Archives for February 2007

It’s no secret, those with the scoop have a tendency to get all the traffic. If a newspaper gets an inside story, they sell more copies. If a news channel has that one special interview, then they get the viewers. With blogging it’s no different.

Case in point, on one of my other blogs, I sometimes blog about American Idol. When a contestant made a sneaky remark about Simon Cowel and Telletubbies, I found it interesting and so I posted about it. Threw in some research I did on the truth behind the comment and made sure to tag the post as well with the relevant keywords. Posted it, pinged it, then I went to bed.

The next day I checked out the stats and site visitors were up by about 1500%. It seems that my little post, was on fire.

After installing WordPress 2.1 my experiences have been both good and bad. There are a few things I LOVE about the updated blogging software, but there are also a few things that bug me.

Stuff That Bugs Me

1. No ‘Previwe Post’ link when writing a post. This really gets me as I preview my post quite often. Granted the functionality is still there, you just have to scroll down to see it.
2. No Firefox spell check. Seeing as my spelling isn’t the best, I rely on Firefox’s spell check quite often. However, the new WYSIWYG editor doesn’t work with Firefox’s spell check and no red-underlined words makes me think I spelt everything correctly. Now I have to make a point to hitting the spell check button.

One of the things any good blogger knows is that titles are an important part of your blog post. When I saw “6 Lessons Britney Spears Can Teach You About Blogging” I couldn’t help but click through to read it. Not only is it a great title, it’s a good post too.

My favorite is “If you hang around with trash, you may be considered to be trash as well.“

Recently the blogs I monitor have been getting hit with a lot of spam that Akismet doesn’t seem to catch. Here is an example:

Author: used auto detroit

Comment: used auto detroit

Info about used auto detroit.

The good news is I’ve come up with a simple solution. Just go into your blogs admin, click on options and then on discussion. In the comments moderation area, add /strong to the list. Next time one of these comments make it through, they’ll be held for moderation instead of going live.

Notice, I didn’t say that this was a fix. You could add /strong to the comment blacklist area but you may filter out good comments too. Seeing as strong tags are OK to use in WordPress comments, a real visitor could use it. Plus, some blogs tell users that they can use basic formatting. That’s why we throw it into moderation and not just throw it away.