The concept: The idea is pretty simple. List your website URL in as many online profiles as possible. Usually most social networks already offer a place where you can list your website. Even if they don’t, try to find a field where you can stick it in.

StumbleUpon for instance does not have a specific field for you to insert your website URL and share it with other users. They do have an “About Me” section though, and it accepts HTML, so just stick your link there.

Does it work?: Do not expect to crash your server with this technique. If you have many online accounts, however, combined they could end up sending you a good amount of monthly visitors. Obviously if your website is large already the effect would be hard to notice, but for new websites every small bit helps.

Secondly, the traffic that you will get from the links place on those online profiles will depend on your activity on the respective social networks. If you are very active on Digg, for example, more people will end up checking your profile, and more people will be likely to click on the link to your website.

How to get started: I would not recommend creating online profiles only to be able to place your link there afterward. This technique is fruitful if you already have dozens of profiles online and can edit them easily to include a link to your website.

Over to the readers: Do you have many online profiles scattered around the web? Do they all contain a link back to your website?

Website Traffic Series

• Part 1: Web Design and CSS Galleries
• Part 2: Blog Carnivals
• Part 3: Leave Comments on Other Blogs
• Part 4: Faking A Website Sale
• Part 5: Pulling an April Fools Prank
• Part 6: Using Forum Signatures
• Part 7: Putting A Blog on Your Static Website
• Part 8: Adding a Forum to Your Site or Blog
• Part 9: Buying Targeted Traffic
• Part 10: Email Signatures

Website Traffic Series Part 11: Put Your URL On Online Profiles

I knew that I was probably doing something wrong, but since I didn’t have time to find it out, I just kept choosing “none” as the alignment, and then I would manually insert the right, left or center alignment attribute on the image tag.

Then last week when I was submitting one of my themes for the WordPress Themes Directory I got a message saying that since version 2.5 WordPress themes were required to have the following code on their stylesheet:

img.centered {
display: block;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}

img.alignright {
padding: 4px;
margin: 0 0 2px 7px;
display: inline;
}

img.alignleft {
padding: 4px;
margin: 0 7px 2px 0;
display: inline;
}

.alignright {
float: right;
}

.alignleft {
float: left;
}

Duh! That is why the alignment feature was not working on my blogs, I never added that code! Now if you faced this problem in the past, now you know how to solve it.

Now I See Why the WordPress Image Align Feature Was Not Working

1. Content is Important:

If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them - George Orwell

It’s like good storytelling – your writing needs to guide your audience into what you want them to think/perceive or they will create a picture on their own which might not be necessarily what you originally wanted.

2. Read Well:

If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write - Stephen King

The more you read, the more ideas gets generated in your mind and you should also focus on reading from the competition to know what they are writing so that you can find a way to stand out from the crowd.

3. Eliminate the Unnecessary:

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak - Hans Hoffman

My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: when you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip - Elmore Leonard

A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts - William Strunk Jr.

Don’t just write for the sake of filling up, eliminate whatever you think will bore your audience.

4. Be Passionate:

This is the challenge of writing. You have to be very emotionally engaged in what you’re doing, or it comes out flat. You can’t fake your way through this - Gordon Atkinson

You should write on a topic you are passionate about as unless you are excited about what you are writing how you can expect the reader to be thrilled while reading.

5. Paint a Picture:

The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think - Edwin Schlossberg

To create a powerful emotional response your writing needs to spark the same thoughts in your reader’s mind as with which you started writing in the first place. So don’t just simply state.

6. Use Images & Typography:

Typos are very important to all written form. It gives the reader something to look for so they aren’t distracted by the total lack of content in your writing - Randy K. Milholland

Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images affect a very simple communion of souls - Gaston Bachelard

Visual sometimes better expresses the writing or at least complements it. So it’s advisable to use images and good typography.

7. KISS (Keep it Short & Simple):

Vigorous writing is concise - William Strunk Jr.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words - George Eliot

Simple words are more easily understood and communicate your thoughts better. So use simple words and write only what is necessary to communicate to the audience.

