An interesting post on 45n5 is titled “About Pages Are Not About You.” The point 45n5 makes is that “about pages” should provide visitors with information related to what can be found on the site. He also provides an interesting video that goes into the idea in more detail.

I decided to take a look at my about page here on Exit78 to see if I could improve on it.

Exit78 is a personal blog. As such, I think that it’s appropriate for some personal information to be included. The blog, as it says at the top of each page, includes “observations, reflections, and a few images from a life of early retirement by a part-time traveler.” But what are those observations, reflections and images about? When I went to my about page, I found, sure enough, that there was nothing there that would tell a visitor what they might expect to find other than that the blog was intended to be a vehicle for me to self-publish material related to some of the things that I am interested in — and that I hoped others might be interested in.

So I tweaked on the page a bit and added some info on some of what might be found on the blog.

Now, maybe some folks who check the page will have a better idea of what’s on the blog and want to stick around a bit or come back for a visit.

… or not.

I took a look at the about pages some of the more popular blogs as ranked at Technorati:

Darren Rowse’s Problogger About page is somewhat autobiographical, but appropriate as it describes his blogging progression from hobby blogger to professional.

The Dosh Dosh About page provides succinct segments on what the blog is “all about” and “who’s responsible.”

Merlin Mann’s 43Folders About page has 5 bulleted items on topics that “come up a lot” and a relatively long bio.

A lost Exit78 post , recovered from Internet Archive WayBackMachine; July 2011

In three out of six of our blogs, we have not been receiving e-mail notifications for a couple of weeks for comments that were posted nor for comments that were being held for moderation. Two of the other blogs don’t get comments very often and the other one only gets spam comments, most of which is caught by Askimet.

My first guess was that one of the spam filters was incorrectly dumping the notifications. I changed the email address a couple of different ways to try to see if a message would be sent, but none of that worked.

After a couple of hours of frustration, I finally decided to go to the WordPress forums to see if anyone else had the same problem. I searched on the phrase comment mail and found that others had seen the same problem and that the solution was to either make sure the e-mail address the notification was sent to was named “WordPress” or delete a line of code in a php file.

I tried both.

The second one worked.

Comments

November 27, 2007

windyridge @ 8:24 pm

Yikes, I haven’t gone to 2.31 form 2.3 yet. Have you found a big difference? IOW is it worth it?

Thanks for your kind comments about my post on Random Good Stuff. I appreciate them.

Can’t type in my url, the cursor keeps jumping up to the email line!

I’ve fixed the problem — there was an coding error on one of the theme’s php pages. – Mike Goad

November 29, 2007

pete @ 3:25 pm

So that’s the bug! I just upgraded to 2.3.1 from 2.2.2 and these delivery failure messages started arriving in my inbox. Rolando at rplayground.com gave me the fix today, but this is the first I’ve seen about it in detail. Thanks for the link to the WP page.

You’re welcome! I’m just glad I was able to find a solution. It was pretty frustrating.

A lost Exit78 post , recovered from Internet Archive WayBackMachine; July 2011

Late Fall Hike — Seven Hollows Trail at Petit Jean State Park — posted at Haw Creek Out ‘n About.

After my publishing success on the first day of our camping trip last week, I didn’t follow through very well. On Saturday, last week,  we went on a hike that wore us out pretty much and that evening all I did was watch a movie. The next day we took a drive and after lunch headed back home. That evening, I believe, — or maybe it was the next — I had all of the photos uploaded to the Petit Jean 2007 flikr set. Since the photos were the main hold-up in doing the travel journal for our trip out west, using flikr will certainly help for our next trip.

A lost Exit78 post , recovered from Internet Archive WayBackMachine; July 2011

I’ve been editing and updating my blog-roll, trimming some of those that have withered on the vine (i.e. stopped posting). In the process I noticed a couple of instances where context sensitive ads didn’t quite fit the content of the blog.

On a blog about professional blogging:

• “You Have 2 Secret Crushes — 2 People Want You! Find Out Who it Is – Scary How Accurate This Is.”
• “Sick Profile Graphics — Glitters, Posters, Background Codes. Pimp Your Profile Today!”

