I decided to upload the file with the File Manager which is accessible from Hostgator’s cpanel. When doing it, I discovered that various folders which belong to olivetalks’s WordPress installation can be easily seen in web browser by editing the URL in the address bar. For example, olivetalks.com/wp-content/uploads/ or olivetalks.com/wp-includes/

Currently these links are already fixed but here’s an image of how this was before:

Check your own WordPress blog, it’s possible that you will encounter the same issue even if your WordPress installation is not hosted with Hostgator.

Now that I got your attention, here’s a short description of how to fix this problem. In the main folder of your WordPress installation (the one which contains three folders wp-admin, wp-content and wp-includes) find file called .htaccess (dot at the beginning of the name is important). If the file is not there create it (and set the permissions to 0644). In any case edit the file and add this line:

Options -Indexes

This line will tell Apache (the most popular web server) not to show listings of directories. The configuration applies to the folder where the .htaccess file is located and recursively to all its sub-folders.

After updating .htaccess file – if you try any of the problematic folders you’ll see that their content cannot be seen any more:

Now it’s all right

Related post(s)

• Inodes 28 weeks later… (2)
• Is your colleague spying on you? (0)
• The 5 stages of bloggers (3)
• Blogging strategies: length, frequency and topics (3)
• The return of the inodes – tell me your package and I’ll tell you your inodes (6)

Blow them out of the water.

First let us define what is meant here by a great blog post. I am assuming that if you are reading this post you are looking for ways to increase the readership of your blog and that is what I am going to focus on – how to write a blog post which will bring lots of readers to your blog.

Hook them and keep them.

The definitions are out of the way and now we can focus on the meat of the issue. You want to write a fantastic post which will result in lots of visitors to your blog. There are three parts to achieving this goal:

• hook – the readers find your post
• sink – the readers find the post interesting
• liner – the readers spread the word about your post

All three parts are essential in order to create a great post. They work best if combined together. Thanks to the synergy their effectiveness reaches its maximum.

The hook

First you need to somehow put the post in front of as many eyeballs as possible. The way to catch the attention of your steady readers is to start with a good title and follow with a great opening. Attracting new readers who do not know yet about your blog is different; use the right keywords in the post so it gets picked up by the search engines, then apply a bit of SEO. You can also place the links to your post in relevant online forums. Be careful as this method works best if the post is truly connected to the issues discussed on the forum.

The sink

People are starting to read your post. Now you need to make sure they keep reading till the very end. You can guarantee this will happen by thinking of a topic and a goal for the post before you start writing it. Both the topic and the goal have to be crisp and clear. You cannot afford to confuse your readers. After you have the post content written it is absolutely crucial that you edit it – this step is essential if you want to end up with a great post. Some of the content will be thrown away during editing, this is normal and expected.

The liner

The readers like your post and feel good about having read it. You want them to tell other people about it, to spread the news. They will be more likely to do this if your post is in some way useful to them and if the content is still current. These types of posts will bring traffic to the whole blog over a long time not only for a short while. They’re known as Pilar Articles, Flagship Content or Cornerstone Content. Regardless of the name you chose for these posts they will be the workhorse of your blog. They will be linked to by other people and they will rank highly in the search engines. All these factors will contribute to bringing you more traffic.

The synergy

Use effectively all three parts of the process to end up with a wildly successful post. Perfection is rarely achieved the first time; you will get better if you do it again and again. You’re bound to hit it true. Happy and successful writing!

Related post(s)

• Today olivetalks celebrates three months (5)
• How to feed Google properly (2)
• One Size Does Not Suit All (4)
• The 5 stages of bloggers (3)
• Blogging strategies: length, frequency and topics (3)

