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Archive for category Web Site development

Review of 2009 and Plans for 2010. Part 1

Jan 3

Posted by admin in General, Web Site development, communication skills, personal development

Happy new year!

It has been almost a year since I began looking at personal development, and I’d like to give a quick review of some of the stuff I’ve done and what I’m looking forward to in the next year.

I’d like to have a go at breaking my posts down to smaller chunks, so I’ll post this in segments.

My path of personal development began at the start of 2009, when I entered into a course at work to develop product creation and selling skills. This was called “Dragons Apprentice”, a mixture of 2 closely related BBC TV programmes: Dragons Den and The Apprentice. Would you ever have guessed? :) Unfortunately due to other work commitments I had to leave the course early but it left me hungry for more. This led me to look at my personal communication skills and think more about my effectiveness when talking to other people and to get over my nerves when speaking publicly. Since joining Toastmasters in March 2009, things have snowballed with various topics, including blogging, volunteering and looking at my own beliefs of my existence.

I’ll go for a topic per post. Topics I have so far are:

  • Blog
  • Mind set – Beliefs
  • Communication skills – Toastmasters
  • Health
  • Work-life
  • Life – major events

Ill try to make a post out of each topic.

Blog

I started this blog in February 2009 and I am glad to say that it is something I have benefited from, though not in the ways I expected.

As far as the technical side goes, I found it very interesting to begin the process of signing up for a domain, and uploading the software to get Wordpress blog software online, and tinkering with all the settings to get something which aligned to the vision which I was aiming for. I even had a go at creating my own php code for the archive page which was interesting as this was the first web-based programming I’d ever done. I’ve posted the code here (http://www.martinogg.com/2009/06/article-archive-page-added-add-your-own-archive-page-easily-code-included/)

Unfortunately this site didnt turn into the mass traffic hub I thought it would. In fact if I look at the statistics I would see less than 10 hits per week and of them I assume most are bots, considering the amount of spam that comes in. I’ve manged the hefty sum of £6 from google adsense clicks, which is still too low for me to take out! So as far as attaining recognition and making money from this venture is concerned, its been a complete failure.

But positive results have come in unexpected places. Because I took the time to set up and continue doing blogging, it has made me more aware of other people’s blogs and writing. I now find myself reading and replying to posts made by others whereas I would otherwise have just skipped over them or not replied before. The result is I have read more about different opinions and this has opened me up to other thoughts I would never have previously considered.

I made some heavy claims in the blog at the start, about how this would be the saviour for everyone who read it and how I would post almost every day! Maybe it was a bit overzealous to make these claims but making these outrageous claims and seeing the result has allowed me to reform what I can reasonably achieve and what I can aim for.

The blog has taken on a new platform in my mind. Instead of being the soap box that I can proclaim that the world is flat, it is more of an access point for people to connect to my thoughts if they choose to. I dont take offence that it appears that not maybe people choose to do that, as my skills to do this still need to be more refined. It shows me that I need to work on my visions on life and the ability to articulate my views in a way that aligns to others.

Aims for the blog in 2010 would be to blog more often! A reasonable amount would be to blog at least once a week.

I’d like also to work on the technical skills behind the blog and keep up with other communication technologies. For example, I have a facebook which I use for my friends, but I dont use twitter. I would also like to spend more time communicating online with people in the field of personal development.

To be continued…

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Article Archive Page Added. Add your own archive page easily! (code included)

Jun 13

Posted by admin in Web Site development

Last night I added an article archive page to this site. It makes it easier to navigate all the blog posts by listing all the blog posts by title on one single page. It is sorted in chronological order. My intention is to have all the articles easily accessible so anyone can quickly scan through any posts of interest. This is better than a standard blog page as typically you would have to wade through the whole content over multiple pages.

The credit for the archive page code goes to stylizedweb.com for his post. The steps are there on this person’s page and they are reasonably clear, however it requires knowledge of ftp, the folder structure of your wordpress installation and notepad or other text editor to modify php code. I noticed a couple of mistakes in his php insert code which caused it not to work on my page straight off, so I will post what i did…

Steps to create an archive index page on your wordress site (For wordpress 2.7.1)

1. Make an archives2.php file – First step is to make a new page template file. I went to my theme directory /wp-content/themes/arc/ using my ftp client ( where arc is the folder for the theme ) and copied index.php over to my desktop. This was then renamed to archives2.php ( I called it this because this theme already had an archives.php file, didn’t want to get rid of it just in case. Note that the filename doesn’t matter as no reader will see it )

2. Modify the code in the archives2.php file – Now this file must be customised for making a template. Edit the file with a text editor. I used notepad on windows. For me I had the first block of text..

