How To Blog

Excerpts of posts from the NEW How to Blog Site

Remember, How to Blog has moved to it's own domain at http://www.emilyrobbins.com/how-to-blog/

In order to stay current with How to Blog's content, you should start bookmark the new location - thanks!

How to Blog has moved to http://www.emilyrobbins.com/how-to-blog/

UPDATE: How to Blog has MOVED! Please update your bookmarks and feeds! The new address is :
http://www.emilyrobbins.com/how-to-blog/
and all new posts and post updates will be made there! Comments and trackbacks at this location are now closed -- please visit the new How to Blog site in order to add a comment or a trackback and see updates to existing posts as well as all new posts from this point forward!

The new How to Blog site is powered by WordPress, and the TypePad version of it will no longer be updated (although I will still be maintaining my Best Funny Pictures blog on TypePad – I find WordPress better for some applications, and TypePad for others and will post more about that on the new How to Blog site)

Starting a new blog? Get your own domain name! Do NOT use a subdomain of typepad.com, wordpress.com, blogspot.com (etc)

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So, you want to start a new blog. Maybe you don’t have much experience with blogging, so you don’t think it’s that big of a deal which platform you choose or whether you have your own domain name. Well think again.

Don’t fall trap to the disaster that I landed myself in, where I started casually blogging and ended up regularly blogging and hating the platform I was using but can’t easily switch because I stupidly put my blog on a subdomain of typepad (http://blogging.typepad.com)

Now I’m at TypePad’s mercy. They own my ass because they own my address - even though I’m paying $150+ a year for their service. The same could happen to you whether it’s a subdomain on typepad.com, blogspot.com, or wordpress.com.

By not having your own domain name, if you ever decide to move to another blogging platform you run the risk of losing all (or a lot) of your traffic, your search engine rankings, all of your hard earned incoming links, etc because you cannot take your URL with you.

How are you going to redirect your traffic to your new blog when you have NO ability to, say, set up a 301 Permanent Redirect? Which, for those who are wondering, would both:

• automatically redirects human visitors to your new blog site
• tells the search engines that your blog has permanently moved and gives it the new location

(BTW - has any TypePad user (whose blog address was a subdomain) had a high traffic blog with a lot of backlinks into it that they then moved to a WordPress blog hosted on their own server? Please tell me what your experience was, whether you lost pagerank, traffic, search engine rankings, etc!!!)

Domain names are cheap - about $9 a year for a single one, as low as $6.75 a year if you own more than 50. There is NO excuse to not have your own domain name for your blog. You will regret if at some point down the road if you don’t start out with your own domain name.

www.GoDaddy.com is the site that I use to register my domain names, although there are numerous other options such as $5.99 Domain Names at 1&1, and, if you only need a single domain name the cheapiest option is domain names from Yahoo! for only $2.99.

The irony here is that I actually own a lot of domain names and I genuinely can’t fathom why I didn’t just use a domain of my own when I started this blog. Don’t make the same mistake as me or you could end up feeling trapped like I do right now. Consider yourselves warned.

UPDATE: Just to clarify, my point is that you need to own your own domain name so the URL for your blog points to a domain you own and control. It’s okay to use a subdomain off a domain that you own, but not one that belongs to someone else such as that of a hosted service like typepad.com.

Furthermore, I don't actually hate TypePad itself - there are truly many things about it as a blogging platform that I love.  What I despise is how poorly TypePad handles comment and trackback spam, which forced me to disable trackbacks because I was getting hundreds of trackback spams a day (much of which was obscene) and didn't have time to wade through them all - but in disabling trackbacks I'm removing one of the features that is at the heart of blogging and thus particially crippling my blog.  I want to be able to have trackbacks on for all of my posts without spending exhorbitant amounts of time dealing with spam every day.  I also have to moderate all of the comments on this blog because of the spam it gets (although not nearly as bad as the trackback spam) and that's a bummer, too - genuine comments don't appear immediately on my blog as a result (and due to the migraines I've been having lately, I haven't always been able to approve the comments in a timely manner).  The difference with WordPress is that it's plugins can tell which comments and trackbacks are likely spam and hold those comments/trackbacks (and ONLY those ones) in the moderation queue, while publishing everything else immediately if you so desire (which I do).  From what I've heard, MovableType (which is owned by Six Apart and is what TypePad is based off of) also has plugins that handle spam management well, so I don't get why they haven't utilized these plugins to handle the massive spam problem on TypePad.

