creeva

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

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Originally Published at Journey To Get Paid in this article.

So a couple weeks ago I moved all of my blogs over to the Disqus commenting platform.  So far so good.  The best thing is that I now have an offsite backups for all of my comments.   I had held off using any commenting platforms until they could sync back to the local wordpress database.

I backup all of my blog posts in e-mail and google documents, but there hasn’t been a good offsite backup system for comments until now.   If I loose my blog or migrate to another platform Disqus (supposedly) will be able to sync the contacts back correctly.

Check them out, and leave a comment to test it.

Originally Published at Journey To Get Paid in this article.

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

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Originally Published at Journey To Get Paid in this article.

We’ve all thought about it.   Why don’t I try one of the services that pay me for each post I do.  I only have to write about something I know nothing about and make it seem convincing.  Yeah, right.   There is more to it then that.   I’m not going to call out all services or their designs, but at the same time, they are bunk.

They don’t want to be black listed for spamming themselves so they are calling you out to do it for them.   Normally you would get anywhere from 2.50-5.00 for the privilege of doing this for them.  So for 5.00 you’ve lowered your integrity.   I can understand if your blogging about cruises or vacation providers if you have a travel blog, if you have a personal blog though it’s kind of transparent.

Looking through the benefits and pitfalls of getting in bed with one of these services, I would recommend becoming an Amazon Affiliate - at least there you can make residual income on a blog post that should add up to more then 5.00 for the right item.

Originally Published at Journey To Get Paid in this article.

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

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Originally Published at Journey To Get Paid in this article.

They (don’t ask me who “they” are) say that to grow a blog you need to create a social environment around your blog.  This theoretically will make people want to come back and read your blog again and again.

I’m not going to discredit this theory, but at the same time it’s not the complete picture anymore then saying Myspace is one of the greatest web sites in the world because of the traffic it generates.   Beyond social aspects you also need good content.   Not all of us are good content providers, heck most of you probably hare my stuff.   That’s fine, no one is forcing to read it.   However commenting is part of the equation.

Every time someone leaves a comment on one of my blogs I do my best to reply within twenty four hours.   This shows that someone is reading their comments and takes an interest in them.   I take an interest in each and everyone of my readers, though some of them don’t care enough about me to actually leave a comment.

So have you left or replied to a comment today?

Originally Published at Journey To Get Paid in this article.

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

Here is what has been published this week.

Articles:

Traffic Does Not Equal Money

My Copy of Little Brother Arrived Yesterday

Rant On The Myspace E-mail System

Out of Date and Unpatched Computers

Sharing Information - Who To Share It With

Being Excited About a New Browser

What Do The Brain Dead Write When They Have Nothing Else - Reviews

Mashable Doesn’t Really Like Ping.fm

The Crossposting God Series Part 8 - Using A Lifestream to Keep Track of Your Crossposts

Movies I Own - American Psycho

Why Did I Start Writing Reviews

Thou Shalt Not Covet - Really?

Rebloggers - Why Are There So Many of Them?

Movies I Own - Bill and Teds Excellent Adventure

Movies I Own - Harsh Times

Daily Activity Summaries:

Online Activity for 2008-08-29

Online Activity for 2008-08-30

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

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Originally Published at Journey To Get Paid in this article.

I don’t reblog very often.  When I do it’s mostly because it’s something that really interests me.    However even sites like Gizmodo or Lifehacker will take stories found somewhere else and write another article about it.  This in and off itself isn’t much of an issue.

The issue lies in the fact that Lifehacker wrote about someone else’s article, in turn someone else writes about the Lifehacker article, then another person writes about that article.   Instead of original thought or words there are huge amounts of people that are regurgitating information and creating a buzz.   The problem lies in the fact that the original author often times do not get credit, the credit goes to the large sites.   This is a great misfortune since the only way to find out where the true information comes from is by chasing link through link.    That is if the chain of attribution is intact during the whole line along the way.

If you are a reblogger, please write something original.   I would say write something original most of the time.  Put your words and voice into someone else’s story, but also tell one of your own.

Originally Published at Journey To Get Paid in this article.

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

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In part 8 I was going to write about crossposting to blogger, but that’s been delayed for the time being.  I’ll get back to that subject as soon as I get a chance.   Let’s move onto monitoring your crossposting.