<?php
/* Arclite/digitalnature */
get_header();
?>

This needs to be changed to..

<?php
/*
Template Name: Martins Archives Page
*/
?>

The name here is only used for your own reference so it can be anything you like. Save the file now

3. Remove the page code and replace with new code – This I belive is the hardest step because you need to see what background code is (i.e. Side bars, background, links, etc) and see what the main code for that page is. The way I did it was to look at the code I needed to put in…

<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

<!– post –>
<div id=”post-<?php the_ID(); ?>” <?php if (function_exists(“post_class”)) post_class(); else print ‘class=”post”‘; ?>>

<div class=”post-header”>
<h3><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark” title=”<?php _e(‘Permanent Link:’,'arclite’); echo ‘ ‘; the_title_attribute(); ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a></h3>
<p class=”post-date”>
<span class=”month”><?php the_time(__(‘M’,'arclite’)); ?></span>
<span class=”day”><?php the_time(__(‘j’,'arclite’)); ?></span>
</p>
<p class=”post-author”>
<span><?php printf(__(‘Posted by %s in %s’,'arclite’),’<a href=”‘. get_author_posts_url(get_the_author_ID()) .’” title=”‘. sprintf(__(“Posts by %s”,”arclite”), attribute_escape(get_the_author())).’ “>’. get_the_author() .’</a>’,get_the_category_list(‘, ‘)); ?> <?php edit_post_link(__(‘Edit’,'arclite’),’ | ‘); ?></span>
</p>
</div>

<div class=”post-content clearfix”>
<?php if(get_option(‘arclite_indexposts’)==’excerpt’) the_excerpt(); else the_content(__(‘Read the rest of this entry &raquo;’, ‘arclite’)); ?>

<?php
$posttags = get_the_tags();
if ($posttags) { ?>
<p class=”tags”> <?php the_tags(__(‘Tags:’,'arclite’).’ ‘, ‘, ‘, ”); ?></p>
<?php } ?>
</div>

<div class=”post-links”>
<?php
global $id, $comment;
$number = get_comments_number( $id );
?>
<a class=”<?php if($number<1) { echo ‘no ‘; }?>comments” href=”<?php comments_link(); ?>”><?php comments_number(__(‘No Comments’,'arclite’), __(‘1 Comment’,'arclite’), __(‘% Comments’,'arclite’)); ?></a>
</div>

</div>
<!– /post –>

<?php endwhile; ?>

<div class=”navigation” id=”pagenavi”>
<?php if(function_exists(‘wp_pagenavi’)) : ?>
<?php wp_pagenavi() ?>
<?php else : ?>
<div class=”alignleft”><?php next_posts_link(__(‘&laquo; Older Entries’,'arclite’)) ?></div>
<div class=”alignright”><?php previous_posts_link(__(‘Newer Entries &raquo;’,'arclite’)) ?></div>
<div class=”clear”></div>
<?php endif; ?>
</div>
<?php else : ?>
<h2><?php _e(“Not Found”,”arclite”); ?></h2>
<p class=”error”><?php _e(“Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here.”,”arclite”); ?></p>
<?php get_search_form(); ?>
<?php endif; ?>

At the top you can see the line <?php if (have_posts()) : ?>  – this is the beginning of the loop which shows every single post in the archive. I then looked at the archives2.php file I had.. I saw..

<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

Quite near the top of the file. It was also indended. Scrolling down I also found the closing <?php endif; ?> for that starting if line. The indentation helped me to see this was page content and not the background for each page. I removed it all and replaced it with the required code mentioned earlier. Note that I have no experience whatsoever for php programming, this was done only by looking at the <?php tags within the file. Now save this file. Dont worry if you think you did it wrong, even if it wont work, the worst youll see on your site is an error message and you can try again. No damage will occur and you wont lose your previous posts.

4. Upload the new archives2.php to your theme folder where you got your index.php file from.

5. Make a new page. Go to your admin page on your website and make a new page. Call it something meaningful such as “Archives page” (this is what the reader will see for the page name) Dont add any text to the body of the page.