And it’s okay to use a hosted solution - just make sure you pick one that allows you to use your own domain name and always reference your blog’s URL w/your own domain so that if you ever decide you want to go elsewhere, at least you’ll be able to take your traffic with you. Right now, the only hosted solutions that allow you to use your own domain are TypePad and Blogger (supposedly wordpress.com will down the line (possibly for a fee) but as of now there's no support for this).

Also of note if you're going to go the hosted blogging solution route: it’s also a good idea to check to see if whatever blogging platform you start with has the ability to export your posts (and comments/trackbacks) for easiest porting of your site to another platform down the road. As of this writing, TypePad is the only hosted system that with this functionality. Blogger doesn't have an export post function, but provides these instructions for backing up your Blogger blog (don't know if that file would then be importable into another blog system, though). While WordPress.com does not have an export function, it will let you import items from another blogging platform - but it's a one way ticket.

For full disclosure, links to TypePad are affiliate links (but as this post shows, just because I'm posting affiliate links doesn't mean I present biased info)

Technorati Tags: Blogger, Reviews, SEO, TypePad, Weblogs, WordPress, Domain names, Domains, Subdomain, Blogging, Blogs, URLs, URIs

More complaints about TypePad's TrackBack system's handling of spam - cannot ban by IP address

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In my continuing rant on TypePad’s horrifically poor system for managing comment and trackback spam, I wanted to post the following complaint:

Why is it that we are unable to ban trackbacks based on a specific IP address the same way we can with comments?  Why is it that when viewing trackbacks through the TypePad Control Panel, we cannot even see the IP address of the offending spammer?  I know TypePad has this information because every time it sends me an email letting me know about a new trackback that has been submitted, it includes the IP address that the TrackBack was sent from.

So what gives?  Here I am manually deleting tons of spam from the same bunch of jerks, all because TypePad hasn’t implemented a simple ban trackbacks based on IP option?

(And all of you spammers — don’t bother.  All you’re doing is aggravating the crap out of me, but your comment and trackback spam will never see the light of day on my blog.  Everything is moderated – do you see any spam on here?  No.  SO LEAVE ME ALONE!!!)

technorati tags: trackback, spam, trackbacks, trackback+spam

I'm still experiencing problems with trackbacks in WordPress 2.0.1

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So far I've only had the opportunity to test how WordPress 2.0.1 handles sending of automatic trackbacks (in the Options|Discussion tab, we’re presented with a checkbox that
says, “Attempt to notify any Weblogs linked to from the article (slows
down posting.)”

What that means is that for any article linked to in a particular
post, wordpress should automatically be sending a ping to alert that
article that you’ve written about them, saving you the time of having
to manually paste their trackback URI into the Trackbacks section of
the Write Post screen.

On what was initially my WP 2.0 Test blog (and which is now my WP 2.0.1 Test Blog), I had reported that in WordPress 2.0, the only blogs that seemed to receive these automatic trackback pings were other WordPress 2.0 blogs.

I had hoped that these problems would be resolved in
WordPress 2.0.1, but instead they seem to have worsened, with even more
erratic results than before:

• again, no trackback pings to WordPress 1.5.x blogs or TypePad blogs got sent
• again, the only time WP properly sent a single ping to a referenced post was when it was pinging the same version of wordpress, this time from v2.0.1 to v2.0.1
• duplicate pings were sent to WordPress 2.0 blogs that were referenced in a wordpress 2.0.1 post, AND
• duplicate pings were also sent to wordpress.com blogs that were referenced in a wordpress 2.0.1 post - making you look like a spammer

What a bummer.

Technorati Tags: wordpress 2.0.1, wordpress problems, trackbacks, pings

WordPress 2.0.1 has been released

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One month to the day from when wordpress 2.0 first came out, the first wordpress point release to address the many needed bug fixes has come out.  The team states that :

"All in all we’ve closed 114 bugs in the 2.0.1 release, which you’re welcome to check out if you’re curious about every fix. To summarize:

• You can now specify an upload directory, and whether to use date-based storage or not.
• Caching has been fixed under certain PHP enviroments.
• Permalinks have been fixed for weird enviroments as well.
• XML-RPC uploading works.
• Compatibility with older versions of PHP.
• Several WYSIWYG fixes and cleanups.
• Imports now use much less memory.
• Now works with MySQL 5.0 in strict mode."