Some people may have noticed that on my lifestream there seem to be duplicate posts.   This is because I’ve been working on adding all the RSS feeds from all the services in one trackable lifestream.   The benefits are that you can see and track how long information takes to get from one site to the next.   This also allows you to see where your crossposting is failing.   For example I’m noticing that my posts going to pownce are not getting through so when I get a chance I’ll look into what is actually causing that.

Lifestreaming all of our sites into one endpoint site that you can control and maintain allows all the little maintance to happy at a single glance.   We all know that crossposting is usually best effort delivery.  Not everything shows up in all the sites, but that happens because your not actively maintaining those sites and sometimes things just go wrong.

By having a single stream of all of your sites you are not bogged looking at RSS items for every site all together.  If I put all my feed items in google reader then it would take me an hour each day to get through all of them.  Having a quick glance allows the information to be singled out in a daily quick view.

Currently I’m using the wordpress lifestream plugin to handle my lifestream page.  It gives me the benefit of having a daily summary post generated automatically.  This allows me to have a permanent archive of all of my daily archives that I can go back search and vault away in my own life vaulting fashion.

Life is good.  Maintaining and monitoring in a single glance - that’s great.

Previous Entries in The Crossposting God Series:

The Crossposting God Series Part 1 - The Introduction

The Crossposting God Series Part 2 - Vox

The Crossposting God Series Part 3 - Live Journal and Derivative Sites

The Crossposting God Series Part 4 - Entry, Distribution, and End Points

The Crossposting God Series Part 5 - Myspace

The Crossposting God Series Part 6 - RSS Feeds to Crosspost

The Crossposting God Series Part 7 - Where Can You Post By E-Mail?

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

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First and foremost I don’t believe there is such a thing as sharing too much information.    That being said I want to control what I share, I also want to be aware of what is being seen, searched, and digested.   I will happily write about anything and everything in my life, even to the annoyance of friends, family, and of course readers who have to put up with my inanity.

I dislike however background checks, interview questions that deal with your personal life outside of work, and assumptions based on the findings of those two things.   What I do outside of work as long as it’s not illegal is none of our business.   It is my life and if it has no bearing on our company or business sector, then buzz of.  If you are so concerned about it subscribe to my RSS feed, I’m sure something on that subject will eventually arise.

During background checks I’ve been ask who my neighbors are.  I don’t know I’m not the neighborly type.  I don’t hang outside with a beer and play the “get to the know the neighbors routine” - just because they live in a geographic location adjacent to me doesn’t mean I want to know or hang out with them.  I’m a picky person on who I waste me time.   The ones that I do waste time with have some degree of amusement or I gain something from it.   My neighbors are not these people.  The simple answer is that maybe if I got to know them they would be.   That’s the rub and catch-22 now isn’t it.

The reason I’m writing about this is the fact I was talking about a background check with someone via e-mail the other day and she said that I shouldn’t worry about it, that her life is more interesting then mine.  She may be right.   That’s the not the point, I’m pretty in control and aware of what I write online, how I share, and how it’s reused.   Check out my lifestream page for m activities pulled and duplicated from many different services.   I spread my dataphonic seed across the blogosphere.

I’m aware and to an extent I’m in control.  It’s when information is forced from me in which I take issue with and will clam up.

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

Now you know if you read my blog regularly that I don’t have the higest respect for Myspace.  I have been using Myspace more and the issues of it’s flaw just become more glaring with me over time.
Issues:

1.  There is no method for saving e-mails.   None, other then copy and paste - which is a huge pain in the ass.   While I do have the first snippet saved in a gmail notification I would prefer to have the whole message saved off and archiving.

2.  After two weeks it deletes your sent messages - WTF?  Why can’t I decide to clean out my inbox - if you want to clean them out why don’t you give me the option to automatically export a copy out for myself in my home e-mail account?

3.  Notifications - theoretically it wouldn’t take much more bandwidth to send me the whole message - I have no problem logging into your site to reply to email - but send me the complete email and not the first 140 characters.

I understand e-mail is not a priority for them, and not a focus of the site.  I understand they are a walled garden.  Dammit though, with the user base some interoperability with their e-mail would be nice.

