Now it seems that these tools do a lot of things, yet there has never been an ‘all-in-one’ tool that is able to do everything that you would like. So I would like to put the question to you all – if you could have a blogging tool, what would you like to see in it? What should it be able to do for you?  What types of things haven’t been addressed in the blogging world? Let me know in a comment, and I will get to work on seeing what I can develop for you guys, and how realistic a program like this might be!

I also would like to know what types of posts you would like to see, what you would like to see addressed, what you would like to know more about, and anything I can do/try out for you – whatever you want! I’m willing to consider anything!

Merry Christmas, to one and all!

Dan

Tell Me How! Or I’ll Come Find You…

I went to check my google analytics account yesterday, and decided Id see what search engine traffic I have got. Google analytics shows you exact search terms that led the user to your site, allowing you to see exactly how someone may have discovered your ‘trove of wonders’. It was there that I saw a strange search term, which had led the user to my site:

“[make money online]” “powered by wordpress” “leave a comment” -”no comments” -”nofollow”

I realised it as a rather ‘crude’ form of ‘google hacking’; there are certain commands and parenthesis you can enter into google, and it will make google behave a bit differently. For example, if I wanted to find every link on google for this site, I could do a search for inURL:”raceforamillion.co.uk” and it would return every single page that had raceforamillion.co.uk in the URL. This is a similar method – so lets break it down.

What Does It All Mean?! Speak Anglais!

We can see that everything contained in “” is so that google will search for those exact phrases only, and not a combination of them. This means it will look for every page that has ‘make money online’ in it, and well as ‘powered by wordpress’ and ‘leave a comment’. This will return all wordpress powered blogs, that are to do with making money online, and that allow you to leave comments. The final two phrases have minus signs next to them. This means to exclude all results that contain ‘no comments’ and all results that have ‘nofollow’ on them. If you want to find blogs that DO have comments on them already, then you can use the + sign instead of the – sign.

Can I Steal Use It?

You might want to try ‘tweaking’ it for your exact purposes, changing ‘make money online’ to whatever your niche is for example, but this will return a good amount of blogs that should not have ‘nofollow’. I have only performed a search with it myself, but this is something I believe I will be looking a bit deeper into. If I can find anything more about this, I will let you guys know. Until then, I hope it proves of some use to you!

Dan

To view the plugin (and its output), head to the settings part of your wordpress admin panel, and choose ‘FTLO Commentators’.

Hope you guys get some use out of this, and let me know what improvements you might like to see!

Dan

Stop Yammering On – What Is It?

Well, basically its a plugin which allows you to see all of the people who have commented on your blog so far, along with how many times the individual has posted and the different names (or ‘aliases’) they have used when commenting on your site. I developed it because I was finding it hard to keep track of who had posted a comment on my blog, and when I wanted to visit those sites to say thank-you (or just check on what others had written), I had to look around to find them. This plugin allows you to display them in a (somewhat) tidy fashion in your actual admin console.

Hang On, You Said Something About It Being Basic?!

Wow you really pay attention! Well the version I’m giving you guys is the basic version I have literally just finished - I haven’t started work on the more advanced version yet. However, the more advanced version will allow you to exclude the websites of people you may not want to visit anymore, along with being able to take a date range – so if someone hasn’t commentated on your blog within the last month, they won’t show up (if your that way inclined). There is also the possibility to extend this and have a list of just blogs you specify, along with grabbing their latest post – more towards the plugin idea I shared with you last time (although I found parsing the rss a wee bit difficult depending on what version of php your hosting provider has – something for me to look into).

Enough Talk – Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie!

So if you’d like to use the plugin, or just simply check it out, you can download it here:

For The Love Of Commentators

To access the page, simply upload the script to your plugins directory, activate the plugin, and then visit “Settings -> FTLO Commentators”.  I hope you get some use out of it – I know I will! If you can think of anything extra you would like to see in the plugin that I haven’t already mentioned, let me know and I’ll see what I can do! I’m off now to rush away from work as fast as my tired little legs will carry me!

EDIT: The prior issue has now been resolved, so download away!! (Have removed issue for formatting and ‘less rambling’ sake!)

