Four Things I’ve Noticed Lately
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 5, 2010
I love visiting a lot of blogs and leaving comments where I can. Because I’m all over the place, I tend to start noticing some things that maybe others hadn’t noticed. There are 4 things in particular I’m going to mention today.
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The first is that I’ve noticed on many blogs this thing at the bottom of the comment area asking me to click the box to prove I’m not a spammer. I thought that was a little odd until it hit me that it’s come about because of a new plugin called the Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin, created by Gail Gardner and Andy Bailey. This is in response to problems they and others have had with Akismet, something I don’t have a problem with but I understand the issue. Many people have said they haven’t had a single bit of spam since adding it; a couple of people said they’re still getting some. Still, it might be a nice addition for some of you to check out.
The second is that I’ve noticed that WordPress.com blogs aren’t sending me email asking me to subscribe to comments anymore. Man, that was greatly irritating to me, as you know if you’ve read this blog, because that’s the reason I was hesitant to leave comments on those blogs, just as I still am with Disqus blogs. I also noticed that I haven’t gotten that message from the last two Intense Debate blogs I wrote a comment on as well. Now, here’s the other side of that. To date, I’ve only gotten two notifications from blogs I’ve left a comment on as it pertains to any of these, and both were WordPress blogs. This tells me that either the owners of the blogs have to go in and select to send notifications to people they respond to or it just doesn’t work for everyone for some reason. I’ve tested this by going back to see if people have responded to a comment of mine, and if they have then I know I never got the notification. I’ll just ask those of you who have WordPress blogs on their site to check out your settings.
The third thing I’ve noticed seems to be happening only to me, unless other Firefox users have seen it but haven’t said anything. This is in relation to the CommentLuv plugin, which I absolutely love. Lately it seems I visit some blogs, write a comment, and the CommentLuv thing doesn’t see my blog. I thought that was wonky and decided to write the folks about it. However, I closed my blog once, popped it back up, went to the same site and put my information in and suddenly it was working again. This tells me the problem is with Firefox and not CommentLuv. I have absolutely no idea what that’s about or how to fix it. I do know that I went through the last update for Firefox and maybe it’s related to that somehow. But I haven’t been able to find on the search engines where anyone else has complained about this.
The fourth thing is that it seems that Twitter Tools isn’t fully working properly. In this case, if I write a post in advance, when it posts Twitter Tools doesn’t show it. It probably took me a couple of weeks to notice this, and it seems to be holding true for all 3 of my blogs. If I post immediately, it goes there, but otherwise, it’s a no-show. This is problematic because I write most of my posts beforehand and schedule them, and if I have to go back and post the link manually it defeats the purpose of having the plugin to begin with. On this one I’ve seen other people complain, but to date there’s been no real fix for the issue, though many think it’s related to the Twitter oAuth thing we all had to do back in August.
That’s all I have. If you’ve noticed anything odd, or wish to comment on any of the above, please share.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Thanking Some Early Commenters
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 3, 2010
I’m not quite there yet, but I’m closing in on 3 full years of writing this blog. Like most blogs, this one took awhile to start picking up any steam whatsoever. I got my first comment 3 days after I started this blog from a friend of mine, and another friend followed up a couple of days after that. I got my first comment from someone I didn’t know almost 2 weeks after I started writing this blog.
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Since those early days I’ve made a few changes. The first significant change was adding CommentLuv to this blog in May of 2008. That really signified the turning of the corner, and though I’m not going to say I was an overnight success, things did start improving some. The second significant change was having my posts go directly to Twitter, though I had started posting the links to articles I was writing in April 2008.
Anyway, since the first comment I’ve received 11,587 total comments on this blog, and I appreciate all of them. But I wanted to give some love to my early commenters if possible, and that’s what this post is about. Some of those early folks are gone or never had blogs to begin with. Some never came back again, but that’s okay. We all need a bit of encouragement when we start, and I’m happy that these folks played with me. A name or two might pop up here and there that you’re familiar with; let’s see what we find. By the way, I was kind of inspired to do this post because of Tia Peterson, who writes Biz Chicks Blogs and wrote a post where she highlighted what she considered as the best comments her blog got that week.
My friend Sue is a life coach, and she was one of the early posters here and has started posting comments again recently. Her business is called Dreamscape International, and she’s pretty good, concentrating on relationships and the like. No, I’ve never had to use her for that. lol
Our friend Sire was one of the early commenters here as well. Back then he was commenting from a different blog that I refer to as his BS blog, but y’all know I have those staid American sensibilities, so I’m going to pop up his Wassup Blog instead. He’s still a regular contributor, and I appreciate it greatly.
A guy named Jonathan showed up when I had a post in a financial topic. His blog is called Master Your Card and it’s on finances, especially credit cards.
