Welcome to Smuggle Me

One of the nice things about Wordpress is that they are always coming out with updates and changes that enhance the blogging platform. One of the bad things about Wordpress is that they are always coming out with updates. That means you have to go and update all of your blogs. Which in my case is far too many. Take a look at the list of blogs that I maintain:

Blogs
Smuggle Me
EMR and HIPAA
Lynn Family Blog
Something for Nothing
Fundraising
BYU Sports
Spoil On

Pure TV Network Blogs
TV Freaks
Dancing with the Stars
So You Think You Can Dance
Fringe
Amazing Race
AGT
TV Sports

Other People’s Blogs
Crowdsource This
True Life Relationships
Take Flight Blog

Blogs I Don’t Write To Anymore, But Don’t Want to Take Down Yet
Cambrian House
miaMessage Blog

Ok, so I’m too lazy to link all of them. A bunch of them are new blogs since I’m splitting Something for Nothing into a TV Blog network. So far it’s doing pretty good, but it’s a good thing that I’m not blogging all of them myself. I have 4 other people helping me to update them with content.

Now if I can just automate the Wordpress update we’ll be all good. At least I’ve standardized the plugins I used so I don’t have to test nearly as much.

I don’t know why Wordpress doesn’t just link to this OPML link file from the link manager, but since they don’t it’s sometimes a pain in the butt to find. So, just go to http://www.example-domain.com/wp-links-opml.php to export the list of links from Wordpress

There you go. Now you can export the links from wordpress just as easy as you can import them.

I’ve searched high and low for a way to move just one blog category from an existing blog into a new blog. I found tons of ways and great documentation on how to move an entire blog to a new domain, but I couldn’t find anything that showed how to take one Wordpress blog category and create a new blog using that category.

I found an old plugin/import that should have done the job, but hadn’t been kept updated with the latest version of Wordpress and so it didn’t work for me. I also found a ton of people on the Wordpress forums interested in doing the same thing, but no one offering an answer. The best they could offer was importing just the RSS feed for that category. Problem there is that then you lose all the comments, categories and tags for those posts. Comments being the real kicker for me.

Therefore, I decided to go it alone and figure out a way to do it using the only option given in the Wordpress Export which was the user that created the post. My goal was:
-Export All the posts, categories, comments, tags for just one category of my blog
-Create a list of those posts that I could use to redirect traffic/google to the new location

There might be easier ways (and hopefully they’ll make this an option in the Import), but this worked for me. Also, I wouldn’t try this method unless you’re pretty good at find and replace, executing SQL queries and editing themes.

Overview of Process:
*Export Blog to Test Server
*Change Theme to Get list of Blog Post IDs/Posts for Category
*Change Author of Each Post ID to a new author
*Export posts for new author
*Import into new blog
*Create list of 301 Redirects on old blog
*Clean Up new blog DB

Read more…

Ted Murphy, founder of IZEA recently launched a personal microblog. If you are part of the IZEA family or a fan or rockstartup this is your chance to interact with Ted. You can check out the site here.

I was the 61st member of PayPerPost when I joined 3 years ago. You can imagine that over the 3 years Ted, myself and PayPerPost (now IZEA) have been through so many interesting experiences. While I’m not nearly as active in IZEA now, I still follow them and am interested in what their doing. Ted’s one of the most creative people I know so it will be interesting to see what Ted does with his blog and if he’ll have the time to do much.

I’m sure that many of you know by now that I have been with PayPerPost since nearly the beginning of Ted’s journey to make money for bloggers. It’s been quite the adventure for me and a true learning process. I’ve met hundreds of amazing bloggers and learned a ton about blogging. Oh yeah, and I made a bunch of cash along the way too. I personally call it my “date” money.

Well, back in November I attended Postie Con where SocialSpark was announced for the first time. It was a very exciting time to see what Ted and crew had been working on for so long.

