Blogging

When Free Plugins Ruin Your Life

18 Comments

The best thing about free stuff is that it’s free. The worst thing about free stuff is that they can indiscriminately change it up, mess it up, make you do things you didn’t want to do if you want to keep using it and pretty much ruin your life… okay, that last point is a bit over the top, but it did mess up the blog. lol

Expressions of Shock
Thomas Gehrke via Compfight

Today’s gripe is about a plugin called AddThis, which had been recommended to me in 2013 as a great social sharing program. Lots of people were using it, and it allowed me to get rid of the 4 independent plugins I had for Facebook, Twitter, Google + and LinkedIn, the only 4 sites I share stuff to. I liked its design and how easy it all seemed to be.

Then they went and changed things up. Deciding it wasn’t so convenient for them to allow you to make changes on your own blog, they set it up with their 4.whatever update that you now had to create an account on their website and manage things from there. I assume they did that so they could pitch other services to you that you’d be charged for, since I saw something there where you could get certain types of reports and education.

All of that might not be bad; I don’t know. What I knew was that I didn’t want that kind of change. I’m kind of an insular guy; I like fooling myself into thinking I’m controlling my own stuff. Thus, I didn’t want to go to another site to take care of my business.

That wasn’t the biggest issue though. The big problem is that the widgets disappeared from the blog. Right at the point where I’d had a blog post go live reminding people how hard it was for their content to be shared if they didn’t have these buttons, mine disappeared. Well, that was slightly embarrassing; actually, I wasn’t embarrassed since I didn’t know for a day or two and, when I discovered it, knew I hadn’t done anything wrong.

Actually, that’s kind of a misnomer. I did was most of us do, which was to immediately upgrade when WordPress said “Hey, there’s something shiny and new”.

I should know better. There are upgrades when it makes sense to immediately do it. For instance, if you have version 3.5.2 anything (just as an example) and the upgrade is 3.5.7, that’s almost always just a bug or security fix that doesn’t change the version any, and you should go ahead and upgrade. However, if the upgrade goes to the immediate next number, such as from version 1.1 to 2.1… that’s when you should take a moment, go to the website and find out what’s being added or what’s changing.

After things disappeared on this blog I went to check my other blogs, all of which were running the same plugin, and my widgets had disappeared from all of them; sigh… Oddly enough, within a few days they came back on one of my blogs but not all of them. I complained on Twitter, then went to Google to do some research, thinking that maybe it was an issue with me, and found that there were lots of people who were complaining about the same exact thing… it’s true, sometimes, that misery loves company. 🙂 And I wrote on Twitter how bad it was that a company didn’t respond to so many 1-star reviews.

Lo and behold they did finally respond to me, after I’d written them something on their website, and asked me to explain my issue. So I did, and they responded that it was their intention that everyone go to the website now to manage their tools, and asked why I’d had a problem doing that, which I had.

Here’s the thing. You don’t take something that was relatively simple and change it to where your users need a crash course. In my case I did try creating an account and going to the site where I was presented lots of different links, none of which said “manage your tools here”… at least I couldn’t find it. Course I was in a state of frustration so maybe I just couldn’t see it.

No matter. I’ve inactivated it and deleted it and now on this blog I’m using something called Simple Share Buttons, which was the 4th plugin I tried because, for some reason, the first 3 I tried after I shut down AddThis wouldn’t show up here. The look is a bit different but I like it, and it works!

Because, when all is said and done, the other good thing about free is that you’re always free to find something else that works for you without lamenting your waste of money. Who’s with me on this one?
 

Web Stuff

Securing Your Online Presence

6 Comments

Last year, while flying down to where I was consulting at the time, I found that my business email account had been shut down. I figured that I would find out soon enough what was going on so I didn’t fret all that much about it. Actually, I pretty much was betting I knew what the issue was and my only question was why it took so long.

Agent [smith]
[martin] via Compfight

On the previous Sunday I noticed that an inordinate amount of spam was coming back on me via bad email addresses, way more than I’d normally seen. At some point last year I figured that my business email account had been spoofed, which is what they call it when your email address has been somehow taken from your website. I thought it was via some script.

