*This may or may not be based on a true story*

Late 2006

Person: What’s that? *pointing at my computer monitor*
Me: Another web site I just made. It’s called a blog.
Person: *blank face*
Me: Just another online site for me to rant my stuff. And I finally got a domain name!
Person: *blank + don’t care face*
Me: I had to spend a little, though, for that and my hosting.
Person: *you’ve gotta be kidding face*

Early 2007

Me: You know, I’ve just found out a way how I can make money out of my blog.
Person: What? (as in what’s a blog again?)
Me: Yeah, they call it paid to blog. I just post some stuff, put links in it and then they pay me.
Person: How much?
Me: 5 bucks a post.
Person: Hrmph.
Me: US dollars.
Person: *blank + don’t care face*
Me: And it’s not like those HYIP, E-gold stuff you’re doing. There’s basically no risk involved.
Person: *you do what you want to do because I don’t care face*

Late 2007

Me: Hey, I got 30 bucks in my PayPal!
Person: *wow that’s a lot…not… face*
Me: Wow, and that’s just one program per month. If I do a few of these programs, I might just get a hundred bucks a month!
(a few days later)
Me: That PayPal money just went into my credit card account. RM100 plus. Not bad, huh?
Person: (quiet)
Me: Were you able to take out your money from your E-gold and HYIPs?
Person: (quiet)
Me: Scams again, huh?
Person: (quiet)

Early 2008

Person: Are you still making money from your blog?
Me: Yep.
Person: How much?
Me: Almost a thousand Ringgit a month now.
Person: Oh.
Me: I’m thinking of doing a few more blogs. They call it niche sites. Looks like a good way to make money, as long as I have the time to blog.

Mid 2008

Person: I wanna make a site about making money.
Me: You should try blogging. I can set it up for you.
Person: Sure.
(a month later)
Me: Why aren’t you updating your site?
Person: I’ll get around to it. I’ll do a whole bunch of updates at one go.
Me: OK.
(another month later)
Me: Are you sure you want to do this blog thing?
Person: I dunno. Looks hard.
Me: *rolls eyes* … You haven’t even started.

Late 2008

Me: Oh, my God! Check out my AdSense! USD100 finally! And that’s just from one blog! Plus my paid postings… yes!
Person: Great! How do you take that money out?

2009 – recently

Me: Where did you go?
Person: I’ve been hanging out with my friends. We went shopping for some gadgets and stuff. They say they’re spending all those with their money they get from their blogs.
Me: *keeps eyes on netbook and blog* Good for them.
Person: I wanna have a blog.
Me: *keeps eyes on netbook and blog + you’ve gotta be kidding face*
Person: I just don’t know what to blog about.
Me: *keeps eyes on netbook and blog* Just blog about anything. Like they do. Like I do. I’ll help you set yours up, and buy you your own domain while we’re at it… just make sure you update, OK?
Person: *excited* … I’m getting the digicam you wanted.
Me: *snorts sarcastically* Yeah, sure.

Much more recently

Me: You haven’t started your blog.
Person: I’ll get around to it. I’ll do a whole bunch of updates at one go.
Me: *snorts sarcastically* Yeah, sure.

——————-

I’m not making this up. At least on my blogs (WebGrrrl.net and my other niche sites), this seems to be the trend.

Take a look at WebGrrrl.net’s Google Analytics one-year comparison for the month of September. My blogging activities were considerably more last year than this year, yet I’ve noticed a marked improvement on the bounce rate. In Google terms, “a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert.” Looking at the stats, this means that once a visitor reads one post from my blog, there is a 99% chance that the visitor will stay in my blog and go read the next post, instead of going to other sites.

I’m surprised that WebGrrrl.net was able to achieve a low bounce rate, due to the fact that the blog content isn’t well-focused. I take bounce rates seriously especially on my niche sites, because this means that my visitors are digging deep into my blog content, hence the chances of them clicking on my ads are higher.

One stats you don’t see in the screenshot above is my traffic sources. Visits from search engines to WebGrrrl.net have increased by almost 20%, and I’m seeing a similar improvement with my currently-idle niche sites. Everyone who’s into monetizing their web sites know that search engine visits are like hearing your shop’s doorbell ring every time a paying customer comes in.

I’ve yet to really sit down and study all these data I’m getting, but if it’s anything like the advice Grizzly gave, saying that you make more money by not updating, then there should be a big fat nose-inflating grin slapped squarely on my face.

