The Million Blog List is an experiment to see how long it will take to get 1,000,000 blogs to list themselves on their site. Will it work? Probably. The experiment is to see how long will it take. The Million Blog List project started April 10th, 2008.

Add your Blog Now!

If nothing else, it’s an easy way to get one more link to your blog.

TysTips is blog #2076!

• Wordpress
• Movable Type
• Drupal
• Textpattern
• Roller
• Meta Weblog API
• Blogger

For example, let’s say you want to write a post about Coffee chains and you have multiple tabs open (one for Starbucks, Tully’s, MoxieJava, and Seattle’s Best). With Scribefire you can switch between the tabs for each coffee company, copy text and images directly into the Scribefire editor, format, edit, and publish the post - all without ever logging into your blog.

To put it another way, if you’re an “alt-tabber” like I used to be, you probably open your blog in one Firefox window, and open the web pages you’re using for your topic research in other Firefox windows. That way you can quickly switch between the research pages you have open and the blog post you are writing using alt-tab. With Scribefire you don’t have to do that anymore.

You can setup Scribefire so it opens in a new window, new tab, or perhaps most useful - in a split screen mode with the editor located at the bottom of your browser window.

You can drag in photos, copy and paste text, and even insert Youtube video quickly and easily.

Another nice perk you’ll find with using Scribefire is the fact that you can use it to ping some or all of the following sites:

• Technorati
• Weblogs
• Blo.gs
• Blogrolling
• Icerocket

This ensures that each of these sites know right away that you’ve posted new content to your blog.

One final interesting feature of Scribefire is the “blog this page” option that allows you to highlight content, right click, and select “blog this page”. Doing so pasts the content directly into your Scribefire window where you can quickly tweek the content and post it. Pretty slick!

If you’re using Scribefire already, leave a comment about some of the features you find most useful. Since I’m a new user, I’m sure there are plenty of features that I’ve yet to discover.

If you have a geeky tattoo, post it to Joe’s site. I’m also going to start a TechToo post over at Snigit.com, a great photo sharing site. Check it out! You can post your Geeky tattoo’s at Snigit.com too, if you like. You don’t even have to sign up to do it!

The number one thing you can do to prevent your address from being harvested is to not provide it to your visitors at all. Unfortunately, this isn’t practical for most people. Visitors generally feel a site is more reputable if contact information has been provided.

If you feel you must provide your email address to visitors, here are a few methods to secure your address, as well as a few methods to avoid.

<br>

Use a contact form:

Arguably, the most secure option is to use a contact form to allow visitors to get in touch with you. There are a number of plugins for WordPress, Blogger, and virtually every other blogging platform that allow you to use a contact form in place of your email address.

• One of the best, most robust, and most configurable contact forms available is CformsII by deliciousdays.com. It’s highly configurable, and therefore not the most simple to install, but it’s still pretty easy (and it works on WordPress 2.5.1 - I’m using it for this site). TIP: Just make sure that after you install the plugin you perform a hard-refresh to clear your browser’s cache (Ctrl+F5). Otherwise the cfII Icon won’t show up in the TinyMCE editor window inside WordPress.

Use an Image:

Create an image of your email address. If you want the text format and size to match exactly, type your email address out like normal, take a Print Screen of the address, and then paste the screen shot into any image editing software (even Paint will do). Crop out the address, save the cropped address as an image (gif, jpg, whatever), and insert the image in place of the original text version of the email address. (Note, don’t make the image link to your email using the mailto: functionality, doing so would defeat your intent.)

• Here’s the text of you@gmail.com
• Here’s the image of

One downside to this method is that your readers might find it annoying that your address isn’t clickable (they will have to hand-type the address into their email client - Oh, the horror!). All kidding aside, this method is also problematic for visually impaired readers who rely on text-to-speech software to read webpages (your image won’t be read aloud to the visitor since it’s an image - but you could type “you at gmail dot com” as the alternate text for the image).

