I’ve been posting to one or more blogs regularly since 2005. That followed three years of running an online forum and several more years of belonging to one or more groups or forums. I became active online in 1995, but had at least a passing fancy with computers for years before.

Blogging Adventure

A latecomer to blogging, I still have managed to see the blogosphere change dramatically. Technorati was the driving force for many bloggers, a platform by which they got noticed, connected with other bloggers and, hopefully, monetized their sites. Technorati’s influence has gone the way of MySpace and Digg, virtual afterthoughts in all things Internet.

Blogging’s strength can be credited largely to WordPress which took the blogging model and ran with it. Early on, WordPress experienced the usual growing pains, but by the time Word Press 3.0 rolled out, those problems largely disappeared. Today, WP is a stable and broad platform, an excellent content management system whether you use it for blogging or other purposes.

Gone Dark

Lately, I’ve been visiting the blogging sites of some of my colleague writers and have found two that haven’t been kept up in at least six months. Both sites offered engaging and sometimes instructive content, but each appears to have ceased being updated. No word from the blogger that the work had stopped, just an aged post occupying the home page. They’ve gone dark, but nobody has turned out the light.

I understand what may be driving some bloggers to quit, especially writers who have a lot of other projects and perhaps personal websites to manage. Matt’s Musings faded in 2011 as I allowed a steady stream of contributors to fill in. I stopped accepting guest posts last May, realizing that this blog belongs to me and it is my voice I want out there. Besides, I have an ulterior motive for continuing this site. Read on and I’ll explain why giving up blogging may be your worst decision:

It is your site and your voice — How do people find you other than you making regular queries? Querying for work is great and needful, but I must admit that most of my current crop of clients found me. Matt’s Musings was one of several platforms where my writings brought me work. Without it, I would lose an important marketing tool.

You can express yourself — You can’t possibly express yourself to the degree that you want anywhere else including on Facebook, the site that seems to have the most impact on pulling people away from blogging. Sure, longer form writing is possible, but it just isn’t the same. Facebook may also delete your content if Mark Zuckerberg changes the rules again.

You own it — Unless your blog is hosted Blogspot or WordPress.com, you probably own the site and have arranged your own hosting. You dress up your site the way you want it to look and you backup your files automatically. Why contribute content to a site that you don’t own when you can connect with your readers at the home base you do own?

Your expertise can shine forth — People who are experts in anything always have a home site where their thoughts can be shared. Unless you have a redirect to a new website, people may assume you have quit writing. Why degrade your expert status by gradually disappearing or getting lost in a sea of Facebook users?

No blog, no income — It is no secret that bloggers make money off of their sites. Yes, paid links and paid content are no longer part of the mix, but a display ad can certainly be a money generator. Matt’s Musings is not a direct money maker, but I’ve garnered work through this site that pays for my web hosting and my time writing articles many times over.

Having Fun

My points here aren’t meant to dispense guilt on anyone. Your reasons for not blogging may have everything to do with your schedule, your interest and your workload. Still, I would venture to say that you have blogged for the fun of it, not worrying about grammar, syntax and a host of other rules we must follow when writing for our clients.

Those problems are now behind me, but it left a bitter taste in my mouth. Besides, with HTML I can keep my six static pages in place and leave it at that. No temptation to add a blog post and dilute my freelance writing message found here. I’m still tweaking the site to make it render nearly the same to viewers across major browser platforms; it actually looks better in Chrome and IE than it does in Firefox. Go figure.

Of course, PRBeam.com is not an end to itself. I’m hoping that it translates into new business for me while allowing small business operators to find an experienced press release copywriter who can give them what they need for less. Under my current arrangement, customers will receive a newsworthy press release for up to 400 words and distribute it themselves.

And I’m advising these same customers to use a quality distributor and to disseminate their news carefully. SEO is certainly important as is targeting your news release to the right people. Print newspapers are fading fast, but many journalists have transferred what they do to the Internet. Those people may be interested in your news too, using your release as a jumping-off place for a fresh article.

