Welcome to Smuggle Me

This weekend I had a little bit of fun and installed BuddyPress. YesN I know I’m twisted to think that is fun. Oh well, it is what it is. I must admit that it was super simple.

I’m really looking forward to using it. I’m planning on using it for my next project. I still need to find a good host for it and create some killer plugins. Hopefully I can get it to work the way I need it to work I’m a little hesitant building this project on top of BuddyPress, but at least it can bridge me until I can hire a true programmer to work with me.

I just got a Blackberry and I’m surprised how much I like it. Today I decided that I’d try out the WordPress app for blackberry. So, this is my first blog post from the blackberry.

I like it since now I’ll be able to do a lot more blog posting during down time. The small keyboard is kind of a pain, but it’s manageable. The only problem I see with blogging like this is that it’s harder to add links to blog posts also.

Are there any other must have Blackberry apps? I already have email(of course) and Twitter. I also use I’m quite a bit as well. I think I want to look into a Mint.com app if there is one. Are there others I should get?

Yes, I’m sad to admit it, but I have a problem. I enjoy looking at my stats far too much. I’ve kind of known it’s a problem before, but now it’s just going overboard. Don’t believe me?

I’m absolutely addicted to the WordPress.com stats package. I hit refresh of that screen far too often. With over 12 blogs that I like to watch their stats, I never have one that hasn’t changed. However, I have my 5 favorites that I watch far too closely. I almost wish the stats weren’t real time.

You’d think that would be enough. Nope, I relatively frequently go and check out some of the same stats on Google Analytics. It’s far too fun. I love seeing the traffic grow.

However, that’s not the worst of my problems. Yes, I also have to constantly check Google Adsense to know how much my ads have paid. Yes, this is real time also. Yes, I am absolutely addicted. By day, by channel, by month, by site. Oh brother, the things I could tell you about Google Adsense.

Nope, that’s not all. All my affiliate programs. My favorites are iTunes, Amazon, Ticketmaster and eBay. iTunes being my most common stats checking. Buy.at (which runs that iTunes affiliate program) has the worst reporting of any affiliate program I’ve seen. Luckily, that’s good for me, since there’s less for me to check. Plus, it’s batched at really weird times. However, since it’s weird times I check it too much as well. Ticketmaster has a nice little widget that sits on my desktop like an IV into my veins, pumping stats before my eyes constantly all day. Do you think that’s a problem?

Ok, you thought you were done, right? Not even close.

Yes, I have to watch my feedburner stats too. You’d think just checking the main page to see how many people have subscribed to my feed would be enough. Nope, not for me. That only wets my tongue to get at more stats. Yes, I have to dig into each feed to see how many views it has and how many clicks for my most recent posts. Thankfully this is batched daily too instead of in real time. See the above comment about my 12 blogs and you’ll realize this is really starting to add up.However, I’m not done with the feedburner stats either. Yes, I have to also check how many people have signed up for the email subscriptions as well. I love watching that number grow since how many people really give over their email? They must really like what you’re doing to give you that.

Nah, maybe I don’t really have a problem checking too many stats. It’s probably just a misconception on my part.

Oh wait, how could I forget? Did you know I passed 3000 followers on my @TVBlog twitter account? Watching follower accounts grow isn’t really a stat is it? Just because I look at follower counts on my 4 different twitter accounts doesn’t mean anything does it?

What do you think? Do you think I have a problem?

Yeah, bring on the comments about how much more content I could create on my websites if I stopped checking stats or how much more promotion I could do for my website if I didn’t check my stats. Certainly this is true. However, just think about this for a second. I’ve done nearly 5000 blog posts over the past 4 years. Guess how many posts I would have done, if I didn’t have stats?

I’m a huge fan of WordPress.com. I’m amazed at the platform they’ve created. There are some amazing benefits to using WordPress.com which I’ll save for another post. However, you can be sure that it’s a big part of my marketing strategy. I just wish they’d open it up and allow users to show ads on it already.

