HOEI

I have come across a couple of blog contests worthy of entering and blogging about. The MsDanielle.com blog site is offering up a 30GB Microsoft Zune in a contest open to just anyone with a blog who is willing to link to her site a couple times. Ms. Dannielle won this Zune in a contest and decided to put it back up for grabs. I like this ideas and I promise to do the same should I come up the winner in this giveaway.

The second contest I am participating is over at PureBlogging.com. These guys are offering up two separate $100 prizes to be delivered via PayPal. The first $100 prize will go to the 1000th commenter on that blog. The second $100 will be given via a random drawing from all qualifying entries. Stop by PureBlogging and read the details and rules if you are interested in a chance to win some cash.

How do you manage blog post ideas? I’m not talking about the ones that pop into your mind while sitting in front of your computer. I am talking about those that pop into your head in the middle of the night, while you’re in the shower, while you are at work, or while driving your car.

I have been experiencing some episodes of writer’s block lately. However, I often think of ideas when I find that I am in a position that prevents me from posting to one of my blogs. I then find myself in front of the computer later racking my brain trying to remember that awesome idea I had earlier in the day. More often than not, these ideas have slipped away and never return. If they do return, the timing might be all wrong for writing a post on that idea if the original idea was based on a current event.

I have compiled a short list of ways to gather those great ideas:
While off line (with no access to a computer)

• Call and leave yourself a voice mail containing enough details to spark your memory
• Send yourself a text message
• Make an analog note (with pen and paper)
• Take a picture or shoot a video with a camera phone
• Use a digital voice recorder (many portable mp3 players have this feature)

My favorite has to be the digital voice recorder. This device can be used in so many creative ways. As noted above, many mp3 players provide a record feature. My favorites are made by iRiver. I am still trying to get used to the voice memo feature on my Treo 700P. I have used the Treo 650 for so long that I forget I even have this application on the new 700P.

One of the above choices should help with off line idea collection, but there are the times when you are at a friend’s house and BAM, an awesome idea comes over you while siting in front of your buddy’s computer.

While on line (at someone else’s computer)
All of the above plus:

• Send yourself an email or ask your friend to email you
• Use on line bookmarks
• Maintain an on line document listing your ideas
• Create draft posts in your blogging software

Bonus: I received an email from a blogging friend yesterday. Mama Grizzly asked me how I did something on one of my blogs and recommended that I write a blog post on this technique. Her recommendation reminded me that I have a ton of tips from my experience of more than ten years in information technology. I could easily be filling up this blog and Tech Land. Look at what LifeHacker gets away with in a post about using asterisks to filter searches in an open dialog window. I might be able to come up with a few hundred blog posts like that one. Thanks Mama Grizzly for helping me get the creative juices flowing!

The images on the left is a screen capture from The Land of Ozz before a WordPress upgrade. The image on the right is a screen capture just after the WordPress 2.2 upgrade was complete.

Step 1: Backup Database Tables and Files!!!

The first step in upgrading a standalone WordPress blog could not be more critical if you are using the default Kubrick theme on your blog. You can not simply backup the database and skip the files on your web server. You will likely make this mistake only once. I have customized the kubrickheader.jpg header image file, sidebar, header, footer, archive, and index pages. The most noticeable affect to the upgrade is the loss of the custom header image and any widgets manually added in the sidebar.

If you have already blown away/overwritten the files in your default WordPress theme without a backup, you have only a couple of options.

1. Recode in all of your widgets, scripts, and custom HTML
2. Ask your hosting provider to restore from last night’s backup.

Option one is my personally preference and it is going to be required to some extent if you are determined to stay with a default theme.   Loosing everything without a backup has happened to me in the past.  The bright side was that loosing all my custom code actually forced me into some much needed house cleaning of my sidebar.   I have never tried the second option and really don’t like that idea much anyway.

Please drop a comment if you are having problems with a WordPress upgrade or if you have some advice to add. Most of my blogs including this one use custom themes. Custom themes will “usually” not be overwritten when using an FTP client to copy your WordPress upgrade to the server. You still should not take chances and you should always backup your entire blog directory structure before an upgrade.

Today I am in an acronym creating mood. My first term of the day is called search landing information (SLI). Ultimately, SLI is what you use to improve your SEO. The SLI can be defined as a combination of:

1. The search word(s) used in a search engine that results with a person landing on your blog or web site.
2. The search engine used.
3. The visitors activity on your site.

When you host your own stand alone blog, you can see these specific statistics from a standard (free) Site Meter account. That is if your statistics are not whizzing by and cycling out of your view at light speed due to having a gazzillion visitors per minute. Even if you re seeing your stats disappear rapidly on Site Meter, you can still get a pretty good snap shoot in time. The visit details page Site Meter will give you all of this and more. You can also us free log analyzers against your raw domain data to gain information on common search words used to get to your site. Tools like webalizer and modlogan give fairly good results and offer much more than you can ever get come a tool like Site Meter. Don’t get me wrong, Site Meter is one of the greatest things since sliced bread, but it falls short on telling you how many people hit your feeds and how many people are pulling down you MP3s via iTunes if your into podcasting.

The inspiration for this post came from my reflection of my own statistics addiction after reading Help! I’m Addicted to Checking My Blog Stats. Don’t let Darren fool you with his “I remember doing the same thing…” spill. Go back a few weeks and take a close look at the graphic in Darren’s post titled A Secret To My Productivity Success. Out of the first fifteen sites Darren launches every morning, Site Meter statistics make up one third of them. I can imaging that his Site Meter stats whiz by at light speed.

Anyway, let’s face it. We must understand who we have visiting our blogs and why if we want to grow traffic? If your blog stats are anything like mine, then about 60% of your traffic is comprised of new visits. Google Analytics offers some great information about new vs. returning visitors. If you consider that 50% of my traffic comes from search engines, then we can conclude that about 30% of my blogs’ visitors are first timers coming from search engines. Of the visitors to my site I get many more page views from search engine deliveries. What the heck, let’s start another acronym out of that one. We will refer to these mortal visitors who land on our blogs for the first time from a search engine as a SED (Search Engine Delivery).

A SED is the backbone of growing blogs. This is where the fresh meat is coming from that you are hoping you can cook up with your FeedBurner. It should come as not surprise that the things your are most passionate about are going to be the things that bring in the most traffic. The number one search term landing people on this domain is “caden”. This domain continues to rack number one for searches on the name Caden on a regular basis in Google and Yahoo! with visitors landing on Caden’s Page which is one of multiple blogs on this single domain. Another notable is “goggle earth” which originally happened by a spelling mistake on an alt tag in my Tech Land blog. I also get my fair share of hits on a simple little Grill’n Time post for steak grilling temperature.

My favorite search word(s) to land a SED here in recent weeks was for “his foot up to his head”. The SLI shows that the SED landed on a post containing a picture of my son scratching his head with his toes.

Now, what do you think of those new acronyms?