I reckon if I was to ask whether or not you have ever had your blog go offline because you installed a plugin, or because you were playing around with the CSS or PHP codes, that the majority of you would say yes. The most important rule when doing any alterations to a blog is to always make sure you have a backup.

Luckily, ever since I changed my theme to FlexSqueeze I haven’t had much need to touch the internal coding at all. However, because the Theme is so easy to manipulate I have been toying with it to see some of the effects I could have. Some of you may remember the Easter Theme I ran a couple of weeks ago.

The thing is I didn’t want to bother my readers with all the different things I was trying as if figured it would freak them out if every time the page loaded they were confronted with something different, whether it was a different font color or perhaps a different header. I decided to use a Test Site to test the changes before adapting them to this blog. The site I used was Inquest, which was a blog that I originally set up for a young lady that went by the name Inquest. She was truly a remarkably talented blogger and I highly recommend they you have a look at some of her posts. Perhaps if you leave some comments we can coax her back. Anyway at the moment it is running the Easter Theme, but don’t be surprised if it isn’t as it is my Test Blog after all.

Once I was happy with the result the theme allows me to save it as a CSV file which I then import into this blog and all the changes I made gets instantly transferred, no worries or dramas at all.

While I was thinking about the whole procedure today I thought it be a great idea if all bloggers had their own test site. I mean, if you host your site it would be a cinch to set up a test blog. You could use this to test a new plugin or every time, for those of you who do not have the luxury of owning a FlexSqueeze theme, you decide to play around with the CSS or PHP codes. By having a test blog you are ensuring that your live blog does not get infected by any of your manipulations. Once you are happy with the way things are going you can then make the required adjustments to your actual blog.

Talking about themes, many of you may have heard of Thesis, especially if you are a regular reader and I have mentioned it a few times, but for those of you who haven’t, you may find Gromap’s post of some interest. IG, it’s author, has graciously mentioned me as a source for the negative viewpoint of Thesis, but I would like to point out that I never said it was shit or anything, just that it wasn’t as good or flexible as FlexSqueeze. Before you ask, yes if you buy FlexSqueeze from one of my posts I will make a bit of money from the sale but it will not add on any cost to you. You are merely supporting my life as a blogger so that I can keep a whole lot more informative and entertaining posts coming your way.

It seems that Twitter has taken the Internet by storm, so much so that every man and his dog has decided to join the Twitter revolution. After some study I have discovered that every Twitterer goes through certain stages before they can claim to be a proficient Twitterer. I’ve decided to list the states that I went through on my  Twitter discovery journey.

It’s quite possible that some of my readers have gone through some of the same stages. Just for a change I’ve decided to use a video to portray the separate stages I went through and I am hoping that at the end you may want to leave a comment saying how close they were to your own Twitter experience.

I’ve written a little post for those of you who have a hard time understanding my accent. Again, if you are offended by swear words you may want to read one of my other posts.

1. Newbie: This is the initial member stage when you don’t know what the hell you are supposed to do.
2. Research: Because you don’t want to remain a Newbie for the rest of your life you decide to do a little research to find out exactly how Twitter works
3. Sifting: That research is starting to cram a lot of ideas into your head, especially if you came across bloggers like John Chow who tell you that to become a successful marketer you need to get thousands of followers. This is the stage where you sift through your newly acquired knowledge to separate the crap from the gems
4. Following: Your research has lead you to believe that bloggers like John Chow are marketing Gurus and must therefore know what they are talking about. Working on that premise you decide to follow his lead and start to follow a whole heap of people that seem to have the same interests as you, hoping that most of them will return the favor.
5. WTF!: The What The Fuck Stage is reached once you’ve accumulated a whole heap of followers and are suddenly bombarded with a whole lot of useless Tweets. After putting up with it for awhile you decide that you don’t give a shit about somebody picking their nose, or what someone else is having for lunch. You find especially annoying that Twitterers who seem to Tweet every few minutes and those Tweets that at first appear interesting but end up taking you to a squeeze page or a site full of affiliate links.
6. Unfollow: You’ve had enough and decide that your sanity is more important than following a bunch of morons and so you decide to trim the excess fat by unfollowing the annoying, marketing and otherwise useless Twitterers. You aslo come across a site that called Friend Or Follow that will show you those people who have decided to stop following you and decide, rightfully so, that they are the first ones to get the chop
7. Panic: You breathe a sigh of relief as the incessant chatter has diminished, but not longer after that your statistics show that your blogs hits have reduced quite remarkably. Naturally you assume that it must be because of all those people you have stopped following. Heaven forbid that you would think to put the blame on yourself because you’ve been posting less and your content has been a little lacking of late. Panic mode sets in and you wonder if perhaps you should start to build up your followers again, but at what cost? You wonder how people like Darren Rowse (Aussie Problogger) and Chow manage to do it.
8. Google: Convinced that a solution must exist you resort to Google in the hope that it can help you with your dilemma.
9. TweetDeck: You discover Tweetdeck which amongst other things will allow you to create groups of Twitterers to ‘easily follow friends, colleagues or other interest groups’ You figure that you can also create separate groups for all those noisy tweets that you ant to suppress.
10. I’ve left this one blank so that you can add your own stage to the mixture

So, these are the stages that I went through and I would really like to know if you guys went through some if not all of the same stages.