8. Accept Criticism:

Don’t mind criticism. If it is untrue, disregard it; if unfair, keep from irritation; if it is ignorant, smile; if it is justified it is not criticism, learn from it – Unknown Author

Pay attention to what others had to comment and learn from it and if you are just starting then again try to gasp from other successful writings (similar) and know why their audience (perhaps the same as yours) appreciated it and what they liked about it.

9. Keep Writing:

Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you’re doomed - Ray BradburyYour

How true – the more you write the better you become.

10. Be Unique & Unpredictable:

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago - Bernard Berenson

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative - Oscar Wilde

Experiment and be creative and your audience will like you more.

11. To Sum it up:

Make it simple. Make it memorable. Make it inviting to look at. Make it fun to read - Leo Burnett

Rajat is a WordPress designer, and you can hire him and follow his work on StudioWordPress.com.

The Art of Writing Catchy Articles: 11 Simple Tips

I went to check it out and it revealed itself to be a slide presentation with many useful and fact-dense images and tables. If you don’t know, China is already the country with the largest number of Internet users, and by far the country with the highest number of mobile phone users. This means one thing: we should all pay attention to what is happening over there.

For instance, did you know that Chinese people are much more likely to write a blog than Americans? Or that in Japan people use RSS feeds far more than in Western countries?

This presentation is sure to give you some basic facts about the online trends in China. Take five minutes to check it out, and perhaps bookmark for future use.

The Trends of Online China

It is 2008; do we still need to ask ourselves what a blog is? I think so, and for two reasons. First of all we still have many misconceptions about blogging floating around the web. Pretty much every week I get at least one email from someone asking if I believe blogging has a future. My answer is always “as long as the Internet has a future, blogs do too.” You will see why I answer that below.

You also have countless articles being published every week where the author suggests that blogs are obsolete, and that the next big thing is micro blogging, or lifestreaming or something else. Again I don’t agree with any of those predicted trends.

The second reason for trying to define what a blog is in 2008 (many people have already done that in the past after all) is because blogging is a social phenomenon. As such, it is constantly evolving, and what was true two years ago might not be anymore.

Blogs Aren’t Necessarily Personal

The main misconception regarding the definition of blogs comes from people that associate blogs with their content. More specifically from people that associate blogs with the content from one particular type of blog: personal blogs.

In other words, those people think that blogs are online diaries where people share their opinions, ramblings and personal events.

Wrong!

That is just one of the things that you could do with a blog.

Today blogs are being used for all sorts of purposes. You have companies that use blogs to communicate and interact with customers and other stake holders. Newspapers that incorporated blogs to their main website to offer a new channel for their writers. Individuals that created a blog to share with the world their expertise on specific topics. And so on.

Separate The Content

If you separate the content from the website, it becomes much easier to work with the definitions.

Consider a person that wants to publish a Questions & Answers column online. She could use several types of websites for that purpose.

She could create an online forum, for example, where each thread would be an answer to a specific question. She could create a static HTML website and publish all the questions and answers on a single page. She could create a wiki where users would be able to edit the questions and answers directly. Finally, she could also create a blog where each post would contain a question and its answer.

As you can see, the content is not attached to the website. The picture below illustrates that (note that only four types of websites were used, but there are many more).

Obviously one type of website will be more suitable for a certain purpose than others. It would be easier for a company to use an online forum on its customer support section, for instance.

So What Is A Blog?

A blog is basically a type of website, like a forum or a social bookmarking site. As such it is defined by the technical aspects and features around it, and not by the content published inside it.

The features that make blogs different from other websites are:

• content is published in a chronological fashion
• content is updated regularly
• readers have the possibility to leave comments
• other blog authors can interact via trackbacks and pingbacks
• content is syndicated via RSS feeds

Keep in mind that it is the bundle of those features that should define a blog. An online forum could also offer an RSS feed for example, but that would not make it a blog.

What Is Your Definition?

As I mentioned on the beginning of this article, blogs represent a social phenomenon, so they are in constant evolution. The Internet itself is changing very fast, so pin pointing a single definition for blogging is a hard task.

The definition above is my personal one, and I am sure that other people will want to add or remove details to it. Some might even completely disagree.

That is why I decided to turn the mic to the readers. I want to hear what you think a blog is. What characteristics define it? Is the definition changing over time?