Another variation of this method is to use a tiny image of the @ sign in place of the text @ sign. This is a faster method if you list several email address on your site (since making images of each email address would be very time consuming).

Using this method you@gmail.com would look like yougmail.com. Again, this is a quick way to employ the image method for multiple addresses.

• yougmail.com
• megmail.com
• etcgmail.com

Now, you can see that there is at least 1 potential downside to this method. You may need to set the spacing/padding for the image so that it aligns properly with the text (I haven’t bothered to do this). Otherwise your email address will stick out like a sore thumb and look rather ugly. Another potential issue is the fact that you would need to update each picture if you ever changed your font or font-size. Also, visually impaired readers who enlarge the text of webpages (using CTRL+) will be able to blow up the text, but not the images.

Use a plugin:

If you’re a WordPress user a handy plugin has been written to prevent email spiders from harvesting your address. I can’t speak for it’s effectiveness however, since I don’t use this method. If you choose to install the plugin, proceed with caution. (FYI - One user commented that he checked the plugin with email spider software and that spider was able to see the address.)

Mask the address with JavaScript:

Here are a few helpful sites that allow you to input your address and click a button to generate HTML or Java code that you can post directly into your website or blog. (Note: I haven’t had success using any of these methods with WordPress 2.5.1).

http://javascript.about.com/library/blemail1.htm
http://www.addressmunger.com/

<br>

Avoid these traditional / old methods:

<br>

“mailto:”

Don’t use the traditional (aka old) “a href=”mailto:” method of pointing to your email address. Using this method enables email spiders to quickly and easily locate and exploit your email address.

“& # 6 4 ;“

Using special HTML characters in place of the @ sign is no longer an effective way to prevent an address from being harvested. You used to be able to prevent spiders from “seeing” your address by using “& # 6 4 ;” in place of the @ sign. Spiders are now sophisticated enough that you& # 6 4 ;gmail.com is no different to the spider than you@gmail.com (note, I’ve inserted spaces between the &, #, 6, 4, and ; because WordPress is sophisticated enough to replace the un-spaced version with the @ sign as soon as I save the post - if you were to employ this method you wouldn’t use spaces between the & # 6 4 ; characters).

One last thing, if you’ve got an email box that fills with spam already, have you tried to Google your email address? You may find your address cropping up on numerous webpages. If you have control over the content of those pages, remove the address immediately. If you aren’t the admin for the webpage(s), try to contact the webmaster to see if he/she can remove the email address for you.

I had posted my email address in a book review I did for Amazon back in the early 90’s before spam was an issue. I’d completely forgotten that I’d listed my email in that review. Several years later email spiders became prominent and the inbox associated with that address started getting clogged with spam emails. Unfortunately for me I can’t remove the email address from the review, so that address will forever be inundated with spam. But if you find your address popping up in Google, perhaps you can take steps to remove your email from whatever page(s) it shows up on. Just a tip!

If you have other methods that work with WordPress 2.5.1, please post a comment!

It also allows you to put a list of “Most Popular Posts” on your sidebar.

Unfortunately, WordPress 2.5.1 users get a fatal error when trying to activate the plugin. The good news is, it’s a fairly easy fix, especially if you were using the plugin in a previous version of WordPress. If you weren’t using the plugin before upgrading or installing WordPress 2.5.1, the fix is a bit more involved, but still doable. Please note, this fix isn’t my own. I learned about it here. I’ve rewritten the steps to hopefully provide a clear step-by-step account of the process (complete with screenshots for those of us who like pictures).

Ok, if you had been using Popularity Contest in a previous version of WordPress, and it no longer works now that you’ve upgrated to WordPress 2.5.1 - the fix is as simple as changing 1 line in the popularity_contest.php file. Open the file in a text editor like notepad (when you save the file, remember to save it with the .php extension, not the .txt extension).

Open popularity-contest.php and scroll down to line 59. Replace require(’../../wp-blog-header.php’); with require(’../wp-blog-header.php’);

You can also download a patched version of Popularity Contest, as well as read a more detailed description of this fix by visiting here.

