BitFreedom

#1 Care about what you’re writing
You will be way more successful if you have a passion about what you’re writing.  You should also care about how the site looks, the ease of getting to information, and the quality of the content.

#2 Provide something useful or at least purposeful
Define your site.  What is the purpose of your site?  Would readers want to visit more than once?  What makes your site unique from other sites?  Your goal is to try to add value to the web and to the community.

#3 Don’t build a site that embarrasses you
If you can’t comfortably put your name on the site and let people know who you are, then you probably shouldn’t build it.  It’s not that people who build junk sites don’t make money, but it’s a lot easier to advertise for a site when you’re willing to tell people what it is.

#4 Don’t get greedy
Don’t cash in too soon and make sure ads are subtle and don’t detract from content.  Putting ads on your site too early can kill your site or make it look like web spam.  A site must give people a sense of an established presence before it can get away with advertising.  Nothing kills a new site faster than tacky ads.  Offer your content graciously.

#5 Plug your site whenever you can
Your return label on regular mail can have your website.  Your email signature can contain a link to your site.  Same goes for forums.  Just remember the previous rule:  don’t embarrass yourself–if you need to hide your real identity, it’s probably overdoing it.

#6 Focus on traffic, not search engines
Search engines should be trying to optimize themselves to find good sites.  Make your site good–a good site has a lot of people that want to visit.

#7 Seed your site
If you’re planning on running a site that has community-driven content, start by trying to seed the content you have to get things started.  You need to have something there to attract the first people.

#8 Find a niche
The less competition the better.  Try to have a site that is focused towards a particular audience that is being less serviced than it ought to.  Better to be the master of one specific area, than a jack of all trades.

I like WordPress–a lot. It’s been my saving grace for constructing websites without having to write the code from scratch. But it’s gotten very, very bloated. I took a look at version 3.0 and the upcoming changes. It looks ok, but it worries me for the future. Now users actually expect updates and new features on a regular and frequent basis.  Whatever happened to just wanting something that worked well, and was patched for bugs and security?  I’m also worried about backward compatibility of things like themes and plugins.

Part of the reason I like WordPress is because it’s written very well compared to most open source LAMP products that came before it.  It has a plugin and theme API which is relatively simple to learn.  I would prefer WordPress to focus on improving the robustness of the API, rather than adding new features.

Overall I’m fairly confident in WordPress’ developers to keep things straight.  I just hope they’re not making changes just to keep themselves relevant.

First, let me give you the link to opt-out of unsolicited emails from Boxbe:
https://www.boxbe.com/unsubscribe

Please Note: even after several months from using the above link, I still receive messages from Boxbe to join.

I’ve been hit by Boxbe spam. This company promises to reduce the spam its users receive, and in return spam every one of their contacts on a regular basis.  The only problem is, they do not provide the above link (which I cannot yet confirm it actually works) within their email.  To the best of my current knowledge, it is still a requirement that they provide this link.

Other folks have been having problems with Boxbe as well:

• Boxbe’s spam. A fatal mistake for them and me.
• boxbe.com is it spam or scam?
• Boxbe anti spam filter – a cure worse than the plague

I’m not a blogger really–if you didn’t already guess by my posting infrequency.  But I do own and use a lot of what people call blogs.  I just don’t like to see them that way.

You see, I’ve been making web pages since 1995, and had a personal home page (remember those?) since 1996.  My first page was rather minimalist, and in a sense, a rebellion against what I’m doing here–writing a dialog with you in typical “blog post” fashion.  Back then I felt that no one really went online to know more about a complete stranger.  I still think I was right about that at the time (although things have changed).  At least I sure never cared about what most people put on their home pages at that time.  My page was utilitarian:  find resources related to gaming, programming, music, or whatever else I happened to be interested in.  More accurately, it was useful to me, a place I could store and show off a few things, including a rather cool photo album for the times.

So I had web pages.  I knew HTML.  The web got more complicated.  Sites like fortunecity or geocities offered free web space, and had “web page builder” software.  The web got even more complicated.  Not only did the web page builders fall short of meeting expectations, but writing a web page by hand got more and more tedious as the HTML and CSS spec started to demand higher quality pages.  And then came blogs, or web logs.  I thought they were retarded.  It was a throwback to the old personal home page days (and actually I was kind of right about that too), where people would narcissistically post things about what they did in their everyday lives as if we were interested in reading their personal diary.  I really didn’t like the word “blog” either.

But eventually I started looking for ways to not have to write all that HTML, CSS, and PHP code anymore.  (Honestly, I guess with PHP included headers and footers, I probably spent less time creating websites back then than I do with upgrading WordPress and installing plugins now.)  WordPress was pretty nice, but I didn’t have any use for an online “diary.”  My first “blog” was just a simple web log that I kept as notes on Linux configuration that I had done to the server I was running.  So all the entries looked roughly like this:

New IMAP Certificate

Generated new IMAP certificate:

openssl req -new -x509 -nodes -out /etc/ssl/certs/imapd.pem -keyout /etc/ssl/certs/imapd.pem -days 365

Yeah, that’s it sparky.  But at least I had found some use for blog software.  And the great thing about it was, I could quickly post new content without having to fuss with making a web page.  And that is the secret about blogs. They reduce the complexity of making web pages that even the page builders couldn’t do because the page builders tried to let you do too much.  In other words:

Blog software provides the structure for your content, making it consistent and easy to both post and navigate.

Forget about diaries.  Your “blog” is just a web page, if you want it to be.  This is true especially with WordPress.

My next blog was “Angelo’s Notepad” and I appropriately selected the Rubrick Theme which had been pretty popular at that time and fit the blog title pretty well.  Angelo’s Notepad was really just a place for me to throw up things I didn’t have time to format and put up more “formally” on my websites.  But then, WordPress did the best thing it could have done for people like me:  it created wonderful support for “pages” as well as “posts” and allowed you to set a page to be the front page.  This is all you need to create a website.

So I use WordPress to build websites.  Does that make me a blogger?