What is so amazing about WordPress.com is how they monetize traffic on the site. I’ve been using it for a long time and driven quite a bit of traffic to the site. However, I’d pretty much forgotten that WordPress was putting adds on my blog. At least when they launched, they said it was only a small percentage of the pages on WordPress.com and ads are only shown to people that aren’t logged in to WordPress.com (or was it just users of that blog that weren’t logged in?). Either way, it’s a genius plan.

See, since they don’t show any ads to logged in users (which the owner of the blog is almost always logged in), then owners of the blog forget that the content their creating is being monetized by WordPress.com. How smart is that?

I imagine Matt Mullenweg back there with a little percentage setting that he can change at any time. This week it might be set at 10% of the pages getting ads. Then, next week he decides to double the revenue of WordPress.com and so he changes the setting to 20%. Best part is that users of WordPress.com won’t even notice the difference.

It’s not quite money growing on trees, but pretty close.

I’m currently sitting in the Las Vegas Wordcamp listening to Matt Mullenweg’s talk on “The State of the Word.” He just announced that Wordpress will be launching a Wordpress handbook.

The basic concept is that Wordpress will be taking a subset of the Codex and some information done from scratch to document the releases of Wordpress. This Handbook will be put into subversion and when a new release of Wordpress is release, the handbook can be trunked out and be fixed similar to how the code for Wordpress is done. Users can submit fixes to the Wordpress Handbook and some users will have the ability to commit the changes.

This seems like a really cool idea since it will allow the Handbook to be version specific. It will also make it much easier for the international community to know what to translate (since translating the ever changing Codex is very difficult).

Of course, the first question is how will this work with the Codex. The answer is that the Codex will remain because it has just too much good information. However, Matt said that it’s so new that we’ll have to just see how they work together and which parts will remain in the Codex and which will be moved to the Handbook.

The other important point is that Matt said the document would be saved in a special format (I didn’t catch the exact format) that will allow it to be viewed in multiple formats including: pdf’s, windows help files, etc. Plus, this format allows consultants, plugin creators, etc to be able to integrate their own help files into the main Wordpress Handbook. Pretty cool. Sounds like a simple way to create a Wordpress for Dummies book.

Matt said that the first version of the Wordpress Handbook will be released later this week.

Thanks to Izea for sponsoring my attendance at WordCamp Las Vegas

I must admit that I’m really excited to be able to attend WordCamp Las Vegas this Saturday. I won’t be attending Sunday, because it’s Sunday but I think I’ll get a ton of value out of even just the first day of the conference.

I’ve lived in Las Vegas for almost 4 years now and I’ve never been to Palace Station, so that should be cool to see. The speakers that I’m most excited to see at WordCamp Las Vegas is Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg, online whipping boy Jim Kukral and Social Media legend Chris Brogan. A pretty amazing lineup if it was just those 3 speakers.

Even more exciting than the speakers is that it will be fun to meet other people from Las Vegas that use Wordpress. I think I only know 2 bloggers from Las Vegas that use Wordpress. We’ll see who we meet on Saturday. Should be interesting.

I also must admit that I feel a little embarrassed that this is the blog I listed on the registration page. This is really kind of my play blog. The problem is that I have so many blogs, that I didn’t know which one to choose on the list and just chose this one. It just doesn’t represent my use of Wordpress at all. Just take a look at the blogs in my Pure TV blog network to see what I mean:
Something For Nothing – TV and Reality TV Blog
Pure TV Freaks Blog – Blogging TV Freaks
Pure Dancing with the Stars – Blogging Dancing with the Stars on ABC
Pure Amazing Race – Blogging Amazing Race on CBS
Pure So You Think You Can Dance – Blogging So You Think You Can Dance on Fox
Pure Fringe – Blogging Fringe on Fox
Pure America’s Got Talent – Blogging America’s Got Talent
Pure TV Sports – Blogging Sports

Also, I can’t forget to thank my sponsor for WordCamp Las Vegas: Izea. I was the 61st blogger to sign up for Izea (then PayPerPost). The CEO, Ted Murphy, is a freakin rockstar and being a part of the Izea community has been key to many of the things I’ve learned and done with blogging.

I’d love to hear from others going to WordCamp Las Vegas. See you there.

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…

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.