Oh, wait. Yeah, there is

Another TCW update has been posted in WordPress.org’s Plugins Repository to include two new additions based on user requests.

Show top commentators between certain dates: This option was requested by James Pearse of Avon School District, MA. In his e-mail, he included a link to his school’s blog, demonstrating the idea that having your name displayed in the site and getting listed in the top commentators’ list not only can be used to increase traffic to your blog, but more so to help generate interest and participation on the posts among your site visitors. What a delight it is to see how something as small as TCW can contribute so much to learning and education. It makes developing WordPress plugins that more worthwhile for me.

Open links in a new window: I received a surprising number of requests lately, both through the WP.org Support forum and e-mails, asking me to include this option in the widget, so there you go – pretty straight forward at that.

As always, feedback and bug reports are appreciated. Do so in the WP.org’s Support Forum (preferably) and remember to tag your post with the words top-commentators-widget, or drop me a line via my Contact Form.

I’ve started a series on how to create a blog aggregator using WordPress at Blogging Fu (I finally got around to doing my first post, whoopee!). As the self-appointed administrator to the first Sabah blog aggregator Giuk.net (OK, not really self-appointed but I got the approval from its domain owner, mrBadak, to be one), one of my responsibilities is to verify each and every application that got through the registration form.

I verify the following manually before adding it to the blog aggregator:

1. A working blog feed: I don’t really care whether it’s a full or summary feed, as long as it’s a legible and well-formatted feed according to the popular standards such as ATOM and RSS.
2. A link back to Giuk.net using the exact HTML codes and keyword link.
3. Some form of content that could indicate to me that the blog owner is definitely a Sabahan.

Matter #3 above drives me crazy. I do a lot of blind-guessing on this one, because:

1. The blog owner may blatantly declare that (s)he is a Sabahan, which I can accept at face value, regardless of the fact that it may be a big, fat lie; or,
2. The blog contains posts with that certain Sabahan flair (e.g. dialect, Sabahan slangs, expressions of the word bah strewn about), which would also convince me, although that can be easily faked; or,
3. The blog owner is someone whom I’ve personally met or know, which rarely happens and is my safest bet in ensuring (s)he qualifies for the aggregator (and which, BTW, would be a good reason for you to turn up for the upcoming Sabah Bloggers Gathering this Hallow’s Eve).

Help me, peoples! What would be a good way to verify that the blog owner claims who (s)he claims (s)he is? Gimme your bright ideas, I beg of you!

Having been impressed with the demo at the recent Microsoft TechNet MSDN Roadshow here in Kota Kinabalu early September, I decided to install the freely-distributed Windows 7 RC installer on my just-repaired Acer Aspire One netbook almost immediately afterwards, and have been installing and testing many software almost non-stop since then.

I’m so psyched that Windows 7 performs as well as, if not better than, Windows XP! Not only were there no hardware and device conflict, but many of the software I used in XP is still compatible with 7! I’ll be honest and admit that there were very very small occasions where I encountered the dreaded BSOD, but those were entirely my fault since I installed certain software *cough virtualization cough* that were not compatible with my CPU, against Microsoft’s and Intel’s warnings, and again those errors were very few and far between.

As a blogger, my main concern was whether I’d still be able to use XAMPP and TortoiseSVN for my WordPress sandbox and plugin development, specifically for the Top Commentators Widget(TCW). Boy, am I glad they work on 7!

The screenshot above shows my Windows 7 desktop with the XAMPPLite program running Apache and MySQL. I’m also re-setting the TCW repository with TortoiseSVN to continue with my WordPress development, specifically the GEDCOM plugin and another plugin which will be simple but surprisingly useful – the latter will also be my first attempt at developing an AJAX-powered app.

So, yeah… I hope this lame excuse is enough of a good reason for the lack of posting in this blog

BTW, I’m typing this post via Windows Live Writer (which is bundled with the free Windows Live Essentials if you’re wondering how to get it). If this program screws up with the formatting, then this will be the last time I’ll be using WLW, otherwise I’ll be sticking to this as long as there are no better decent and free offline blog editor that comes along. I’m currently not using ScribeFire, since Mozilla Minefield doesn’t support it yet (yeah, don’t install FireFox on Windows 7, it’s very unstable).

Hope to do more posts concerning my WordPress plugins and Windows 7 experience soon.