Now, what's ominously missing from this list of bug fixes is any mention of the problems with trackbacks, which is my main hesitation for upgrading all my wordpress blogs.  Yet in reading through the complete list of fixes, it appears the trackback problems were fixed -- see tickets 2197 and 2170 -- I must say that I don't know why the WordPress team didn't emphasize that in their bulleted list of fixes.  In any case, I'm thrilled to hear it's been fixed -- YAY!  Hopefully this means I can seriously contemplate moving my blog from TypePad to WordPress.  Unfortunately, TypePad doesn't support functionality for 301 permanent redirects, which are what would be necessary to tell the search engines that my blog has moved (and word to the wise and newbie alike -- don't ever make the mistake that I did and use a subdomain off a typepad.com, wordpress.com, etc account if you think there's ever the slightest chance you'd like to use your own domain name down the road, or heaven forbid switch to a different blogging system altogether -- moving How to Blog is gonna be one hell of a nightmare, but the benefits that WordPress provides may make it worth it...still on the fence)

In any case, you can download WordPress 2.0.1 here.

Technorati Tags: wordpress 2.0.1, new wordpress, wordpress bug fixes, wordpress release

Just Great - TypePad stats currently not working

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Wanna check your TypePad stats to see how many visitors you've gotten and where they came from?  Too bad.  Stats are temporarily disabled

Comparison of WordPress and TypePad by someone who has used both extensively for over a year

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I am feeling really frustrated right now – like I'm stuck in limbo with a conundrum on my hands.  Why?  Because I’ve grown to love WordPress so much so that I really prefer it over TypePad, for an increasing number of reasons.  (Please note that in this review, when I refer to WordPress, I’m talking about the full version of it – the one that must be installed on your own web server.  In the few instances where I refer to wordpress.com, the hosted and dumbed-down version of WP, I specify it’s wordpress.com I’m talking about.)

The main issue is how spam is handled.  On TypePad, spam is a nightmare to deal with, whereas on WordPress spam is almost a non-issue (provided you are using the proper plug-ins like Spam Karma 2 for those running v1.5.x – or for those on WP 2.0, the included and revolutionary Akismet).

Then there are all the other easily customizable things.  Like the look and feel of your site.  Ok, so TypePad’s is easier to control without having to know any code — but really limited in comparison to WP.  As my comprehensive wordpress theme list shows, there are now 615 free wordpress themes out there, and growing! OVER SIX HUNDRED.  That’s a staggering amount of templates to choose from to give your blog it’s own unique flair.  And they are all customizable as well (if you know some css) – and with WordPress 2.0, themes can be made customizable within the admin area by their authors such that bloggers can customize areas of the theme at will without ever touching any code!

Then there’s the issue of pagination.  It’s quite simple – WordPress has it and TypePad doesn’t.  By pagination, I mean those little links folks have grown accustomed to seeing on blogs that say “Next Page” and “Previous Page”.  Don’t see them on this blog?  That’s b/c TypePad doesn’t have that feature.  TypePad bloggers get to choose the number of posts that will appear on their homepage, and after that – well, good luck navigating the blog b/c the only options are to do so through clicking on the categories or the monthly archives.  TypePad doesn’t even have built-in search.  And of course, WordPress does. (TypePad users should check out my article on how to make your typepad blog searchable).

And then there are the plugins.  No small matter.  WordPress has plugins that enhance it’s functionality for almost any thing you could want to do with it:

• Tagging plugins (such as Jerome’s Keywords or the Ultimate Tag Warrior) that provide an easy way to automatically tag posts with keywords for social bookmarking systems such as Technorati, del.icio.us, and Flickr.  This means more traffic for your blog. Tags also provide a whole new way for readers to interact with a blog.  For example, Jerome’s Keywords makes it so “readers can click on a post’s keyword/tag link to see other posts with the same tag. It’s a simple but effective way of letting users find content that interests them.”.   You can even create a local tag cosmos.
• Post related plugins, such as the ability to display the top 10 most popular posts in your sidebar, or the ability to show a list of related posts when viewing an individual post
• Comment related plugins, such as giving users the ability to display gravatars in their comments and allowing blog readers to subscribe to a particular post’s comments
• There are just WAY too many ways in which plugins expand the functionality of WordPress way beyond the capabilities of TypePad to even discuss here.  And from what I’ve been hearing about WP 2.0, which provides added hooks making it even easier for programmers to create even more fantastic plugins in the future, the possibilities seem limitless.

Customization of where you ping to notify the world that you’ve updated your blog — WordPress has it, and (you guessed it) TypePad doesn’t.  The workaround with TypePad if you want to use a service like pingoat, is to paste the URL for pingoat’s RPC server into the Trackback area for each and every post, each and every time you update it.

