Helping You Rock Out Your Site Like A Rockstar!

National Blog Posting Month or affectionally known as NaBloPoMo is an event that happens during November each year – the same time as NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month.) No, you do not have to write 50,000 words in one blog post or throughout the month. However, this is something bloggers can sign up and take the challenge of at least blogging once a day for the whole month of November.

For some, blogging once a day is actually a challenge. For others, it may be encouragement to get more content out on their blogs. I learned about this last moment and joined. It is pretty easy for me since I already blog once, and sometimes more than once in a day.

NaBloPoMo is a way for bloggers to be able to meet other bloggers as they also have communities arranged by interest rather than a regular forum. It is also a way you can post your articles and share them with other NaBloPoMo users too and possibly a way to attract new readers to your blog. I recommend giving the site a look and joining even if you are late in the game to take up the challenge.

National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo is around once again. This is the third year I have participated. Every November thousands of people take up a challenge to write a 50,000 word novel before the end of the month. Insane? Cool?

I am really excited about it and although I missed the first meetup of my area, I can say that there are regional NaNoWriMo meetups, so if you like to meet people who are writing fiends, then it is definitely something to join and participate in. There is no shame if you cannot meet the challenge, but it is fun to at least try. Last year I beat the quota, and this year I am sure I can do the same this year.

NaNoWriMo might be a time you could write a tutorial book, something about social networking, or even blogging, or just write for fun. If you are already a member of NaNoWriMo, my ID there is taiyoukai.nile and you can add me as a writing buddy if you want.

Have you participated in National Novel Writing Month? How did you fare – did you meet the challenge?

October 26, 2009 signifies the official closing of Geocities. All sites will be gone. In the past few months several online places have tried hard to gather and preserve sites that have been abandoned by their site owners or whether the site has been moved elsewhere, but retain great information. Whether by documenting the general information of the site, screencapping, or hosting the entire site, obviously this was an important project to tackle since the site dates back to 1994.

Some of the places online that have worked hard to try to document as many sites are:

FanHistory – Fanhistory.com:Geocities preservation project
ArchiveTeam – Geocities Project
Internet Archive – Saving a Historical Record of GeoCities

Of course I believe there are other projects out there, but as for significant contributions, these sites have done their best to reach out to the community as a lot of webmasters today may have used GeoCities as some point in time. A lot of people might laugh, but even though there was a lot of bad design, there were some pretty nifty websites out there that were tastefully and simply created, but also provided great information. Things that became of great interest were fan sites, and some of todays bloggers that have moved onto self-hosting. Geocities was undoubtedly a great stepping block.

So, I guess, this is my own personal eulogy. Your thoughts about GeoCities final rest?

Paid to tweet or sponsored tweets have been something that has popped up majorly in the past year, especially since Twitter has really exploded onto the mainstream. Basically paid to tweet is as it says. Usually you will get the final say on what goes through your own social network stream and all these sites require full disclosures, which is great since the laws on endorsements have changed for both bloggers and social network users. Below I have listed a few sites that offer these services for user looking to make a little cash. Although I may have an account with each, none of them contain my referral. If you plan to join, and like to use my referral, please ask me via my contact form and I will send my referral link.

RevTwt: I have really never been paid by RevTwt, though I do not doubt their services. The problem is that their opportunities come in increments below $1 per tweet. Even their cost per followers is quite low, which makes it almost impossible to make anything with this service.

Twittad: Twittad has both paid to tweet services and also replacing twitter backgrounds with full ads. The user can submit and search topics that are relevant to their Twitter stream conversations and choose ads which best fit. The payout is okay, but nothing to impress. Opportunities for those who stay true to their interests may not be lucky as those who do not give a care.

Be-A-Magpie: Has been promising and is the first paid to tweet system I joined. I was a bit skeptical, but it does pay out and I have gotten a fair amount of opportunities. The thing is that opportunities are usually in groups, or it seems there is a time when more opportunities come through my stream. In the past Be-A-Magpie has been a bit funky with getting tweets out, but apparently that has been fixed.

SponsoredTweets: Opened just a couple months ago and by far is the best program I have tried. It is ran by Izea, creator of Pay Per Post, Social Spark and other sites. The system seems to be great and their support is right on top of anything that might go wrong or if anyone has any questions. I have not had to wait too long for opportunities, but I am thinking compared to other paid to tweet sites, this one gets more business because it has a company with influential and trustworthy people running it. Payouts are not hard to obtain and I like how their system allows you to list your interests and you can even have opportunities in which you decide how your twitter ads will be displayed – of course with a disclosure intact. This company requires full disclosure.

After so many people asking, I thought I would add my experience with these sites.