So where is my own press release announcing my press release service? I’m actually going to wait until June to publish it so that I can tend to the needs of my customers first. Besides, if PRBeam.com is a raging success, I might want to tweak that $99 offer or add a distribution option. Stay tuned!

But, WP isn’t without its share of problems, most notably its vulnerability to being exploited. Many of the updates accomplished over the past few years were rushed into place when a security issue was suddenly uncovered. A quick patch and your WP was updated; your blog safe as long as you took security problems seriously and uploaded the changes.

Google SERPs

Recently, I uncovered a problem with one of my blogs that would not have been discovered had I not stumbled upon it in the first place. It seems that some of the descriptions in Google’s SERPs had been changed from article snippets to describe porn terms.

If you are not sure what I mean, do a site search (site:yoursite.com) to see the two-three line description of what your articles are about. That description should match the article, but in the case of this website some of the filthiest terminology has replaced what should be there. Yes, you have to add a dirty word to find out if your SERPs have been hacked, but include the word porn and you’ll know for sure (site:yoursite.com porn).

Frantic, I began to search the internet for answers but found very little support. Google’s site, as usual, wasn’t much help as they explained that such descriptions are generated from the website. Which got me thinking: could there be a bit of malicious code embedded in that blog? Might that code be messing with the SERPs?

AntiVirus Plug-in

Cutting to the chase, I turned to the AntiVirus For WordPress plug-in developed by Sergej Müller for help, thinking that a rogue comment got through. Turns out that my comment files were fine, but the plug-in turned up a problem with coding in the sidebar. Specifically, “AntiVirus” scans through your WordPress theme to detect problems and it was the sidebar.php file that was shown to be infected.

Isolating the problem, I discovered that a script used to rotate ads was infected. This script was built by a web designer so we removed it (from my client’s blog) and ran the virus check again—all clean. My client will work with his designer to make sure that the replacement code passes muster.

The SERPs still reflect the other junk, but I’m sure within a few days the site the problem will pass when Google Bot crawls the site. Thankfully, most visitors wouldn’t see the problem in the first place and, if they should click on the description, they’d still be able to see the blog’s pages as normal.

Whacking Mischief

Still, who wants to have their site associated with porn? Plus, you have to wonder if such mischief would eventually cause your pages to sandboxed by the search engines. Ouch.

Since I rolled out my very first website in 2002, I have typically created at least one, sometimes two or three new sites annually. But last year was different–I pulled everything back and maintained what I had. Yes, the sour economy meant that I needed to take a pause and pause I did.

Scaling Mountains

So why create a new website? Metaphorically speaking, I enjoy climbing mountains and conquering new lands. Through the development of new websites I gain the inspiration to do what I love to do which is to write.

My new website is called Jet Venue, but the domain isn’t new. I created it in September 2006 and operated it as a job board for business aviation professionals for a few months until I decided to go with a competing site. For the past three years the domain sat dormant as I pursued other interests, but my interest in aviation never died.

Perfect Timing?

The timing for starting this site probably couldn’t be any worse–business aviation is struggling mightily, the jobs just aren’t there and a lot of people are pursuing other lines of work. Then again, Jet Venue’s timing may be perfect: things cannot get worse, therefore this budding community may be on the leading edge of a widespread recovery.

I sure hope so–a lot of people have had a terrible time of it these past few years.

Jet Venue is of significance in that I have used WordPress as the content management system for the site. WordPress as you probably know is customizable and this site also includes a forum thanks to a nifty plug-in which enables that feature.  My previous shot at running a similar community was much more complicated than this arrangement so I’m relieved with its ease of use.

Jet Venue is a business aviation community and has been designed to appeal to corporate flight attendants, cockpit crew and maintenance crewmembers.  I may eventually expand the site to encompass other areas of interest, but for now I’m planning to maintain the site with this core group of people.