I hate you Myspace.

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

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Some people may notice that on my lifestream page it has a new look and feel, it also has a whole lot more stuff in it.   I’ve transitioned to a new lifestreaming plugin, previously I was using the “Simple Life” plugin.   The new plugin is is called “Lifestream“.  It allows me to put in more RSS feeds then I was previously able to with “Simple Life”, it also performs a daily digest post (which has allowed me to stop using the twitter plugin I used to use to pull in my digest of tweets).   There is one bug with the digest posting in the fact that it does a double post.

For creeva.com this is easy to fix.  I just go in each morning and remove the duplicate post.   However the people feeling the sting are the ones that I crosspost to.   There is absolutely no way I’m going to go everywhere my data replicates and track down and clean out the duplicate posts.  I have been in contact with the plugin author and he is aware of the issue.   He did some massive updating last night, let’s hope this got corrected.  I was also kind enough to hide these daily posts from the front page of the blog.   I didn’t want to make it seem that all I did was do daily updates of myself.  I’m not that vane to broadcast on the front page of my blog.   There is a link at the bottom of my lifestream to direct you to my lifestream archive.

The other thing to notice is the multitude of items.   It makes me look like an internet posting maniac.  Ok I am an Internet posting maniac, but not as much as my lifestream shows.  I thought it apt to try to get information on where my stuff is being posted and pull in the RSS feeds from here.  This will allow readers to see everywhere I crosspost to how frequently they are updated.

We’ll see if this is the magic bullet for my life vaulting.

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

My online activities for you to read:

Yesterday
	7:25am	Scrobbled a song on Last.fm. leo@leoville.com – net@night 60: Too Hot
	11:25am	Bookmarked 2 links on Delicious. (Show Details)</p> Internet Archive: Details: Vermilion High School Marching Band 1993 Season 1993-1994 School Year Using Feedburner in WP Bliss | Tree Rat Fishing
	11:29am	New Look For The Blog
	11:34am	Posted 6 tweets on Twitter. (Show Details)</p> creeva: New Look For The Blog: ….. Read MoreNo tags for this post. Related posts No related posts. http://tinyurl.com/6zkd9k creeva: @evilpacket I may be doing the retro look for a different blog I’m configuring creeva: VCMA Concert Tonight: ….. Read MoreNo tags for this post. Related posts No related posts. http://tinyurl.com/646lc5 creeva: sitting through normal thursday meeting creeva: I Admit it, I Liked Archie Comics Growing Up: ….. Read MoreNo tags for this post. Related posts No rel.. http://tinyurl.com/583qnl creeva: I’m told I’m a royal pain in the ass
	1:33pm	VCMA Concert Tonight
	1:35pm	Posted an item problem_with_disqus_and_my_wp_theme (disqus)
	6:56pm	I Admit it, I Liked Archie Comics Growing Up

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

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Going through my RSS feeds this morning I came across an article, “Ike’s Granddaughter Calls Obama ‘Future of America‘”.  My first thought was good for her.  My second thought was who cares?  What I don’t want to get into is the meat of the article for a moment, let’s look at the headline.   Anyone vaguely aware of presidential politics should be aware that Ike is referring to Eisenhower.   What does his granddaughter have to do with anything.   Why should can claim she is an Eisenhower Republican that doesn’t means she has the same values as Ike.   I don’t really have a care who she supports or her political beliefs, but the fact that because she is Ike’s grand daughter seems to make this news.

My grandfather sold tractors, I don’t particulary like tractors - if a tractor blog going to print “Martin’s grandson predicts tractor sales are dead?”  I don’t think so.

Personally I’m waiting on  the “George Washington’s Distant Cousin Gives McCain a Big Thumbs Up” article.   If I’m really lucky the “Jefferson’s Great Great Great Grandson marries Ben Franklin’s Great Great Great Great Grand Daughter at the Ron Paul Rally” article.   Once again it means nothing.

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

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So I’ve taken over the position of webmaster for the VCMA (Vermilion Community Music Association).  This is going to start a new series as I’m going to use them as guinea pig’s for what I’ve felt non-profits need to do to survive and thrive in the web 2.0 world.   They are not a big organization, and I’m sure I received this position for my background and not my witty personality.