On a personal blog of a happily married lady who lives in the mountains out west:

• Asian Friends –Search 1000s of Asian Sites. 100% Free! Find The Right Site Now.
• Single thai girls — Girls and women from Thailand searching for friends
• Abraham Lincoln — Learn Little-Known Facts About The Fascinating Life of Lincoln.
• 100% Free Personals — Meet singles in your area now. We’re 100% free for everything!

In most cases, the ads do match the content very closely. Of course, a lot of the blogs I look at either have no ads or ads that are static and don’t change with the content.

Comments

November 24, 2007

teeni @ 11:45 am

I get a kick out of seeing the mismatched ads. Maybe that is the evil streak in me?

November 25, 2007

Rose @ 4:41 pm

Right now you have a dating ad on your blog for sexy single girls. lol

November 26, 2007

CatherineL @ 5:25 am

Hi Mike – what a heap of mismatches. I don’t use contextual ads on my business blog much. They were just not accurate. Because my surname is Lawson, I was just getting too many ads about law.

Opal Tribble @ 2:41 pm

Yeah I get that occasionally on my websites that have contextual ads.
Occasionally I will use ad filtering to weed out the advertisements I don’t want.

A lost Exit78 post , recovered from Internet Archive WayBackMachine; July 2011

So much for following through on my plan not to make any more major changes until ‘08.

I did like the WordPress theme that I was using, but it wasn’t able to do some the things that can be done using WordPress 2.3. Even some of the capabilities it did have didn’t produce results that I liked.

Instead of working on some of the things I had planned on working on, I found myself browsing through WordPress themes and plug-ins, trying to find solutions.

Sure, I know that I could probably learn how to do the coding. I even looked at some books on CSS and php in a couple of bookstores, one locally and another in Little Rock.

However, I’m not a coding kind of guy. I played around with programming and database management back in the late 80s and early 90s — even had a number of computer classes besides what I learned on my own. I don’t have the patience — or interest — for it. Why try to develop something if I can find something out there that works without having to delve into the files?

Along with the new format, I’ve included links to our other blogs and web sites. I’m pretty sure that that the blog will be my new personal home page and main page for Exit78, so I will be adding a few other things to facilitate that.

This is coming together rather well so I will be writing new material soon.

Comments on “Well that didn’t last long!”

November 23, 2007

teeni @ 4:56 pm

I really like this layout so no complaints from me! And I procrastinated again this week but will hope to be posting my meme over the weekend or on Monday. So keep an eye peeled.

 

November 25, 2007

Rose @ 4:42 pm

Honestly- I don’t like this theme. lol Sorry.

A lost Exit78 post , recovered from Internet Archive WayBackMachine; July 2011

While modifying the feeds to my feed reader, I read an interesting post by John Chow, the guy who made $23,448.59 in blog income in. In There Is No Secret Formula, John says:

Making money online can summed up in four words as well: Get traffic, optimize ads. There. I’ve just given you the secret formula to getting rich on the internet.

Build traffic and optimize ads.

Sounds simple.

It’s not, or more people would be making the money that John Chow is making.

It’s NOT getting rich quick without effort. There is no magic secret formula.

It takes work. It takes talent.

Funny, he didn’t say anything about quality content. However, if you don’t have the content, you’re not going to get the traffic and you certainly won’t do well optimizing ads, if you don’t have traffic.

Create content—->—–> build traffic ——>——-> optimize ads.

Simple.

Yeah, write…

Comments

November 19, 2007

teeni @ 10:32 pm

Oh, it always just sounds so easy. Maybe it IS easy for people who are good at those sorts of things.

 

November 24, 2007

cardiogirl @ 4:39 am

Amen brutha. I am constantly amazed at certain sites with high Alexa rankings, high Google Page Rank, tons of ads that seem to generate money and ZERO interesting content! Sometimes the content is clearly written by someone who uses English as a second language.

I do not get that. I cannot wrap my head around those people’s success.

Maybe I need to go back to remedial writing. I don’t get it. How can these blogs have such high ratings? Who’s going there? This is not the LL Bean catalog where people go specifically to buy stuff.

Ugh, I really want to have quality, original fun content on my site, which I work diligently to create. But I’d like to make a bit o’ cash on the side, too. (Momma needs a new pair of Converse low tops.)

It really is painstaking work trying to market your blog, to increase traffic to make some money off your ads. Lots o’ work and you have to love your blog like a newborn child, in my opinion.

