Reaper-X .:[ ID ]:. » Blog

BlogRush Beta … let’s see how it goes

Reaper-X — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 01:23:01 +0000

So today i just installed yet another tracking code in this blog, and this time the tracking code comes from Blogrush (after reading various website … erm blog … talking about Blogrush). And to those who didn’t know or never heard about Blogrush, here’s some description about Blogrush taken from their website :

BlogRush is a free service that was created to help bloggers solve their #1 need: More Readers For Their Blog

After testing what Blogrush actually does by clocking on other blog that use Blogrush code, i assume that basically Blogrush is just another traffic exchange program, with the exception because Blogrush code use javascript, you don’t have to worry about being punished by Google because of linking to bad neighborhood

But how BlogRush works ?

BlogRush is a Cooperative Syndication Network that rewards its users for their contributions to the network from the impressions they provide of the BlogRush Widget to the referral of other users through 10 generations of activity and the impressions of the widget that they provide

Which mean, for every impression your site received there’s a chance that your headline will be shown at other blog who’s using Blogrush Widget. For example, if there are 10 visitors viewing your page (10 impression), you’ll get a chance for your headline to show up 10 times on other blog who’s using the blogrush widget in the same category as your blog, which is not really good for small traffic blog

Well … but that’s just my own opinion because i’m pretty sure that there are other factors involved such as how many times your visitors clicking on your Blogrush widget

As for now, i’m just going to see how well it's going to perform on this blog ;)

0x87485B96 | Tags : Blog, Internet

Do what you love and money will follow you ?

Reaper-X — Fri, 18 May 2007 19:11:20 +0000

Lately i’ve been thinking about this after i read Problogger review with Gina Trapatani recently. And here’s what Gina Trapatani said in her review with Problogger :

What tips would you give someone just starting out in blogging if they wanted to build a profitable blog?

First, pick a topic you love, one that you can’t wait to write about every day. If I wasn’t truly obsessed with productivity, I would have never lasted at Lifehacker. Second, center your site on the reader, not yourself. Provide useful, informative, entertaining material that readers will come back to over and over again. Third, measure your success by your readership and the response you get from others, not your Adsense checks. Once you build your audience, the money will follow

And because i always interested looking for another opinion about this, i tried searching for similar keywords using Google and came across an interesting post about this :

Mark Albion cites a study by Srully Blotnick :

A study of business school graduates tracked the careers of 1,500 people from 1960 to 1980. From the beginning, the graduates were grouped into two categories. Category A consisted of people who said they wanted to make money first so they could do what they really wanted to do later after they care of their financial concerns. Those in category B pursued their interests first, sure that the money eventually would follow.

What percentage fell into each category?

Of the 1,500 graduates in the survey, the money-now category A’s comprised 83 percent or 1,245 people. Category B risk takers made up 17 percent, 255 graduates.

After 20 years, there were 101 millionaires in the group. Only one came from category A, 100 from category B

Found at John Kwarsick Blog via George Ambler Blog

And after finished reading it (including it is moral story lesson), i think the above story has a truth in it because most successful (if not all) bloggers i’ve ever seen, does the same thing too on their blog. They think about their site visitors first not the money

0x87485B96 | Tags : Blog, Blogging, Journal, Opinion, Personal

Wordpress 2.2 Released

Reaper-X — Wed, 16 May 2007 10:50:05 +0000

Wordpress 2.2 has been released today, and like most of you already know that everytime Wordpress released a new version especially major version that means there’re various changes into it such as new features, bugfixes and so on …

And here’s what new in Wordpress 2.2 :

Improved comment editing
Widgets (no longer a plugin but available under Presentation tab)
Deactivate Plugins automatically (activate automatically not in yet)
New Blogger Import
Fewer clicks and better user experience for upgrades
Improved login accessibility
Improved UI when deleting Drafts
Improved clarity regarding "Spam it:" and "Delete it:" in comment notification e-mails

Just like before, i downloaded the tarball release into my computer and tested it right away locally to make sure the currently used plugins, theme, etc are compatible with the new release before deployed it into my site. After tested it for a while and did not see any problem (no error, no incompatible plugins, etc), i decided to apply small changes i have made previously to this new release and then begin another test to make sure it is still okay … and so on

And the final result is … well … you can see it by yourself when you see this post

0x87485B96 | Tags : Blog, Journal, Website, Wordpress

No more paged comments

Reaper-X — Fri, 11 May 2007 09:43:56 +0000

Well … if you’ve been to this site before, you see that i'm using paged comments to make this website load faster and also reducing the query used which resulting in less cpu usage. Although this blog rarely get comments but i think it is necessary to do it first because i do not want to get kicked from this host again (well … actually there’s one of my post that has more than 700 comments, and that’s why i choose to use paged comments at first)