I’ve been working on the site for a couple of weeks and here is what I’ve found so far.   They had a private member’s section on the old site to share files and personal data.  This section was password protected, but the username field was just a front, as long as you nkew the password anything you put in the username field was accepted.  Since I’m a security engineer, this just wasn’t going to work for me.  I’ve ranted before the illusion of security and how illusionary security wasn’t worthwhile at all anyways.  The other problem was that their member page “password protected” section was just a javascript that rewrote the “HTTP GET” to a file named a combination of the requested page plus the password.   So if the page was index.tml and the password was “password” the ending HTTP in the “HTTP GET” command would be indexpassword.html.   Since it was still a plain text file without any encryption on it, in theory it could still be spidered and stored by google, thereby completely undermining any security it was giving them.

I’m working on a better and more secure solution while maintaining the balance of ease of use.   I don’t want to burden them too much on the security side.  I’m sure some of the older members would blink at me with a blank stare if I handed them secureID tokens to access their newsletters.

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The next thing I discovered is that code each web page by hand, ugh.  There was no way I was going to maintain each HTML manually and hope for any semblance of style and continuity between pages (an issue they had in the past).   They had been using FrontPage and offered to buy me a copy.  First no, no and no - currently I’m using Linux on my main computer (Ok I dual boot into XP and between WoW and Netflix streaming I don’t get into Ubuntu as much as I should), so Frontpage was out.  They were insistent at first that this is how it was done, I however readjusted things.  I moved them to Wordpress which I’m not using as a blog but rather as a CMS (Content Management System).

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I manually migrated the data from the old HTML files, I spent hours converting the front page data to be “clean” data that i can migrate and copy paste anywhere.   I was a dumbass though, I should have just copy and pasted the text into notepad or a generic text editor, then I wouldn’t have had all the background crap.  This is my nore to myself to now be stupid next time.  I added images and a javascript navigation menu, but essentially the page was just a cleaned up (easy to maintain now) version of what they already had.

Now the next step is to migrate them to Google Apps for their member related information……

Somehow I always end up volunteering for Vermilion non-profits, now if only I could get one of them to pay me……

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

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I randomly go through my commentors and visit their sites and profiles.   This is more out of curiousity then anything else.  I’m curious who they are what they are interested and what they write about.   In most case they are not much different then myself.   They are geeks, or lovers of crossposting, the occasion security geek.

While for this post I don’t really have a point, just an observation.  “They” say to make your blog sticky and interesting you build up a community.  You interact with your commentators and make sure you comment on their posts.   I’m just curious how many of the bloggers actually read what their commentators have written that fall outside the realm of their own door step.

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

In the picture above is my maternal grandfather and my great grandfather, it seems I am going to be joining on them on the ability to reproduce and pass down genetic material to the next generation.  Yes I am going to be a father, Xie want and annouced the pregnancy on Twitter just a few hours ago with the following message:

As of yesterday I am 7 weeks pregnant - coming from the person who would never in a million years want kids, I am very excited & happy

I sent the follow up:

@xielanthia congratulations who is the father……nm

Then I sent this:

As of yesterday @xielanthia is 7 weeks pregnant and I’m going to be a father - wish us luck - we’ll need it.

So we have announced to the Web 2.0 World (WTW? W2W?) that we are having a baby and doing it in true web fashion.  We have known for about 3 weeks and over that time eeked the information out to family and friends.  The first person I told was the IPS guys I played SWG with that I have constant e-mail communication with.  The first family that knew was my in-laws and followed by Xie’s grandmother (I wish she had a blog i could link to).   Then it was ghoulishcharm.  From there I told my father and my brother who was also there.  I went and told my grandparents last Sunday and drove over to tell my sister, but she already knew it seems that she found out from my father who knew the week before.

I did find out from my sisters that my grandparents had already known about the pregnancy (having heard it through her) but yet they acted like they didn’t know anything.   Welcome to my family, we can act surprise even if we have known something for months.   I know I used to unwrap my Christmas presents before hand and rewrap them - I got that trick from my godmother.