Now, if you’ve never used Popularity Contest before and you’re trying to install it now on WordPress 2.5.1 you’ll still get a “Fatal Error” message when you try to activate the plugin. That’s because you need to some database modification to get it to work.

Again, this issue is discussed in greater detail here, my goal with this post is to provide a set of screenshot instructions detailing how to create the two database tables necessary in phpMyAdmin for Popularity Contest to run. I host with GoDaddy, so my screenshots will be perfect for anyone else hosting with GoDaddy. If you’re not hosting with GoDaddy, you’re on your own. Hopefully the steps will be similar. When in doubt, call your hosting provider.

• Navigate to phpMyAdmin. If you’re hosting with GoDaddy, go to: Hosting and Servers > My Hosting Account > Manage Account.

• Click on the Databases Tab > MySQL

• Click on “Open Manager”. Your username for the next screen will be the same as your Database name. If you’ve forgotten your password you can click the pencil icon (circled in black) to change your password.

• Once you’ve successfully logged into phpMyAdmin, click on the SQL button to create the tables needed for Popularity Contest.

• Paste the following text into the popup window and click “Go”. Note: If you’re running multiple copies of WordPress on the same database, please read the details here about changing the ‘wp_…’ portion of the text below. If you’re running a standard install of WordPress, don’t worry about it and proceed.

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `wp_ak_popularity` (
`post_id` int(11) NOT NULL,
`total` int(11) NOT NULL,
`feed_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`home_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`archive_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`category_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`single_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`comments` int(11) NOT NULL,
`pingbacks` int(11) NOT NULL,
`trackbacks` int(11) NOT NULL,
`last_modified` datetime,
KEY `post_id` (`post_id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM;
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS
`wp_ak_popularity_options` (
`option_name` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
`option_value` varchar(50) NOT NULL
) ENGINE=MyISAM;

After pasting the text and clicking “go” you should see a screen that looks like this stating that your “SQL Query has been executed successfully:

Pop back over to WordPress and try to activate the Popularity Contest Plugin. That’s it! If you have any problems, be sure to visit here. Again, these steps aren’t my own fix, but I thought a step-by step guide with screen shots documenting the process I went through to fix the plugin might be helpful for others.

EDIT: after publishing this post I discovered another patched version of the plugin from yellowup.com here that doesn’t appear to require any changes to your database. I haven’t tried it (I didn’t want to break my currently working plugin to see if this one works), but a few people on yellowup.com have commented that it works. Give it a shot and let me know if it works for you.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site.

If you’re confused about what SEO is and what it means for your site, don’t worry. A quick Google search will produce numerous articles that can help you understand SEO (I recommend starting with Wikipedia’s overview of SEO first).

But here’s the good news! You don’t really have to understand SEO to start improving your web site or blog (although understanding it certainly helps). Free SEO tools like Website Grader can help you understand where changes to your site are needed to help improve your site’s SEO.

TYsTIPS.com has been up for less than a week and I really haven’t done a whole lot to “optimize” my site. Instead I’ve been concentrating on writing good content - since good content is ultimately the largest factor in any successful website. After writing 8-10 good posts I felt it was time to submit my site to Google and other search engines (I didn’t want to submit my site early before I had at least a handful of helpful articles - otherwise I might give first-time readers a poor first impression). But before I submitted my site, I needed to make sure it was optimized for search engines (at least as much as possible).

I turned to Website Grader to run the first SEO report for TYsTIPS.com. Website Grader generated this report which shows that I have a long way to go before my site is “optimized”. The nice thing about Website Grader’s report it that it breaks everything down into categories and subcategories. This structure provides you with a checklist-type view of all the little things you could be doing to help your site’s SEO ranking.

I knew before I started TYsTIPS.com that things like descriptive post titles and alternate text for images were important SEO factors, but I didn’t realize that things like having a domain registered for more than a year were important. Also, Website Grader makes sure you don’t forget to submit your site to free sites like del.icio.us (pronounced “delicious”), Technorati, digg, and DMOZ directory.

