HOEI

I have been furiously testing Twitter gadgets just like a slew of other folks. Live happened and I did not blog or tweet much for a couple of days. However, this blog and my Twitter home page did not get the memo to stop the presses until I returned. Below is what happens when you tell Twitter Tools to “Create a daily digest blog post from your tweets?” and at the same time telling Twitterfeed to post tweets for all new posts.

And here is the Twitter end:

The way I stopped the loop was to disable the feed for this one domain in Twitterfeed.  I have activated the “Create a tweet when you post” option in the Twitter Tools options.  We will see how that works out.

Mrs. Ozz is a genius! Tonight she asked me, “what happened to Lowcountry Christian Community School web site?” As you can see from that link, there is little to see on their web site right now, well at least until I complete the instructions I am about to share with you. I told Mrs. Ozz that the LCCS administrators had let their domain registration and hosting service expire. This resulted in the hosting service deleting all of the HTLM files for that domain to free up space for the next paying customer. I told my wife that the school administrators had asked me to help build a replacement site which I had promised to do when I got some free time.

The next thing out of my wife’s mouth made me feel REALLY stupid. She asked, “can’t you just get a copy of the site from one of those online services that saves everything automatically?” My response was, “You are a GENIUS! I have not even considered that.” She turned a couple of shades of red as I proceeded to follow her advice.

What she is talking about is something like the Internet Archive WayBackMachine. As a result of her suggestion, I have been able to recover about 90% of the content from the original LCCS web site as it was last displayed in August 2007.

To recover the site I did the following:

1. Searched archive.org for the LCCS site
2. Clicked on the most recent copy of the site (Aug 2007)
3. Using Firefox – selected File – Save Page As (making sure to choose type “web page complete”)
4. Navigated to each subpage and repeated step 3 for each
5. Edit the content and FTP it into the new site location (In Progress)

That’s it. Now I have a pretty solid copy of the content from the school’s site prior to their domain and hosting service expiring. I can use these HTML pages to create the same look, feel, and content that they had prior to the expiration.

By the way, you have not heard the last of Mrs. Ozz. She has got the itch to do a little blogging. She will be joining me on The Land of Ozz(s) and she may actually jump into the mix over at GrowingKids.org as well.

I have stepped out on a limb and upgraded one of my production blogs (Riley’s Page) to WordPress 2.5 RC1.  Well, it is sort of production in that it is still live.  I plan to shutdown Riley’s Page at some point and consolidate all of my family blogging into my personal blog.  Here a couple of additional notes about this upgrade so far:

• Riley’s Page was running on its own MYSQL database instance
• It was a direct upgrade from WP 2.1 to 2.5
• The blog uses the default WordPress theme (the theme folder was not upgraded at all)

Others are blogging about this today and recommending a little more cautious approach than what I am taking.

Daily Blog Tips

WordPress SEO and Blog Marketing 

Invitation: I am inviting all of my blogging buddies to take a look under the hood of WordPress 2.5.  If you know me well enough to have my personal email, then drop me a note and I will hook you up with an admin account on the back end of Riley’s Page.

Not so fast there cowboy!

I will step out on a limb here and say that there are very few people who build a publicly accessible blog or web site with the intent that no one will ever visit. While that was not my intent when I built Blog Community College (BCC) more than six months ago, the harsh reality is that less than fifty people total have visited the site since it was built. Well over half of the 42 unique visits to the site to date have come from me or my co-author Chad.

Site Meter stats more than six months after the first post.

There are a few lessons to be learned from this unplanned exercise in blog flop:

Publicity Required - Building a blog requires some very basic marketing if you want people to actually read the blog. We might start by:

1. Registering the site with search engines
2. Using BCC’s URL as my “Website” when commenting on other blogs
3. Notifying other bloggers of BCC’s existence
4. Emailing a  few friends

More Content -Only one video tutorial has been posted out of nearly a half dozen that are in various stages of editing.

Follow Through – Continue you what you start.  While I have not done very good on this so far I believe that this is a pretty good idea for a blog.  That said, there is no reason to sit on it.  It is never too late to follow though.