This Blog’s Woe Continues

[ad#ad-4]And when I thought, after spending a lot of hours, that my misery with this blog’s host is over, I received a message from a friend that he cannot click on any of my older posts without getting an error.  I have a feeling that this would spell doom for my current blog host.  This one can no longer be ignored.  It’s a good thing that renewal for my domain registration is coming up so I think it’s going to be “Hello, Godaddy!”

Finally!

After more than 10 days of god-awful downtime, I’m finally back on my feet again. No it wasn’t laziness or sloth on my part this time. I wasn’t able to update this blog because of a little something called php memory. I’m sure one of you may have chanced on this blog when it was only showing a couple of sentences saying fatal error. It was in fact a fatal error. I couldn’t log-in to my wordpress dashboard and it’s all because of that frigging php memory thing. It’s a painful lesson in small print that every self-hosted blogger should know about, especially when one is using that absolutely fantastic Wordpress blogging platform.

Being a non-techie person like most bloggers, when I decided to go for a hosting plan, I only looked at two things(aside from the cost of course); storage capacity, and monthly bandwidth allocation. Who the heck cares about php memory right? Well apparently, php memory is way more important. You see, even cheap hosting offers a lot of storage and bandwidth to convince the newbie blogger. Php memory however, is one of those things that are usually left unsaid, but when you least expect it, this thing turns around and bites you in the butt.

According to the technical person I talked to, when I was getting all those fatal error messages from my blog, every hosting account they sell is only allocated a maximum of 10Mb’s worth of memory. Enough to make your eyes bulge right? But of course at this point you still don’t know what eats up that memory, so enough with the pretension. J/K. Well as explained very thoroughly to me, Wordpress is very php heavy. A lot of its themes and plugins are developed using this programming language. So for guys like me who likes to keep a mountain of themes stashed in my WP-themes folder, 10Mb gets consumed really, really fast. Couple that with at least 30 plugins (all written in php) installed, what we have is a recipe for disaster. The technician was even so bold as to tell me that I was actually consuming 3x that memory limit!

The lesson here is that we need to be really cognizant of these little things. I believe I can be forgiven for not knowing this beforehand and luckily on a good day this blog only earns around $0.01 from all the advertising I put in here. Just imagine if this were a really profitable blog with hundreds of dollars a day in earnings! The several days worth of downtime could have really cost me some serious dollar. Perhaps it’s also a wake up call for me not to be too trigger happy when I see new themes and plug-ins. Sure, having nice zings and dings for our blog is awesome, but it shouldn’t be a blog-breaker. It’s very important to do some housekeeping every once in a while just to ensure that there’s no unused php hogs just lying around.

Other than that, it’s happy blogging all around.

Don’t Lose Your Blog’s Competitive Traffic Advantage

I am feeling Google’s wrath. My posts are getting harder to get indexed these days. Even those articles where I should have the number 1 page ranking are getting too slow to be recognized. Those sites that have included my posts in their daily aggregations are getting the benefit. How do I feel so smug that I should get the page 1 ranking for my selected keywords you say? Well, it’s all thanks to Market Samurai. But that’s another story for another entry.

I’ve noticed recently that my page rank has gone down to 2 from a lofty high of 3 a few weeks back. Good think I didn’t go into sponsored posts and all that, otherwise I’d be looking at a fat zero right now. My particular sin was not updating my blog as often as I should. Blame it on human frailty or lack of inspiration, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that when Google’s spiders came crawling again and again to this site, the lack of new material apparently created a huge impression. So after a while, they stopped coming regularly. I still have to check the regularity in which they index my blog this days but I’m almost positive that it can’t be more than once every two weeks. I think there’s a wordpress plugin somewhere that I can use to remedy this somehow but I still have to search for it.

What I’ve done, is a violation of a blog’s purpose. A blog is supposed to have regular updates otherwise it won’t be any different from any other plain vanilla website on the internet. Come to think of it, why are blogs so popular with search engines? There are a lot of reasons really, but the most glaring are these:
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1. Agility - because blogs are relatively small websites, we are able to move as quickly as we want. And usually that’s what search engines like about blogs. We are able to churn out fresh content regularly. And you know how search engines love content. This, sadly, was my mortal sin. I got bitten by the real life bug, and that kept me away from this blog for an inordinate amount of time. You see for blogs, search engines are like jealous lovers, you ignore them for some time, and they ignore you back in return. I wasn’t updating as much as I should have and this was contrary to what being a blogger is all about– fresh content served regularly.

2. Flexibility - unless you’re maintaining a tight niche, bloggers can post whatever they want on their site. Notice how esoteric some popular blog’s contents are? Ideally they should be writing about things that are central to their blog’s existence. But they’re not. A lot of them engage in what they call keyword hijacking. You research a few popular keywords and hope to find a jewel that isn’t so competitive and then focus your energy on creating a few pages around that keyword. Some would engage in trend wars (you find an event that’s gonna be really popular in a given period and write the hell out of those events). This is no wonder why folks(myself included) would suddenly be writing about board exam results and some popular celebrities. For these trendy posts a very helpful indicator is Google Trends.

3. Maneuverability - Blogs, being what they are can easily be retooled or refashioned to suit the blogger’s moods. I think I’ve changed templates more than you can shake a stick at. With the blog platforms that we currently have, as long as you know your way around these platforms, changing your blog’s look is a walk in the park and something that can be done as often as you want. It keeps things fresh and your readers interested.

4. Interactivity - A blog that’s not interactive is no blog at all. This is one of blogging’s greatest strength. With good, regular content, a community of followers and readers is born. The important thing is not to be lazy and just wait on your fat ass for these readers to come. Go to other blogs, forums, social media.. Put your blog out there and comment to your heart’s content. And your community will come, and if they like what they see, they will come back for more. Not everyone will feel the need to comment right away though, but if your content is engaging enough, people will reciprocate. A lot of widgets have been created because of this sense of community. There’s Disqus, Sezwho, etc.. A blog’s interactivity breeds a community. Never lose sight of this advantage.

5. Constantly Evolving - compared to a static site, blogs are constantly evolving. Thanks to the legions of widget/plugin makers and theme designers, blogging is more dynamic than ever. The usually clunky websites recognize this and thus they have come up with pages of their sites dedicated to blogging.

Blogging makes sense in a lot of areas- keeping the customers abreast of what’s happening, pleasing the search engines, adding that youthful touch—but the thing is, if we start losing sight of our blog’s purpose and why it’s there and we start procrastinating or taking a lot of time off between posts, our blogs lose their competitive advantage. It becomes a static site that spiders will try and avoid.

The thing to do so you avoid the pitfall of procrastination and ensure that your blog doesn’t die of neglect is to make a realistic goal for posting. You could start with a goal to always update your blog every week. This is very attainable I think, and this is why I’m taking my own advice.

How about you? What is your goal?