Even if you’re an expert on SEO, it’s easy to forget some of the things that you could be doing to help improve your site. Website Grader doesn’t let you forget.

If you haven’t concerned yourself with SEO before, run a Website Grader report on your site to see what you could be doing to improve your search engine ranking. Website Grader is free - you don’t even have to provide your email address if you don’t want to, but if you do they will email a link to your final report for your reference. If you’re already an SEO expert and you’ve been doing everything under the sun to improve your SEO, run a report anyway - you may have forgotten something.

Note: If you’re using WordPress, there is also a plugin called the All In One SEO pack that allows you to tweak your WordPress blog and your posts to help optimize them for search engines. The last time I glanced at the site it said that the plugin is no longer supported, but I’m currently using it which means it works on WordPress 2.5.1 (currently the newest version of WordPress).

I hope this article helps! If anyone has advice on other helpful SEO tools (preferably free), please leave a comment with a link. Thanks!

1. Download the plugin and upload it to your plugins folder using FileZilla or some other FTP client.



2. Navigate to your plugins tab and scroll down to find and activate the plugin.

   

3. Once the plugin has been activated, it should appear on the same screen as your Plugins and Plugin Editor Links:

   

4. Click the Google Analytics link to open up the settings for the Analytics plugin. Paste your Analytics User Account Number into the box (not the entire code! Just the ID itself).



5. If you’re curious where to find your Analytics User Account Number, I’ve taken a screen shot of mine and pasted it below. Normally you would paste the entire code Google gives you into your website, but with the plugin you only need to paste your unique Analytics User Account Number. I’ll say that again - You only need to paste the letters and numbers in between the (” “), don’ t paste the quotes or parentheses, just the number/letter combo. I’ve erased my ID out for security purposes (paranoid? yes), but it looked like this (”UA-#######-#“). Paste your Analytics User Account Number into the box and click “Update Settings”.

   

6. It may take Google a while to realize that you’re code has been inserted (it took a few hours when I did it). To check and see if the code is working, navigate to this page within Google Analytics and hit the “check status” link. Don’t be surprised if Google complains that your code hasn’t been inserted properly. Remember, it took several hours for Google to recognize my code. If it’s been a full day and you’re still getting an error, try uninstalling the plugin and repeating the steps from above.



7. Eventually you want Google to say “Receiving Data” like the two blogs above www.tystips.com in the image above. Once you’ve got the green light (er . . . green checkmark?) from Google, you’re all set and Analytics is collecting stats!

Now, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that there are alternatives to Google Analytics. One of my favorites is HiStats. I actually run both stat trackers on this blog because they offer not only different ways to view the data, I can also use them to check on each other to make sure that the traffic showing up on Analytics matches (somewhat) the traffic showing up on HiStats. Give HiStats a try, it’s free and you can use it to put a free hit counter on your site as well. Can’t beat that!

What is a favicon? A favicon is the tiny 16 x 16 image that’s associated with your web page. If installed properly it will show up to the left of your web address as well as in other places like the tabs of a tabbed browser like Firefox.

You have 2 options when it comes to creating your new favicon. You can download one (typically for free), or you can create your own using favicon creation software. The software I used for my favicon was a free online tool called Favicon Editor by www.degraeve.com. This tool is nice because it gives you a large space to work with (see the screen shot at the beginning of the post) and it will allow you to upload an image if you’re not up to “painting” your own favicon.

It only took me a few minutes to create the favicon for TYsTIPs.com and, although still a bit plain, I think it looks a lot better than the generic page-with-a-folded-corner icon that Firefox used to display. Once you’ve created (or downloaded) your icon, remember to visit this post for instructions on how to upload your new favicon to your WordPress.org blog. Have fun with your new favicon!

Here’s my generic favicon in Internet Explorer:

And here’s my generic favicon in Firefox (notice Yahoo’s nice little favicon - I’ve got favicon envy!).