I was invited into the alpha version of Social Spark and it’s been quite the experience. My favorite part has been the blog sponsorships. I can see why this might not fit right for many of the bloggers out there, but it’s perfect for a number of my blogs. In fact, I’d like to automate the blog sponsorship so that my blog always has a sponsorship with the highest paying sponsor (possibly with the option for me to block certain sponsors). Overall though, sponsorships are really neat and I haven’t heard any complaints from my blog readers. Granted I understand how I generate traffic to my blog and these type of sponsorships aren’t a problem. I’m still generating just as much traffic as before.

The next best part of social spark is the transparency and disclosure (ie. no follow). Here’s what social spark offers (which quite frankly was a problem with PayPerPost):
-100% Audit-able In-Post Disclosure
-100% Transparency
-100% Real Opinions
-100% Search Engine Friendly

Now that those problems are out of the way, I think that Social Spark can bring in some really large brands. Hopefully that means more revenue for us bloggers.

I think the most disappointing part of Social Spark to me has been the method of filtering, organizing and finding blog opportunities. It was bad in PayPerPost and is still bad in Social Spark. It should be much easier for me to know what opportunities are available and a way to sort them the way I want to see them. Plus, if I no longer want to see an opportunity, then give me an option to hide that opportunity forever.

Some of the social aspects of the site are interesting, but I would have preferred if Social Spark would have focused on more of the functional parts of the site and less on the look and feel of it all. I’m sure that hundreds of hours of design and development time were spent making it look pretty. When the reality is that functionality would have been more beneficial to all involved.

In the end, this is still the beginning of social spark, but I honestly had hoped for a little more after all the delays. However, it’s a good foundation for making bloggers a good amount of money. Especially with blog sponsorships. Let’s just hope the market will pay well for those blog sponsorships. They definitely can’t be missed by blog readers.

Email is still the most used application by internet users. I don’t know many people that are online that don’t pretty much go straight to their email when their online. Checking your email for new messages is an addiction for many (including myself). It’s my connection with my social life and it connects me to other things happening around the internet. In fact, one of the first things that new users of the internet do is get an email address.

Since email is so ubiquitous, then it only makes sense that getting your blog posts in people’s email box is one of the best way to drive traffic to your blog and encourage comments from users interested in what you’re posting to your blog. In fact, my wife has a friend that would manually send out an email to everyone telling them that she created a new blog post. That’s how much people like the idea of using email to “promote” their blog.

The crazy thing is that these people were sending out their blogs posts manually. What a pain in the butt. Plus, there might be some blog readers that aren’t on your personal email list.

If you’re manually doing it, then stop it and start using Zookoda. It’s a free service that basically turns your blog into a newsletter. Here’s a short list of features.

-Manage email newsletter subscribers.
-Enhance your blog with custom newsletter subscription forms.
-Design eye-catching newletters to match your blog design.
-Schedule recurring broadcasts for each day, week or month.
-View real-time open, bounce, click and unsubscribe reports.
-Access mobile users by emailing blog content in text format.

Did I mention it’s free? Trust me, that’s a good deal. I had personally worked on projects like PHPList to do the same things, and it was a pain in the butt. A hosted email newsletter service like this is so much better.

It looks like Wordpress 2.5 is going to arrive possibly next week. Either way it will be coming really soon. Is your blog ready for it? I found a pretty extensive check list of things you can do to prepare for the upgrade. I think that it is a little over the top myself, but I guess you kind of have to be to avoid that person that gets mad at you for saying that the upgrade should be very easy. That’s why I’ve basically limited myself to the plugins that are so mainstream someone is going to update them or the ones offered by Wordpress themselves (ie. Akismet and Wordpress Stats). It’s always interesting to see what features they come out with next.

I’ve been working the past couple evenings to get a Wordpress blog to integrate with a bbPress forum. They’re both from Automattic so I thought that it would be a no brainer. Turns out it should have been, but I just missed one link. I’m putting them here for those looking for a reference on integrating Wordpress with bbPress.

