
Where Did All the Blogs Go?
When I logged back in Feedly, I realized there weren’t that many articles unread, certainly fewer than I had expected considering I follow about 50 personal blogs.
When I logged back in Feedly, I realized there weren’t that many articles unread, certainly fewer than I had expected considering I follow about 50 personal blogs.
It came down to either paying hosting fees and keeping the blog online or just giving up on ten years of blogging.
Beyond the solitary writing exercise and the somewhat “dry” technical aspect of managing a website, blogging includes a more social component.
If you can turn on a computer, connect to the Web and write an email, you have enough technical skills to start a blog.
I’m taking you behind the scenes of blogging to explain what has been going on between the keyboard and the screen for the past ten years. Plot twist: I am a real human being, not a computer program.
As the year draws to a close, “top something of 2015” started to pop up everywhere—top books, top news, top podcasts, top movies, top Tweets, top articles, you name it. It’s a year-end tradition.
March was the month when the blog was most visited (165,708 visits… what the hell did I write about that month?!), followed by January (138,070 visits, must have been our trip to Mexico) and April (137,746 visits).
WordPress changed, I changed, the world changed… and I wanted a theme that would load faster, with more emphasis on the pictures and the articles. Sahifa, the theme I installed in March, didn’t really deliver. There were too many bugs and I have too little spare time to waste on fixing them. It was best to start again from scratch (if only life was as easy!).
I have to a draw a line somewhere. Fake subscribers, fake authors, fake readers… what’s the point of blogging, then?
Arthemia, my previous theme, was a bit outdated. So here is a brand new blog theme, based on Sahifa and customized by moi!
It’s the end of the year as we know it! No party for us this time. The return from France has been pretty brutal: Feng is still dealing with his battle scars, it’s very cold and we lost our Internet connection and landline (thanks, Bell!). We are still unpacking and getting over the jetlag and Mark is très très cranky.
This blog is a great way to meet people, to fuel my passion for writing and photography, to show what I do to prospective clients, to network, etc. And it’s always rewarding to see the readership grow. But it has downsides as well. Earlier this month, I received an email from Site5, my hosting company, claiming that my resource usage was too high to stay on a shared server plan.
One of the perks of WordPress.org is the plugins, these mostly free and easy-to-use programs that enable you to enhance or customize your website. The choice is almost too vast, so I decided to make your life easier. Here are ten neat WordPress plugins you should test!
One of the main differences between a blog and a static website is the interaction with the community. But this kind of interaction takes months or even years to build and must be constantly addressed and redefined.
I can’t stress enough how many blogs and websites there are on the Web, and how important promoting your blog is. “In space, no one hears you scream”, and in the cyber world, no one will find you if you don’t adopt a proactive approach.
Welcome to the new 10 posts series, All About Blogging! Each Saturday for 10 weeks, I’ll investigate an aspect of blogging. I hope you will enjoy the new series and that you will find it useful. Don’t hesitate to give me some feedback and to share your experience!
You wouldn’t believe how much spam this blog is getting. Every time I log in and go to my WordPress dashboard, I do a double-take at the number: “Akismet has protected your site from 74,191 spam comments already.”
When I first started blogging 5 years ago, I was more of a writer than a photographer. Most of my posts were text-only and I didn’t even have a profile picture.
And then came magazine-style blog themes, with thumbnails pictures. They quickly became popular and enabled a lot of bloggers to add pictures easily to their posts.
This is the tenth and last post of the “How To Blog” series and I’d like to close it with some advice on blogging etiquette.
Today, I’d like to share something even more personal than clothes, make-up or a toothbrush: bookmarks. We all have our favorite sites or tools to make blogging easier… here are mine: a collection of links to online tools, great blogs and generators for the geeks impaired.
Note that all these tools are free and none of these links are sponsored!
Who loves you? Yeah, probably a bunch of real life people. But blog-wise, who is you friend and who isn’t?
Today, we will explore the different tools you can use to assess your blog ranking. Is your blog popular? Easy to find? High-ranked? Followed by regular readers or one-time visitors?
Monetizing a blog takes time. First, you have to build good content. Yes, just signing up for a blog isn’t enough. These two days old blogs full of ads but still with the default “welcome” message always makes me laugh. Yeah, I wish it was that easy….! You also have to somehow master the basic of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to be found on search engines. And finally, you have to investigate the best ways to make money on your blog.
A fun part of blogging is tweaking and customizing your blog. Not only you will be able to transform a default template/ theme into a unique piece of artwork, but you will also get a chance to catch readers’ eyes. And that’s priceless!
We’ve already covered what you needed to put on your blog, and for WordPress users, what were the best plugins. Now, let’s have a lot at what you can do to tweak and customize your blog.
We’ve already covered a few subjects in this series, and today, I wanted to highlight how important it is to have a few basic informations on your blog.