6. Apply the template. On the right hand sidebar ‘attributes’ you should see Template. Under that drop down you should now see your “martins archive page” or whatever you called it earlier. Select this and then click publish. Youre done!

Navigate to the page to see how it looks. If you get a page which looks nothing like your other pages (i.e. background gone) or an error line at the top and nothing else, then something went wrong. I have found the error lines quite helpful as it tells you the line number to check. Turns out my initial code had spaces in <?php…  so it was  <? php…  and that crashed it.Just try to re-upload a fixed file until you get what you want. There is no irreversible damage here as you are using your own file and not wrecking anything else in the theme. Even if you do accidentally damage a critical theme file, you can just re-install the theme and restore.

I hope this is of use to you, It makes navigation much easier for your blog posts and articles so I would highly recommend it, even if you dont regard yourself as a programmer or it seems a little messy. Let me know how you get on and post links to your own sites’ archive pages here!

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About site change… Changing the focus of my blog

Jun 10

Posted by admin in Web Site development, personal development

I have decided to change the focus of this blog. I had hoped to make this into a personal development website initially, but instead I will make this just a site about my own personal development.

I hoped to make this a site where I could help people with their lives. In some way I’d have hoped to have a site where people could read the stories of my own life which would keep people coming back for more. At the same time I anticipated site traffic and hopefully some income from advertising! (generated $7 in total so far, about 4 months. Not bad :) )
However, I am finding now that I do not have so much to be talking about past experiences. Recently I have been looking forward to learning and experiencing more. I’d like to use this blog more as a focus point to my interests and learning.
At the same time I am seeing that the success of income generation from this site has not gone to plan. The intention was to give readers a reason to come look at this site; to get something from it. In this way we would all benefit; me from revenue and readers from reading it.

One good thing about having a small site is the ease of which to change it if things dont work out. I am also seeing that I would rather focus on improving myself and I would like to change this site to reflect that. I will continue to blog about my life and interesting things I find, but I think the focus for justnow is about my own self improvement. The millions of dollars of passive income from the site will just have to wait..

Interestingly enough I listened to a podcast today by Tal Ben Shahar, called Happier. In it he explains the concept of the currency of happyness and how goals in life all lead to the ultimate goal of becoming happy in life. So in fact my goal of making a popular website has ultimately the same goal as making a website that makes me happy to have written one… we are all aiming for happyness one way or another. How long will it take you to realise that money isn’t the only way?

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1 Comment

New site theme for easier navigation

Jun 8

Posted by admin in Web Site development

Based on feedback from friends, I have made my site easier to navigate byt changing the theme on my wordpress blog. The main focus of this site is the blog section so I wanted to ensure there is an easily reachable blog button on the front page.

A couple of friends told me that it was hard to find the latest blog entry on my site previously. This is because the theme listed my post categories at the top of each page. This makes it difficult to find the posts in chronological order, or to see under which category had the latest posts. The new theme still has the categories on the right hand side, but the main page buttons (about, blog, CV) are right there at the top. This makes it simple to find the blog page.

I still like to categorise my posts even though it doesn’t make it so easy to navigate at the moment. Its good to add indexing information to your posts.

The intention for my blog is to keep the posts free from getting out of date. This means that anyone can read it in the future and it still proves as useful today as on the day it was written. However, keeping a simple blog link means that the posts are listed chronologically and you might only see 2 or 3 of the latest posts. The next step will be to have an indexing system or an archive which holds all the posts in one page. That makes it much easier to quickly scan through all the posts and pick the one that takes your interest.

Take care and keep improving!

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Continually improve yourself! Make your own bookmark icon for your site

Jun 6

Posted by admin in Web Site development

Today I thought I would share the little revelation I had today about customising the bookmark icon for wordpress sites. Although its just a tiny change, its important to keep on with improving yourself and surroundings; if you stay still you will stagnate. Its also fun!

My girlfriend Amanda asked me about changing the wordpress ‘W’ icon that sits at the top left of her blog site (on the firefox / internet explorer window) and I realised that my own page had no icon at all! Just a blank sheet.

First of all I searched online to find out what that little icon at the top left of each page is called. Turns out its called a bookmark icon. For all these years I knew that websites had their own icons at the top left, but I never ever thought to think of what it was actually called!