Another friend of mine, Kelvin, was an early commenter; he’s pretty much disappeared since then, but we still talk all the time on Twitter and get to breakfast here and there. He has many sites and things he’s doing, but when he commented he was promoting his Ringold.net site, so that’s the one I’m sharing with you. At some point I think he’ll end up setting it up as a portal site to direct you to all the other stuff he does; at least that’s what I’d do.
Heidi was a Ryze friend who was also one of my early Facebook and Twitter friends. Her blog is called Connect Simply, and she’s a business motivational coach.
Larry’s blog has really taken off, and I think we pretty much started near the same time. He calls it Online Social Networking and he talks about social media, business networking and of course the internet in general.
Dave was also a one time visitor, whose blog is called Dave ‘n Judy. Looks like he hasn’t written anything new in awhile since he wrote a book that he talked about, but he used to write on computers and things like that.
Josh is another one of my good friends, the one who was with me when I wrote my story about the key. His blog is his name, Josh Shear, and he pretty much writes about anything like me.
This guy Tim busted on me for talking about Joel Comm messing up. He kind of missed the point, but that’s okay because it was a comment. He doesn’t have a blog, but linked to his website on massage products.
And finally, this lady commented twice in those early days, and I haven’t seen her again since. Her blog is called Style Frizz and her name is kpriss; that’s it, and I did try to find a real name. It’s on fashion, and it’s actually pretty neat; I’m just not a fashion guy, but it’s for women anyway.
And there you go. I think those folks, some of whom are still around, for helping me bring this blog into some kind of prominence. One of these days, I might do the same for my business blog; I doubt it, though. 
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Four Reasons To Put A URL In When Commenting On Blogs
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Oct 11, 2010
I’ve noticed that sometimes people don’t put urls (web addresses) in when they make comments. Almost everyone has either a website or a blog somewhere that they could link to, so it would seem like the natural thing to do. It’s not a required field, though, so many people don’t even think about it. So, I figured it was time to give people some reasons why it’s a good idea, and I’m going with four.
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1. You get a backlink to your blog. If you know SEO you get this concept. If you don’t, the idea of a backlink to your blog is that sites such as Google try to determine how much of an authority your site is online, and one of the criteria is how many backlinks you have going to your site. The more the merrier, as long as they’re somewhat related to what you do, but even if they’re not backlinks can only help. And supposedly they help more when you’re getting a link from another site and not having to link back; that part doesn’t matter to me, just take the link. By the way, this is why there’s so much comment spam, because these weasels are hoping to find those blogs that don’t monitor their comment spam so their sites can grow in prominence; and you thought it was so you’d buy Viagra from them. lol
2. People might click on your link and check out your site or blog. If people like your comment, sometimes they feel compelled to check you out. And none of us are on the internet so we can hide from others, right?
3. If you blog, CommentLuv will be your friend. If you put a link in and you have a blog, you’ll notice that on blogs that have that little heart on them that you see below, it will pop up your latest blog post. That’s from a site called CommentLuv, and it’s there to help people get their content noticed while they’re participating on another blog. Go to their site and register, and suddenly you have the ability to pick from your last 10 blog posts to decide which one you want to highlight. This works great if you comment more than once on someone else’s blog, or if there’s a specific older post you want to highlight.
4. It verifies you’re not a troll. Spam is one thing; trolls are another. Trolls are people who post without any real identifying information. If your blog doesn’t require an email address,then people can post anonymously, and that means they don’t always have to show the proper respect your blog deserves. They can go after you or other people and don’t care whose feelings are hurt. When I was dealing with trolls on one particular post earlier this year regarding Akismet a bunch of them came to the blog and posted these really long and threatening messages, which of course I could care less about. None of them left a url, and all the email addresses were fake. They just wanted to rant, and they wanted to hide. I just deleted them all, which was easy for me to do. If you have the appearance of having something to hide, people don’t always trust the comment. I at least give the benefit of the doubt, but not everyone will.
And there you are. Any questions, comments, please share.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
What Will You Go Out Of Your Way To Do For Your Blog?
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Mar 15, 2010
First, I’d like to mention that I had my final guest posting article on DeAnna Troupe’s blog post last week, titled You Can’t do It All When You Work For Yourself, a small business topic many folks need to learn as soon as they can. I hope you check it out, and I thank DeAnna for asking me to write it for her.
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You know, ever since I wrote my post on guest posting, it seems I’ve been coming across many other posts about the subject as well. One of those posts I commented on, and it’s created an interesting exchange that has prompted me to write this post. It’s from a blog called We Build Your Blog, and the post was titled Guest Blogging – Why don’t you do it?. Andrew is the guy who writes it, and he had recently commented on my post above, which is what prompted my return visit. By the way, that’s the great thing about CommentLuv; thought I’d plug that while I was at it.
