From the monthly archives:

November 2009

Bloggers tend to face challenges in the path to becoming a successful blogger which may make them think they should give up. Here are some of those common roadblocks in the blogging path, and a few suggestions on how to get past them.

1. Your blog lost or has never gained PageRank

PageRank is not a determining factor in whether or not your blog is valuable. PageRank is simply Google’s analysis of your site based on an unpredictably changing algorithm.

Remember that most readers do not care about your PageRank. Quality writing comes from sites ranked anywhere on the Google scale. PageRank does not necessarily affect your position in SERPs (search engine result pages). This means that sites with a 0 ranking could still be in the first 10 results for a given keyword or phrase.

If you’re concerned about your PageRank, maybe you should devote some time to reading the Google Webmaster Guidelines and Search Optimization Starter Guide to make sure you are following their rules.

If your site is suffering from low PageRank and missing from search engine results, it may be time to review the above mentioned Google guidelines and ask them to reconsider your site.

Continue 5 Bad Reasons to Quit Blogging

This post is part of a weekly series, Fetching Friday, featuring the biggest resources mashup to date at kikolani.com.

The Resources Mashup

Here are some of the best articles I have stumbledupon this week.

Blogging

Continue Fetching Friday – 90 Links in the Biggest Weekly Resources Mashup

Blogging During the Holidays

by Kristi on November 25, 2009 · 23 comments

Happy Thanksgiving

For most of my readers, the holiday season is about to go into full swing, starting tomorrow with Thanksgiving. Tis the season of four day weekends, or even full weeks off of full time jobs, depending on what you do for a living.

Continue Blogging During the Holidays

This post is part of a weekly series, Fetching Friday, featuring the resources mashup, Poker Face (like you’ve never heard it before), and the week in review at kikolani.com.

The Resources Mashup

Here are some of the best articles I have stumbledupon this week.

Blogging

Continue Fetching Friday – Resources Mashup, Week in Review & Poker Face

Yesterday, I was browsing the web for some new WordPress themes, and I found a site that had a lot of great premium like themes for free. I was quite impressed with them, ran a demo of a few of the themes, downloaded some, and added them to a new site that I am working on. After installing the theme, I went to adding my content and doing my usual customization. Everything was going great, until I hit the footer of my new theme.

In the theme’s demo, the footer looks like this:

WordPress Theme Demo Footer

I have no problems with keeping the credits for a theme. I have no issues whatsoever giving credit to the designers of the theme and sending some traffic back to the site so others can find and download these themes as well. Sometimes I rearrange the credits to suit the way I want to lay out my footer, or I may link directly to the theme’s page instead of the homepage of the theme site, but the credit will be there.

Now, take a look at the footer that comes with the downloaded theme:

WordPress Theme Actual Footer

Continue Free WordPress Themes – With a Catch

This post is part of a weekly series, Fetching Friday, featuring the resources mashup, PageRank updates, funny tennis, and the week in review at kikolani.com.

The Resources Mashup

Here are some of the best articles I have stumbledupon this week.

Blogging

Continue Fetching Friday – Resources Mashup, PageRank Updates & Funny Tennis

When I created Kikolani, over a year and a half ago, it began as a site for poetry and articles on personal discoveries. As time progressed, the site moved more towards its current theme of blogging and social media. So the question became, what do I do with my personal, creative side?

The answer was simple in theory, but a bit more complex in execution: to start new sites. This way I could focus on building very specific communities for each. Because those interested in tech are not necessarily interested in creative writing, and vice versa.

Moving Select Posts from WordPress to WordPress

One of my first concerns about moving my posts from one blog to the next was that I would lose my comments. Fortunately, WordPress makes it easy to transfer posts from one site to another (including comments, categories, tags, etc.), using the Tools > Import and Export. The only catch – import file size to the new site was limited to 8MB. My export file from Kikolani was over 50MB.

Continue Branching Out and Gaining Focus with New Blogs

This post is part of a weekly series, Fetching Friday, featuring the resources mashup, the week in review at kikolani.com, and getting off your computer and exercising.

The Resources Mashup

Here are some of the best articles I have stumbledupon this week.

Blogging

Continue Fetching Friday – Resources Mashup, Week in Review & Getting Off Your Computer To Exercise

TwitterTwitter Lists are the new feature on Twitter (still in Beta) that allow you to organize particular Twitter users into lists and view only their Tweets. For example, you can create a list of inspirational Twitter users by following these easy steps:

How to Create a New Twitter List

During the beta period, you should see an announcement for Twitter lists at the top of your homepage. Click the “Create a New List” button.

Create a New Twitter List

Alternatively, you can click on the “New List” link in your sidebar, right above the Trending Topics section.

Create a New Twitter List from Sidebar

Choose a name for your Twitter list, and whether you would like it to be public (so that others can follow your list) or private (a list for only you to see). Choosing a public list will also let the Twitter members you add to that list know that they are being listed, whereas they will never know if they are in a private list.

Twitter List Name and Privacy

Continue A Guide to the New Twitter Lists – Basics, Pros and Cons