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What a difference in mortgage rates!

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I’ve been talking with some of my friends who also happen to be home owners and we were comparing our mortgage rates. What I found out was that california mortgage rate are a bit higher than they are here in Ontario.

I’m wondering now if the mortgage rates are a little higher because the US economy isn’t doing quite as well as Canada’s? I haven’t heard any recent rates but the last time I did I think our unemployment rate was lower and well … our dollar is certainly climbing. If our dollar gets much higher it will hurt our economy.

What do you think?




Visitors leaving website links

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I’ve noticed that one of the newish frequent commenter’s on several of my blogs is a Las Vegas Real Estate agent. She signs her posts with her business name and I know after reading some discussions on a forum that this has thrown a few people off.

Why? Well, we all get spammers coming around trying to leave comments so they’ll get a link to their site. This isn’t the case with this lady though. Yes she is a real estate agent but she’s also a blogger and she leaves legitimate comments that relate to the post.

Hey, I’ve got blogs and websites and there’s been times when I’ve been on a site that related to one of my websites and I’ve left the address for my site when I signed up to leave the comment. I don’t mind when others do this from time to time … I mean, not everyone has a blog, yet they still might enjoy reading them.

It’s the people that leave multiple links in their comments – even in legitimate comments that bother me. If the link doesn’t really relate to the post or the comment I really don’t care for the extra links.

I’ve removed the nofollow tags from my sites and as a result I’m actually giving away a tiny bit of my sites PR for each outgoing link. I don’t like to give out extra if there’s no good reason for it.

Keeping up with all the blogs

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I find that I haven’t been getting to this blog as often as I’d like to post all the interesting tech related finds that I come across almost every day.

I don’t know if any of you reading this have more than one blog or website, but I can tell you that the more you create the busier you get! No kidding right?

I’ve been so busy with other work lately that I haven’t had time to do one of the main things that used to always allow me to keep up with my blogging and have regular articles daily or at least almost daily.

What I used to do was prepare articles in advance. If I was in a writing mode I’d get busy and write a number of articles at once and store them as drafts. That allowed me to release one a day or as needed without having to think about it too much.

I think that’s one of the main things that I have to get back into doing in order to feel like I’m maintaining my websites properly again.

What not to do to your Blog design

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There are some things that I just dislike coming across when I visit a blog or website. Does your site have or do any of these things?

  1. Autoplay video
  2. Autoplay music
  3. flashy buttons
  4. too many buttons (put them in a roll up menu if you must have them)
  5. advertisements that take up the whole header area making me scroll to see the actual header and posts below.
  6. Too many advertisements – don’t do the max google adsense – you actually make less money from them if you do too many!!! Plus it turns off your visitors.
  7. Pages with so many plug ins, large file size images, buttons etc that make the page really slow to load- or worse cause it to freeze when loading.
  8. Text that is hard to read – white on black doesn’t work if you are trying to read a long post – light gray text works better … same for florescent coloured text on black or white backgrounds, or neon backgrounds with black or white text.
  9. no paragraphs -makes posts very hard to read
  10. Set your posts so that only 5 or 10 display on the main page!!!! Not everything you’ve ever written on your blog for the last two years!

Tips!

Use roll up menus in your sidebars if you have lots of buttons or blogrolls etc. It really makes the page look so much tidier.

Test your blog design in Firefox, Internet explorer, Opera and Netscape – all easy to download and have on your computer. Make sure your site loads correctly and works well in all the browsers listed above,

Also look at your site on different computers. Text and background colour might look great on your monitor but really really bad on 5 other computer monitors that you test it on.

As I said in the last point- visitors only need to see your last 5 or 10 posts when they load your page. If you have more than that showing your page will load very slowly.

Same with categories and archives. Do your visitors need to see your archives dating back to 2001? That’s a long list taking up valuable blog sidebar real estate. Use a roll up menu or modify the code in your page so that only 5 or 10 archives and or categories are viewed. You could also create a page just for your archives and link to it from the main page of your site.

Every once in a while ask your readers their opinion on your page. Ask for constructive criticism. If the majority of your readers state they don’t like something or that your page loads slowly – do something about it.

Got a health or fitness blog?

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Last June a market research, well maybe it’s better to call them a Buzz Marketing company, got in touch with me and offered me a free Nokia smart multi-media phone.

All I had to do to get the phone was answer a survey a few months later, and just openly talk about the phone to people I encountered or on my blog. I could say whatever I wanted – whether I loved it or hated. The company was just trying to generate some buzz for Nokia and for the particular cell phone model.