Anyway, his response here left me wondering what he might be getting at, because, well, truthfully, my mindset wasn’t geared towards how he responded. When I went to read what he had to say, my mind cleared up and I knew where he was coming from. And it’s something that, personally, I won’t do and never have done, and never even thought about doing, yet something he recommends. First, I hope you go read his post and comment; it was nicely written.
It’s this concept of actively seeking out blogs to write guest posts for to help spread the word, get backlinks, and help PR, which in this case, I assume, is page rank, though I could be wrong on that. He talks about asking some of the big boys if they would accept guest posts, and how sometimes they accept it and other times they turn it down for whatever reasons they have.
As I said, the concept of asking someone else if they’d accept a guest post of mine has never flickered in my mind, but while reading his post, it reminded me of an old post that Dennis wrote when he alluded to the thing about if I wanted to write a gust post for his blog to just ask him, and in my mind “why would I ask someone if I could write for them, for free, instead of just putting it on my own blog and moving on with life?” Not sure if you remember that exchange, Dennis, but it remains clear in my mind.
Once again, I’m left wondering whether this is a generational thing or a cultural thing in why, to me, such a thing as asking someone else to accept a guest post of mine is anathema to my way of thinking. Maybe it’s couched in some way in some of my history of others claiming my work as their own and not getting credit for it. Maybe it’s tied in with the fact that I never asked out first any of the women I ended up having any sort of relationship with. Or maybe my mind sees it as a favor to me to ask people here and there to guest post here. I do see it as a compliment, I must admit, whenever someone asks if they can guest post here, but I know that not everyone sees things that way.
It’s probably the same reason I think the way I do about posting to article directories. I see that as someone else getting the benefit out of what I write rather than my getting much benefit out of it. That point can easily be argued both ways, but the way I see it, when I get those monthly stats showing me how many people looked at an article I’ve written, it’s not much higher than when I post articles to my own sites.
By the way, on Andrew’s blog, I responded that, because of my own pride, I have never asked anyone if I can guest post for them, and probably wouldn’t, that I don’t care about page rank, since this blog has no page rank anyway (but my Alexa rank is now around 115,000, and getting better weekly), and that at this point going for more backlinks probably isn’t going to do much more for this blog, though I welcome them when they come.
So, I put the question out there; how far will you go to promote your blog? I don’t mind guest posting, and I don’t mind people asking me if they can guest post; I want to make that clear. I just don’t do it, and can’t see myself doing it. What say you?
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011-2012 Mitch Mitchell
Andy Bailey Interview
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jul 26, 2009
Something special for y’all today. Andy Bailey of CommentLuv fame, has agreed to an interview on CommentLuv, plugins, and business in general. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb in saying this was one of the most important plugins of 2008, in my mind, and has helped the blogging community greatly; at least those who use it. This is great stuff; I hope you enjoy it:
1. Tell us about your business/businesses/websites.
The Comluv network was set up to act as a hub/portal for the 10,000+ users of the Commentluv plugin so they can register their site urls, see who clicks their links and looks at their info. It’s also a place where anyone with an internet connection can start a WordPress blog with the Commentluv plugin already installed for free.
There are lots of features on the site that are set up so new bloggers or those with limited free blogs can move to the next step of blogging. They can try out a new blog or import their old one and if they are happy with what they can do on a WordPress platform, they can carry on (for free). If they then go on to take their blogging a bit more seriously or want to make some income, they can become a supporter and get access to things like domain mapping and other awesome upgrades in the future like a global commentluv search engine or custom CMS themes and an ecommerce shop theme.
I have a number of other sites and run a web design company too. (oh and a Chinese Takeaway & delivery shop)
2. What made you think about doing CommentLuv in the first place?
It was to fulfill a need, I wanted to reward my blog readers. Not the ones who came, looked and went but the ones that took the time to comment and build a discussion around my posts. There were a few other widgets that got released at the time that were supposed to do that but I found that they only rewarded the blogs that were already popular, the more hits you got, the more links you got etc. I didn’t think was fair just to reward those who needed it the least, that didn’t make sense! so I wrote commentluv to level the field and reward every blogger who comments with a titled backlink to their site.
It was only for my own site and the first version only worked for people that commented who had wordpress blogs themselves, but as soon as it went on my blog, people started asking for a copy. The rest, as they say, is history.
3. How do you find the time to work on it?
It’s my hobby, my passion. It consumes every spare moment!
It’s harder and harder to put the time in because it’s getting more and more complex with a hundred new ideas and (sometimes) bugs to fix every day. If it was my entire job then I’d be fine but I run a Chinese takeaway and a company too so it’s even harder to find the time to go through code, answer support, write new content, make tutorials, market the site, visit bloggers, catch spam, delete spam and all the other ‘normal’ things that having an online life means.
But, after saying all that, I wouldn’t change it for anything. I luv it.