I am looking forward to reading your definitions of blogs!

What Is A Blog?

Six years in the making, the 1.0 version of Open Source Web and desktop info organizer Chandler finally arrived on Friday. It was not met with thunderous acclaim, nor did it get the kind of press its development cost of $8 million and tens of thousands of volunteer hours was supposed to generate.

Chandler consists of the Web-based Chandler Hub, and desktop clients for Windows, Mac and Linux. It is meant to be your everywhere digital notebook for organizing appointments, tasks and notes. Chandler lets you import and export calendars to just about any iCal-compliant application, such as Google Calendar and Apple iCal; it creates alarms and reminders; and it provides simple task management.

I can remember when Mitch Kapor–the founder of Lotus Development and Lotus 1-2-3, the man who gave reason to put a PC in every office on the planet–started this project. It was going to free the masses from domination by Microsoft Outlook and Exchange Server and triumphantly herald a new age of open-standard killer software.

Chandler is a capable to-do list manager, but its design and capabilities are dated.

Despite some innovations in brings to the category, it has not delivered on the promise. Here’s where it fails:

• Whether you’re working in the Chandler web app or using a desktop client, you enter to dos, appointments and notes in a single entry field, then add detail. But the devil is in these details, and you will get tired very quickly of the slow interface for entering calendar items.
• While Chandler lets you triage your items into Now, Later and Done buckets, this is rudimentary task management at best and will leave practitioners of David Allen’s Getting Things Done wondering where the rest of the application is.
• Chandler’s big selling point–seamless Web app/desktop synchronization and backup–works as advertised (although it did not work for me out of the box), but
  a competitor, the free but commercial Evernote, offers superior features, like picture and sound recording, and Web-based OCR of images stored.
• Chandler organizes your information into collections, but unlike say Google shared calendars, there’s no way on the Chandler Hub to discover collections others want to publicize.

With any 1.0 app you can expect rough edges and unimplemented features: neither Wikipedia or Mozilla Firefox were much to talk about in their early days. The question about this open source project is whether Chandler 1.0 is the start of something great or the last gasp of a party no one wants to be at.

I talked with Kapor, who underwrote $5 million of the nearly $8 million that went into Project Chandler, He said, “It’s been a long, long journey. So long that a whole book was written about a part of it. It’s obvious to anyone who is familiar with the story and the history that it is one of the project that, to make an understatement, did not turn out the way it was originally planned.”

Kapor pulled the plug on the free money and office space for the Open Source Application Foundation back in January. “Last January I reached the conclusion that I was really ready and needing to go on to other things. And the team on the project had a really strong desire to see it through to competition. The team shrank in size pretty dramatically then. I put a little more money into it in order to enable this transition to happen in 2008, part of which was they were going to ship 1.0,” said Kapor.

“You asked if Chandler has lived up to the dream I had six years ago. And I think the fair answer to that is in part yes and in part no. What has actually been delivered delivers on part of what the original dream was. There’s a cross-platform, fully open-source, innovative personal information manager with a very strong calendar. Those were among the original goals. Obviously it’s taken dramatically longer than I thought it would, which I would attribute to not good judgment about how long it would take or the complexity of the project.”

Now Project Chandler is on its own. “It’s more of a conventional open source project in the sense that its momentum hereon is going to depend on the extent there is a community of volunteers who find it valuable enough to contribute to it and move it forward.” Are there enough volunteers to do that? “The short answer is I don’t know, but there are promising signs. The numbers of people involved, while modest, are nontrivial and growing. If you view it from the point of view as something that would replace Outlook and Exchange, it has completely and utterly failed. But from the point of view of having built something that tens of thousands of people are happily using, and were using before there was a 1.0, by those metrics, it’s pretty promising.”

And any advice to the new generation of Internet wannabe millionaires running around the valley? “Well yeah, actually. It’s easy when you’ve been successful to lose calibration about what you can accomplish, about how hard it can be, about how long it will take. There’s lots of people on the second time around that have dug themselves into one or another kind of hole. Part of what allowed Chandler to get traction and to get to 1.0 was when people on the project, myself included, where able to have more modest objectives, to have more realistic planning and to get into a more agile cycle of development, on the principle it is far better to deliver something than it is to have huge dreams and deliver nothing. That would be my advice.”

