Don’t use Gallery

Gallery is free and as such there is no support to speak of. If you used the urls of your photos from the gallery and the gallery breaks, all the photos on your site break. There really isn’t anyway to repair that, especially if you have a lot.

Don’t use the native Wordpress image upload and self-hosting features

If you use Wordpress that is. The problem with this is that when you change themes, your images can potentially all be affected. So what should you do?

Create an “Images” folder on your sever

You can resize your photos with the width=”xx” declaration in the img line. Or, you can resize them manually with Photoshop. Don’t use the “WYSIWYG” editor in Wordpress to make your image links. Instead, use the html editor.

I have found that using these features to hardcode my images hosted in a dedicated “images” folder is the best way to feature and backup my images. What method do you use to host and insert images on your blog.

If you care about success, you will define it. I have defined mine as about $2-400/month and at least 200 unique visitors a day. If I am hitting those benchmarks, I feel successful blogging. I made these goals after years of tracking my stats and seeing what was “good” for me.

I check two things every time I log on:

1. Google Analytics – This is the best free way to check how many visitors I have each day.
2. Google Adsense – This tells me the money I make by clicks on my many pages.

I used to check a lot more but found I was taking time away from creating content. That should always be the top priority, in my opinion, of a successful blogger.

First I had an .htaccess file for my two other main blogs and put it in their root directory. The effect of the file was to do this:

Post was: postcardsfromthefunnyfarm.com/crazy-quotes/
Redirect now is: damienriley.com/crazy-quotes/

As I saod, the usual blogging design that I love doing had little to do with this “nuts and bolts” migration stuff.

The .htaccess code I used came from this helpful page on 301 redirects. My current code modified from there looks like this:

Options -Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/gerryriley.com/$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/music/$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/images/$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/rileycentral/$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/sgallery/$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/gallery/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.damienriley.com/$1 [R=301,L]


As you can see, this isn’t Wordpress coding. Still, after all was said and done and much testing, it worked!

I ran into a few snags. The most maddening of which was that my “Postcards” blog (over 2,000 posts and most popular blog) was originally set up in my server’s root directory. This caused every file or folder in that directory to be forwarded to my damienriley.com … this was really annoying.

I was able to remedy it by using “exception” statements and keeping certain directories from being forwarded. Once I did this I notice Google was starting to list my posts from my migrated blogs as living at the new blog. Woo hoo, that feels good. Now searches in google of site:http://www.postcardsfromthefunnyfarm.com or site:http://www.dynamitelessonplan.com return most of my old posts from those blogs and, when clicked, they redirect seamlessly to their new respective url at damienriley.com

.htaccess files are really not that complicated and if you are looking to migrate your blog somewhere, you should look into how they work. It’s miraculous. Oh, and by the way, I am so much happier running one blog instead of 5! ;) In week when the month ends I will report as usual the amount of money and popularity I gained through blogging. It should be interesting to see if the one did as good as the three main ones. Goes to show you a blogs design is just the icing on the cake of all you have to know as a blogger.

Do we really need all those?

The answer is clearly, no we don’t. I think the littering of social media buttons on blogs is really ugly. I’d remain silent if I thought it was helping people. In truth, I don’t think all those icons are necessary. I have three you see below my titles.

These three sites have proven themselves over time (source Google Analytics) to be my highest social media traffic referrers. Of course, the “P” in Ping.fm and that allows a myriad of referrals to take place.  SU and Twitter are really the only ones that bring me notable traffic and as most bloggers know, traffic stats are the proverbial gold coins of blogging.

What social media is working for you? How do you feel about this idea of limiting your social media to what refers the most traffic?

If you were a reader of Postcards from the Funny Farm – Bless you! Please continue to read this blog. I will be featuring the same sort of psychology and self imporvement articles here at least once a week in the Psychology category.

If you read Dynamite Lesson Plan, I have redirected the old posts here and imported those posts here as well so eventually this will be their “Google” archived home. I am committed to writing a “teaching” category post once a week.

I appreciate your support. I will continue to write the same categories on this blog I used to from online diary to Blogging A to Z and updates of my music. Thanks for following my work.

So has the cowboy image got you thinking of equestrian apparel yet? It’s not a joke, bloggers really do have a tough road. If you blog as a journal, your job is a lot easier. You write only for yourself and don’t have to consider “the big picture” and how each post fits into it. Most bloggers do it for some sort of return, and those bloggers must be tough.