But now … well … perhaps it is not necessary for me to use it anymore. Because in this several days, i’ve been getting comments / question on my wow private server guide. But most of the time the question has been answered before by me. And i can assume that’s because they’re just dont really like browsing all of the paged comments (yeah i know … i'm lazy like you guys too … beside if there’re several pages, i think it’ll make you bored by browsing each page) lol

And now … finally i decided to turn off the paged comments so you can view them all in one page (i also set up a 301 redirect so search engine can find the actual page without getting 404 error), so i hope that you guys can read it first (if it has been answered previously) … :)

0x87485B96 | Tags : Blog, Journal, Personal, Website

Just when i thought i’m the only one ..

Reaper-X — Thu, 10 May 2007 15:03:38 +0000

I saw the Problogger interview with Tim Ferris, author of The 4–Hour Workweek book … and it writes :

Darren : What have you learnt about blogging since starting yours a month ago? Teach us oh wise one!

Tim : LOL… I don’t claim to have all of the answers, of course. Not even most of them, but I’m a pretty good “reductionist”. That just means that I question what everyone is doing and ask myself: if I ignore what’s popular, what everyone says you “have to do,” what actually works? I cut out all the fat and look at just the highest-impact variables.

For example, I’ve been told I need to post everyday, but when I really looked at the facts, a different picture emerged.

i’ve found that if i post less often, my blog has a sine wave sign-up curve. in other words: if i post just infrequently enough (for me, once every 4-6 days), the comments add up on each post, making the site look very popular, and rss subscriptions spike. if i post too often, it doesn’t look popular (since posts get pushed down and comment-count is low), so it is actually better for my site to post less often! love it when that happens…

Well … at first i thought i'm the only one who’s experiencing this but after reading that post … now i'm sure there’re other who’s experiencing the same situation like me too. So what’s the point of telling you this ? well … im sure that most of you already read various blogging tips, and most of them says write often for various reasons. And as you can see, not all the tips from various sources can be applied to your site, because every site has difference audience (for example, i can be categorized as a full-time lurker and rarely leave comment unless i feel necessary)

Although in reality when i search for Tim Ferris blog and found it at Fourhourworkweek.com … i saw that his site has more comments compared to this site, even i can see comments on all of his post lol …

0x87485B96 | Tags : Blog, Blogging, Internet, Journal, Personal

Three out of every four Blogspot URL’s were spam

Reaper-X — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 14:37:16 +0000

Now this is a good reason on why you shouldn’t choose Blogspot to blog if you’re serious about blogging :

Three out of every four unique Blogspot.com URLs that appeared in the top 50 results for commercial queries were spam, the study said. Blogspot is the hosting site for Google's blogging service. Blogs created for marketing purposes are sometimes referred to as splogs

Also, one domain – topsearch10.com – hosted many other redirection domains that were responsible for 22 percent to 25 percent of the spam detected during the researchers' tests, the study said – Full Story

If you’re serious about blogging without thinking about anything else maybe you should consider using free wordpress.com service rather than blogspot because of their strict spam policy, other than that they also restrict you to put ads on your website (i know there would be different opinion about this but if you’re really serious, you should try to get a domain name and get real webhosting instead) or using any redirection technique which results in less spam

0x87485B96 | Tags : Blog, Blogging, Internet, Opinion, Personal

How i make money online from Blog

Reaper-X — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 05:38:29 +0000

This site first started in July 2006 using the free wordpress dot com service. When i first created this site, actually i just want to write about everything related to computer because .. computer is my favorite subject and i always like anything related to technology talk such as computer. As a side note, the first language used on this site / blog is using Indonesian Language (my primary language) but because i find lots of this site visitors came from USA i tried to switch into English language although i'm not really good at it (at first i was afraid of using english language because – as far as i know – that most USA people are always want to see perfect sentences with perfect grammars)

After 1 month blogging at wordpress dot com, i find it hard if i stayed with them for too long because of limited functionality (they’re disabling javascript and you can not monetize your site). But back then i do not really have intention on monetizing this site, the only thing i want is using a domain name (at that time, wordpress does not support domain mapping) and ability to customize my theme

And in August 2006 i decided to bought a domain name, and get a webhosting space for this site. And like most of you already knew, wordpress does not allow you to use redirect or such stuff to automatically redirect your old site to the new site, and it cause a significant traffic drop and in the end i have to delete every post from my old site and force google to not index it at all ! so i can bring the old visitors to the new site. But it’s worth the time, trust me you’ll never regrets on having your own domain name and get yourself a payed webhosting service