Disclosure: Bob Walsh occasionally sells a copy of a Windows desktop task manager he wrote three years ago.

Rather than stick you all alone with a browser-jarring PDF file, the PDF Download extension provides you the option to: download the file locally, open it with Firefox using the PDF download options settings, view the PDF as an HTML file in the browser, bypass PDF Download, or cancel the link. The first two options are self-explanatory, while the “view as HTML” feature works a bit like Google’s own version of the feature, speeding load times while largely abandoning formatting. The dialog box also displays the size of the target PDF file, which can help in deciding which option to choose.

The latest updates adds one incredible feature, in addition to the bug fixes. Users can now convert the Web page they’re looking at into a PDF, complete with hyperlinks. It doesn’t like pages with embedded content, changing Flash videos, for example, into links back to Adobe. But even with that limitation, the former Web page looks fine as a PDF. The plug-in now supports Firefox 3 and its social networking branch, Flock. PDF Download isn’t fancy for an extension that bills itself as “one of the most popular Firefox add-ons ever,” but it could be a big help for journalists, government workers, and others who spend considerable time with PDFs.

GeoGraffiti is a geolocation service that centers on little voice notes users can leave all over the world. Before having a native iPhone application it was a voice service you could call into and leave a note that would be associated with whatever ZIP code or telephone number entered through your phone’s keypad. It wasn’t the most exact system, and to remedy that parent company Slingpost has been working on a native iPhone application that makes use of the handset’s GPS to make the voice notes a little more precise.

In its pocket form GeoGraffiti is now quite a bit smarter. You can use it to browse “voicemarks,” which are other users’ recorded messages from wherever you are. It doesn’t say how close or far the radius is, but I’m assuming it’s only about one to two miles–if that. Since I’m in the middle of San Francisco I found two nearby voicemarks, both with fairly precise geographic information, including addresses. These are the same voicemarks that have been created on phones as well as on an accompanying Google Maps mashup. The app does not make the distinction as to which platform they originate from.

The app will constantly ping for your location, and if you’re on the move it will update every few minutes. If you’re driving your car, you can set it to “hands free” mode, which will call your phone and transmit any new, local voicemarks via a telephone call. It would be nice if you could just have it funnel through the app to save voice minutes, but it’s almost like a radar detector for messages.

This app reminds me of some of the local note applications that I’ve seen getting buzz on the app store (see Graffitio, NearPics, and Zintin). There’s a certain human fascination with scribbled graffiti and notes written in guest books. This is a smart play on that. I wouldn’t be surprised to see people take advantage of something like this to create their own scavenger hunt or to leave messages for friends, making it a platform of its own. Adding some things like special password-protected drop boxes or easter eggs would definitely take it to the next level.

To see a demo of the service in action I’ve embedded an early look below. Just note it was produced before the creators got their hands on the new hardware.

LogMeIn Free can be set to full screen, or magnified with a built-in zoom tool.

(Credit: LogMeIn, Inc.)

I haven’t encountered a single VPN client review without some degree of legitimate complaint, and my own experience with them has left much to be desired. I dislike how, by their nature, they affect every program that connects to the Internet. Last year, I tested out LogMeIn Free for Windows and Mac, and figured an extended, multiweek test now couldn’t be any worse than suffering through a VPN.

LogMeIn Free functions so well it makes an excellent case for ditching the VPN entirely. I installed the program on my work computer before I left San Francisco, created an account at the LogMeIn Web site and then logged out, leaving the machine on but in standby mode. The next step was installing the LogMeIn client on my laptop. Once I arrived in Massachusetts, I hit a coffee shop with a reliable Internet connection, and fired up Firefox. The LogMeIn client runs at start-up, an essential feature for the computer you want to use remotely. It also uses 256-bit SSL encryption, dual authentication for the application and the remote computer, and RSA SecureID, which assuaged my security concerns.

LogMeIn Free's reboot screen ensures a safe reboot and re-establishes your remote connection.

(Credit: LogMeIn, Inc.)