Dan

The Film Cell Frame

Now I know I promised you guys pictures of the finished product I described in my last post (before I went off the grid), and it is all made…I just haven’t brought in the picture of it to work with me today. However, tonight I will get the pictures off of my phone, and put them on a USB drive to upload tomorrow. The results are quite interesting, so I think you’ll be pleased to see what I’ve come up with, and how much it cost me…

Xmas Competiton

The Christmas competition I announced you should all look forward to – well this one is a bit tricky. You see, I wanted to offer a prize of $100 out of my own pocket to you guys for finding Santa hats around the site, one Santa hat hidden every day. I thought this would be good as its a nice bit of money for the festive season, it gets you reading my old posts, and it’s different from the usual ‘enter your email’ competition (albeit I won’t deny, that would have been part of it). However what with me moving into this new place and having to pay for expenses (over £100 to set up a telephone line!!), I have had to borrow money from various family members – and without the Internet I haven’t been able to make any sites to sell for a bit more cash! So the competition is on hold right now, but to those people who read my blog regularly (you know who you are), I will contact you in the not-so-distant future, about the possibility of making some money on an idea I came up with during my time off. It doesn’t involve any work or monetary investment on your part, and if it works, you get ‘free’ money essentially. I will be talking more about this when I have the collateral to start up the site, and have Internet back at my house (which I’m told shouldn’t be too long).

An Idea You Say?

Speaking of ideas – more ideas for you! I like giving little ideas out that you guys can use to try to make money online – even if you don’t go out and do it, you might be able to give the advice to some friends, family etc, so I plan on sharing more of my little ‘idea’ posts with you all. I’d love to say I will give you guys a great one this week for being gone for so long, but I need to make sure its good before I go committing to that. Look out for an idea this week though, possibly Friday afternoon (GMT).

As well as ideas, I have a couple of my own in the pipeline, one of which is slowly in motion. It might be a month or two in the making before I can show it off to you guys, but I will be sharing it with you when I have the first prototype ready. I have some other great ideas in the pipeline as well, and am going to really try moving on them. Being this out of pocket (great time to be that way isn’t it) has made me really want to step it all up a gear, as I know my ideas will work but I haven’t had the will to ‘go forth’ with them. So as well as ideas, there will also be motivational speeches and techniques! Probably more of the latter, as I’m not one to blow my own trumpet (I could be a bit naughty or ’blue’ here but I won’t).

Are You Still Talking?

I won’t ramble on anymore, namely as this post isn’t strictly ‘on-topic’, I haven’t had any time to catch up with some of my favourite blogs (despite the news regarding the sells) and I am going to miss my train, but I just want to say to you guys: stay tuned. Good things are coming. I promise.

Dan

Oh, and for the easily confused, mice don’t actually make plans…but lions do (they have flow charts and everything).

The Theory Behind The Plugin

We all know the advantages of commenting quickly on popular blogs – being the first commentator on a blog that gets a lot of visitors normally means that everyone else who views that post will also see your comment. Depending on how ‘attractive’ your comment is (be it the comment itself, the name you use, or if the blog is using commentluv, your latest post title), the amount of viewers to your website should increase. So how do you determine when someone makes their new posts? Well, if you have subscribed to the blog via email, you normally wont be notified until some time after the post has been made, which could be upto 24 hours in some cases. With RSS readers, my knowledge is a bit…’damp’. I assume that an rss reader will let you know as soon as there is a new post on any blog that you have added, but then again depending on the type of rss reader you use, you might not be able to access it from any other computer bar your own.

The Concept At Its Simplest

By now you might have got the idea about what I am proposing, but lets go through it anyway! Basically, the plugin would act very much like an rss reader for any websites you wanted to visit. You would be able to enter in a selection of sites, and then on visiting the plugin page, it would present you their latest post – and notify you of any new posts since the last time you visited. This way you would be able to see at a glance what blogs have new content for you, without having to wait for an email, or load up your rss software.

The Concept – Extended

You could also have the option of letting it show how many comments have already been posted on the blog in relation to that post, allowing you to see at a glance if you could possibly ‘own’ the first comment! If we were to step this up further, it could be made to parse through the list of the top 100 blogs relating to your blogging niche, and notify you of the ones that currently have no comments, allowing you to swoop in.

The Issues

Now some issues with this present themselves (they always do!). Firstly, there is already a piece of software similar to this called ‘Comment Sniper’, which actually texts you when a certain blog had just made a new post! Pretty good, but I believe you have to pay for that service, whereas my plugin would be free. Other pitfalls include widespread use of the plugin, making it harder to get the first comment, and the possibility that the first comments left might all end up being ‘Great Post’ comments.