If you found this post entertaining and because of the economic crisis can’t afford to buy me a beer, perhaps you would consider stumbling, digging it or any other way of letting the world hear of it.

EDIT: Try Googling what the fuck is a twitterer and see what you get.

When people first start up a WordPress blog they usually go for the default settings as this is by far the easier option. Unfortunately in certain cases it is the worst thing that you can do. This is especially so when configuring your permalink settings. I had completely forgotten about this until I read some of the comments on Understanding The New Rules Of SEO.

The problem arises in the fact that the default setting is http://wassupblog.com/?p=123 which shows the search engines that you have posted post # whatever but not much else. It makes more SEO sense to present to the search engines a lot more information such as the title of the post. While you can change the value midstream this can have disastrous results because all your pages that were previously indexed by the search engines become invalid. Not only that, if you are in the habit of linking to pages within your own blog, a good habit I might add, these also become invalid which would mean you going through all your posts and fixing up the links manually. A very boring and time consuming task, as can be attested by some of the commentators on the above post that I mentioned.

There is an easier solution, a plugin by Dean Lee called Permalinks Migration Plugin.  As the author states;

There is a way to tell the search engines (and browsers) that the page has permanently moved, and that the old address should be replaced by the new one . It’s called a “301 Redirect”, also known as a Permanent Redirect.When you do this, Search engines will update their indexes quickly and you won’t lose your pagerank.you will continue to receive traffic as though nothing had changed. This works for search engines, bookmarks, and links from other sites.

So, if you are having permalink problems or changing your permalink structure I  think you will find this plugin very useful.

I have always wanted and decent online store but have never really had the time to start one up. The reason for having an online store is that if you set one up and market it properly you are almost guaranteed a passive income. The difference with putting a link on your blog advertising a product and having that same product advertised on your store is that the chances for a sale is greater at your store than on your blog. The reason being that people who are browsing your store are potential buyers where those reading your blogs are just browsing through.

Today I’ve finally realized my dream because I’ve just found out that RegNow has now got an Affiliate Site Builder Tool! This tool allows the affiliate to create a search-friendly affiliate site populated with up to thousands of RegNow products quickly and easily. It was so easy that I was able to setup my store in no time. All I had to do was select my template and then customize it with my logo. I then used their simple drag and drop system to install the content widgets of my choice. Once I was happy with the way the store looked I just downloaded the files to my computer and then uploaded it to Top Software Online, my new online shop.

At the moment the shop is fairly basic and I have a bit of work to do with it when I get the chance. Even though I’ve only got three pages that I’ve configured, including a section for bloggers, the standard set up has already got hundreds of products ready for online sale. I have complete control over what product I sell and the knowledge that my margin from sales can be as high as 70% is a pretty good feeling. I was even able to add Google Adsense to it and later I will use it to promote other affiliates.

The next step is to market it and I reckon I will use the normal methods that I have used to promote my blogs. I think it is also time that I start getting stuck into my Squidoo Lenses, something that I have been meaning to do for a long time now but have been too slack to do anything about it. I remember that John Dillbeck wrote a post on Promoting a CafePress Store On Squidoo, so I feel that would make a good start. It’s times like these when I wish I didn’t already have a full time job so that I can devote all my time on several online enterprises.

Whether you treat your blog as a business or as a way to express your thoughts the most important aspect of your blog is your reader. The way to keep your readers returning is to make sure that your blog is continually updated with new material, whether it be thought provoking or merely for entertainments sake.

A blog’s success can be determined by the comments that people leave and replying to them in such a fashion that shows you are interested in what they say is another important aspect of blogging. It is important that you treat all commentators with the same respect that you would treat a visitor to your home. This can sometimes be a little difficult especially when you have those obnoxious commentators,  but treating them civilly will only improve the way others think of you.

Actually this is no different than the way you should act when you are in the real world and there can be serious consequences when you forget this, especially if you are in the position of some power. I want to share a story with you that I feel should punctuate the importance of treating others the way you would like to be treated. It all began when;

A Missouri Sheriff stopped at a ranch in rural MO to talk with an old farmer. Rather abruptly he tells the farmer, ‘I need to inspect your ranch for illegally grown drugs.’

The old farmer says, ‘Okay, as long as you don’t go into that field over there.’

The Sheriif verbally explodes saying,  ‘Mister, I have the authority of the Sheriffs Department with me.’ Reaching into his rear pant pocket and removing his badge. The officer proudly displays it to the farmer.  ‘See this badge? This badge means I am allowed to go wherever I wish..on any land. No questions asked or answers given. Have I made myself clear? Do you understand?’

The old farmer nods politely and goes about his chores.

Later, the old farmer hears loud screams and spies the Sheriff running for his life and close behind is the farmer’s bull.With every step the bull is gaining ground on the officer. The Sheriff is clearly terrified.

The old farmer immediately throws down his tools, runs to the fence and yells at the top of his lungs….. ‘Your badge! Show him your badge Smartass!’