When my email was shut down, it turns out someone had actually hacked my email account, which was set up at my host, and all this time they’d been sending these spam emails through that account. I was slightly stunned because I thought my hosts site was more secure than that, especially since no spam goes out through any of my other email addresses created there, and yet I’d wondered why it was still so strong after more than a year of my removing a script that had caused the original problem for me back in 2006.

I accept the fault for two reasons. One, my belief that my host wouldn’t be hacked for my email when it had been hacked months earlier through two of my blogs. Two, the password I had on that email account wasn’t particularly strong, as I’d set it up almost 9 years ago, and I just never thought about it all that much; idiocy. lol

There are these things we do and don’t do that threaten our online security, and we all need to be smarter about it. We don’t create passwords that are at least a little bit more difficult for a spambot to crack easily. We don’t update our software or our blogs when we’re notified of an update. We don’t check on some of the things we’ve attached ourselves to all that often, thus don’t know what’s being said or what’s going out in our names.

The thing is it’s really easy to protect yourself. For blogs, just update the software when the updates are available. For passwords in general, even if you have problems remembering them longer is better, and having at least one capital letter somewhere in there is even better than just going longer. For instance, you could have the word “invincible” but make the C capital, which suddenly makes it a strong password. Many sites require at least one number; do that as well.

On social media, don’t make all of your usernames and passwords the same on every site. If someone figures out one they’ll have access to everything. Some people will recommend that you change your passwords at least once a year but if you can make it pretty difficult up front, you might not have to do that as often.

One final thing. For any site that has anything to do with your money never save your username and password via the browser. All of us at some point inadvertently end up on a site with malware that’s looking to steal those things, and if you don’t have pretty good software to stop it at least you’ll have protected your most important information.

Think security first online; there’s just too many people looking to hurt you.
 

Blogging

Blogging Dedication

28 Comments

You want to know a truth? Blogging isn’t easy. Blogging is one of those things where, unless you love to write or share your thoughts, you just might not like it all that much. That’s because it takes a lot of dedication to the craft; yes, I’m calling it a craft.

Determination. Or is There Another Word For It?
Jackie
via Compfight

I’ve always heard this statement that says if you do something often enough it’ll become a habit that you’ll continue doing for the rest of your life. We all know by now that’s pretty much inaccurate. I remember working out 63 straight days once, sometimes twice a day, and right now I’ve been to the gym once in the last 6 months.

The problem is that there are two types of habits; good and bad. Bad habits are easy to do because they require little effort and they make us feel good; or at least they don’t bother us at the time. Why do people continue smoking when they know it’s bad for them? Because dopamine makes them feel good. Why do people sit around and watch TV? Because it makes them feel comfortable and relaxed.

If you decide that blogging is going to be a business strategy you have to treat it with as much passion as you do the rest of your business. Business blogging’s purpose, after all, is to show your expertise and get people interested in what you do. Nothing says you have to write like Stephen King; that being how much he writes, not writing scary things. Truthfully, if you’re only capable of writing two posts a month, spacing them out, that’s a good thing. One post a month won’t help as much, but at least it’s something; consistency is a big deal in the world of blogging.

The main thing you have to do with your blogging is to be honest about it. This means you don’t steal content from anyone else. This means you don’t plagiarize; that if you use even portions of what someone else has written you give them attribution. This means you check your grammar and your spelling. This means you don’t make things up just to try to drive sales or business. This means you treat your reader with respect. And finally it means you offer some kind of consistency, and then if people respond to what you’ve written you comment on their comment.

All of these are business principles as well; isn’t that a nice tie-in to blogging? Along with the fact that as you’re reading this I’m in Orlando? 🙂
 

Business, Social Media

10 More Business Social Media Tips In 2 Minutes

25 Comments

Back in October I wrote what turned out to be a popular post, if you believe Analytics, 10 Business Social Media Tips. I knew it would be popular because people love list posts. It was also relatively short; sometimes that works well.

IMAG1363

About 5 minutes ago I wrote the follow up post to that one; then it totally disappeared, and I actually know the reason why and I’m not going to get into it right now, though I suspect alligators. lol However, it wasn’t bad, and I sat here thinking for a couple of minutes wondering if I wanted to try to recreate it or just let it go and move onto something else.