Later i learned about adsense and various monetizing technique from various sources such as Problogger, Shoemoney, LiewCF, and JohnTP. and decided to use it in order to get income to pay my monthly hosting bill so i can keep this site up. At first i only make around $0.xx – $1.xx per day and i'm really struggling on passing this mark ! and fortunately at later time i can past that $1.xx mark and get around $3 - 4 per day and then goes to $4.xx – $7.xx per day or at least i can get payed by Google monthly, although that’s all nothing compared to the pro-bloggers, or other A-list bloggers out there

So what’s the point of this post ? if you read the above paragraph you’ll know that even i have had a hard time on monetizing this site, but in the end i was able to make a cash online although its not much (have you ever heard this words somewhere “No Pain No Gain”) :)

And if you still remember the No Pain No Gain quote, you’ll know that there’s no such thing as easy money. So if you read someone says You can make over $1000 per month without doing real work, just run away form them and never look back. Because you’ll need to work hard in order to earn money even in online world

That’s all about my experience on how i make money online from blog :)

0x87485B96 | Tags : Blog, Income Sources, Internet, Journal, Making Money, Personal

Media Temple Grid Server Review

Reaper-X — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 05:37:28 +0000

Finally Media Temple already approved the previously mentioned Grid Server account for my uncle’s today (when i posted this). And one thing for sure, the Media Temple GS Control Panel rocks ! i’ve never seen a custom control panel like this before (Godaddy use custom control panel too, but their control panel lack features)

And here’s my own review about Media Temple Grid Server (since my uncle account just got approved today, i can not give you report about Media Temple Uptime / performance), but i’ll give you a short review about their features (after few months with them, i'm going to make a review about their uptime too)

First of all, the first thing i did notice on their control panel is i can manually edit Zones for the domain name used .. and this is a big plus because Hostgator does not give you access to edit your domain zones manually, unless you’re on their dedicated server or using a reseller account. I know that this is not normally required by everyone but at least to those who know to edit their zones name by themself, this makes you feel a little bit better because you dont have to email them whenever you want to edit your zones file (actually i'm a shy type, and dont really like to email support team for something like this) lol

The other important thing is you can get SSH access to your Grid server account which is really useful especially if you dont want to FTP your script. And thanks to this, i can complete wordpress installation within short time :)

Other than that, media temple also use FastCGI on their Grid Server, so you can use a more restrictive permission on your php scripts. And they also update their php executable really fast, they’re currently using php 4.4.6 (at least that’s what i saw on my uncle’s server)

As for database, unlike on most CPanel based server which is using localhost as your MySQL database host, you must look carefully on what server your MySQL host located, here’s an example of what their MySQL database host looks like :

internal-db.*****.gridserver.com <= for internal access, and most of the time you’re going to use this address
external-db.*****.gridserver.com <= for external access, and do not forget to create access rules if you’re going to use this one

What about their other features ? well .. there’s one click script installation, web statistic, bandwidth report, etc. But i think most of you already knew about that because most web hosting company also provided standard tools like that

Although they gives so many features but there’s one thing that i do not really like from them, and that’s because their control panel using SSL and it slow down everything for me (maybe they should use SSL for login only instead of full SSL on control panel) … but i think that’s just because my internet connection .. s***s

And because of the above features, i recommend them but we’ll see about their downtime later on my next review about them :)

Update : I just got access to use jailed SSH access on my hostgator account after verifying myself with them :) .. hurray

0x87485B96 | Tags : Blog, Internet, Web Hosting, Web Servers, Website

Block search results on your site from being Indexed by Google

Reaper-X — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 15:37:01 +0000

Wow .. i just read this today regarding the search results getting indexed by search engine (in this case Google), because now Google gives you a warning about making your search results page from getting indexed by Googlebot

Here’s what Vanessa Fox from Google said about this – link :

Typically, web search results don't add value to users, and since our core goal is to provide the best search results possible, we generally exclude search results from our web search index. (Not all URLs that contains things like "/results" or "/search" are search results, of course.)

Other than that, Matt Cutts also suggest you to use robots.txt to block search engine from indexing your search results, and here’s what he said about this :

Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines

And because of this issue, Google also updated their quality guidelines page

Thanks to Danny Sullivan for posting about this matter, because i’ll never know about this issue if he’s not posting it on his blog

0x87485B96 | Tags : Blog, Google, SEO, Website

Minimum Requirements for Text Link Ads ?