Changing your favicon in WordPress 2.5.1 isn’t hard, you just have to make sure you’re following the proper directions for your version of WordPress. So, for WordPress version 2.5.1 here’s the steps:

1. Upload your favicon to folder of the WordPress theme you are using (if you don’t have a favicon yet, click here to learn how to make yourself a custom favicon).
   • As you can see, I’m using the “wptp-chocolate theme” and you can see the favicon.icon file residing within the “wptp-chocolate” folder located at /wp-content/themes/wptp-chocolate/.



2. Once you’ve uploaded the favicon.icon file, insert this code into your header.php file somewhere between the <head> and </head> tags. Note - click the screen shot for a larger image.

Here’s the line of code. Copy and paste it exactly as it appears below (don’t change anything!) into your header.php file:

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”<?php bloginfo(’template_directory’); ?>/favicon.ico” />

If you’re using WordPress 2.5.1 and you’ve uploaded your favicon.icon file to the right spot, you should be all set (after saving the changes to the header.php file). Navigate to your webpage and force-reload the page (Ctrl+F5). Your new favicon should appear. Here’s mine

Notice how both the address bar and the tab show the new favicon. One more thing, in the past there have been plugins available to help you change your favicon. If these steps look intimidating try searching for a WordPress favicon plugin (be sure to find one that’s compatible with your WordPress version). You may be able to update it using a plugin instead. But these steps are pretty simple so give them a try before adding another plugin to your site. After all, the more plugins you install, the more chance you’ll have conflicts with plugins breaking other plugins. Oh, and if you have a theme switcher or you regularly change your WordPress theme, make sure you add the new favicon to each of the themes you will be using, otherwise when you change your theme the favicon will disappear!

Well, that’s it! Have fun with your new favicon!

In this post I intend to share my user experience with StumbleUpon and answer this question: Does a StumbleUpon Campaign actually work to help drive quality traffic to your site. The short answer - NO. At least that was my experience.

I started a website (www.snigit.com) as a way for people to post unique and interesting photos to a website via their mobile phone (like an iPhone). In an effort to drive traffic to the site I decided to set up a StumbleUpon campaign. I’d heard good things about StumbleUpon and I figured spending a small amount to experiment with it (in my case $25) would be worthwhile.

I sent $25 in funds to StumbleUpon via PayPal (you can send more or less $ depending on your traffic goals) and set up a $1/day campaign (campaign lasted ~ 25 days).

I certainly received traffic daily. But the average time spent on the site was terrible (seconds rather than minutes) and there was almost never more than 1 page visited by any of the Stumblers. Taking a close look at my HiStats log illustrates my point nicely.

You can see almost my entire StumbleUpon campaign (from the 13th through the 2nd). Note - Click on the image to make it larger. Disregard anything outlined in red since those jumps in page views represent traffic from me uploading pictures and making changes to the site. The green boxes around the tips of the blue bars represent stumblers who actually clicked on a page within my site (ie visited more than just the homepage).

You can see that for the most part the number of visitors closely matched the number of page views - which means the people who stumbled my site left without poking around and visiting multiple pages. This isn’t the kind of quality traffic I was looking for, especially when I’m paying for hits!

Even more frustrating was the fact that all my stumbles happened within the first few minutes after midnight. I know that there are thousands (millions?) of people using StumbleUpon, but it looked pretty suspicious to me to see all the traffic within about 5 minutes. Oh, and I upped my daily max to $5 to see if that stretched out the traffic and it didn’t, it only took 4 minutes for 101 hits (but I got an extra hit somehow).

Here is a screen shot of a typical 24hour view of traffic for snigit.com. Sad, isn’t it? You can see how I got 18 visitors in the first hour (actually within the first few minutes of the new day via StumbleUpon), then one visitor at 8am, one at 8pm, and one at 10pm for a total of 20 visitors that day.

Also, and this is the most important part. Despite having plenty of content (over 100 posts of fun and interesting photos) I didn’t receive a single comment or post (remember the site is setup so readers can post their own pictures) from a single StumbleUpon visitor throughout the entire 25 day campaign.