4. Have you only received positive comments about it?
The comments I receive are wonderful, I regularly get emails, phone calls and sometimes donations via paypal from happy users. It’s what keeps me going when I see someone write a long and detailed post about commentluv or start a series of posts about how to use commentluv blogs with proper comments to increase site traffic/community.
The only negative comments I get are from users who didn’t read the instructions properly or are trying to do everything too quickly without making proper backups. I can fix most problems pretty quickly because there’s only a few things that can go wrong with a script include so they normally cheer up when it starts working!
Overall, there always seems to be something positive to read about it every morning in my inbox.
5. Have you made any money from it?
Nope. Not a dime. In fact, it costs me money from my own pocket! That’s ok though, there are avenues for passive revenue like the Adsense that appears on the search page and some of my own 125×125 ads I show create a commission payment now and then which helps with the server costs.
There’s plenty of time to make money! I think I can just worry about making the site good, the features work and keep it improving and when that happens, just the sheer amount of traffic and being able to communicate with over 10,000 registered users (now) and the millions who see the comentluv badge below a comment form in an instant will surely open up monetization opportunities.
I do have ideas and code ready for when the site is fully stable as a free option and the userbase goes over 50,000. Things like a supporter option where a user can pay a small monthly fee and get more space, use their own domain name, access to a newsletter software, CMS themes and other ‘premium’ options for paid subscribers only but I think it’s important to get the free side of the site completely stable first before I start trying to make money from it.
I have implemented adverts on the main site and users of comluv can signup to be an affiliate for selling those and make 50% of the fee, maybe that can bring in some revenue to pay for the awesome server I had to upgrade to but, this is my hobby, I enjoy it and if I didn’t do it, I’d spend more on radio control helicopters or start drinking at the pub so I’m not too worried about getting-rich-quick. (unless I get completely bought out by one of the blogging/commenting platform companies!)
If I do it right and get the site and plugin popular enough and used by enough people, there wont be any need to charge anyone anything. If I can continue to find ways for people to make money from their site, all I’ll need is a tiny piece of it for providing the platform they use to make it and I’ll be set. 1% of 100 peoples effort is the same as 100% of my own. Imagine if I got 1% of a million peoples effort? No need to do the math.
6. Have you won any awards from it?
Yes, I won the WPMU plugin contest with it when it went to the new 2.0 version. I got a free WPMU premium account as part of my prize which has been instrumental to me being able to build the new network site. Best thing I have ever won from my pc (apart from a massive lottery syndicate win from my online lotto business).
7. How does one go about creating a plugin?
It’s easy peasy, I didn’t know anything about php before I got a version of wordpress installed! Everything I learnt about programming came from the web, for free. Just start simple, find some tutorials to get you started and the rest is just making the format of the file correct. Don’t try to make a new akismet or cforms straight away, try a flickr image widget or other simple get and display plugin and ask around on the wp forums or visit the squillions of wp specific blogs.
8. With everything going on, do you still have time to blog?
Blogging helps me release the words in my head that have no place elsewhere, it’s my inner-monologue on screen sometimes. It helps me remember what I’m doing if it’s down on paper/keyboard too! I wish I had more time to make the type of posts that are floating around in my head but, I can’t have commentluv and have that type of blog experience at the same time so I try to do the best I can with what time I have.
That to me is the best thing about blogging, I do it because its fun, its nice to reach out and touch people without ever leaving the comfy man-cave that is my office and there are no obligations or standards of performance quotas to reach. If you think it, you can blog it. If you don’t have time, never mind!
9. Do you have another plugin on the horizon?
I have about a billion ideas and quite a few proof of concept scripts floating around the pc. I have a cracking one in mind for twitter and some “make it so anyone can do it” plugins too but, with the popularity of commentluv and the sheer amount of effort it takes to keep a plugin and site up to date, there’s not much hope for releasing them (yet)
10. Have you achieved everything you expected or hoped for with CommentLuv?
All I wanted to do was reward my readers and provide a way for others to do the same without needing a degree in computers or an established community so I guess you could say I have achieved everything I first expected from commentluv but there is so much more to be discovered and added. I really want another day in the week, hell, even an extra hour a day would make a difference!
11. One last question; what’s up for Andy Bailey next?
I’d really like to get a good company as a partner, someone with a team of programmers, developers, designers and marketers so I could hand over the maintenance and feature updates to them and concentrate on coming up with the good ideas and seeing them through to fruition. I already have a book of notes and folders of code for what I would like to add to the site to help people with the blogging, even make them an income but as always, time (or the lack of it) and supporting the users of the existing fruits prevents me from working on them enough to share them.
The sky’s the limit though, as long as I have a keyboard and an internet connection I will always have something to do ‘next’.
As I said, great stuff from Andy. If you’re not already on CommentLuv, you should be, and if you are, let Andy know how much you enjoy it. I did.
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