Next step is making an icon. I’m sure there are lots of places to get pre-created 16×16 .ico files but I thought I would be creative and use paintbrush to make a simple 16 by 16 pixel white background with a black circle. Saved this as a .gif file.

Then I needed to convert this to a .ico file. I went to this site, entered the path to the file and clicked generate favicon.ico button. Interestingly, I was asked if I wanted an animated icon or just a static one. I opted for static but theres nothing there to stop you from making an animated one. The site creates a zip file for you to download. It contains the ico file, an animated icon, and a readme file to let you know what to do.

It says in the readme file to add a line of html code to each page you want the icon to be shown:

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”favicon.ico” >

This is simple if you write all the html pages yourself, however writing blogs and pages using wordpress doesn’t give you easy access to the html behind each page. So I had to improvise for this.

I added a text widget to my sidebar on each page. I changed the mode from normal viewing text (like a microsoft word document) to HTML code, and added it in. I then saved the new text.

Finally I used the FTP client to upload the file to the server at the root folder. This is a complex step if you are unfamiliar with file uploading, but its a necessary step to even create your wordpress blog.

Hey presto! Every page from now on has the new bookmark icon. The total time taken to do this, including learning how to do it and create the icon; about 10 minutes. I hope this tutorial is useful to you and inspiring for you to give it a try

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The weblog hurdle… beating through the pain of sporadic and deserted blogs

May 12

Posted by admin in General, Web Site development, personal development

As you may have seen, it has been some time since I have posted on my blog with any consistancy. I guess this is the fate of the majority of blogs; the writer has the great idea of writing down their thoughts, and all goes well for the first few posts. But then the monotony kicks in. Do I have anything to say today? Can I be bothered? Does anyone else care? (the comments left, adsense clicks and analytics page show they dont…)

So here I am at this point. Disheartened at the non-immediate success of my blog. When I began posting the numbers of visitors gradually increased. I had pressing issues built up over time which were begging to be written about. And I did that. But then I became lazy, putting off writing. From the heady heights of 7 views a day I am now lucky to see 1 view a day (my own view, of course, to check and see the page still exists)

This appears to be the common fate of blogs. Does a quick blog for a few days or months serve the purpose of those who write it, and those who read it? Does it teach us about the effort required to keep up such activities and how we might not be as willing to put in the effort as we first thought?

This morning the thought came to me that I should really get back into the routine of writing here. But why should I? And what would I write?

My thoughts brought me back to the reason why I created a blog in the first case. I want to be completely happy, and in some way have a positive effect on people in within my contact. Setting up a website would therefore be the best way of doing this. With this, the outreach to people in the world is far greater than humanly possible.

But the purpose of the website for me was not to set up a website in itself. My key goal is for self-improvement to become more happy.

I’ve made promises before that I would write consistently, and they have gone unfulfilled. Creating a successful website with lots of traffic is a goal shared by many a blogger. But often this goal overcomes as the reason for your blog and then this goal becomes so overwhelming its often easier to ignore it. Is your blog successful only because you get lots of views? Wouldn’t you feel success if you felt some kind of realisation or story which leads to a making a good blog post, and not the post itself?

My advice for people who may be struggling with the effort to continue their blog; think about why you created one in the first case. Does the goal still remain? What have you been doing recently to achieve that goal more closely? If you haven’t done much recently, what could you do to achieve it?

To give an example of how this has effected me, I wrote earlier about how working on communication skills was important to me to help me become more happy. After many weeks of procrastination I went to my first Toastmasters meeting. It was there that my vision of self-improvement was re-enforced and it reminded me of my key goals. Part of communication is through writing and of course and while the meeting didn’t help with that, it reminded me that this is something that I still want to improve upon. The articulation of my experiences is helpful in a cyclical manner. By writing it down, it helps me to organise the thoughts in a more meaningful way. I may get feedback from people via the website. And by the whole process, I practise my written communication skills which helps to improve them, for the next time I write about something.

So I encourage you to write something on your blog. Go do it today, even if you only have a few words to write. If you would like some feedback for encouragement, please drop me a comment with the link and I will have a look at it.

2 Comments

Creating your own website from scratch. Easy, interesting and fun!

Apr 20

Posted by admin in Web Site development, personal development

I’ve had one or two questions from different people about how I put my blog website together from a technical perspective. While I would say this is far from being complete, I’d like to discuss what I’ve done so far, and what my guiding principals are for some of my decisions.

