The Blogging Existence

Well the blogging has been going pretty smoothly of late with a few exceptions, for about a week my readership was pretty high and I was actually struggling to keep up with the comments as well as new content however it seems to have settled on around 50 people a day. That is pretty good for 6 months of blogging and after reading sites like problogger.net, I have come to realize that a King did not earn his crown in a day so If I really want to be taken seriously in politics, I have to read more and write more.

Listening to a speech by Fareed Zakaria, I have come to realize that the key for me in terms of journalism if I decide to change careers is non-print journalism because that is a dying breed of information. The problem is to find a school that offers to teach so-called ‘new journalism’.  Anyway some of this should have gone on the personal blog but I will leave it here. So for July, here are the list of successes so far:

1. Readership has improve significant in the last few months
2. My writing, grammar and spelling have also improved decreasing the time to produce new content
3. The Site loading speed has improved and I have found a tool OptiPNG that allows me to optimize the size of images on the site.
4. I finally have a Database access tool within WP that should allow me to optimize the site yet I am not sure how to do that yet.
5. I have an organized set of blogging resources that should provide me with constant information to write about

There is more than that but at this moment that is all I can think about but here is the current list of problems:

1. The site still loads far too slowly and I would like to be able to write in IE7 as well as FireFox 3
2. The only video embed that works is with YouTube otherwise I have major issues with other Embedding.
3. I have 2 or 3 spam sites that link to me which has no doubt affected my Google Ranking, I need to contact their ISP’s and complain.

Again, there might be more problems than those but here is my To-Do List for the moment:

1. Keep on changing the content of the sidebar to see what really works, Barack Obama Widget?
2. Ensure that the blog is W3C compliant and RSS compliant
3. Check for dead links again
4. Optimize SQL Tables
5. Improve Site Loading Time
6. Submit Blog to places for people to make suggestions
7. Participate in some blogging community
8. Implement the Twitter Blaster Widget
9. Improve Traffic
10. Remember to submit to Digg and Reddit

Well I experienced a traffic spike the other day when a lady from the global voices project linked to me which was great but now I have to figure out a way to keep my traffic sustainable. Ideally I would like to write about American Issues as well as certain other issues though it looks like the global voices project is looking for people to write about issues of South Africa which is something I am sure I could do without a problem. We will just have to wait and see.

In the mean time, now that the RSS is fixed, I would like to be able to add it to a few directories to see if I can boost traffic like that. I also would like to get back to podcasting and figure out some questions to ask Pamela for the interview on the global food crisis.

I am still having some small issues at the moment with the blog:

1. The blog works best in opera but the problem is that when I type sometimes, it is like the text can seem to go on forever at some points in that is is not restricted to the margins.
2. Also with some pictures, there is this border around pictures of different colors that I would like to get rid of.
3. I have established somewhat of a schedule for blogging. Basically I know that during the week it has to be short articles while on the weekend they can be long. I also know I can do comics, quotes and podcasts somewhat regularly.
4. I would still like to find a contributing author somewhere however that has not been very succesful, I tried to contact this one person in malaysia but no response yet.
5. I need to not rush some articles because I have made mistakes as demonstrated by last night’s bad embedding of the Meet The Press video

Beyond all of that, the new Wordpress update is great and has really improved the speed of the whole program though there have been some minor issues here and there. I am looking foward to future updates. Also started using akismet which has worked out quite well in reducing my spam load. Would like to embed it on my blog but need to figure out how to center the code.

Well Wordpress 2.5 was definitely a step up from previous versions but with a few quirks:

1. The uploading image system was great before hand, it is now shot to hell though as you can imagine because it takes me 5  - 10 min longer to upload an image.
2. I was using wp-cache for a while however there were a whole bunch issues because my homepage is set to the politics website and quite a few times it never loaded so I decided to stop using wp-cache for a while to see if I notice any difference.
3. Using Opera, there are times when the text goes out of the frame which is one big irratation but it works on IE7 which is strange.
4. I have also experienced issues when upgrading plugins with intermittent successes and failures.
5. With IE7, the window that loads to add media is stuck on the bottom of the screen for some reason.

Those issues that I just outlined above are not huge train smashes but they do make the blogging existence  a little bit tougher. Its my plan starting in the new week to try and post something at least once a day to see if that improves traffic. I did manage to submit my Tibetan story to Digg and Reddit with some boost in traffic according to sitemeter.

The next big thing for the site, well I was going to work on the Forums as the next big thing but I realize that you need people to go to your site first before they will login to the forums. I really would like to get back to podcasting for the site, though I have to explore a better way to do that then the way that I was originally podcasting. Things to do:

1. Get the site W3C certified
2. Have someone lookover the code to see if it can be optimized
3. Find a good podcasting solution for wordpress (Look at bluburry again)
4. Look into keyword programs, maybe even shell out some cash for that
5. Examine instablogs as a source of supplementary traffic

Well this past weekend I spent a breath-taking few hours installing the latest Wordpress 2.5 to my three Blogs that I run on the Wordpress platform with Godaddy.com. First let me address a couple of issues:

1. Godaddy is really slow with the updates of Wordpress which is something I am not too happy about, but they are the cheapest hosts out there so you get what you pay for I suppose
2. 2.5 is an Amazing update so I would have thought that they would have implemented it sooner rather than the usual 15 - 25 days

Otherwise the Site is running great, don’t really have anything to complain about in that front. I am still looking for people to help me write articles but that has been a slow process here in Ireland. I need to figure out another way to find the requisite talent so that I can grow my readership since my timing combined with my laziness is not providing for the most productive approach to growing readership.