I do like the phone btw, it’s a Nokia 6682. I’m still using it. Free is good. It always is!

Now, this same company has contacted me again.

They’d like to get in touch with people in the Toronto or Montreal area. If you have a health related blog where you discuss health matters, nutrition, weight loss etc and you live in Toronto or Montreal let me know and I’ll put you in touch with the company.

This is specifically what my contact is looking for:

I’m currently working on an interesting word of mouth marketing programme that involves a health food product, and I’m interested in speaking with individuals who are enthusiastic about fitness, eating well, and pursuing a healthy and active life style – and who host a blog on any of these topics.

Specifically, I’m looking for people who:

· are 25-54 years old
· live in Toronto or Montreal
· are actively pursuing a healthy lifestyle
· are very socially active and engaged within peer (personal and professional) social circles
· Prone to spreading new health information to friends and/or clients
· Host a blog that focuses on fitness and activity, healthy living, or nutrition

If you fall into this category let me know and I’ll put you in touch with the marketing coordinator.

One way to lessen the spam on your blog

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I’ve always had Akismet activated on our WordPress blogs, and we do get a fair amount of comments. However, in February I also added Bad Behavior to our sites because the amount of spam Akismet was catching was getting out of hand. I was easily getting 400 spam comments on some sites!

That’s a lot of spam to go through to find a real comment or two!

I still find that anyone who leaves a link or two in their comment often ends up having their comment go to the spam folder. I hate that, you’d think that if I approved their comments once or twice in the past both WordPress and Akismet would learn and not put the post in the spam folder. I even increased the amount of links allowed in a comment on one of my sites because I run several blogrolls out of that site and it still puts the comments with one or two links in it in spam.

As I was saying, in February, I downloaded Bad Behavior, and it actually hides the site from some bad bots so the amount of Spam hitting our sites dropped dramatically.

Yes we still get spam, but it’s down to at most 10 spam per day on the busiest sites, and often only one or none on some days. It’s great … 400 spam a day down to 1 to 10? I love it!

So if you are sick of dealing with spam download the Bad Behavior plugin, install it in your WordPress plugin folder and then activate the plugin. That’s all you have to do. It works along side Akismet without any problems.

Web Conferencing and it’s future developments

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More and more companies are starting to use web conferencing technology as a way to conduct business meetings with clients, or other branches of their company. They’ve also been using web conferencing to conduct seminars, both for employees as in in educational sessions, and for customers too.

I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the online colleges started using web conferencing to begin teaching some of their classes. Wouldn’t that be a great idea. Take a course from home – but attend class on the web?

My husband was watching a documentary the other day about future technology. I believe the documentary was created in the late 80’s or very early 90’s. One of the “Future” technologies that they discussed was the ability for everyone to be able to partake in virtual conversations.

So instead of just talking on the phone you could sit yourself down in front of a screen, perhaps select a background for yourself and call up your family, friends or business associates and talk to them face to face in real time. Very much like what video conferencing is today – but with a little bit of extra flare added in.

I think we’re almost there.

Want more comments – make it easier!

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There was a discussion going on, on one of the forums that I visit regularly about sites that only allow registered visitors/members to comment. I’m certain that at least 90% of the people that responded to the thread stated that if they encountered a site where they had to register just to leave a comment they closed the site and didn’t bother leaving a comment.


Oh, sometimes they’ll still visit the site and read the posts. It’s not that the posts aren’t good reads, it’s just that they don’t want to jump through hoops just to leave a simple comment.

I mean, with all the social networking going on, and different lists to join – just how many sites are you registered with already? Do we really need to sign up at even more sites and have to remember login info for all the different blogs we visit just so that we can leave a comment?

I have registered an account with the major free blogging sites like Blogspot, Xanga, WordPress.com, live Journal and Typepad, but I really didn’t want to get a membership to any of them. After all, I don’t have any of my blogs on those sites – why do I need a membership just to leave a comment?

The same goes for private blogs on their own domains. I’ve encountered several lately where you must register to leave a comment. At least with the larger blogging sites if you register you can leave comments at all the blogs within that service. With private blogs you have to register for each one separately.

If I really like a blog or a particular post I sometimes will sign up and leave a comment but I don’t like having to do so, and most people will not do this. It’s no wonder that the sites that only allow registered commenters have so few comments on their sites.

Here’s an example of a site I encountered the other day – One of the sites that registered for the do follow blogroll the other day didn’t have any comments that I could find, just a few trackbacks. People had to register to comment so when I spoke with the site owner I mentioned the registration for comments and he clued in and said “ah maybe that’s why no one leaves me comments”.