These months have been fun. Interesting. Insightful. Intriguing. Stressful. Addictive. Addictive!? Yes, blogging is addictive. But not at the beginning, later. Later you say? Yes, later. Bloggers go through 5 different stages. 5? Yeah, that’s the number of stages I have observed so far. You mean like the 7 stages of grief? Kind of. Really? Yeah. How do you know? I went through them. But if only you went through them… well, and ZoltarStark. Two peas in a pot. True, but the olivetalks team’s experiences served to create the theory and now we are testing it. I know personally two other bloggers who have started blogging recently and I can see at what stage they are at the moment. Really? Yeah. So these two bloggers will serve to test the olivetalks-blogging-theory? Well, the two bloggers serve as our first two “guinea pigs” to check our theory. To test your olivetalks-blogging-theory? Now you named our theory, not us. Well, it’s a cool name. Ok. So what are the names of the stages? They are… And does every blogger stay in each stage the same amount of time? Well,… And can a blogger go backwards? What? I mean, if a blogger passes a stage, can they go back to a previous stage later on? eeeh… And do you think there will be more stages? Hey! let me tell you the 5 stages first! Then ask! ok…

olivetalks-5-stages-blogging-theory (oh, crap, the name stuck) He, he, he… Shut up! ok…

1. Blog fright
2. Blog doubt
3. Blog fever
4. Blog exhaustion (plus blog stats plunge panic attack)
5. Blog peace

1. Blog fright

It takes the blogger a few weeks or even months to come up with that super cool name the blog will have. The blogger finally buys the domain, obtains a hosting service and sets up the Wordpress or b2evolution or Blogger or… blog. And then… nothing. All the cool ideas he/she had for the blog disappear. All they can think of writing is “Hi, my name is yyy, and this is my blog. Hope you read me”.

For the blogger to gain confidence and improve from this post (or even several posts) to less timid posts can take days if not weeks. It is a daunting moment. The blogger suddenly realizes what they write might be read and their opinions criticized, ridiculed or… ignored.

2. Blog doubt

The blogger starts writing posts with a bit more confidence. He/She sees it is not so hard and hey, what he/she wrote the previous night is actually interesting… And then the blogger checks the stats and realizes that nobody but their mother has read the posts. Hmmm… is it because the posts I have written are not that interesting? Will anybody ever read my blog? What’s the point? Am I not thinking too much of myself for believing I could blog and people might want to know what I have to say? Should I not just stop? What if blogging is not for me?? - The blogger cries with amounting panic.

3. Blog fever

Suddenly, after a few (a couple, a dozen, a hundred…) posts, a Googler reaches one of the blogger’s posts. A Googler means someone, not family, looked for something using a search engine like Google or Yahoo, and found the link to a post of the blogger and actually pressed it and visited the blog. The blog has been found! It has been read! If the blog has something like Clustrmaps or any other kind of map that shows where the visitor’s to the blog come from, the map might even have an extra dot (besides the ones marking the author’s location and his/her mother’s).

The blog has been read (doesn’t matter if it was only by a couple of random visitors from even more random cities), the blog’s raison d’être, has been discovered. And here starts a period where the blogger needs to publish every day. The blogger cannot see but posts in every task/story/anecdote/experience of the day. All day’s activities become posts with titles, tags, categories… The blogger cannot go to sleep even if it is 5 am in the morning and he/she must get up to go to work in an hour, if the day’s post has not been published.

And if a comment is by any chance left by someone (again, not a blood-relative), the “hyper-ness” will prevent the blogger from sleeping that night completely.

4. Blog exhaustion (plus blog stats plunge panic attack)

Suddenly, because of a work deadline, a trip, an absolute physical/mental breakdown or a blogging aversion reaction, the blogger will stop writing posts. The blogger will try to think of things to write about and will come up empty handed (empty headed?). He/she will feel their brain is depleted. All there was to say, has been said. Feck the blog and its overpowering control of my life! – the blogger will scream to the silent computer.

And days/weeks/months without posts will pass by. And the world will still go round even though the blogger has not published anything in two days, a week, two weeks, a month… But out of curiosity, the blogger will check the stats from time to time. The stats will show that the number of visits continue to increase. How can that be??? Maybe the quality of the posts wasn’t so bad, and Googlers keep finding the posts. So without posting new things, people still come? Wow! Forever? Will they?…

OH! NO! The stats went down!