The Bottom Line

I think that the plugin, made ‘mainly’ for keeping you upto date on the latest blog posts (like an rss feeder) through your own wordpress blog, isn’t a bad idea – but what do you guys think? I’d like to make a plugin that a lot of people might use and find ‘handy’. Ideas and opinions on a postcard…or to save on stamps, you can use the comment form below.

Dan

(On a side note, you may have noticed I have updated the banner so now the blog has its own mascots – let me know your opinions on it! I’ll be putting a link up for the artist at some point in the near future, in case any of you wished to get work similar to mine. Also, check out the new ‘My Updates’ page, where I will be putting little things like this from now on, instead of cluttering up the main blog page with potential ‘useless’ information! Catch ya later!)

Now what do I mean by this? Well, when you own and operate a blog, you are lucky enough to be visited by people who are interested in what you have to say, and if they particularly like something you have said they might leave a comment on your blog – possibly thanking you for the advice, maybe even offering their own! A lot of bloggers leave it at that – just posting up their thoughts and admiring the comments left to them by their ‘fans’. However what they are doing is showing these people a lot of disrespect, and quite a few bloggers end up losing readers and commentators because of this reason. I have personal experience of this - I used to visit and post on a blog very frequently, but had no response from the creator of the blog. Since then, I have stopped commentating on it, and his site has slowly shrunk in the amount of followers that he had. So how do we prevent this? Well, there are a couple of ways of solidifying yourself some good readers, as well as making some great friends.

First right off the bat, is that anyone who decides to leave a comment on your site, you should always try to leave a reply. They have taken the time to read what you have written and actually leave a thought about it! You should show the commentator some respect by either replying to the comment or even just thanking them for visiting. It only takes a minute or two to do so, and is a very friendly/sociable thing to do.

Another thing I try to do is visit the blogs of the people who have visited my site. If they have taken time out of theirs lives to read what I have to talk about, I should be able to spare them a little bit of my time to check out their blog / website! Even nicer is to return the comment on their site, leaving them with a comment regarding their post. However if you are going to leave a comment, don’t make it a comment saying something like ‘Thanks for visiting my site!’ as that is just patronising, and shows you didn’t even bother reading what they had to share. If you can’t think of anything to comment, then don’t worry about it – you don’t have to comment! You could always send a nice message to the owner via email, thanking them for visiting the site, and complementing them on theirs! There is actually a nice plugin that I use myself – which emails new commentators on your site a nice little welcome message, thanking them for visiting. It is called Comment Relish and I highly recommend it.

Obviously your not always going to be able to visit everyones blog, or maybe even reply to all the comments left on your site (we all don’t have the amount of time we would like) yet showing your visitors some form of respect – be it in your posts, competitions, or even little emails - is paramount to making new friends, and ensuring return visits to your blog. If you ignore your visitors, your blogging is worthless.

Dan

XML error: Invalid document end at line 261, column 1

Obviously me being the loving person that I am, and not being just out for the links (I am such an angel), I continued posting and thought of it as just a glitch…oh how wrong I was…

I logged onto my computer again today and proceeded to look around the blogging world to drop my comments – yet again I was receiving the XML error. This time I decided to investigate into the matter at hand. I first went to comment-luv to check that the correct feed name had been placed in – which it had. I then proceeded to load up my feed, on which I discovered it wouldn’t load. So I went to my feed provider (which is the google owned feedburner), and proceeded to do a ‘feed check’. This repeated the error that comment-luv brought up for me, as well as all the source for my feed! On scrolling down, I found that someone had lovingly put links to various pornographic websites at the bottom of my feed, which was preventing it from loading.

Now I had discovered the issue, it was a matter of where they had put the data so that I could remove it. I logged on to my server and checked my ’index.php’ file first – and to my surprise it was just at the bottom of that file. I promptly deleted the lines of code that had been added, and my feed was restored (once I reloaded it via feedburner). I reported the attempt to my web hosting provider (who then proceeded to break my website without asking…but that’s another story), and everything was back to normal!

So what do I recomend to protect yourself from this type of hacking attempt? Well, firstly download Comment-Luv as soon as you can, and comment frequently – you’ll notice any problems with your feed instantly. Even if its not the same problem, and you can’t figure out what is happening, there is a handy forum over there also you can ask questions in! Comment-Luv is a great way of keeping a good hold on your feed, as you would never normally check it yourself – why would you need to? As well as using this plugin, you may just want to check your index.php file, just to be sure that nothing had slipped its way in.