Here’s the Wordpress plugin that you need to integrate it. I didn’t activate it until after I had created both the Wordpress install and the bbPress install. This plugin also requires you to set the prefix for your bbPress database name. Simple enough to do on the tab that’s created for bbPress once the plugin’s activated.

This is the bbPress Wordpress Integration plugin that is used in bbPress to do the integration. Of course this is activated after installing bbPress. Just make sure when you install bbPress that you set all the right information in config.php I won’t detail that out since the documentation is good for that and is really very straightforward.

A lot of the documentation points to a Display Name plugin to show the Wordpress display name in bbPress rather than the login. It’s a great idea and would be great if it worked. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work, but the comments made on the plugin have a better workable method to make this happen in the bbPress template which in reality is probably where it should be anyway. Although I would shy away from loading all of Wordpress on the bbPress pages if possible. I can imagine that it will slow things down.

The Spaces and special character in login name Plugin isn’t even an official plugin and I haven’t tested it myself, but it loads well and seems like a simple enough plugin that I added it in to prevent errors in the future. Let’s hope now that they’re putting some resources towards bbPress we’ll get some things like this in the core.

I haven’t added the Human Test Plugin yet, but I expect that I’ll probably need to do that sooner or later or we’ll be swimming in fake accounts before we know it.

There are a bunch of other plugins that would be cool, but we’ll see what the manager of Crowdsource This wants to do. A signature plugin might be cool. The Private Message plugin might be useful. Probably a few more I haven’t looked at yet.

Well, hopefully this helps some people trying to integrate Wordpress with bbPress. Next up is to find a good theme. Possibly a look and feel designed for Wordpress and bbPress would be best. I’ve read that there are a few out there. If someone knows where they are, please let me know.

So, you don’t know how to market your blog or you’re not sure what to do to drive traffic to your blog. Well, don’t say I didn’t point you in the right direction. I haven’t looked at too many details of this list, but just looking at the volume and the categorization I’m sure there’s a lot of information in it that could be used. In fact, probably too much. The key will be to take this list and find things that match your interests, blog and skills well.

UPDATE: This post was completely tongue and cheek about someone who is non-technical and shouldn’t know how to do these technical things. See my comments below for further explanation on my intentions with the post.

My friend from Cambrian House decided to step into the blogging world with his blog Web Fugitive. I think he’ll actually be a really good blogger with his knowledge and writing skill. I guess time will tell.

However, his tech skills and implementation of Wordpress sucks. Sorry Web Fugitive, but there’s a reason you shouldn’t expose yourself. I’d be embarrassed to admit who I was if I’d committed so many mistakes. Here’s a few helpful hints to get you started.

1. Turn on permalinks. If you don’t know what that is, then find out. It’s easy and Google likes permalinks. Don’t be lame and link to a page with ?p=12
2. Turn comments on on all of your posts. I was about to comment on a post and comments was turned off. How lame is that. Well, I guess maybe it was a good strategy, because it motivated me to blog about you. Otherwise, I think it sucks. I bet it was just an accident, but fix it already. Comments are what makes blogs interesting.
3. Get rid of the “Uncategorized” category. Choose a topic like Web 2.0 which will encompass all your posts and then make it the default. Uncategorized just makes you look lazy and uneducated in the art of blogging. Not to mention good categorizing is liked by Google bots too.
4. I already told you this so do it already. That lame hostmonster favicon not only makes you look lame for using hostmonster, but it shows you don’t care about your website.
5. I can’t tell this for sure, but I bet you don’t even have the Wordpress stats plugin turned on and maybe not even akismet. I’d even settle for Google Analytics, but I’m confident you don’t have that. Get some stats already.

Ok, I will give you one prop. At least you have the latest version of Wordpress installed. Of course, you don’t have to listen to anything I say, but I’m sure you will since you know better than to not listen.

Welcome to blogging. It’s addicting!!