And while this isn’t an issue for me in choosing a blogging platform, the issue of cost still needs to be brought up in any review.  Again, it’s simple – WordPress is free, and TypePad isn’t.  Of course, the full version of WP with all of it’s glory and customizable options (including access to all free themes and plugins) requires you to have a web hosting server with mysql support (which most do).  Which means it really isn’t entirely free b/c now you’re paying for web-hosting.  But if you do want entirely free, Wordpress.com offers that — and while it’s a really dumbed down version of WP, it still offers some things that TypePad doesn’t, like sub-categories (however, it doesn’t allow you to run adsense ads on your site – you get what you pay for with wordpress.com).

Then there’s ease of use when posting.  When it comes to blogging editors, WordPress 2.0 finally has a built in WYSIWYG editor (something TypePad has had all along, and which I think every blogging tool should offer).  The only problem is that WordPress’s wysiwyg editor is kinda buggy. See this problem that I encountered on my WordPress 2.0 test blog. However, I generally use an external  windows client (BlogJet) to post to my blogs, which has it’s own WYSIWYG editor that’s better than both of them.  But you also need to take speed into account when you talk about ease of posting.  WordPress is very speedy when creating or updating posts.  TypePad is very sluggish, especially if you are sending trackbacks to a large number of sites.

Want stats for your blog?  Well TypePad only shows you referrers from the past 24 hours.  That’s it.  And not only that, but it is slow as molasses

Now there are a few areas in which TypePad sort of shines in comparison to WordPress, with the main one being maintenance and upgrading.  I say sort-of, because sometimes TypePad has outages and when that happens there ain’t a thing you can do about it.  On the other hand, every time WordPress comes out with an upgrade, it can sometimes be a major pain in the rear to install it, wreaking all sorts of havoc over your blog (although sometimes the upgrade process is totally smooth).  All of that customizability that WP offers through themes, plugins, etc, makes for more things that can get broken every time there’s an upgrade.  And sometimes it seems like those upgrades come every few days (like after the release of WordPress 1.5 when there were numerous minor point releases that were required updates because they pertained to security flaws which seemed to come out every few days!) And when there’s an upgrade, you’re the one that has to install it (unless you’re using a free wordpress host like blogsome, but then you’re at the mercy of them deciding which themes and plugins are available to you, and when and if they’re going to do an upgrade – right now they’re still using WP 1.5).  When TypePad does an upgrade, it’s behind the scenes and you find out about it in the TypePad news (unless the upgrade wreaks havoc on their servers, in which case you get the joy of TypePad outages, the inability to post to your blog for sometimes days on end, etc – but ultimately they fix it, and it’s up to them, not you, to fix it).

All of this makes me want to move this blog and all of it’s posts (and future posts to come) over to wordpress on my own server at emilyrobbins.com.  Which brings me to my conundrum (and the possible state of limbo).  Is it worth moving an existing site that gets over 1000 visitors a day and is ranked well in the search engines over to another server, URL, and blogging system entirely, possibly losing all of my backlinks and high pagerank that I spent so much time in generating?  And if so, should I wait until WordPress 2.0 has ironed out some more of the kinks (there are currently problems with trackbacks, which I think is a rather major issue, among other things) before proceeding?

WordPress 1.5.2 works great and is a very stable release.  But I know I’ll eventually want to move to Wordpress 2.0.x — it’s new features are just too enticing.  And I also know that I do not want to have to deal with doing the kind of major upgrade that going from 1.5 to 2.0 entails on a website that is this important to me (I just don’t have the time deal with it in case something goes wrong with the upgrade, and there have been far too many reports of people having trouble with the upgrade for me to risk it).  But I’m getting so damn sick of TypePad’s limitations, and even more so of managing all the spam (I have to have all of my trackbacks and comments moderated because of the vulgar spam that people try to put through a zillion times a day – an issue that I wouldn’t have to deal with if I were using WordPress instead).

So what should I do?  Should I hold off on doing any more posting until WordPress 2.0 comes out with a more stable version and then move the whole site over to WP 2?  Should I just take the plunge now, and hope that the trackback issues don’t affect me too much until they are resolved?  But what if I lose all of my traffic as a result?Should I just leave things as they are right now and stick with TypePad for ‘How to Blog’??

What to do?  What to do??????

My Comprehensive WordPress Theme List Crosses the 600 Mark!!

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Wow, I can’t believe it — I’ve just uploaded the latest update to my WP theme list and it now contains a mindblowing 615 free wordpress themes that wordpress users can download and use on their blogs for free.

Some of the themes have been tested on WordPress 2.0, and have been marked as such, and a few of the themes are actually specifically for WordPress 2.0 and won’t work with 1.5.x (also marked accordingly).

I’m super excited about the prospect of all the new themes to come down the pipeline now that WP 2.0 is out — and for all of the updates to current themes that theme authors might be lured into performing given the fabulous customization that wordpress 2 allows.