From there, I went back to LogMeIn.com and signed in. My account details popped up, along with the name of my work computers that had the client installed and their status–in use, in standby, or offline. Clicking on one put me through the LogMeIn log-in for that computer, followed by the computer’s own log-in. All of this takes place in a Web browser, so I was expecting halting responsiveness. Instead, it ran smoothly. There was a slight lag, but I’d peg it at about one second or less.

Essentially, I was using my work computer through a secure, encrypted connection, but without any of the obnoxious failures and hassles that come with running a VPN that affects my entire system. One big plus was having access to my local email archives, as well as those still living on CNET’s Microsoft Exchange server.

System crashes, especially when constantly installing and uninstalling programs, are to be expected. I was worried about one until it occurred. When my laptop’s browser crashed, I was able to re-establish the remote connection as effortlessly as I was able to create it in the first place: I merely logged back in to LogMeIn.com. When the San Francisco computer was having memory leak problems, I was able to reboot it from within the remote access window. Once it reached the Windows log in screen, I could control it as I had before.

The in-program options include chat, a white board, and a "laser pointer" for highlighting.

(Credit: LogMeIn, Inc.)

The clipboard can be configured to cross between the two machines, so a program name that I copy on my work machine can be pasted into a document here on my laptop. The ALT-Tab hot key combination works with the remote machine. There’s a chat program, too, for when you need to remotely control a computer with another person. You can also lock the keyboard of the remote machine so somebody walking by can’t create any input.

The problems I’ve encountered have been minor. There’s the lag, and the fact that file transfers are only available for users who upgrade. The only other drawback to LogMeIn is if the host computer suffers a fatal crash and won’t restart. Unless a friend will go push the power button, you won’t be able to get in and you’ll have to resort to a VPN connection, which won’t give you access to files on a local drive.

Throw in that big bagel of a price, and LogMeIn Free has become my first option for work-specific remote access.

On Tuesday, blog commenting add-on tool Disqus is launching version 2.0 of its free service. Many of the biggest changes are on the back end, but the user-facing elements have been given many small tweaks that should make it a faster, more approachable solution for the mass market.

I chatted with co-founder Daniel Ha about it on Monday, and he says one of the biggest changes blog owners are going to notice is the plug-in support. The plug-in with the most improvement is WordPress, which can now be moderated from inside of WordPress’ admin area instead of on Disqus alone. (Download WordPress from CNET Download.com.) All comments are also synced up both locally and to Disqus’ servers, so if Disqus goes down your comments won’t. Likewise, you’ll be able to copy over Disqus comments to your existing system if you decide to ditch it later on down the line.

For commenters, the experience has also been improved. Gone is the up and down voting system, which has been replaced with a simple up button to give a good comment a nod, and smarter tools to flag offensive or otherwise spammy comments. Commenters who write a veritable opus can now turn that nine-paragraph work into its own standalone blog post that lives right on Disqus’ servers, where other users can comment and interact with it. Ha says he’s not trying to take away from existing platforms, but give these really good, in-depth comments their own place to start another conversation without completely thread-jacking the conversation that’s going on there. Think of it kind of like FriendFeed, but using the same engine people are used to.

Disqus' new comment admin area lets you quickly remove, restore, and jump user comments from one blog or several at once.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

These are just some of the improvements with the updated platform. Disqus comments are now SEO-friendly systemwide, so your blog posts will be indexed both by content and discussion. The administrative area of Disqus has also been tweaked slightly to be simpler to manage across multiple blogs, although there’s still no way to mass delete messages via search query, or select multiple messages from a list like you can in some blogging tools’ stock comment systems. After having used Disqus to power our Webware 100 2008 award pages, the lack of mass edits and deletes was one of the only weaknesses that really bugged me. Luckily it’s something Ha says is working in testing and will be coming soon in another update.

Disqus is currently in use with about 30,000 blogs and competes with tools like SezWho, IntenseDebate, and JS-Kit to enhance the built-in functionality found in mass-market blogging platforms. To play around with the new system I’ve embedded it below. You can also check it out by visiting one of our Webware 100 2008 winner profile pages.

View the discussion thread.blog comments powered by Disqus