One thing I’ve already learned in the two short days since it was launched is that I know who my friends are. Several people have been spreading the word with no encouragement from me.  That makes my job so much easier and also helps me to focus on other things, namely building a better community.

Feel free to stop by and check Jet Venue out!

Work Aplenty

Don't cry; it will all work out.

The website issue has to wait because my efforts to move one blog from URL A to URL B is taking me days, not hours to complete. I have discovered that larger blogs with many posts, categories, photos, tags, and what not can be more difficult to move even if you manipulate the .htaccess or php.ini files to import a large WordPress xml file.

Yes, I turned off the plugins first but even then the shrunken file is still quirky. So what I did was to break 47 months of blogging into pieces, sending bits over here and there. Even then, I discovered that some of the coding contained in various posts was presenting a problem which served to remind me to “go light” on the scripting on the new site.

A few of you have wished me well in the transition with one remarking that this sort of move can “cause more problems than what it’s worth.”

I agree!

But sometimes there are good reasons to make a move including several that I am up against:

Old theme – WordPress offers thousands of free themes, but as you might guess many of these do not age particularly well over time unless the designer keeps up with them. Few do, but who can blame them?

I am considering buying my next bunch of themes and using them instead, especially if they are being supported. I do not mind paying for something that is being looked after; Open Source has its benefits but you cannot expect people to do everything for free.

Wacky plugins – Just like themes, plugins do not always make the transition from blog update to blog update. Even when a newer version is released, I have found that they do not always work as well as they once did.

I have had the occasional plugin mess up a blog, only being able to discover which one it was by deactivating all of them en masse and then activating them one by one.

Lousy URL – When I initially started blogging in 2004, I did not have nearly the understanding I have now regarding search engine optimization and related matters. The blog I am moving sits on a site it once shared with another blog. That other blog is the one you are reading now, itself moved here two years ago.

The other blog making the transition will have its own URL which has been around for some time and was pointing to the blog until I started to make the transition last week.

Such Madness!

Confused yet? Welcome to my delirium! At some point everything will work out. Once the blog has been moved, then I will refocus my attention on the website issue and then maybe, just maybe, I will replace a few blog themes elsewhere.

WP 3.0 Looms

Being that this is release 2.9, this particular update brings us one step closer to a major overhaul of the platform which will introduce WordPress 3.0 to the world. No doubt, we’ll see several interim updates before then such as WP 2.9.1, 2.9.2, …, but when it does show up I’m sure that it’ll reflect the best of what WordPress has to offer.

Before you upgrade WordPress, you’ll want to back up your database first. Select Tools > Backup to accomplish that task, but if you’re not in the habit of regularly backing up WordPress, I suggest that you install the nifty WordPress Database Backup to automate the process. Why chance having your site crash and then discover your database (which contains all of your articles) is old and your most recent articles are no more? That’s a lot of work to lose because you failed to backup your database!

Four Significant Changes

Automattic, the company which developed and oversees WordPress, says that the following major changes have been included with WP 2.9:

1. Batch Plugin Update – I like this feature because every time that there is a significant update of WP, many of the plugins fail or don’t work quite as well as they could. That means WP plugin developers will respond by making quick changes to bring their plugins up to snuff, which also means that you may have scads of updates to handle. FYI, some of my sites have as many as 26 plugins installed, but thanks to the new batch update process, I can handle those changes at once and so can you.

2. Undo Feature – Have you ever accidentally deleted one of your posts? I can’t say that I have, but I know if I did I’d be bummed. WordPress has created a feature which will allow you to find and bring back your killed off posts, saving you a lot of grief and anxiety.

3. Image Editor – A built-in image editor makes it easier for you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images without having to leave WP and use Photoshop, Gimp, or other image editing program to get this work done. I haven’t used it yet, but if it works according to plan, then this feature will save bloggers plenty of time and remove the excuse that you don’t have time to include a photo with your work.