Be safe out there guys!

Dan

Then the weekend came, and as I always do on the weekends, I spent time with my girlfriend. We had a lovely day, and when I had some time spare, I played on the new PS3 release Mirrors Edge. Playing the game saw me into the evening and then my girlfriend returned, and we caught up on some TV shows. Today has been very much similar, spending time with my girlfriend and playing Mirrors Edge.

So why am I telling you all this? Well while all this was happening, something in my brain was screaming at me…

My brain was telling me I needed to update my blog asap. I would constantly be thinking about when I could get the time to update my blog, and what I could write about. Yet the more I thought about trying to do it, the more I found I could be distracted easily – everything else became more important. Just sitting in front of the TV screen felt to me more important than writing, yet my head was telling me I needed to do it! Suddenly I remembered I had experienced this feeling before, many times over, and I’m sure you all have as well – Ever had that piece of work you knew had to be done, but when it came to trying to actually ’start’ that bit of work, you felt like you had to do something else: clean the house, wash the car, watch TV etc. I realised that I had started looking at my blog as work! As something I had started and am enjoying, this feeling is completely backwards to what it should be!

Now you may have noticed the post title was how to overcome distractions. Well, I’m about to flip it on its head, as I am going to suggest that instead you embrace your distractions. The distractions we have in life are what keep us sane, and what keeps our work good – if I had forced myself to write a blog post, it could have been quite a bad read, as my heart may have not be in it – ideally, your blog should be the distraction you take from work, as opposed to feeling like anything else. You should be able to come to your blog to get away from all the work and stress you feel during the day, and be able just to say whats on your mind. You should be able to relax and not ‘feel the need’ to even post everyday! When I started with my blog, I wanted to post everyday, and keep it updated to try and attract readers – and I think this is what a lot of new blogs try to do. I found it a bit of a burden on myself, as I would always be thinking of what to write, and end up writing useless content because I needed something to put down, so that people would know my blog was frequently updated! Yet through reading comments and posts from some of the more ‘established’ bloggers out there, I’ve found that it is what you write, as opposed to when you write, that will keep your audience coming back for more, and that’s what I have tried to do with my blog as of late.

Obviously you can’t just embrace all of your distractions all the time – you will need to do some form of work as and when e.g. to meet a deadline. Ideally you will ‘get bored’ of the distractions that plague you, and fall back into doing your work – however this is unlikely. I did call this post how to ‘overcome’ distractions, so here are a couple of ways I have found that have helped me ‘get on’ with my work!

When you start getting that ‘distraction’ feeling, try focusing on doing semi-important distractions (cleaning, diy etc.) rather than your ‘entertainment’ distractions, and then once you have done those, jump straight into your work, as quickly as you can without thinking! As you have been working yourself as opposed to relaxing, your brain should be in the correct ‘mind-set’ to carry on with work. Once done, or even once started, you can reward yourself with an entertainment distraction.

If that seems unlikely to help you, look at the piece of work you currently have on hand, and then think about something else, maybe another piece of work that needs doing, which is far less appealing than what you have on hand. Then try to start it – you should find the other piece of work starts to look more appealing now, and you will be able to pick up the piece of work you originally didn’t want to do.

If all else fails, do something else – don’t go with any of your distractions, don’t do any of your work. Simply go outside for a walk, run on the spot, do something completely different to whatever it is your thinking about. What this does is completely takes you out of the situation, so that when you come back to it you aren’t in the same ‘distracted’ mind you started off in. I recommend some form of mild exercise, as it also release ‘feel good’ chemicals into the body.

Distractions are a daily part of our lives, but rather than ignore them completely, if the work is not ‘important’ – distract yourself. You’ll find your mind and body will reward you for it. If the work needs to be done as it is important, follow some of the tips above – hopefully they will help you! Let me know your experiences with distractions, I love to hear from you all!

As for me, I’m heading back to my girlfriend, and will hopefully catch up with you all on the blogosphere tomorrow (I have a lot of emails and blogs to read that I haven’t got around to yet, lol!).