One day the number of visits will drop, maybe only slightly or not really overall, just at a particular time or day, but the blogger will suffer the blog stats plunge panic attack and the fear of losing those readers will prompt the blogger to go back to writing…

5. Blog peace

After the blog stats plunge panic attack the blogger will realise two things: blogging must be done regularly to keep the visitors coming but it must be done without losing oneself in the process. A new post doesn’t have to be published every day. Blogging must be done as long as it is entertaining not as a compulsory task. If it is raining, it can be quite nice to sit in front of the laptop and write a new story for your blog, but if it is sunny, dude (or dudette) go out!

The end of the 5 stages of bloggers.. until a 6 one is found…

What do you think? Are they true? Did you go through those stages? Do you find yourself in one of those stages? Did you “lose” someone to blogging? How long…

Woman, now you are the one asking loads of questions…

Oops, true.

Related post(s)

• Blogging strategies: length, frequency and topics (3)
• How to feed Google properly (2)
• Security problem with WordPress (2)
• How to write a great blog post? (0)
• Today olivetalks celebrates three months (5)

When starting a new blog, three doubts arise:

1. Should the posts be long or short
2. Should new posts appear every day (even more than once?) or every few days?
3. What should the posts be about?

1. Length of the posts

ZoltarStark already went through the differences between post lengths in his post One Size Does Not Suit All post. He compared short and to the point posts with more detailed articles, concluding that both had their audience. People that have little time will not read posts that look long, while those looking for detailed information on a subject will pass your blog if they see you only say a sentence on their topic of interest.

2. Frequency of posts

Two extremes: when several new posts appear each day (with the risk of regular readers getting overwhelmed); when no new posts appear in over a week, or even worse, a month (in this case the risk is readers might think the blog is “dead” and not come back). Then there is the in-between position: 2-3 of posts per week on average.

3. The blog’s topics/subjects

There are three main types of blogs: a. where different subjects are discussed, b. where all the posts have something in common, c. personal blogs.

1. multi-subject blogs: where one day the post will be about the dangers of fireworks and the next day about how to make your guinea pig understand Linux.
2. blogs with a main aim/topic behind them: they may talk about different aspects or subjects, but they will have an idea in common (for example Computer blogs or Theatre-reviews blogs like Hairline).
3. personal blogs: where the author shares his/her experiences in life, stories, anecdotes, etc.

While blog types b and c will be able to create a group of followers or regular readers, type a will have it a bit harder. If the posts have little in common besides the author(s), it will be difficult to keep a “faithful” group of readers. For example, in olivetalks readers of the Xen posts will probably not be interested in the Rio Hair Laser Remover ones, and viceversa. But it will be easier to have new visitors arriving in blog types a and b from search engines like Google, because it is more likely they will discuss topics that are currently searched for by Internet users.

So… all in all, balance is the answer? What about real examples?

What I have done is compare the Wordpress stats of two quite different blogs which have been running along a similar period of time: olivetalks and elblogboyacense.

• olivetalks is a “long(ish) posts + medium post frequency + type a” kind of blog. It has posts on quite a variety of topics (I mean, look at the categories, and you’ll agree). The posts are not short, but so far we haven’t published any that went on and on. And we have published an average of 1 post every second day.
• elblogboyacense on the other hand is a “short posts + very frequent + type b” kind of blog. They publish several posts per day which are usually only a few lines long (10 tops) and all the posts have a common denominator: they might be interesting to the people in the Department of Boyacá in Colombia. They have published about 3 posts per day.

Oh, and while olivetalks is mostly in English (with the odd post in Catalan), elblogboyacense is only in Spanish. So pretty much, two completely different blogs.

The people of elblogboyacense were kind enough to share their visitor’s statistics with us for comparison purposes. We have plotted the visitors to both blogs per day (for the last 30 days), week and month (beware that elblogboyacense is a month younger than olivetalks. Also that we are only counting the posts of Monday for week 15th and only the 7 first days of the month for April, and hence the apparent decrease in visits in the last data point in each graph).

1. visitors per day

2. visitors per week

3. visitors per month

As you can see we are having approximately the same success! Both seem to be increasing at the same rate and have a similar average of visits per day (about 70 visits per day for olivetalks and 85 for elblogboyacense). In spite of blogging in completely different ways! Curious isn’t it? Just chance?

