(.*).html /index.php?name=$1 [QSA,L] at the end before </IfModule>.
3. Upload .htaccess back to your server.
4. Login to WordPress, click Options > Permalinks.
5. Replace your current Structure with  /%postname%.html
6. Download and open your .htaccess again and remove all the lines starting from “# WordPress BEGIN” to “# WordPress END”.
7. Upload .htaccess back to your server.

Done! Now you can access you posts by entering old permalinks, and new permalinks will be in example.com/postname.html format.

Blog marketing is all about word of mouth. You should make your blog worth talking about, and get your posts quoted on other blogs and web sites. You main asset is content, that is – your posts. All you need to do is to learn how to use word of mouth.

1. Choose your topic. Blog about everything or about various stuff won’t interest readers. Narrow your topic. By trying to interest everybody you’ll interest nobody.

2. Write simple and add some personality to your posts. Awake your readers’ interest in you and earn credibility – the blog is yours after all!

3. Post regularly. Well, everybody knows it but not everybody actually writes regularly. There’s more here: if it’s pain for you to write, by writing regularly, you’ll improve your skills and it will become easier and easier to write.

4. “Tell a friend”. Add to your blog tell-a-friend feature to let readers send your posts by email. This feature won’t drive a lot of traffic, but imagine what happens when one reader tells about your blog ten people…

5. Put your blog’s address everywhere: in your email signature, on discussion boards, on your other web sites, on your business card.

6. Comment posts on other blogs. And don’t forget to put a link to yours. But, of course, don’t spam, and remember that if you have nothing to say, say nothing.

7. Quote other bloggers and ping their posts. It’s easy to do with BlogJet: grab the trackback link from blog, click “Properties” tab and paste it to “Pings”.

8. Link to other blogs. But don’t ask for a link back – most bloggers don’t like it. But because bloggers check their hit stats, they can find out about your blog by looking into referrers. Like every curious person, they want to know what’s your blog about and what it have to do with them.

9. Write articles for other web sites. And put a link to your blog.

10. Submit your blog to directories and blog search engines.

11. Use pay-per-click advertisement. If you have spare money, of course. I’ve tried Google AdWords and discovered that it’s better (for me) to advertise single popular and interesting posts instead of my whole blog.

12. Learn what your readers want and give it to them. What are your most popular posts about? What are your most quoted posts about? Find this out and write on this more.

13. Use catchy titles for posts. Follow my favorite book authors: “All Marketers Are Liars”, “Your Marketing Sucks”, etc. Use “How to…”, “55 Ways…” – these titles often interest readers. For example: “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living”, “17 Ways To Drive Traffic to Your Blog”.

14. Don’t forget about search engine optimization. I don’t encourage you to learn SEO and dig in search engines algorithms, but learn just a few key principles and use them.

15. Do something for other bloggers and blogosphere. Offer your help for free.

16. Actively participate in bloggers community. Join meetings, conferences, exchange emails with other bloggers. Send interesting links to them on the topic of their blogs (again, no spam,
and only if they agree).

17. Focus on the long-term outlook. Don’t expect to get lots of traffic immediately. Get it gradually. Set small goals (for example, “get 500 RSS readers in three months”) and achieve them.

BlogJet will keep you focused on content and make you forget the technical side of blogging.

Good luck!