Ever had a transmission go out on your car and tried to fix it yourself? This is akin to a database going bad or a theme breaking. As a blogger you don’t have the money (usually) to hire the Geek Squad to come out and fix your problem.

Then, there is the issue of writing. Blogging takes your wit and candor and time. For these reasons, I would hope to discourage those who think blogging is easy money. At the same time, I wrote this to encourage those fellow bloggers out there “in the trenches.” You can do it! Don’t lose heart.

Table of contents for Blog Stats and Earning Data 2010

1. Blog Stats January 2010
2. Blog Stats February 2010

January has come to an end and in my usual way, I am blogging about my blog stats. Although … you will find these updates will be more like “anti-blog” updates in 2010. Interested? Hope so.

I am tired of sitting at a laptop stressing over blogging stuff all the time. I’d like to pursue other diversions like finishing my Herman Hesse Novel, “Demian” and re-reading my favorite books in college, the U.S.A. series by John dos Passos. But hey, if I can still make money doing it once in a while, or even when I’m AWAY from the comp … I’M GAME! Stay tuned to see what “downsizing” will actually occur and how that may affect income. My goal is to do almost nothing and make the same or more money each month at blogging. Not likely you say? You’re probably right. We’ll see … First, the good  old acronym I have measured my blog(s) progress with since 2007:

C: circulation (# of backlinks)
A: analytics (# of visitors)
N: net (# of dollars earned)

I’m breaking down my stats by circulation and analytics.
My Net income “N” for all three blogs in January was:

Sponsored posts: $118.31
Adsense: $ 47.96
—-
Total: $166.27
Specific blog income sources are found in this post: Companies that pay you to blog

Damien at the Speed of Life
C: 4,034 inlinks per Yahoo! Site Explorer
A: 700 visits per Google Analytics

Postcards from the Funny Farm
C: 9,281 inlinks per Yahoo! Site Explorer
A: 6,482 visits per Google Analytics

Dynamite Lesson Plan
C: 1,009 inlinks per Yahoo! Site Explorer
A: 2,472 visits per Google Analytics

Reflections on January 2010: As I stated in the intro to this post, I am in scaling back mode. I want to spend much less time on blogging in 2010. Fear not however because I think my “scaled down” is more time than most people ever spend blogging. Still, you will probably get more about my vacations, movies, love affair with my wife, and how good my new gum flavor tastes than posts that seek to make money in 2010.

I always hope money will come but I really want to get away from all the tired, boring things people do with their blogs to make money. My ultimate goal is to just write on one by 2011. That alone would alleviate a lot of energy burnout. So what about you? What do you think about these blog stats? How are yours?

This post is part of a series tagged Blogging A-to-Z

Now, the finger is aimed at me. Who am I online and why do I write things on the internet? I want it to be more fun … more fun for me and more fun for you. It’s become somewhat unenjoyable meeting all my own goals for 3 professional self-hosted blogs (I did the free host thing years ago and it was too limiting).

I’ve been pondering combining my three blogs into this one until I realized it wouldn’t be all that easy at this point. I haven’t just created three urls, I’ve developed them and integrated them into two main income sources. If I do a 301 redirect from my teaching blog and my psychology blog, those two sources will disappear. Now, it isn’t much. Last month I only made $166.

Still, I am not prepared to destroy those two blogs. In fact, I may just be temporarily frustrated with the work that goes into them. Sometimes in any job I think you hit those walls where you question if you are doing what you really want to.

I will use this year, 2010, to evaluate what the three blogs really do for me. I really love to blog so for sure I will not quit it altogether. At the same time, the thought of just one blog is very alluring. I ran across this post that tells how I could do it if it does prove worth it.

In conclusion, be careful what you blog for. Making money at it pays out very little financially. If there are no intrinsic, non-monetary rewards for you, stay away.

This post is part of a series tagged Blogging A-to-Z

Out of the three I checked out, this plugin worked the best. Of course, it isn’t perfect but it still offers access to my blogs without taking forever to load. I think everyone who is serious about blogging should configure it somehow, whether through a plugin or browser detection, to render a mobile friendly blog if an iPhone or android, etc. tries tuning in. It seems the future of the web is going the way of the mobile phone. If you want to capture all the readers you can, mobile’s now a piece of the pie. So far, most phone emulators return something like this.

You can check your website on the iPhone with this free app.

Update: The page renders very simply and unattractively on the iphone and I have chosen to opt for a simpler regular theme instead of using this plugin.