Good luck and keep on truckin’ buddy.

 

November 26, 2007

Opal Tribble @ 2:49 pm

Of course it’s easy! You just slap a big ole adsense or affiliate banner on your website and the money will start pouring in.

Unless you are already popular it will usually take a lot of work, trial & error, to find what works. Also your strategy at times will be different depending on the different revenue programs you use.

On a few of my websites I’m still testing to see what “works” for them with Vegan Momma I’ve have a good idea and am able to place things based on what I’ve learned. It might appear easy to some but it is a lot of work.

A lost Exit78 post , recovered from Internet Archive WayBackMachine; July 2011

Now this is pretty amazing. Mike Huckabee is at the top of the searches at Technorati, the self described “authority on what’s happening on the World Live Web, right now.” That means a lot of people are blogging and talking and searching about the former governor of our state, Arkansas.

Mike Huckabee wasn’t bad as governor, in my view. He did things that got Arkansas noticed, which can be good – though when he and his wife moved out of the Governor’s mansion into a mobile home, that was a bit much, even though it was a very nice, triple wide. While governor, he also set an excellent example by losing weight and going from being a pudgy politician to a very lean one.

During Huckabee’s administration, Arkansas highways went from being the some of the very worst in the nation to some of the best. Having traveled the highways of 16 other states this year on three different road trips, it was a bit of a relief each time the cross the state-line back into Arkansas. Unfortunately a couple of stretches of road that weren’t redone are close to home. I sometimes look at those as a reminder of what most of the interstate used to be like.

I’ll admit that I don’t pay a lot of attention to politics. Like so many American’s, I guess I’m just kind of burnt out on all of the partisan bickering and political gridlock. I can’t provide any more specifics about Huckabee’s administration. From what I know of him, I prefer him over the rest of the Republican pack. He can be very funny, sharp, and perceptive.

Interestingly, his hometown, Hope, Arkansas, is also claimed by William Jefferson Clinton as his boyhood home.

Some of the blogs talking about Huckabee: BLOGGERtrail, Politics and Christianity, ApologiesDemanded, Race 4 2008, Still Stacy, and many, many more. A large number of blogs are posting the YouTube video of Chuck Norris’s endorsement of Huckabee.

A lost Exit78 post , recovered from Internet Archive WayBackMachine; June 2011

Canoing On Lake Bailey (not us!)

We got to Petit Jean State Park, which is south of Morrilton, Arkansas, yesterday afternoon. It’s not a very long drive from where we live, so it didn’t take long to get here. We’ll be here one more night and head back home after lunch.

One of the things I wanted to do this weekend was to see if I could do a travel journal and process photos on a near daily basis. The last thing I did last night before going to bed was post a travel journal article to Haw Creek Out ‘n About. I had posted some images to flikr earlier. It looks like it’ll be a successful process. I’ll just need to keep on top of it on our longer trips.

I also posted some of the images to my photo blog for the weekly Photo Hunt. The topic is I love ____ (participants fill in the blank, so it’s kind of an open category week.) For more Photo Hunt submissions see the Technorati photo hunt tag page.

I’ve been a bit behind on my photo blog. My intent is to have picture for each day, not to necessarily post a new image each day. That’s kind of a picky point, but to meet the intent, if I get behind, I’ll be posting the missing images to catch up. A better way to do if I can’t post each day would be to post in advance. That way, I won’t be behind.

We’ll be going on a hike or two today and I’ll be taking more photos, some of which I hope to post this evening.

A lost Exit78 post , recovered from Internet Archive WayBackMachine; June 2011

This is the beginnings of a Mariner’s Compass king size quilt — the center.

Karen has been planning to do a new Mariner’s compass for quite some time. She is using material from a fabric line that has been discontinued, having done an extensive search to augment what she already had, including contacting the two ladies who had designed the line. They both had some left that they were willing to sell if she couldn’t find some “locally.” On our last trip to Little Rock, she found all that she needed.

Completely self-taught, Karen has become quite an accomplished quilter. For more of her quilts see her web-site and blog.

Comments

November 17, 2007

Opal Tribble @ 8:47 am

That’s a lovely quilt. I’ve been by her blog a few times. Does she sell any online? I don’t think I saw anything about that on her blog.

Karen @ 9:25 pm