Website name

This site is www.martinogg.com because my name is Martin Ogg. When I began I didn’t know what my blog was going to be about, so having such a unique surname I was sure by choosing my name I would get a unique url! If you have an idea of what your blog or site is going to be about, then by all means a more appropriate url name is a good idea. I wouldn’t advise stressing too much about a gimmicky or memorable url name; I believe the strength of your content would be the best advertising factor and people will remember your site based on what you write, not what the url was.

I went with a top level domain ( nothing like martinogg.bebo.com or martinogg.blogspot.org ) because firstly I wanted to have the experience of obtaining and using webspace, and secondly because I personally find top level domains more serious. For example if you saw a page hosted on a free site such as geocities, would you hold it in the same regard as a top level domain?

Hosting

To get a top level domain I needed to register it and host it. A quick review of companies online showed me what was right for me, but I went for one which I felt had good general reviews. It cost about 40 GBP for 1 year of hosting with 9 GBP per top domain level registration (max 3 different top levels) The hosting package came with lots of features I’ve yet to utilize, but major features ive found are PHP servers, email addresses with webmail or pop3 login ability, FTP access, and tutorials how to add features to the site. As far as I’ve seen, some companies offer free hosting for the first 3 months, but the problem I thought about is if I kept on this longer than 3 months, the site offers after this time may not have been as competitive. I therefore chose a 1 year term to see how things would go.

Wordpress

All of my blogging is done using Wordpress. I would recommend this one to other beginners as it appears to be easily customiseable and easy to use. It has 3rd party widgets and plugins to use on your site and you could even create your own themes/plugins for those with that need. Making a post is easy, just log in to your admin page from anywhere and click ‘add new post.’ you can even add in pictures and media clips. Knowledge of html and programming is not essential, but basic use of FTP is required to install it and you need to know how to edit a text file to put in your database login details.

Themes, Widgets and Plugins

The customisation ability in wordpress is provided through 3rd party themes, widgets and plugins. These are very easily put on your site and you can search for new items from a link in your log in page. Its not quite as easy as I’d have expected though because when you click a new theme for example, you have to download the zip file containing the related files of that new theme. After that you must upload it to the correct place on your FTP space. You may then select it from your list of themes. While its not particularly difficult to do this (especially if you already had to use FTP to upload wordpress in the first place) Id have found it more intuitive if there was a 1-click process of doing this.

Widgets are items that live on the sidebar, which for me justnow lives on the left hand side of every page. These items are not things which I created, but I have selected to be there which add value to each page with no additional effort of creating them yourself. For example, I have a calender, recent posts and google advert on the sidebar.

Plugins are like widgets but they do not live on the sidebar. An example is the spam comment checker. This plugin checks every comment to determine if it is spam. If so, it goes straight for the spam folder. I have had to enable this recently as I have been hit by spam bots recently and it is annoying having to sift through page-sized comments to find the one liners left by geniune commenters.

google adsense

I use google adsense to generate income from this site. I would recommend thinking about monitising your site for two reasons. First, obviously is that here is an money making opportunity staring you in the face. If lots of people visit your site, then you have the traffic there who might click your sponsor links. In this way you can generate income even if you dont personally sell anything on your site. Secondly, this can be used as an analysis tool to determine how successful your site is. If you are posting on to a blog that is readable by millions, then surely you do actually want to have people reading your pages. The goal of making your site popular and earning money off it go hand in hand with advertising on your site.

So now with this goal of getting lots of readers, you now have the opportunity to think about how to achieve this. One way I have thought of this is to work on the quality of my posts.

Getting adsense on your site is straight forward, but I did have some hiccups along the way. My site was reject initially, but I then changed my theme to a more comprehensive looking page and it was fine. I add the google HTML code (along with my code number issued by google) to a text widget addon on my sidebar. This means it will appear on every page on my site, as my sidebar is available on each page

google analytics

Another useful tool for site analysis. After registering and adding the required html, you can log in to the google page with your google id to get site statistics. These statistics include what pages were visited, where the request came from, and how long they spent on each page. Using this information Im sure would be useful to obtain feedback on what works on your site and what doesn’t. For example, I find that currently I get a lot of hits on my front page, but very few elsewhere. That might indicate that my front page is not transparent enough to get to other pages.

