BlueCow Hosting Blog

PadPressed is the easiest way for WordPress publishers to make their content tablet friendly using their existing theme.

Although not as clean as a native application, it is a quick and convenient way to get your WordPress blog, iPad friendly. You can find more information here.

Tim Ferriss talks about:

• Why I blog
• How I blog and select best practices
• Frequency and tools — best times and days to post
• Blogging myths and how to harness data for better results
• Testing design and surprising findings that can be copied
• How I address comments and community building
• How I write and research for good social media response
• 20 minutes of audience Q&A on Twitter, branding, outsourcing, and much more

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Small Business Trends, a blog for small business (obviously) has a post on how to balance your blog and facebook presence.

It is worth a read to remember that Facebook is not your site, it is theirs. You can read it here.

This is version 2 of the must read Problogger book from Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett. And when I say must-read I mean if you want to be serious about blogging this is where you start.

This is an update of the 1st edition and not a complete rewrite – however there are a few significant updates including:

• there have been many many small updates and changes throughout the book. New examples, screenshots, updates of new tools, a few deletions of references to old tools, an update to our stories in the intro etc.
• we’ve removed a chapter on blog networks – things have changed a lot in this space and many networks are not hiring any more or have changed their models significantly.
• Chris has added a significant chapter on social media and how it impacts and can be used by bloggers
• I have added a case study chapter that goes through the first 4 years of my main blog – Digital Photography School. I work through how I launched it, what I focused upon in years 1-2 and then in years 3-4, how I monetize it and share the secrets to how I drive significant traffic and income through email newsletters, social media etc.
• Bonuses – we’re offering anyone who buys the book a series of bonuses (some interviews with successful bloggers, some extra teaching etc)

You can find it here at Amazon.

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There are many ways to build a strong audience but one of the best is having a strong technical skill. In this case, it is Wine and Vinticulture.

From Seattle Times:

With so much information about wine swirling around the choppy seas of the Web, it’s good to get down to sites and blogs that consistently offer wisdom, usually with some wit. Among the choices that wine adviser Paul Gregutt recommends are: Winebusiness.com, 1winedude.com and Wawinereport.com.

They have a good discussion on the wherefore of Wine Blogging.

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Part of WordPress’ popularity is the wealth of plugins available to add all sorts of functionality. This extensibility allows the WordPress user admin afford a very rich environment for their users. However, as the title suggests plugins are a two edge sword. While they deliver new capability, they also deliver upgrade and version control headaches.

This is because plugins are a voluntary effort. They invariably start as a effort to provide functionality to the author’s own site as well as sharing with others. But over time maintenance of plugins becomes a lower priority over making a living.

If you have a large site that depends on stability and performance for a living, the rule of thumb for WordPress Plugins is less is more. Job number one is stability ahead of functionality which sits just behind performance.

Job one includes making sure you regularly upgrade to maintain the security of your site. If you need to add a plugin, make sure that it can survive upgrades or discard them. Remember, the more complex the plugin the more things that can go wrong.

Secondly, have a test site. I can’t believe the number of bloggers who do not maintain a test site to test upgrades, plugins, theme changes etc. This sounds like a lot of work, but believe me, when your site crashes in the middle of the night and the complaints roar in, you will thank your ability to quickly recover.

Thirdly ask the hard question, do I really need that plugin or is it just vanity. Quality content is really the key to traffic.

As part of job we run into many first time bloggers and web presence new persons. As you would expect, they spend a lot of time being preoccupied with what their site looks like. We understand this and can appreciate that it a personal expression and why it would be an important, the completion of your website design is only the end of the beginning.

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I want to spend some time better understanding page rank before we move onto how to make your site PR friendly. In the first article we discussed what Page Rank was and where it came from. We tried to make it a primer, but there was still some confusion, so lets break it down further.

• A website has a maximum amount of PageRank that is distributed between its pages by internal links.
• The maximum amount of PageRank in a site increases as the number of pages in the site increases.

These first two rules are important. Your internal site rank is based upto a point on the amount of quality content you have on your site, but there is a maximum amount of PR you can have.

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We get asked that question a lot. Just how do you get information on a blog. It is of course useful to understand what goals you should be looking at. One should always be realistic what they can achieve given their niche. Obviously entertainment rags (eg Perez Hilton), techno-geek sites (Techcrunch) and big news aggregation (Huffington Post) sites get big rankings so they are difficult to compete with, but it is very possible to get good traffic in your own area such as opinion on politics and the law.

The is one reliable source and that is Technorati. As you can see above Blogcritics, which we write for from time to time, has a weekly page view of 1/2 million so 2 million per month. You can find it at http://beta.technorati.com.

Head over and wander around, it is very enlightening.