We’re going to be featuring lots of different types of blogs, all great in their own special way!

Today we are going to visit Skeet’s Stuff. What makes this blog great? I’m sure you are wondering and everyone is going to have varying opinions of each blog that we visit.

Where to begin? Voice, this blog has a great voice. Skeet’s voice of course. The author is not afraid to be honest and talks openly with their readers, welcoming comments. She puts herself out there, and shares details, talks about controversy, and gives you her opinion.

There’s a wide variety of topics, but they somehow all meld together and fit. This is a great example of a personal blog with a solid voice. And to further the personalization (and adding personality) you find all sorts of pictures included in posts. Pictures of Skeet, pictures of things she sees, things she does, and things she finds. It’s not cluttered, there’s no flashing signs, and everything flows into the next thing.

Another thing I want to add about the voice, is that the conversation does not end with each blog post. If you get further into things and check out the comments you will find Skeet actively conversing with her readers. It’s interactive, social, and interesting for everybody. There are some juicy ones going on there too!

If you’re all about the stats, (and I am not about the stats, they are boring and not so important but you know just cause) you’ll find that this blog is a PR4, an Alexa ranking of 74,633, and a Technorati authority of 323 (that’s a rank of 11,811 for us techno oldies).

I hope you’ve enjoyed this and I’d love to hear your comments about what makes Skeet’s Stuff a great blog, or your argument against my opinion even.

There are several different ways that a website or blog’s importance in the internet can be calculated and it’s no surprise that the most known and widely recognized one is done by Google. It’s called Page Rank and the creators of Google came up with it in their initial invention of the Google Search Engine. PageRank is defined as follows:

We assume page A has pages T1…Tn which point to it (i.e., are citations). The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. We usually set d to 0.85. There are more details about d in the next section. Also C(A) is defined as the number of links going out of page A. The PageRank of a page A is given as follows:PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

Note that the PageRanks form a probability distribution over web pages, so the sum of all web pages’ PageRanks will be one.
from “The Anatomy of a Large Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine” by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page

I don’t know much about Math and logarithms and stuff so I won’t try to pretend that I do. I will tell you what I do know about raising page rank and provide you some links if you want all the technical stuff.

There are a couple of ways to raise your page rank and if you have been blogging for a long time then they might be pretty obvious to you.

1.) Read Blogs. Find blogs of your friends or of a subject matter you are interested in. There are millions of blogs out there so with tools like Google Blog Search and Google Reader it’s not hard to find blogs and keep an eye on them. Once you find blogs that have a similar subject as yours or a subject you are interested in then read and leave comments. It’s also nice to blog about interesting things you have read and link back to them. This will bring new readers to your blog and get links out there. The main key to links on your blog is that they must be relevant. That means that you can’t write a blog that is totally dedicated to sports and go comment on a lot of blogs about celebrities. It’s ok to read a post about something off the topic of your and then to comment that you enjoy it but not to go and comment on 100 celebrity blogs to get your links out there.

2.) Join a few meme’s that you find interesting. There are tons of them. My friend Jennifer will tell you all about them here.They give you a theme and you write about something on a certain day. Once you sign up and participate you will get your nameon their blogroll and put the blogroll on your site. That means that every blog that participates (and there may be hundreds) will have a link to your blog on their blogs.

3.) The third way is to list your blog on directories. There are millions of free directories out there but there are a lot of good ones that you have to pay for. The thing about the directories is that the higher the page rank of the directory the better it is to raise your page rank. That is why the really high ones are the most expensive. For example, the Yahoo Directory has a Page Rank of 8 and it costs $299.00 to get listed there. Go check out The Paid Directory List that lists them all by PR and price.

These are some of the proven ways to improve your page rank. In the next few weeks I will tell you a couple of places to go to find your page rank.

Resources

The Anatomy of a Search Engine (by the creators of Google)

The Google Page Rank Algorithm and How it Works

google, page rank, directory, meme, blogs, comments

PayPerPost is probably the largest of the paid blogging companies and they have a huge database of users. They claim over 28,000 bloggers are in their system. That’s a lot of buzz on a lot of different blogs. PayPerPost was created by founder Ted Murphy, and has been nothing less than controversial. With a loud company, a big voice and an army of bloggers, they lead the pack in handling the most paid blogging opportunities.

When you sign up for PayPerPost, you need to be sure your blog meets certain requirements such as being 90 days old, and having a certain number of posts on it. The full terms of service can be found on their website. After your blog is accepted into the system, you can then choose to write opportunities which are located in their marketplace. The values are stated on each post, and there is a color coded system which tells you which opportunities are available to you.

PayPerPost offers advertisers a way to create buzz for a product, service or website. The advertiser can choose to have a press release posted to someone’s blog, can choose a word count and free form article, or choose an individual blog through PayPerPost’s new system, PayPerPost Direct.