Reaper-X — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 14:23:04 +0000

I’ve been wondering this for a while, even i’ve searched Digitalpoint forums about text link ads information. But none of the results are giving me accurate information about Text Link ads requirement (link)

Some of them are lucky :

oserymour – I just got accepted immediately for a PR4 site that has 3 pages and gets no traffic... weird

While there’s an unlucky one like me :

Duilen – They denied my PR3 gaming blog with 1k+ uniques per day

Well .. i guess after waiting for several months without being accepted into Text Link Ads program, i decided to forget about Text Link Ads. Simply because, i’ve tried contacting them a few times and i always got the same message about my site link popularity is too low :(

I do not know what tool they use to judge website link popularity, but currently my blog is PR5 (at the time i wrote this post) but still got rejected by them. Other than that, i’ve also tried emailing them too and after a few days waiting for their reply .. i still got the same rejection message

0x87485B96 | Tags : Advertisement, Blog, Journal, Personal, Website

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for Wordpress

Reaper-X — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 12:03:49 +0000

Well .. let’s say you’re using wordpress to power your website. And what should be done next to make sure your website is ready to be crawled by search engine ? Here’s the answer on what should be done after installing wordpress to your web server, and it’s called SEO / Search Engine Optimization

As a side note, this should be done before you go submitting your site to various directories, doing some link exchange, or to various search engine itself to make sure they’re not indexing your unfinished website :)

1. Choose Whether you want to use WWW in your domain or not

This is the most important thing to do, so this come first before anything else. This is done because having one canonical url version for all of your page will help you improve your search engine ranking

And here’s what Matt Cutts said about this :

Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?
A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Google. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

www.example.com
example.com/
www.example.com/index.html
example.com/home.asp

But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.

And now how to use it on your blog ? Well .. you can read my previous article on how to force www on domain name. And if you don’t like WWW in front of your domain, with a slight modification you can also force the non-www version on all of your webpages

If you’re using add-on domain, you might take a look on my previous post on how to configure add-on domain so it’ll looks like a single domain placed on a single server

2. Control how Search Engine Robot visit your site

The next step would be creating robots.txt file and placed / upload it to the root folder of your site. This is done to control how search engine crawling your page, so they do not index your secret page

Read here for more info about this or here. And if you need real world example about this, you can click here (Google Results) for robots.txt example from various live sites

As a note, there are different opinion on whether you should let Google or other search engine bot to index your /feed/ address, archives page, etc or not. Personally i’ve tried them both and i don’t find any differences (in traffic, because of Google putting my site into it is supplemental index) between blocking them or not

If you want to read more about this issue, you can read Aaron Wall from Seobook post about this Google Supplemental Index Issue

3. Change your Permalink Structure / Using Nice URL

In order to change it, just go to Options -> Permalink from your dashboard and choose the Date and Name Based Permalink. So your url will looks like this for an example :

Default URL Structure : http://www.example.com/?p=123
Optimized URL Structure : http://www.example.com/category/post-name/

If you need more information about Permalink Structure in Wordpress, you can read it from here

4. Use unique title and meta description for each page

I know that inserting each meta description to a custom field (as for title, im sure no one are using the same title every time) for every page is time consuming especially to those who’s moving from the free wordpress.com blog

Fortunately there’s one plugin for wordpress that can help you with this situation, and it’s called Head META Description plugin by Kaf Oseo (if i'm not wrong, because i couldnt find his about page) :P which will automatically create Meta Description tag for your wordpress blog

And now the next step to do is optimize your blog post title by installing another plugin, and this one called Optimal Title created by Elasticdog that can be found here

5. Create Sitemaps for your Wordpress Blog

Creating sitemap is necessary especially if you want Search Engine to index your pages properly (deep linking). And in order to simplify creating sitemap for your site, you can use the Wordpress Sitemap Plugins which can be downloaded from here

That’s all about it, as an addition you might be interested on reading my previous post about DIY SEO

0x87485B96 | Tags : Blog, Google, Google Sitemaps, Guide, SEO, Tutorials, Website

Got Slashdotted from comment ?