The reason why I decided to have a website at all is because I felt the need for a presence on the internet. Of course you can have your own email address, instant messenger handle and facebook page but these things are for communication with people you already know in more ‘real life’ communities. The internet community is something I felt that I did not have any presence in and thats something I’d like to move into. The advantage of an internet based community is of course the possible size of members. The outreach possible using the net is by far the most convenient and widespread. The likelihood of getting into contact with someone who gives you an idea or insight is greater by the fact that there is the potential to come into contact with so many.

Would this approach be suitable for you? Do you have interests that might be suitable to have a website or blog to discuss? I would highly recommend it even if you don’t have anything to say right at the moment. The experience I have gotten and am still receiving for making this site is certainly reward enough for me and I find it very encouraging to think about the processes involved in both technical and non-technical aspects of creating this site.

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Advertise Successfully using Zero Cost, Zero Effort strategies.

Mar 23

Posted by admin in Web Site development, personal development

Increasing website traffic to your website is important. In my case I want to have a website that is useful to the people who read it and can provide meaningful helpful information which is valued. A key feature of that aim is gaining a reasonable amount of relevant web traffic who will read my posts and possibly give feedback to me and to other readers. In this post I will show you free strategies for advertising that can be as effective, if not even more effective than giant billboards selling the latest mp3 digital projector camera phone to the masses..

Let me begin with an example how these strategies are useful in all walks of life.

My girlfriend Amanda is an opera singer and private music teacher. When we moved to our flat near Edinburgh, we both knew no-one. We came here because I started a job here, and friends and family live 50 miles away in another city. To get started on her career in this new area, Amanda started with online advertising for music teaching on private teacher websites. The pick up was very slow and no serious contact was made about teaching music. She then became involved in the local choir group. Every Thursday she would go to choir practise and sing like all the others. Very quickly she became recognised for her talent and she was asked more and more to do solo pieces. At one point she was asked to be understudy for a performance the group had organised. Whilst this didn’t pay anything, she was recognised for her talent and then was asked to give a paid masterclass for her fellow choir members. In the meantime the choir members told their friends about this ‘new music teacher’ and very quickly by word of mouth she was asked to give private lessons to adults and kids. She was even asked by a local school to be the music teacher. Now she is so busy with lessons I am lucky to see her before 9pm most weeknights!

This is an example of a Zero Cost, Zero Effort strategy. By giving example of her work for free, and getting exposure to the right people, that was all the advertising she needed. Zero Effort in that example may be seen to be misleading, because she of course has gone through years of schooling and previous experience to achieve the skill level she has now and had to put in some effort by going to the choir. By Zero Effort I mean the amount of effort she put into advertising herself. The choir practise is something she wanted to do and the advertising took care of itself.

So how does this relate to you and what are the key aims? The route of these strategies lie in your social ability. The more sociable you are and the more you communicate with other people, the more opportunities you have for advertising. Choose your audience by going to the right places. If you want sell your skills as a Japanese-English translator, go to anime clubs and conventions and show people you have the skills you intend to sell.

In my case I want to advertise that I write on this website and it has value for the reader. After reading a post or two from here, the reader will be enlightened in some way and be given new insights which can help them in some way.

However, there already exists a huge amount of personal development websites containing free quality interactive content such as Forums and Blogs. So if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!

Try writing a few quality responses to existing threads. Be sure to answer what they ask, not just straight up advertising for your site; a reader will just ignore it. Try to give a useful response to a topic that interests both you and the person you reply to. Provide a link in your signature to your website in all your posts. That way people can link to your website if they feel inclined to. Remember, the value of your post or reply content does the advertising itself, the link provides a means for them to find you.

Another resource is social networking websites. These sites inform your friends when you update your status or upload new photos. Why not blog into there too? You could use content from your original blog and dont forget to provide a link back to your main site.

The key objective is to show to people that you are worthy of their visits to your site. You prove your worth to them in the posts and replies they read elsewhere. Remember it wont necessarily be the person whom you are responding to who will read your post. Days, months and years later your posts will be held online and indexed by search engines. If what you say is valuable to any reader, they will continue to read your posts and your link will be right there for them to click on.

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Writing a good blog post…. where was I again?