Dan

So why am I revealing it here? Well, a number of reasons. Basically I get ideas to generate money online all the time, yet I rarely have the time to actually go ahead with any of them, and some of them are quite big investments that would take me a long while. So by sharing them with you I may be able to help one of you guys start up something, or even start a joint venture! Also, after initially thinking it hasn’t been done, I accidentally stumbled across a site which is very similar to my idea, so the ‘unique’ potential has already flown out the window. It could be I haven’t searched hard enough and there are already sites offering this without me knowing – if that’s the case please leave me a comment letting me know! Another reason is the fact that I want you guys to come away with good information, and I don’t want this to be a blog with lots of ’secrets’, where I give you crap and keep the ‘good’ techniques / ideas to myself.

Anyway, enough with the tension, lets get to the actual idea:

The idea stems around advertising. Now if you own a blog, its more than likely you have some form of advertisements scattered over it. Now these adverts bring in money via an advertising ‘agent’, who sells the space for you, and each month you make a certain amount of money depending on the price you’ve set your adverts to be shown at. The revenue for this is normally monthly, and every month new people can buy advertising space on your blog. Yet pricing can be difficult, you may ‘under-price’ your blog, which means you wouldn’t get as much money as you could, or you could ‘over-price’ and get no adverts at all. As well as this, there may be people who are willing to pay more to show their advertisement on your blog, but can’t because your ad spots are already taken, so they go elsewhere and forget about your blog.

What I propose is an advertising website where you can sign up your blog and your advertising space, and then instead of adverts being ‘bought’ on your site, they are auctioned off on a rate that could be per hour, per day, per week etc. To give you a clearer idea, I’ll give an example – say I have two advertising spaces on my blog, and two people have bid $1 a week for advertising space. Now I get another visitor who decides they would like advertising space as they think its a popular blog! So they say they will pay $2 a week, and one of the existing adverts gets bumped off. Once bumped off, the previous advertiser is charged for the amount of time he was present on the blog – so if he was there for 24 hours, he is charged 14 cents – and is sent an email to inform him he has been knocked off. Obviously I use ‘per week’ as an example, but it could be per day - per anything really! I realise this is very similar to some cost-per-click and cost-per-impression sites, but this isn’t a design for a ‘rotating adverts’ site, but rather static adverts that will stay on your website for as long as the user is the top bidder - such as the 125×125 adverts you see on many blogs.

Now this method has obvious advantages for both parties, as advertisers are able to get their adverts shown as and when they want (depending on what they want to pay) and bloggers are able to make more money without having to increase prices per month. Heck, you might even get a few advertisers fighting for space which would increase the pricing to a lot higher than what you would think. It would work extremely well for a user that is trying to ‘hype up’ a project that is going live in 24 hours, as he can bid for all the advert space he needs in that one day, get the quick flood of visitors that he needs, and then be gone again, without having to buy advert space for a whole month!

There are downsides as well – people with more money are essentially able to ‘bully’ the little people out of advertising space – but its not to say you can’t combine auction ads with regular ones! As well as this, they may be able to get ‘cheap’ advert time at just $1 an advert! Besides this one item, I’m unable to see a potential downside with the advertising – especially as this is just the framework of an idea, and more features could be added on (e.g. manual advert bid approval, so you never get unwanted adverts on your site).

As for the advertiser site itself making money, you would either charge users and advertisers for being on the website (not the greatest idea), put advertising on the website itself (self-promotion), or even take a percentage of the auction money that is paid out on each advertisement. With a lot of users, and especially with some big websites, the latter has the potential to make a lot of money – even if your only taking a 6% cut at a time!

When I think about the idea as a framework, I get excited and want to get stuck in, but obviously the construction and maitenance of it is going to be a lot harder than I think in my head. Hell, in my pants was trickier than I thought, and that’s a pretty simple website idea, lol! Also the fact that I have seen someone offering advert bidding (albeit in the form and style of google AdWords) makes me a little bit more wary and demotivated to the idea and its appeal, but I suppose the site could be ‘niched’ to make it stand out a bit more – e.g. make it exclusive to ‘blog’ advertising as opposed to all websites.

De-motivators aside, I personally feel its a pretty good idea, but what do you guys think? Maybe one of you would like to take up the project, maybe some of you might want to motivate me to make the site so you can use it! lol. Or maybe you feel differently – that the site lacks the potential to go far, that its already been done, or that its simply a waste of time. Whatever your thoughts and / or opinions, let me know. I hope the idea is of some good to you all!

Dan