So if you want to spend two hours writing a post, you will probably be ok with only publishing every few days. On the other hand, if you prefer to write short posts, it might be better if you publish at least one, if not more, every day. And if you want to have regular readers, decide on the characteristics of your posts and your target audience, and always remember those characteristics when writing new posts.

What remains to be seen is the stats for a type c kind of blog. I have my eye on The Stork, The Guinea Pig & The Elephant, a new personal blog that started 2 weeks ago. I’ll try to convince the author to let me access his stats when it reaches two/three months of life. In the meantime, if any reader has a personal blog he/she would not mind comparing blog-type vs stat results with us, drop us a note!

PS. LadyRostand would like to thank the team of elblogboyacense for allowing her to use their Wordpress Stats for this article: Saludos y gracias desde olivetalks al equipo y los lectores de elblogboyacense.

Related post(s)

• The 5 stages of bloggers (3)
• How to feed Google properly (2)
• Security problem with WordPress (2)
• How to write a great blog post? (0)
• Today olivetalks celebrates three months (5)

The second month of olivetalks brought a continuation of the Rio Laser and Xen sagas, including some of their most successful posts so far which will be dealt with in more detail in the soon to be published post by ZoltarStark. Besides that we’ve published more miscellaneous posts about computers and a failed attempt at sarcasm. The average daily amount of viewers during the second month was seen to steadily climb to almost double the result from January. The olivetalks writers were very busy that month, trying to post something every day as documented in the upcoming post by LadyRostand.

The third month of our blog has showed an even faster growth, the total amount of views in March was over 50% higher than January and February combined! This surprised us a bit but nonetheless we are very happy with the olivetalks performance. We put at least part of the “blame” on the new fashion sense of the blog. The average daily amount of viewers in March was more than twice than in February. All that in spite of the writers changing the blogging strategy and publishing higher quality posts while reducing the posting frequency to half of the preceding months. LadyRostand is writing a post about the two main blogging strategies – often short posts or less often but longer ones. ZoltarStark will give some insights into publishing posts which attract many viewers based on our experiences with olivetalks.

Well done olivetalks

And thank you all our readers for your support, your comments or just showing up from different search engines. A blog without you, the readers, would not be half as fun!

Related post(s)

• How to write a great blog post? (0)
• One Size Does Not Suit All (4)
• The 5 stages of bloggers (3)
• Blogging strategies: length, frequency and topics (3)
• How to feed Google properly (2)

image 1

image 2

Yes, I’ve gone inside the beast and turned it upside down. It’s been quite entertaining changing parameters, font-sizes, colors, images, layouts… This morning I got up at 8 am to try to upload the new theme before any viewers visited us. It took me two and a half hours because some glitches appeared. The biggest one was that the Excerpt Editor plugin we are using started causing some errors like

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of ... bytes exhausted (tried to allocate ... bytes) in .../wp-includes/post.php on line 127

but it was readily solved by disabling the Auto-Generate options of the plugin, which as far as we can see, are not really needed.

We have tested our new design in Firefox, IE6 and Opera and 3 different laptops. Now it’s your turn to let us know what do you think of the new layout and any problems that might arise in your browsers or computers. Oh, and any questions regarding modifying the Cordobo Green Park theme, are welcome! I have become quite an expert at tweaking it…

Related post(s)

• olivetalks redesign (3)

First let me introduce the meaning of the title tags since while discussing the topic with LadyRostand we realized it’s not as clear as we thought. It all started in 1980 … – OK let’s not go back so far, even though the beginnings of HTML are really related to the matter at hand. The title tag is what your web browser displays in the title bar. It’s basically the title of the page. Big deal, you say, I knew that. Sure, it’s not a big deal, it’s rather simple. The big deal is that when Google, Yahoo, MSN or any other search engine is indexing your page they pay big attention to this title. Why? The title is supposed to be a summary of your post. It’s not supposed to be witty or funny. It’s just a summary.