Reaper-X — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 03:35:55 +0000

Today i got a really big suprised on my incoming traffic and it’s all from Slashdot (someone post a link to one of my previous post on the comment there). The truth is im surprised on how big Slashdot effect can be, eventhough my page is not on the Slashdot frontpage, i got more than traffic than the usual traffic (got an increased of 1000 or more because of one link on the slashdot comment)

Now i'm just wondering .. what happen if i got my page into the frontpage of Slashdot ? i'm pretty sure (99.99%) .. this site is already dead by now (every HTTP Request goes timeout), or even worse i got my site suspended .. but i'm sure this increased amount of traffic is for today only so i do not need to change anything

Anyway by posting this, i just want to say many thanks to the person that put a link to this page on the slashdot comment page :D

As a note, the only thing changed because of this i got an increased impression from my adsense account but just as i thought, there’s no change in the actual revenue itself (because .. everyone on slashdot can be considered as a geek that does not like to see ads, or already filtered them)

0x87485B96 | Tags : Blog, Journal, Personal, Website

Ahh … Guest Bloggers …

Reaper-X — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 02:42:46 +0000

Darren Rowse writes about Why guest bloggers are great for a blog after reading the Guest post over at John Chow’s Blog written by Matt Coddington. He says that it’s a win win situation because of the following reason :

The blogger who does the guest spot wins : The guest bloggers can get a link back to his site, and that’s including promoting himself
The blogger who owns the blog wins : The owner of the blog can take a break and do not have to worry about posting something new
The reader wins : because they get to hear about the topic of the blog from a new angle

While personally i agree to Darren Rowse statement, but maybe Darren forgot to tell you something important, the first thing that everyone noticed is John Chow’s blog has a big number of loyal readers. And with that condition of course you can get guest bloggers to easily write something for you because they’ll get the exposure by writing on John Chow’s Blog or any other popular blog

Even one of the commenters on that Guest Post over at John Chow’s blog writes this :

Some good points - but it certainly is much easier to get a guest blogger when you have a very popular blog, right?

Now i think you’ll get the idea. Guest bloggers can be useful especially if you’re running a popular blog on the blogosphere and of course they also lining up to write on your blog even if your not asking for it ..

0x87485B96 | Tags : Blog, Blogging, General Blogging, Internet

Making Money from Blog with Pagerank

Reaper-X — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 12:48:03 +0000

Almost every webmaster already know about Google Pagerank. And thanks to it there are various opinion on whether pagerank should be used to judge a website value. Some of them are saying that the most important thing in a website is it's content, while some other says that pagerank is the first thing to look when judging a website (indirectly, and the truth is i'm included in this category too :D )

And what about Alexa Rank ? .. well most people always said to not trust Alexa rank because they’re also not providing accurate result for your website statistic. And that’s simply because Alexa rank can be manipulated easily.

But let’s put that aside, shall we ? .. okay .. at first when i'm still building this website, my site didn't have a pagerank (or at least it’s not appearing on the Google Toolbar or many other site that provides service to display your site pagerank), and of course with that status i'm having difficulty especially if i want to submit this site to various directory (although some of them are nice by giving a free link, but most of them require you to have a pagerank first), doing some link exchange, etc

But the worse part is, if you’re trying to monetize your site by submitting your site to various advertisers. They always check your site pagerank first (except for Google adsense of course, because adsense always accept any site as long as your website is using english language or any other language as long as it’s still supported by adsense), and some of them also check your Alexa statistic. And the results is, if your site doesn't have a pagerank or low alexa rank .. you can be sure that they’re going to reject your website

And now what if your site already has a pagerank on it ? and even better your site get a pagerank of 4 and above ? Simple .. you can do various method to make money from it. But the easiest way is of course selling ad space on your site, such as text link or place the advertisers banner on your site. You can try offering your ad space from various online forum

But what if you don't like or don’t want to advertise your site in every online forum by yourself ? It’s easy, you can simply join third party site that is automatically offering your site to various advertisers, and the best part is you don't have to do anything because all you have to do is just wait. And for this part i recommend Text Link Ads (aff) because they’re the easiest and all you have to do is just placing their code on your site

Okay, that is all about using your pagerank status to make money from it, but please keep this in mind. Having a good pagerank status doesn't guarantee your site will be making lots of traffic because Google pagerank value always changed (dynamically) although the toolbar value is only exported after several months at Google update

0x87485B96 | Tags : Advertisement, Alexa Rank, Blog, Google Page Rank, Google Pagerank, Income Sources, Making Money, SEO, Tutorials

Blogsmith for hosted only ?

Reaper-X — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 15:10:26 +0000

It seems that the recent news about Blogsmith to launch in early 2007 is just for another hosted blogging platform not for public download just like other blogging platform such as Wordpress or MovableType

At first i thought it’d be available for public download and i was really enthusiastic on trying it .. on my local server first :-P (hey its not a good idea to try out something new on public, beside with the current connection problem i don't want to upload anything because i'm connecting at really slow speed) especially after reading Problogger post about this .. but it seems i was wrong

As a note, i say this based on Brian Alvey comments about this matter, and he says that Blogsmith is hosted only, not downloadable like MT. :-(

0x87485B96 | Tags : Blog, Blogging, General Blogging, Internet, Internet Tools