4. Video Embeds – I don’t do all that many video embeds across my network of blogs, but that may change now that WP 2.9 has made this task easier to accomplish. All you have to do is paste the URL of the video in your post and WP automatically converts it to an embed code. Amazing! My personal recommendation for WP pros is to use videos sparingly as they tend to slow down the loading of your site. Too many videos on one page and your visitors may move on. Still, the updated feature sounds like a good one to me.

Upgrade Now

How do you perform an update to WordPress 2.9? That’s easy. A drop down notice is sitting on the top of your screen in the administrative control panel. Click on it and choose either to “upgrade automatically” or “download 2.9” and do the latter yourself. I always select automatic updates once I know everything is backed up and I haven’t had a problem yet.

Scheduling your blog posts can help you maintain control over your site, while giving you the opportunity to write when your creative juices are flowing.

This article is dedicated to Dominique who solicited my thoughts on blogging in advance. Make sure you check out her blog, An Unlikely Perspective 2, to find out what is on Dominique’s mind.

How Often Do You Write?

One question that some bloggers have about blogging concerns their writing schedule. At some point, you’ll discover a rhythm that works best for you – perhaps you like posting on Mondays and Thursdays or maybe you prefer a more frequent schedule which includes Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and the weekend. Or whatever.

Regardless of how often you write, you can probably agree with the following sentiment – there are days when inspiration flows, but there are other times when you’d rather not write. However, by not adhering to a consistent schedule your blog could eventually fall to the wayside, perhaps even die. No serious blogger would allow that to happen to their blogs which for some folks serves as an extension of themselves.

Scheduling Your Articles

An important way to ensure that your blog is always fresh is to write articles in advance and schedule them to appear (drip) at certain times and on specified days. Even though I don’t have to tell you, I wrote this article on Labor Day when things were quiet and slow. I completed the article shortly before noon, then took the rest of the day off. Thanks to scheduling, I have enough articles set to appear on my other blogs for the coming days as well.

What this ultimately means is that I can work writing around my own schedule without being tied down – a measure of freedom I want and crave. Likely, you feel the same way too.

Assuming that your blog platform allows you to schedule articles in advance, developing a schedule certainly makes sense. Even though the calendar says September, I’m already thinking about articles I’ll write for the remainder of the year, including seasonal topics such as Thanksgiving and Christmas. I may write and schedule my Christmas message in November, especially if I feel particularly inspired.

Three Tips For Successful Article Preparation

Of course, there are a few things to keep in mind when writing in advance:

Don’t Date Yourself – You may think it odd to write your new year’s message when the leaves have yet to change, but that’s something entirely up to you. If I’m writing well in advance, particularly for a holiday, I write as if the holiday is in the present or “today” – not the future. That goes without saying that you should never reference the actual date when you wrote your article – your readers don’t need that distraction nor will they care.

Pick And Choose – With several of my blogs, I usually write one or two articles in advance, but with one particular blog I go much further. For example, sometimes I’ll write an article about a special event taking place one or two months out, then I fill in the remaining dates here or there.

Don’t Force It – One bad habit to avoid when writing in advance is to force yourself to write when you aren’t prepared to write. I have a personal policy that works well for me – I write only when inspired. Maybe I have only one article to write; perhaps three or more. If I write when my creative juices aren’t flowing, then I’ll torture myself to complete the task. And, who wants to read tortured writing?

In the end, writing in advance is something completely up to you. Sometimes, I will write in advance and amend the article before it is published. There are other situations where I’ll change the date when an article is to appear. My readers aren’t aware of these changes, but I like to maintain control over the publication process as that gives me the freedom to write and publish as I see fit.

Photo Credit: Maxime Perron Caissy

Please read on as I share five foundational principles to help you decide whether blogging is right for you:

If you're seriously considering launching your own blog, you'll want to consider several important points first.

