All posts by Mitch Mitchell

I'm an independent consultant in many fields, so I have a lot to share.

Multiple Page Articles; Oy!

February 13, 2014 Mitch Mitchell 17 Comments

This is a minor rant, one I touched up a couple of months ago when I did a video rant; I’m including that below in case you want to see more things I griped about. lol

Arti Sandhu via Compfight

About 2 years ago I wrote a long article on blogging. It was mainly for folks who were either new to blogging or had started blogging but found they were having some difficulties with it. My purpose was to write something known as a “pillar post”, where the intention is to highlight your expertise in something by putting a lot of information into one particular post. Search engines supposedly love pillar posts; I wouldn’t really know, but I was up for the challenge.

However, my post ended up being almost 5,900 words, and I thought that would be a bit much. Thus, I broke it into a 2-part series, starting with Better Blogging Part One and Better Blogging Part Deux. It seemed like a much smarter thing to do, breaking such a large post into two parts; I stand by that decision for the sake of the readers.

You know what we’re getting a lot of these days? These websites that will have something like The 20 Top Baseball Players Of All Time or 8 Actors Who Say They’ve Seen Ghosts or a host of posts like this. Sometimes it’s even stuff that’s good for you or knowledge you need, such as foods you shouldn’t eat or learning more about a pharmaceutical you might have to take.

And what to you get? You get the privilege of going through multiple pages to see them all; I mean, not even one page where you can see a list of all of them with any extra detail.

Now, if you’re going to give me 20 baseball players and you’re going to do a nice write up on each one, I could excuse you having 21 pages (the first page is the set up page). But having 21 pages with only the first page having any significant content… now I’m irked. I don’t know about everyone else but I don’t have the time to go through 21 pages for one article all the time. That mess got old really quick for me; I’m a curious kind of guy but my curiosity stops when someone is putting messy stuff in my way.

There are two reasons these sites do stuff like this.

One, because they know Google loves tons of pages, and even with the Panda and Penguin updates, and any other animals that might crop up here and there, these sites seem to be able to weather the ratings hit quite well.

Two, because of advertising. The sites rank high, which brings in lots of advertisers, and thus they can pack each page with a bunch of advertisers links and banner ads, knowing that an overwhelming majority of people are going to keep hitting those links to get to the next page.

A site that does a little something like this that I actually kind of like is called Cracked, which has very long and often quite detailed articles that they’ll break into 2 or 3 pages. In that instance you’re getting so much content that it makes a lot of sense breaking it up, and it’s quite entertaining stuff.

Some of you might be saying “hey, I never see any of those pages”… really? If you’d like to see an example go to CNN.com, click on any news story there, go to the end of the story you clicked on and look at the links to either more news stories or other goofy stuff. Ugh!

Now, it’s bad enough that websites are doing this, but now I’m seeing some blogs doing it. Most of them are blogs with lots of images, and what they’re doing is putting up a lot of pictures but making each picture a blog in and of itself, even if it’s a series concerning the same thing. These folks might write a paragraph about the picture if you’re lucky, but come on now… Sure, it’s building up your pages but it’s ridiculous to visitors and I’m doubting that all of these images are getting comments. The few I’ve seen have had very few comments; what’s the point right?

Maybe I’m being sensitive, so I thought I’d put it out as today’s question. Have you seen this phenomenon on websites and/or blogs, and if so what do you think about it? Does it irritate you or do you think it’s creative? Take your time in thinking about it while watching my rant video below lol:

Software

F. B. Purity For Facebook

February 10, 2014 Mitch Mitchell 12 Comments

One of the biggest gripes I hear or read from people about Facebook is seeing all this stuff that they don’t want to see. Political arguments, religious arguments, lots of other weird stuff that they just don’t want popping up in their stream. The problem is that people are people, and you never know what type of thing someone is going to be putting up that’ll pop up out of nowhere and drive you crazy.

Do I have a solution? Of course I do, but I only know that it works for Firefox.

It’s called F.B. Purity, and what it allows you to do is customize what your Facebook page looks like and a lot of what you’ll see. If you click on the image a couple of times until it’s larger you’ll see what I’m talking about. Actually, look at the image as it is; that’s the color of my Facebook page on my laptop. On my home computer the background is red.

Yes, you can change colors, fonts and font size. You can eliminate right or left sidebars if you wish, or you can pick and choose which of those boxes you don’t want to see on either side. For instance, I’m blocking sponsored stories, gifts, chat and chat box, game & app stories, and a host of other things. Do you want to see when people aren’t connected with you anymore? You have that as a choice also.

If you see the big image you’ll see that you have choices on the left side of the program where you can customize things you’re going to get anyway, such as do you want to see your news feed in real time or in the way Facebook gives it to you, deciding what it feels is more important to you? Do you want to eliminate certain types of stories from showing up in your stream? You can modify that.