Perhaps you have a blog that requires registration and you’ve been wondering why you don’t get many if any comments? Well – it’s probably not that your blog is boring, it’s just that people don’t like jumping through hoops. Make it easier for them – open up your comments to all.

By all means put all your comments on moderation if you’d like – I don’t mind that at all, but don’t make it too hard to leave a comment or you’ll get far fewer than your site deserves.

If and when sites that have been registered members only do open up their comments I strongly advise that you either moderate your comments or get some kind of spam control for your comments – otherwise you’ll be dealing with a lot of spammers and that’s not pleasant either.

Remove the no follow tag and become an I follow Blog

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I’ve always had some form of linkage on my sites that allowed my commenters to get a real link. By this I mean the links did not have the awful nofollow tag. Instead, the search engines were able to follow the link and index it.


Now, I’ve discovered that there’s a whole movement out there called the I follow movement. It’s caught on like wild lately and I actually started a blogroll on one of my other blogs for people who have removed the nofollow tags from their sites comment area. The blogroll is called the “Do follow blogroll” and anyone with a blog (not a website!) can join if they have removed the nofollow tags from their site, added the blogroll which I will supply the code for once I hear from interested parties, and preferably do not have their comments set to registered members only.

If you want to get rid of the nofollow tags from your blog you can use this WordPress plugin if you have a wordpress blog or this other do follow plugin. If your site is on blogger you can follow these easy step by step directions to remove the nofollow tags from your comment area.

Once you’ve removed those tags, and or comment on a site that has the nofollow tags removed you’ll find that the comment links left get indexed in the search engines, added to technorati thus raising the sites Technorati rank, and once all those links are counted by google as backlinks to your site you might even get higher PR.

Become a follower.

Bought some new domains

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I went on a domain buying spree! No I’m not about to create a bunch of new blogs. I purchased new domains so that I could move some of my existing blogs over to their own domains.

You see, my main blog related domain is feverishthoughts.com. I had originally started the blog that is currently located on that domain on another domain that I own. It was on a sub-directory. Last June I decided that I enjoyed blogging quite a bit and I wanted to start a few more blogs but I really didn’t want them to be on my original domain. The original domain that I was using was one that I’d set up for my reptile care website. A bunch of blogs about different topics on an exotic pet domain just didn’t seem right, so that’s how I began my mini network of blogs on Feverishthoughts.

Now all those new blogs that I started last summer have grown in popularity and since I use some of them to make money and I thought that it might be better to give each of them their own domain.

Unfortunately, for a little while at least, I’m going to have twice the amount of blogging to do. You see, I don’t want to just up and move my current blogs to their new homes. The new domains don’t have any page rank yet, or any links going to them. I haven’t even begun to promote the new sites yet either, let alone installed WordPress on each of them.

What I think I’ll do is spend the next three or so months blogging regularly on the new domains. I’ll make sure that whatever posts I make on the new domain are in keeping with the topic and style of posts that are on the blogs that will be moved over to these new sites. Blogging on each of the new domains as much as twice a week for three or so months, and promoting the sites as I build them should help them gain some page rank. Once they’ve attained some page rank I’ll make the move. Or at least I think I’ll be moving them.

The blogs that I plan to move to their own domains have decent ranks now. They range from PR3 to PR4 and have good Technorati and Alexa ranks as well. They also have rss subscribers. Gee this is getting more and more difficult the more I think about it. Within the next few weeks Google will begin it’s dance and there will be a page rank update. If my current blogs go up in rank it’s going to be really hard for me to move them to their new homes and lose that rank.

I really expect my gardening site, which is currently a PR4, to move up to a PR5 and if I’m lucky it won’t take long for it to become a PR6. It’s a popular niche blog so I think I’m being realistic in that hope and well, expectation.

The new domains don’t have anything on them yet but that will change in the next few days:

As the Garden Grows – homeandgardendiva.com
Celebrity Scoop – celebrityscoop.org
WebStyle – getwebstyle.com

My husbands sites
Guitar Licks – guitarlicksandtips.com
Odd Planet – trulyoddplanet.com

and, ok I lied, there’s one brand new site:
Shopping Maniac – shoppingmaniac.net

What do you think of those domain names? As you can see I had already named the sites in a way that describes what they are about to some degree, and luckily I managed to get domains that are very similar to the original name of the site. Well, As the Garden grows will become Home and Garden Diva, but that’s descriptive too.

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