Your Topic – Some blogs are narrowly focused, discussing one topic or perhaps a segment pertaining to that topic. For instance, if you enjoy cars but are particularly passionate about car parts, then your blog will likely cover everything and anything related to replacement parts, accessories or other aftermarket products. But, you don’t have to limit yourself to one topic, especially if your blog is along the lines of a “my thoughts” site which, by the way, is what this blog is all about! Generally if something comes to mind, I’ll talk about it and I assume that there are enough people who are interested in listening to what I have to say to check in on me every once in awhile.

Your Voice – Many bloggers aren’t particularly gifted writers but don’t let that stop you from sharing what is on your mind. Having passion for a particular topic is important as readers can quickly determine if you’re interested in the topic at hand or not. Over time, your writing will improve, if you stick with it and are open to constructive criticism. The operative word here is “constructive” because you’ll always encounter anonymous trolls who are destructive and care nothing about you.

Your Site – Though many bloggers will disagree with me on this point, it is perfectly fine for you to start a blog through Blogspot, Live Journal or WordPress, but keep this in mind: you may not have full control over your site which in some cases may forbid you from running ads on your site. I use WordPress to power this blog, but WordPress doesn’t manage it. I do. I own the domain and I pay for monthly hosting; I downloaded the free WordPress files and have added everything related to the blog myself. Clearly, if you’re not knowledgeable enough on how to launch an independent blog, then by all means use a blog platform’s service to get the job done. You can always move everything to your own web address at some point.

Your Schedule – Once you make the decision about starting a blog, you’ll need to think of a writing schedule that fits your lifestyle. There are people who write multiple articles every single day while others are content to post one or two times per week. Of course, if you’re attempting to build a following, then higher frequency is the key. But don’t let other people determine how often you should blog, because when you come down to it, you’re responsible for the site.

Your Satisfaction (and Theirs) – I purposely started each point with “your” to emphasize what establishing a personal blog is all about – you. Well, not quite. Yes, you can treat your blog as an “online journal” where you share your thoughts with no expectation of return, meaning no readers. But, most people blog to communicate with their readers who are either like-minded folks or someone who may be interested in what you have to sell. Your personal satisfaction could be based primarily on a desire to share your thoughts which involves interacting with your readership through comments. Therefore, make certain that when you launch your blog that you allow readers to comment, preferably without registering. Then, answer their comments to foster dialogue.

Blogging: Staying The Course

Most bloggers quit blogging within the first year with very few blogs owned and maintained by the same person after three years. After five years only a tiny cadre of bloggers are still at it, committed folks whose passion for sharing what is on their mind remains strong.

Blogging is a journey that begins with one step, but once you step out you’ll be in the good company of millions of other online journalists.

See Also — Where Has All Of My Traffic Gone?

Modifying Your Articles After The Fact

Barry Welford of SMM Internet Marketing Consultants recently made a compelling case for making later updates in his piece titled, “10 Reasons For Editing Your Published Blog Posts.” Without rehashing all ten of his reasons, I encourage you to read his article to see how you handle your own blogging. It turns out that after finishing reading his narrative I realize that I do modify previous pieces on occasion, although not with the same degree of intention as Barry. Allow me to share with you four of Barry’s points that resonated with me.

You fix mistakes, don’t you? I like to think that I catch every mistake before I publish, but that isn’t always the case. I proofread as I go along, but I also do one final, comprehensive read through to make sure that what I wrote makes sense and that all words are accounted for and spelled correctly. Usually, it is one of those smaller words such as “an” or “and” that I get sloppy with. Not that I have a grammatical problem, rather I sometimes type faster than I think which means I’m bound to miss something – even what should be obvious.

Image Addition? I must say that I do not add more images to an article later on. On most blogs (such as this one), I’ll include one image with the article, while on my car blogs I’ll include as many as six pictures if the article is discussing a new product release. I understand that images can add SEO value to an article, so maybe I should give this some closer scrutiny.