This is we’re talking about, so I’m going to go ahead and write it anyway. Course, with this preamble it now might take 3 minutes for you to read it, but them’s the breaks.

1. Don’t sign up for all social media accounts and services if you’re not going to use them.

2. You don’t have to be a great writer or speller. Be a good writer and use spell check.

3. Blog commenting is the best way to drive traffic to your website or blog; trust me on this one.

4. Make sure you share the links to your websites and blogs as often as possible, wherever you have the opportunity to share them.

5. Don’t always agree with people just to be polite. If you disagree with something say it; just don’t be too aggressive if you can help it.

6. Give people a chance to share your content. Notice that with this blog you can share it on Twitter, Facebook or Google Plus.

7. Whether it’s your opinion or not, make sure you know your facts first. You can bet someone will know the facts and won’t hesitate to tell you.

8. Never forget to share other people and their links with your readers if they’re the inspiration for what you’re writing.

9. Don’t be afraid to make videos. Remember, what you see in a video is how people see you in real life.

10. It’s okay to ask people to follow or connect with you sometimes, just don’t overdo it. Every once in awhile people need a bit of encouragement to participate.

Whew; I had problems remembering two of the things I originally said but came up with 2 more instead. Now go enjoy your weekend, and don’t forget to give me a thumbs up.
 

Blogging

Should You Worry About Google Penalties?

15 Comments

If you’re already blogging you might have heard some noise about more recent changes to Google algorithms that ended up in a reduction of traffic to many blogs. Because of that there’s been a major railing against Google and its algorithms because what they told the public about these changes doesn’t seem to make much sense.

TODA MULHER MERECE UMA FLOR - AO DIA INTERNACIONAL DA MULHER...Every Woman Deserves a Flower - To International Women's Day
Jônatas Cunha via Compfight

I’m not going to get into all of that here. Instead, I’m going to answer the question as to whether or not you should let something like that get you worried, or make you hesitant to keep doing what you’ve been doing with your blog.

In one word, no. You should keep on writing and doing just what it is you’ve always done with your blog, unless you’ve been doing sneaky things. However, I’m going to own up to the fact that with this last update many of my blogs have taken a hit. I’m not really sure why because I haven’t engaged in any of the things Google said we shouldn’t be doing. Knowing something about SEO and the rest, you’d think that if I knew I hadn’t done any of that stuff and yet was still having issues (this is actually only the 2nd time that any of my sites have suffered traffic issues, though one of them did hurt my income a lot), that I’d be saying yes.

But I’m not, and I’m going to give you 3 reasons why.

One, because it’s hard to determine just what Google did, or what you might have done if you haven’t done any of the bad stuff. Even though they said what they did was an adjustment rather than a penalty, it affects us just the same. In their terms, a penalty means they manually did something to your blog or website because you were violating some terms, whereas an adjustment goes system wide. No matter; they can give you reasons for things they do but in the long run the explanations are meaningless.

Two, because when all is said and done what Google and other search engines value more than anything else is new content, and original content at that. Even if you took a hit with one of their changes you’re probably still ahead of a lot of other people, many of whom have hired companies to send letters to folks like me asking us to remove links that they paid someone to leave on our blogs in the first place. By adding new content on a regular basis they’ll continue stopping by and taking a look. Most of us probably aren’t doing a thing wrong or sneaky and thus we can believe that Google isn’t targeting us specifically, even if we take a hit.

Three, there’s no guarantee that your blog or website will be hit. I have 4 blogs, and three of them have been affected. Only two of my websites have been hit; no idea why since I follow the same formula across the board. Sure, it affects traffic to a degree, but what’s strange is that when I look at Google Analytics and compare what’s going on now to last year the traffic numbers are the same; go figure. That’s what I mean about analytics and such; it’s just too convoluted to deal with.

I’m still adding new content, and by building up the blogs for my consistent visitors, I don’t depend as much on search traffic for the blogs that suffered some. By doing more with social media and promotion I should be able to overcome the loss of potential traffic from search engines; this is what we all should be shooting for.

So just keep writing and pushing forward; those who like what you write will find you.
 

Blogging, Social Media, Writing, Motivation and General Stuff