Any other sites I should check out that I missed? Do you use any paid to tweet services?

I think as the debate on using tables or not, the use of iframes has been second to that.

Inline frames, also known as iframes as described by Wikipedia:

An inline frame places another HTML document in a frame inside a normal (rather than frameset) HTML. document.

The use of iframes for years has been much of a beginner’s fad in designing. It allows the user to make a small website and put all their content in a small area. However, as time passed, people were abusing this more than using frames. An iframe calls another page to load, so instead of 1, you will have more than one depending on how many iframes you have placed on your layout. Some web page newbies decided to place their content in a larger window, so now only did their content scroll, but their page, even in larger browsers.

Why not to use them?

1. Well, often the page is not indexed correctly by the search engines. Search engines will often overlook the iframe and then the design is broken. This is not good for the designer.

2. Some browsers may not show the iframe properly or at all.

3. Using the iframe could take more load time for your users. Remember, even though there is broadband, there are still people out there that only have access to the Internet via dial-up, and even if the modem handles 56K, it does not always connect even that close.

4. Using the iframe as a means to place content is not exactly a good excuse if you are allowing the window to be large in length. Rather than use the iframe, you can place your content in division layers. It is just as easy to code and makes your layout more flexible if one page is longer versus another page.

There are more efficient and better means to coding layouts than using iframes. What other reasons are there? If you are one that supports iframes, why?

The Fan History wiki has been trying hard to preserve Yahoo! Geocities since it is due to close before the end of October 2009. Although Fan History is covering sites that are within the fandom realm, like fan sites, fan fiction sites, fan art sites, and the like, there are other places too that are trying to preserve more. AboutUs.org even covered this issue, so you know if they mentioned it in their article GeoCities is Closing: Here’s How to Wiki-fy Your Sites , it is important enough to pay attention.

The reason behind this is that there will be a lot of sites lost due to the fact that the owner may have long abandoned their site even though people actually visit it to get relevant information. Although Yahoo! offers paid services for their hostees to move to, GeoCities has been a great tool for many to just be able to have a website. Other than the paid services, Yahoo! recklessly redirects their hostees to choose other sites as if it was no big deal.

Although most of the places like Fan History and the Internet Archive, you can help with this, even if it is or is not your website.

If you did have a site at Geocities that is currently up, put some type of notation that it have moved and provide a visible link in your anchor text. I have done so at my old and ancient site – Petals In The Wind (as an example.) You can then go to the Internet Archive site and have them preserve your site. If you know of any websites that should be documented, but only have time to make a list, you can contact me and share your list, or contact the site owner Laura Hale on Twitter. In at least doing this people will be able to find your content if you have since moved it. Already, I am aware that Fan History has documented over 5,000 websites so far on GeoCities that are fan related.

Have you heard of the GeoCities Preservation projects? What do you think of GeoCities closing, even if you might not have used their services?

I came across the site Spottt and thought that this might be something to share with those of you looking for something that could help. Spottt takes the old idea of the banner exchange and instead of all of the people on the banner exchange eventually being seen, you should only see sites with similar content to yours.

This is idea for people with smaller sites that are seeking more traffic. Although it says it is a link exchange, you are really submitting both a link and a banner, so it really is a banner exchange. Banner exchanges have been a great way to get traffic, but they have usually been very unfocused. Banner exchanges with more than 150 sites with various content, so if you had a web design site, you would have seen sites that had no common grounds with your own.

It is free to use and you can place it on a multitude of sites like:
LiveJournal
MySpace
Xanga

or any site that allows you to insert outside HTML.

Requirements are that you must put the ad above the fold, or by Spottt’s definition, less than 850 pixels from the top of the page. In return, Spottt will calculate your site impressions and how many clicks have gone through so you can monitor your site’s performance.

Have you tried banner exchanges similar to Spottt? Where? And has it worked to bring traffic to your site?

So, I guess I should make it at least official. Blogrity is a social bookmark site built with the WordPress core. Of course, the site is pretty raw on design, but it is functional, and I am hoping that some of you might try signing up and submit your links to the site. I am just at the point that I need people to try it out, feel free to give some imput, and hopefully through that, I can add more features.

One thing on mind once I get to a comfortable point, I develop and will offer up to my own ‘digg’ type button that you can bring back to your website, or perhaps offer it to the other places like Sociable or that like so bookmarking your links will be easier.

For categories, I am not going to get too detailed on the categories. I would like them to not exactly resemble Digg’s categories where sometimes the article might not fit. I will be open to adding more general categories. I want to thank Webmasterish for some of the help provided along the way to get to this point. In fact, I probably should have mentioned the site before.

Do you think you might try out Blogrity?