The big one for me is the box on the right where you can type in words you don’t want to show up in your stream. This works very well unless the words are in an image; nothing you can do about that unless you decide to type in the name of the site the person who shared it got it from. You can see some of the words I don’t want popping up in my stream; keeps me from getting mad and wanting to verbally attack people most of the time. lol My problem is that I don’t use bad language and that includes ever writing it, thus I haven’t been able to bring myself to type those words in so I won’t see them anymore. Maybe I should think about cutting and pasting. 🙂

As I said, it’s an add-on that works with Firefox, and it possibly works with Chrome as well, maybe even Opera; I don’t know. However, you have to add it independently, as you can’t go through the normal way of adding it. You can go to the F.B. Purity site and download it from there.

If you decide to download it, I want to tell you that they put the date in wrong for when the last update was. It was January 2014; they typed in 2013 by mistake. If you care take a look; I love it & highly recommend it.; oh yeah, it’s free! And Facebook hates that people use it because they feel we should just be subjected to a lot of nonsense; another good reason for using it. 😉

Blogging

Your Comments Going Into Spam For No Reason? I’ve Got One…

February 6, 2014 Mitch Mitchell 39 Comments

I have a few consistent commenters on this blog. Most of them I’ve known for quite a few years and they’re pretty popular commenters on the blogosphere as well. And yet, some of them have an interesting problem.

Stuart Williams via Compfight

They’re comments have been showing up in my spam filter, and spam filters of other blogs they comment on. They didn’t do anything wrong as far as they knew, and as far as I knew either. One day their comments were showing up fine, the next day and every time after that they were going to spam.

Now, I do have some settings where some people are going to go to spam. One too many words in the name field, email addresses that begin with certain words… that’s where you’re heading. If I’ve named you as spam and added your IP address, you’re going to spam. But that’s not what was going on with these folks.

A couple of weeks ago I decided it was time to check something out. I was talking to Brian at Hot Blog Tips about it and I asked him to send a comment to me using his smartphone. He did and his comment showed up without going into the spam filter. He thought that maybe it was coming from a different IP address.

I then wrote our buddy Adrienne about it in the private message area of Facebook and asked her to try the same thing. It worked for her as well. However, when I looked at her IP address I noticed it was the same as her normal comments, and when I looked at Brian’s I noticed the same thing. So it wasn’t the IP address.

But I had the mind working well at this juncture. I asked Adrienne to pull up a different browser and send me a comment. She did and it went through; yippee! I told her it worked and asked her which browser she normally used, and she said Chrome.

I then reached out to Brian and asked him to try leaving a comment on my blog using a different browser. At the same time I asked Mitchell Allen if he’d try leaving a comment on this blog using a different browser as well. Both of them did & their comments came through just fine.

What browser were they all using? Chrome! In my mind, it was a pretty good experiment and possibly the reason so many people were ending up in spam filters around the world! Well, that might be dramatic, but one of my friends is in India and he always goes to spam, and I’m not sure which browser he uses.

Mixy Lorenzo
via Compfight

Now, whenever I see something like this that looks like a pattern, I always go to Google to see if there’s anyone else mentioning it. There were lots of topics that looked like it, but they were all talking about something else. So maybe I get to scoop them all! 🙂

Meanwhile, Adrienne decided to try something else first. What she did was uninstall Chrome, reboot her computer, run her antivirus program, reload Chrome, and try again. This time her comment came through perfectly; problem solved.

The only question would be what’s in Chrome that could be affecting so many people? Well, there’s a second question, which is what if it’s not just Chrome users this is affecting? Anyone else who shows up in the spam filter isn’t a regular writer, at least yet, so I don’t know if the initial problem could happen with other browsers and could be solved by switching.

So, this is a twofold testing question for all of you. One, if you notice that your comments, or the comments of someone who comments on your blog often, seems to be going into the spam filter, ask them to try a different browser to see if their comment comes through fine. If it does, ask them what browser they originally used and let’s find out if it’s a Chrome thing (by the way, I’m a Firefox user). Tell them that if they want to continue using their regular browser to try uninstalling, then reinstalling to see if that takes care of things (running the virus program wouldn’t hurt, but I’m not sure if that’s a part of it or not).

If it doesn’t, then it’s possible they’re really on a blacklist, which is a totally different issue and one I’m not ready to address right now. Still, I know I’ve taken care of a couple of people who comment so far, and maybe we can help some other people as well. As an addition, I was talking to Adrienne about this and supposedly some people have found that if they leave everything off before the domain name that it seems to work for them & CommentLuv still works. So try domainname.com to see if that might cure your issue also.