The blogger chooses the opportunity they would like to blog about, and following certain rules, such as a particular link or keyword is added into the post. When all of these requirements are met, and the blogger has filled in the information on PayPerPost’s end, if all checks out, the blogger will be paid via PayPal 30 days later.

Their newer system PayPerPost Direct, you place a badge on your site, and an advertiser can hire you directly through this badge. There is also a large directory on the site where advertisers can sort through and pick and choose individual blogs.

There are rules and limitations, so again, be sure to read and follow the terms of service, if you are interested in working with PayPerPost.

This company requires full disclosure. What that means is that on your blog, in an obvious place, it must state that you are receiving compensation to write paid opportunities. You also have the choice to disclose in each individual post you do. Either way, make sure your disclosure can be found, or your posts will be rejected.

PayPerPost is the biggest and boldest of the paid blogging venue, and with Ted Murphy leading the way, there’s always something interesting going on. They have received press with Good Morning America, Forbes, and many other venues.

PayPerPost also has a blog if you’d like to learn more about the background of PayPerPost, or just like to know the scoop on the latest happenings.

I think the best place to start our series on plugins is with Akismet, this is the plugin that’s already installed on any wordpress installation. In order to use akismet, you will not only have to activate it through your wordpress admin page by simply hitting “activate” on the plugins page; but you will have to enter your wordpress API key on the akismet configuration page.

Getting a wordpress API Key is free and simple; go to this page and fill out the short form choosing the option for “just a username, please.” You will get your new API Key in your email then you just need to enter that key into the field on your wordpress akismet configuration page. You can get to this page by choosing the plugins tab option then choosing akismet configuration.

Once you enter your free API Key and choose update options, akismet will begin working, it scans comments left on your site against a database of known spammers and spam words it then catches these spam comments and keeps them from landing on your blog. To review the comments left on your blog that have been caught by akismet, simply go to the comments tab option and choose akismet spam.

Every so often akismet will catch a comment that may not be spam, simply choose the option next to the comment that is not spam and then update, akismet will learn from these corrections. However it is still good practice to go through the akismet spam folder at regular intervals to make sure it is not catching things that are not spam.
Akismet does a very thorough job of catching spam, but sometimes depending on your blog the amount of akismet spam can be daunting, next week I’ll be telling you about a plug in you can get that works alongside with akismet to better catch spam and reduce the amount of comments you personally have to review.

plugins, akismet, how to, plugin, wordpress

Welcome to the first in a line of tutorials on how to change CSS coding on your own. Fun, right?

What is CSS?

It stands for Cascading Style Sheets. Style sheets are an easier way to maintain and change color, font, and even pictures on your sites. You upload an additional all text file with design rules that will tell your webpages what to do. There are rules that can be applied to all parts of your website, or only a few. It’s up to you how much CSS you want to include into your site.

Okay, so how do we change stuff?

The very first things everyone seems to ask about changing are background color, link color, text color, and fonts. I will go through each one and explain how the CSS translates from HTML so you may better see why this language is so popular.

In HTML, the <body> tag used to house all your rules for background colors and usually the overall text color. It used to look like this in your page:

<body bgcolor=”black” text=”yellow”> which would render a page like this:

Now we would use something similar, but placed and worded slightly different. The following would be put either in its own file, or at the top of the webpage you are working on. If you are only changing a few aspects, it is easier to leave the styles right on the page you are working with. If you end up having a long style sheet, then it is best to put all the style into their own text file. So now that we have decided to keep our styles within our page, all we need to do is find the right place within the code to add our style list.

Look for this at the top of your HTML coded page:

<html>
<head>
<title>Whatever your webpage is called</title>
</head>
<body>

We will add our style between the <head> </head> tags like this:

<html>
<head>
<title>Whatever your webpage is called</title>
<style>

</style>
</head>
<body>

Now we are ready to add in our styles, removing them one by one from the actual HTML in the <body> tag or wherever else these rules have been placed.

First, let’s change the background color. We will go from <body bgcolor=”black”…> to this:

<style>
body {
background: black;
}
</style>

The body tag tells the stylesheet where to apply the styles. You leave <body> but delete the bgcolor=”black”. Why? The <body> tag is a label. Everything in the stylesheet must match up with a label tag somewhere in your webpage or it will not show up correctly.

Sidenote: I am using the color name, but you can also use the hexadecimal number in its place. Black is #000000. White is #FFFFFF. There are lists of hexadecimal colors all over the internet. My favorite one is here.

Next we will want to change the color of the text within the box. It’s fairly simple. All you need to do is take font=”yellow” and place it in the stylesheet like this:

<style>
body {
background: black;
color: yellow;
}
</style>

Finally, we can change the colors of the links in the document with a simple addition of another rule.

<style>
body {
background: black;
color:yellow;
}

a {
color:green;
}
</style>

The a is derived from the link code <a href=”link.html”> where a is seen as the label.

Next time we will get more into depth about the different aspects that you can change within these two style rules.

Happy coding!