So if you write a post about installing an external USB enclosure you better give it a good Google friendly title tag. Like for example: “Enermax EB307S-B Jazz: installing external USB enclosure” rather than “That’s how I’ve learned to like Jazz”. Now the second one is funnier but Google has no sense of humor (quite a big shortcoming if you ask me) and it interprets the title tags rather literally. After seeing the title tag it will “make up its mind” about what should be the content of the page. If the page content doesn’t match it will lower your ranking in the search engine results. Why? How would you like to see a page about penguins (or more likely porn if you’re using the same Internet as I do) when you were searching for rabbits? See, if the search engines didn’t compare the page content with the page title they would allow pages to be ranked high for results to which they are not relevant. I think I’m mumbling here a bit. Basically it’s a technique to prevent or at least reduce web spam.

Back to the “That’s how I’ve learned to like Jazz” post. So far you know that the title tag as seen by the search engines should be relevant to the content of the post. It should be even devoid of articles and include relevant keywords. Now it starts to sound more like a super concentrated abstract. In fact, that’s what it is. The problem is that this super concentrated soup of keywords is not very human friendly and believe me you are really writing for humans not for search engines.

OK, so is there a way to have nice human friendly post titles where you can show off your wit and at the same time allow for high keyword concentration in the title tag? Yes, it’s possible. In fact, if you’re using Wordpress for your blog it’s just one plug-in away. The plug-in we’re using here at olivetalks is called SEO Title Tag. Once you install it you can have a separate post title for human consumption and a title tag to feed the search engines.

Installing SEO Title Tag plug-in is rather simple. First download it from this location. Then you need to unzip the file and upload the whole seo-title-tag directory to the wp-content/plugins directory of your blog. After that you activate the plug-in using Wordpress admin. The default options are just fine so you don’t need to change them. Editing the Header in Theme Editor is also unnecessary even though it’s included in the plug-in installation instructions.

With SEO Title Tag plug-in already installed you can now see “Title Tags” under “Manage” in the Wordpress admin. Here’s where you can quickly mass update the title tags of your existing posts. You can also do it by editing individual posts – you’ll notice a new field “Title Tag (optional)” which appears below “Save” button. The field “Title Tag (optional)” will also appear when you edit a new post.

In this post you can see that the title of the post (for humans) is different than the title which appears in the title bar (for search engines). So now everybody is well fed… and happy.

Related post(s)

• How to write a great blog post? (0)
• The 5 stages of bloggers (3)
• Blogging strategies: length, frequency and topics (3)
• Security problem with WordPress (2)
• Today olivetalks celebrates three months (5)

After looking at few different options we’ve selected Cordobo Green Park as a base for our new design. Cordobo Green Park is a three column theme with widgets support. It was originally designed for http://chungo.net/ a German site about file sharing.

If you want to know how does the theme look like here’s a screen shot:

Related post(s)

• The new design of olivetalks is out! (5)

“I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it short.”

- Blaise Pascal

Jakob initially assumes that shorter articles have slightly higher information density than the long ones. The assumption makes sense – in most articles one can remove some fragments without affecting the value provided by the text. It might take extra time spent editing but the readers will appreciate it. With that model the preference is for the short articles so make sure to spend some time editing your articles with intention of reducing the length.

“Variety is the soul of pleasure.”

- Aphra Behn

Later though Jakob takes into account situations where the longer articles provide more value because the reader needs in-depth information. The readers still generally prefer short articles but not exclusively. Their “diet” now contains both short and long articles since the readers are trying to optimize their cost/benefit ratio. So with this mixed model you need to write both short summaries and longer comprehensive posts. This way you provide better match for the readers’ needs.

In the end there’s no simple answer. Too much depends on the target audience of your blog. If you’re looking for lots of visitors then shorter articles will be more useful for you since people find it easier to spend one minute reading a short post than five, ten or even more to digest a much longer paper. If you’re writing for people who really need to know something then longer articles are the way to go since there’s a limit to how much you can fit into a short summary. There’s also the middle road where you write both short and long posts to attract large readership and to also cater for a smaller but more interested subset seeking a deep understanding of the subject matter. What exactly should be the perfect ratio of short and long articles is a matter of defining your audience, trying out different options, experimenting and then choosing what works best. This article should give you a good starting point but the final answer is up to you.

Related post(s)

• How to write a great blog post? (0)
• Today olivetalks celebrates three months (5)
• The 5 stages of bloggers (3)
• Blogging strategies: length, frequency and topics (3)
• How to feed Google properly (2)