For those who don’t know, WordPress 2.0 has taken themes to the next level in a serious way, providing the ability for theme authors to actually allow theme users with options that can be easily customized through a panel in the adminstration area of WordPress.  If a theme is customizable, there will be a tab under Presentation for “Current Theme Options”.

The Default theme that is packaged with WordPress 2.0 allows you to make changes to the theme’s header, including the font color and colors used for the background of the header.

But themes like Regulus 2.0 really take it up a knotch by providing checkboxes allowing the blog owner to change the header image, the color scheme, whether to show full posts or excerpts on the homepage, whether to display the post’s author on the homepage, as well as sidebar options such as ‘show calendar’, ‘show recent posts’, ‘show all archive months’, etc. 

You can also see a running demo of a new WP 2.0 theme called BloxPress which actually allows the blog viewer to change the layout of the theme, dragging and dropping theme sections around to change their order in the sidebar at will and adding and removing content as it suits them (something which I wish was incorporated into the WordPress core for the blog owners, at least).  Seriously cool stuff.

It’s a beautiful thing, this level of customization.  I sincerely hope that more WordPress 2.0 theme authors create their themes with these sort of theme options (and more!) in mind!

WordPress 2.0 also allows theme designers to include a screenshot as part of their theme package which will then display on the Presentation|Themes tab so it’s much easier to select a theme that’s suited to your blogging style.

I’m going to need a better way of managing my theme list now that some themes are for v1.5.x and others just for 2.0, etc which isn’t something I can easily due from within the constrains of TypePad.  Which leads me to my next post….feeling like I’m stuck in limbo and with a conundrum on my hands.

TypePad has no pagination features (next and previous buttons at the bottom of the page) AND no way of implementing them!!

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Under the category of more absolutely ridiculous things that current blogging platforms are missing the boat on, I just found out that not only does TypePad not have pagination built in, but there is NO WAY of implementing it even through advanced templates.

By pagination, I mean the <next> and <previous> buttons that many bloggers and blog readers are accustomed to seeing at the bottom of a blog page (a feature that is built into WordPress, for example).  TypePad gives you the option of customizing how many posts appear on a page, but no way to easily navigate to posts beyond those appearing on the front page.  For example, How To Blog is set to display 10 posts on the front page.  But when users visit the old typepad version of the site at http://blogging.typepad.com/how_to_blog/ and read through those posts, and want to see the rest of what I’ve written, they have only 2 options, neither of which is optimal:

1. View each category one at a time
2. Go through the monthly archives

I had put it on my personal ‘to do’ list to figure out how to add Next and Previous links to the buttom of my TypePad pages, and when I finally decided to tackle the project and couldn’t figure it out on my own, I submitted a support ticket to Six Apart asking for help with it.  I wrote:

WordPress has built in previous / next page links at the bottom of every page. This makes their blogs much more easy to navigate, especially for beginners. As each page only contains a certain number of posts, without having next and previous buttons it's hard for people to easily navigate the blog.

In addition to making this a feature request, I'd also like to know what code I should use in my advanced templates in order to implement this on my blog on How to Blog.

Your prompt attention to this matter is greatly appreciated.

Thank you!
Emily Robbins

The response I got back from TypePad Customer Support was astounding (bold added by me): 

Hi Emily,

Currently TypePad doesn't offer pagination (Next Page and Previous Page links), so there isn't any code that I can offer you to do this.

Thanks for the suggestion, though. We are always looking for ways to enhance TypePad for our users, so we will keep this in mind as a possible future feature for the system.

Please let us know if there is anything else we can do for you.

Thanks,
Kymberlie

Excuse me for the double-take, but NO CODE AVAILABLE TO DO THIS?  How can this be when SixApart themselves acknowledged the importance of pagination features in their own article on Six Apart Pronet entitled “Building on Movable Type Part 3: Creating Pagination Controls”, wherein they say (again, bolding is from me):

Pagination controls are sufficiently ubiquitous that our own developers saw the value in creating a reusable mechanism for creating the links developers should all be too familiar with: “next page," “previous page," “last page," “first page" and “you are viewing results X to Y out of Z." This reusable framework is not only accessible within Movable Type, but by plugins as well.

So apparently Six Apart thinks that pagination controls are so ‘ubiquitous’ that we’d be ‘all to familiar’ with them, and they are not only built into the functionality of Movable Type but also accessible by MT plugins.  GREAT.  For Movable Type users.

So how come when SixApart created (and updated and updated) TypePad, this “ubiquitous” functionality was somehow forgotten?