Mar 15

Posted by admin in Web Site development

Do you find writing a difficult subject? Is the idea in your head but when it comes time to writing it down, your mind goes blank and nothing can kick start your momentum? Maybe you can recall having a homework essay in school to do, and always putting it off. Or maybe when you are writing, you look over what you have just written and it doesn’t make sense in any context. Or it makes sense to you, but if you give it to someone else to check over they just do not seem to get the point you are trying to make. Or worse, a reader becomes bored and just doesn’t pay attention to what you have to say; their review is “I read it over, it looks fine”

I remember when I was in Primary school, aged 9. Every Thursday we were asked to write 10 short sentences, each containing a different word we had learned to spell during the week. These were not difficult words; I used them in every day speaking to my classmates, teachers and parents. However, when it came to conjuring sentences on paper containing these words, my mind just stopped. “What do I write? How do I begin? What story could I imagine that could possibly contain this word?”

I admit that writing is not one of my strong points. Not that that has really been a problem for me because my writing and communication skills were good enough to pass my maths and computing exams in school, in uni and then finally to get jobs in computer programming.

Unfortunately, beginning to write here has unearthed my ‘writer’s block’ of never being able to start what I mean to say. This is particularly painful when it comes to writing blogs, considering their key method of communication is by the written word. To address this I have decided to go back to a familiar question. “Why am I doing this?”

I want to make people happier by reading my blog. To do this I need to write so that readers will actually want to read and can understand my points clearly. I need to attune my writing skills to provide the ability to communicate. This will not only allow the articulation of my ideas in better form, but it would allow readers to more easily and enjoyably understand what it is I am trying to say (or write)

The key to being a good writer appears to be, as with most things, Practise, Practise, Practise! Seek out opportunities for writing and where it will be read and appreciated. For me, this site serves that purpose. Getting feedback on what you do is also very important; experts can have a better outside view of your work and can give more reliable feedback and help for those who wish to improve.
I also intend to look into writing classes online or at college. A quick google search has shown up lots of websites about how to write blogs and websites, it would just be a matter of time to find something that works for you.

If you have similar feelings about writing, the worst thing you can do is bury your head in the sand. There will always be times in your life, professional or otherwise, when your writing skills are required for use. Wouldn’t it be great if you could be prepared any time for writing without having to worry about your ability, being stuck what to write, or creating a piece that people just don’t want to read?

I ask that you give yourself a little review of your own writing skills. What have you done in the past? Did the reader (or in some cases, the customer) like it? Do you have any upcoming essays? What can you do to improve your skill and confidence in such undertakings?

Please let me know what you think by leaving a comment or email.

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30 days and 30 nights…

Mar 13

Posted by admin in Web Site development

Following on from my previous post ‘The virtues of an early start’ I find myself on day 3. Getting back from work about 4:45 instead of 7:00, I find I have lots of energy left to do other things that I would otherwise never find the time to do.

With this in mind, I have set an aim for myself of writing 1 post every two days until I go on holiday to Hong Kong on April 8th. This leaves me with 30 days from now, equating to 15 posts.

For me this seems like a huge commitment, considering that this is 5 times more than the amount of posts I’ve previously written!

The biggest difficulties I have considered are: Time and Content. Will I have enough time to spend writing one entry every two days for 30 days? And will I be able to write enough interesting content?

Time for me feels the biggest issue. By time I mean free time in which I feel fine to use my mind for creative output. By waking up early I have realised quite how much extra time there is now available to me. But how much of that time can I give to thinking and writing? There are always other things which need attending to; such as household chores, shopping, repairing the car and seeing friends and family.

Content is the other major issue. I have only written when I’ve had a particular burning desire to, so what if there are times when I just have no inclination to write about something?

Instead of just hoping for the best, I have decided to take actions to address these issues by asking myself a question. ‘Why am I doing this?’

The reason why I started a website is because I want to become happier person. I become happy by doing things which make me happy. The thought of making other people happy is something that makes me happy! A website would help me achieve this by allowing my views and content to be shared throughout the world. It will help me articulate and shape vague ideas I have floating about.

When it comes to ideas, I always have countless half-baked wonderings and plans just waiting to be realised into something. The trouble is of course that they either get forgotten in favor of ‘real life’ events such as work, or because I haven’t thought about them properly a clear articulation is impossible and never comes into existence.

By imposing this aim of writing an entry once every two days for 30 days, it will lead me into a practise of thinking, planning and writing; valuable communication skills which will not only benefit me but also the reader.

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