Web Stuff

CNET: The Site That Was Cool Isn’t Anymore For Downloads…

February 3, 2014 Mitch Mitchell 17 Comments

When I was first getting acclimated to being online a couple of decades ago, everyone used to say that the place to go for downloading things was CNet. Back in the day, even PC World used to always send you there to download many of the things they found that they thought were great free programs for all of us to use.

mdaniels7 via Compfight

Even though PC World still does this sometimes, they’re a lot less likely to do so these days, and there’s a major reason why. At least from my perspective, it seems like every file one downloads from there is loaded with bloat ware and, dare I say, a lot of malware, to the extent that if you’re not paying attention to what you’re loading onto your computer, the next thing you know you’ve added toolbars, coupon and sales software, and who knows what else.

It’s gotten so bad that I refuse to download anything else from them. Unfortunately, my friends haven’t learned their lessons yet, so who keeps getting the calls because something’s gone wonky with their systems? You guessed it; sigh. Thing is, it’s hard to tell someone not to download things from a site that’s so highly ranked and well known. What happened to CNet?

I’m not the first one to talk about this, and it’s not really all that new. Back in December 2011 the Inquirer talked about it in relation to a forum poster of some significance who was irked with the process. In Early 2013 botcrawl.com confirmed the malware coming through CNet’s new download site, correctly called Download.com (nope, not giving them a link).

What’s funny is many of their bigger accounts put out warnings to their potential customers saying that consumers need to make sure they’re clicking on the correct button when downloading products because it could lead to other problems if you’re not downloading the right thing. You think?

If you can, find another place to download your stuff, paid or free. Otherwise, unless you’re technically savvy, you’ll find yourself awash in ads and unable to get out from under it. That is, unless you have a friend like me who lives close enough to fix it for you.

Blogging

What Is Your Reason For Blogging?

January 30, 2014 Mitch Mitchell 27 Comments

Some months ago I wrote an article here based off a question one of my friends asked me. He asked me “what are you getting out of making videos?” I responded “I like it.” Actually he never heard or saw that response, as I did a video first, then wrote the post.

Me speaking to a baby 🙂

In the last few weeks I’ve started thinking about this in a different way after having a Hangout conversation with my friend Joanne DelBalso. We were talking about business in general and she asked me what my intention was for blogging. She further explained she wanted to know what my purpose was, or what I was hoping to get out of it. Finally, she wanted to know if I had expressed that purpose anywhere, if I even knew what it was.

Of course I’ve known since late 2008 what I wanted the purpose of this blog to be. Okay, it has many purposes, but the main purpose is to get organizations to request me to come speak to them, and get paid for it. My long term ambition is to be a professional speaker and presenter. At this point I’ve spoken in 8 states but I haven’t given a presentation outside of my own area in 4 years now.

I had to think about it a bit to see if, at least on this blog, I had indicated that anywhere. I looked at my About page and realized that I had linked to a bio on my business page but never mentioned speaking. I looked at my contact page but there’s nothing on that page about it. It seems the last time I even mentioned it on this blog was on June 16th, 2010, on a post talking about social media strategies. Wow!

You can imagine how disconcerting that was to discover. How is anyone supposed to know what my intention, purpose and reason is for writing this blog if I don’t mention it anywhere? Heck, I didn’t even mention it on my focus post at the beginning of the year, nor put it into the video I recorded about the same subject; Oy!

All of us hate selling so much… at least directly. We also have this thing in our heads where we believe that self promotion is a bad thing. I’ve worked hard on breaking both of these because I’m self employed, and if I don’t promote or market I won’t get business, will starve, my wife will leave me and the dog won’t come home (I don’t have a dog; see? lol) and I’ll be forced to get a grocery cart to push my stuff in and eat in shelters because I won’t have enough money to put gas in my car (which is paid off; whew!) to stay warm.

Educational Postcard: "If you want me to engage in learning..."

Ken Whytock via Compfight

By the time you read this I’ll have fixed that About page and added a little something to my contact page, but now it’s time to ask all of you if you’ve stated the reasons for your blogs somewhere? I’ll pick on my buddies Brian Hawkins, Adrienne Smith and Peter Pellicca, aka Sire for a quick moment. 🙂

A true intention for all of them is to make money in some way. Brian kind of hides it in the middle of a very long paragraph on his About page, but it’s there. Peter talks about it early on, saying that once he learned he could make money blogging and had passion for writing he was hooked. Adrienne doesn’t specifically say she blogs to make money, but she does mention her intention well by telling us she makes money via affiliate marketing and consulting others on how to create a presence online.

It behooves all of us to have a stated intention, especially if you’re kind of like me and you’re not writing a niche blog. Even with a niche blog, you should want your visitors to know whether you’re talking about something because you like it or because you’re hoping it works out in bringing you business in some fashion, whether through consulting or selling products or getting hired to do some work for them.

And… well… I guess you should mention it more than once every 3 1/2 years. 😉

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