Update Developments – This is a good one. If I update my html pages I use on sites not powered by WordPress, why not update my blog posts too? It seems that a policy that we web developers used to follow — update fixed pages as needed – should apply to our blogs. But for some reason it doesn’t, so we don’t. Hmmm….

Search Engine Visibility – This is important, but I also think we miss out on keeping up with it. How many times have you written a piece that rushed to the top of the SERPs only to slide back down over time? Perhaps we should pay more attention to who has surged ahead of us because I’m sure that it isn’t just newer articles that are pushing their way to the top, but updated information as well.

Update Or Perish?

With so many new blogs and websites launching daily can we afford to neglect our sites? It seems as if we are doing just that if we fail to take advantage of the opportunity to make changes later on, especially when those changes may have a positive impact on our readers as well as on our visibility via the search engines.

See Also — You Can Blog Better Than That!

Yesterday morning my plans were altered somewhat as I realized that WordPress had issued an important upgrade, version 2.8, with my admin panel alerting me to make that update now. With ten blogs to keep up and running, I would have dreaded this practice a few years back when the process involved turning off my plugins one by one, backing up my databases and ftping the files for each site.

Press Button Updating

These days, WordPress has made updating a snap which allows administrators to press just one button and wait for the update to complete itself. You still need to make sure you have your database backed up, but if you’re like me you already use a plug-in to routinely send backups to your email account or download to your computer.

Now, I don’t automatically do updates as soon as they are available for the simple reason that I know updates still take time to successfully complete. Usually, when there is any sort of update, a number of plugins routinely fail which means that they’ll need to be updated too. In most cases that’s a “push button” update too as the latest copy is available and ready to go.

Starting With The Smaller Sites First

To make things easier for me, I routinely start updating a smaller site, one with the least amount of articles/pages on it. On Thursday, those updates went lightening fast and were done before I realized it.

Several plugins had to be updated, but I did notice that SEM Google Analytics, a plugin for tracking stats failed and there was no replacement for it. So, I deleted the plugin and then checked the footer to make sure my analytics coding was in place — either method tracks stats and I certainly don’t want to miss a moment of keeping tabs on my traffic.

Matt’s Musings Goes Buggy

The first three or four blogs updated quickly and without problems, but when I attempted to update this site, which is my second largest blog, the update failed. Big time. Turns out that the SEM Google Analytics plugin was a bust, so I had to remove it, but when the file transfer protocol (FTP) ended, I could see the blog, but I couldn’t access the admin panel. Something was blocking my wp-admin files and, darn it, I could not figure out what that problem was.

Though I didn’t have a pressing work deadline on Thursday, I decided to quit while I was behind and move on to do my work. Matt’s Musings was still accessible to my dear beloved readers (that’s you!) but accessing the all important admin panel was beyond me. Literally!

Writing About WordPress

This morning I decided to return to this blog especially since I knew I would be writing something fresh today. Turns out that my original was story was to be shelved as this whole WP upgrade fiasco was my top news of the day.

To shorten what has already become a fairly lengthy story I’ll tell you what I did to gain access to the admin panel — I ended up going back and downloading version 2.7.1, the most recent update and uploading those files to this site. Bingo! Problem solved — I obviously have control over the blog again which is good news.

What I don’t have is the latest version of WordPress installed, at least for this site. And, I’m leery of updating three other large blogs including my flagship The Auto Writer site which has more than 1200 articles and pages on it. Sure, I’ll back everything up before I make that attempt, but the hassle of swapping out WP versions in the event that something breaks makes me want to drag this process out over a week’s time instead of the customary one or two days.

Sticking With, Not To WordPress

I’m not any less committed to WordPress because a few problems crop up from time to time, but I have been reading that some people are angry and planning to switch to Drupal or to some other blog or CMS platform. I’m sure my issue will be addressed by someone, somewhere but in the meantime I’ve got a busy day ahead of me and will simply punt this problem into the middle of next week.

See Also — WordPress Woes? Check Your Theme!