I have really enjoyed though the whole learning process and I am looking foward to blogging on this website and the Wordpress platform for the forseeable future.

Well I just reinstalled Windows yesterday and things are going alright so far, there are still a few irratating messages I keep getting which I have no idea what is causing the issue but I am glazing over them since they are not critical. The worst part of the whole affair is that I backed up the wrong favorites so I lost a ton of my internet history which included some important sites. I don’t remember what those were but I guess I will find them as time goes on.

I know this is wrong to say this, since I am a big fan of Firefox but I think part of the issue was where I had my favorites located. I mean, I thought I backed up the right folder which is located in “Documents and Settings” but maybe I was wrong? What would really be great is if Microsoft allowed us to use just one browser and not make Internet Explorer a core part of the Operating System.

Everything is back to normal though, and as far as this blog goes:

1. The RSS is sorted out and works….I think but I have not heard anything back from the major podcast directories.
2. The main politics theme is still causing me a little grief with the formatting issues, haven’t had time to look at that yet.
3. The gamescreams blog is up and running but I still need to spend sometime configuring it.
4. I still need another writer to work with me on the politics blog
5. I tried to get Snapshots working but no luck…

So the site is finally up with not too many issues. The problems that I have noticed so far are:

1. The sub-domain’s seem to take longer to load than the proper domains. I am not sure what the issue is there but I think I will probably have to contact Godaddy about that.
2. I still have no idea how to setup the RSS inside the text box so that I can spread my podcasts.
3. There is still kind of a formatting issue with the blog where hyperlinks break the formatting and totally screw with the way the way the blog looks.
4. Would like to have a box to the left of the blog where I can put some video’s there.
5. I am not getting enough visitors, is that related to SEO or some other cause?

Well this is my first real website so I hope everyone will forgive the lack of flare that one would expect of some blogs these days. It was an uphill battle in all honesty, I remember the days at WBHS when we were learning about Pascal and I thought to myself how complex could programming really be? That being said I realize now that programming is indeed the science that people claim it to be so to anyone who thinks that sitting in front of a computer all day pouring over code is less than a job, well I don’t have any words for you… No seriously I really don’t know what to say.

Back to the site, well when I first installed wordpress, it was not in the root directory of the domain name which caused big problems because Google does not like redirects. Being the lazy person that I am, the first thing I did after that realization was to email Godaddy tech support and by the time I got their reply, I had already solved the problem. Again I digress so the point of this page in the blog is that I will talk about changes to the site and what to expect on a monthly and sometimes weekly basis.

For the moment I am using Viper’s plugin to manage the embedded video’s, Uber’s plugin for the SEO optimization, the wordpress stats plugin for the zero visitors I have so far at the date of this entry. All the plugins are great, I would like to adjust the homepage of the blog a bit with widgets but because this theme does not support it, that goal will have to wait.

The site loads a bit funny from my side in Ireland, not to say that it is slow but in the coming days I will be submitting the URL to friends and family to check load times. I also emailed Godaddy’s support staff regarding whether a static IP would improve load times and they categorically told me that if I did that, I would have to migrate my site to a different kind of server. I still might consider the Static IP idea if I find out loads times are terrible but then again I might try the site optimization plugin.

Another discovery I made was that the spellcheck does not work for me, not that I mind that but it means that I will have to copy this entry as I write it and paste it into Word to spellcheck everything. My spelling is not too bad I might add but I sort of flucuate on spelling sometimes between American and British so that does cause some issues.

Lastly I don’t know how to continue adding entries to this part of the Blog in the sense that when I change this page, I will have to edit it as opposed to posting stuff below the intial entry. This is going to be a bit irratating for myself and people who will read this part of the blog but until I figure this out, it will have to do and I do apologize for that.

27th of January - My good friend Amilie has agree to collaborate with me regarding certain global political issues, from now on I will be pasting the entire contents of her thoughts when it comes to a new topic into my blog before I write my own. The next topic will be “Will China’s economy continue to develop or will another Asian economic crisis develop?”

I encourage everyone to read her blog because her opinions are well founded and researched hence I am glad that such collaboration can occur because they will provide the essential east/west contrast.

1st of February - I have been meaning to write more frequently but been side tracked this week since I purchased a Unreal Tournament 3 Server which has been giving me hassles, everything seems to be caught up this week. So I am planning to have a new Entry up by Saturday Night. I have also decided to have a Downloadable files section since I hate the idea of using someone else’s bandwidth to serve files relating to my entries. I will also be creating some audioblogs this weekend so listen out for that.

16th of February - Well its almost 12am and I should have written my weekly entry but I know that is not going to happen tonight. So well I finally figured out how to center an image in HTML. I still have not figured how to get the wordpress spellcheck to work so I have to manually copy the text out of anything I write and paste it into word which causes some formatting headaches. I found a cool bar at addthis.com which allows people to bookmark my entries. I need to add a recent posts entry to the sidebar but I have to spend some time to figure out how to do that.