So from my experience, StumbleUpon was a miserable failure and a complete waste of $25 dollars - but I did learn a lot. Now, your results may vary greatly. You may have amazing content, or you may luck upon a post that gets stumbled and dugg to infinity and beyond propelling you into blog-stardum. But probably not. I consider www.snigit.com to be a very reasonable example of what a normal “Everyday Joe” kind of blog might be like.

So if you’re an “Everyday Joe” (or “Jan”) with regular content, don’t be surprised if your paid StumbleUpon campaign doesn’t net you great traffic rewards. It might not. Remember what StumbleUpon does, it allows users to add a “Stumble” button to their browser that they can use to randomly explore new sites. Unfortunately, some (many?) of those stumblers are just hitting the Stumble button, glancing at your site, and hitting the Stumble button again. The fact that they list “Top Stumblers” on the StumbleUpon web page would suggest that the creators of the site not only know that some stumblers do this, they encourage it!

Oddly, whenever I hit the stumble button out of boredom, I find myself reading the content (and sometimes commenting) on many of the blogs that I stumble upon (pun intended). So I was surprise that out of 500 StumbleUpon visitors ($25 dollars @ $0.05 per visitor = 500 visitors) no one commented on any of my posts and few looked at additional pages of content.

Now, there is a silver lining. While setting up this site last week I discovered EntraCard.com and setup an account. I noticed that my traffic for this site (TYsTIPs.com) with EntraCard has been exceptional compared to snigit’s traffic. Here’s a screen shot of my HiStats data for TYsTIPs.com - you can see the difference too.

The red bars are new visitors, the yellow bars are total visitors, and the blue bars are page views. You want nice tall blue bars because it means that your visitors are looking at multiple pages and exploring the content of your site. Also, if the yellow bars are higher than the red bars, that means that visitors are returning to your site - return visitors are also good. And 1 more thing, since starting EntraCard 4 days ago I’ve had my fist 2 subscribers to my RSS feed. Note: TYsTIPs.com is less than a week old and it has already received more traffic than the first month of snigit.com.

Lets take another look at snigit.com’s traffic. I’ve outlined in orange where I started using EntraCard on snigit.com (the day after my StumbleUpon campaign ended). You can see that the traffic from EntraCard had almost as many hits, and far more page views (note the orange box around the tall blue bar) than the traffic generated by StumbleUpon, and it was free!

Also, the extra page views (tall blue bars) during the 10 day’s I’ve been using Entracard on snigit.com are not a result of me posting or tweaking my site content - I haven’t posted to snigit in more than 2 weeks.

And another thing: a few days ago when I set up HiStats on my TYsTIPs blog I discovered that HiStats lets you exclude hits from your own computer. I could never get it to work with my snigit.com blogger account. But with TYsTIPS (a WordPress.org blog hosted on GoDaddy) I was able to easily exclude my PCs traffic from HiStats data from day 1. Therefor all the data on my hits to TYsTIPs is accurate and uninflated by my own activity.

So, to sum it up: purchasing a $25 dollar StumbleUpon campaign didn’t work for me. Does that mean that it won’t work for your site? Not necessarily. But I would recommend other traffic generating options like EntraCard before you shell out money for hits, be it with StumbleUpon or any other traffic generating site. You may be pleasently surprised with the free options out there. I know I was.

Now, EntraCard has it’s problems too. Some people just stop by (or return) to drop off their “card” and move on without looking at your site. However, you get a credit for every one of these people who use EntraCard in this way, so even if they aren’t actually looking at your sites content, at least they are helping you earn points to use for advertising. EntraCard isn’t perfect, but for me and for my sites, it has proved a better alternative to drive traffic than StumbleUpon.

If you’ve had success (or failure) with StumbleUpon, please share it with TYsTIPS.com by leaving a comment. You’re welcome to leave a link back to your site or to relevant posts.