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

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Where can you post by E-mail?  Well this is the easiest of crossposting methods (especially if you use Blogger).  There are lots of plugins for wordpress or movable type that can send out your full post as an e-mail to another address.   In most cases you would send this to your own e-mail address so you had it for reference.  What about sending it to another site entirely?  What if that site could send it to another site?  You can see how this chain can work.   If you are using Blogger then you can send out your post to ten e-mail addresses.   This means that your post can replicate like bunnies.   What are some of the sites that can receive e-mail posts?  Let’s get into that.

The original Creeva’s World was hosted on Blogger at creeva.blogspot.com.  This is where I started writing and I didn’t want to abandon it after migrating over to wordpress.  This was the very first site I crossposted to from my wordpress blog.  Crossposting allowed me to not abandon my site and any readers that may go to that address, but I could enhance my own experience while keeping theirs the same.

Lifelogger is the “cooler” blogging service, at least that’s what they say.   I’m not going to use any blogging platform again that I can’t customize to the fullest extent.  Wordpress has spoiled me.   Though I do maintain a site there.

Unlike some major social networks (I’m looking at you Facebook and Myspace), Friendster does support e-mailing in your blog messages.

Blogr is just another blogging host that accepts e-mail.  Very blogger like, but crossposting friendly.

Evernote is unique unlock some of the rest of these sites, Evernote is a notebook service.   It allows you to e-mail in snippets (or use the desktop applications) to send in information that you can then share with your friends.  You can e-mail in text notes, audio, or video.

Busy Thumbs is a simple moblog site that accepts posts via e-mail.

Twine is similar to Evernote, but it’s about collections and community.   Think of it as sharing what you have with your friends.

Google Groups is a spot that I used to use as an online backup for my blog.   I have a private google group that only handles my own blog posts.   No you can’t join, not like you would want to.

I’ve just recently start crossposting to an old Yahoo Group that I used to moderate.   Mostly this is because I can share my thoughts with my friends that are still in that group, but that group is essentially dead.   So this is the only thing that it’s around for to keep me from pulling the complete axe on it.

Each Day is designed to handle your memories and save them so you can go back over your life.  It handles multiple media formats but all I’m concerned about is the e-mail option.

Multiply is a social network in the same vein as Friendster, Myspace, and Facebook.

Over at Vox I maintain a page to integrate with their community.  I’ve posted in the past how vox is a unique community and because of that I receive unique feedback.   They refer to their e-mail inbound service as moblogging.

I like to think of all of my blog posts as separate documents.   After working on this for awhile, I decided to start e-mailing all of my entries to my google docs account let’s me to search and repurpose documents a little easier then searching through the blog.   It’s my dump all account for documents.  I am annoyed that I can’t e-mail blog posts to Zoho Writer for redundancy, they only take documents as attachments.

When you are looking for a new site to crosspost to check and see if they have an option where you can post by e-mail.  Some sites may refer to this as moblogging.  Also remember to e-mail your post to yourself so you have a backup you can control.

Oh, I use the DJ E-Mail Publish plugin to push out posts from Wordpress.

In the next part of our crossposting god series we are going to cover Blogger more in depth.

Previous Entries in The Crossposting God Series:

The Crossposting God Series Part 1 - The Introduction

The Crossposting God Series Part 2 - Vox

The Crossposting God Series Part 3 - Live Journal and Derivative Sites

The Crossposting God Series Part 4 - Entry, Distribution, and End Points

The Crossposting God Series Part 5 - Myspace

The Crossposting God Series Part 6 - RSS Feeds to Crosspost

Related posts

• Utterz - It Allows You to Cross Post to The Blogosphere (0)
• Internet Deadman’s Switch Part 1 (2)
• Creeva’s Shared items in Google Reader (4)
• Web Wandering Dump (0)
• Life Caching is better then Life Streams (4)

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

This nokia device will take a bit to get used to, but most the problems stem from fat thumbs. The more I do it the fsster it becomes.

The predictive typing helps a bit and I can say it actually gives me time to think about what I am writing. If I was going to sit at a coffee shop though I think I would carry a bluetooth keyboard with me. This would be great for IM or twitter.

i think I have been won over but I’m still going to wait at least a few days before I order one. I don’t plan on getting a wimax service so that’s not really a selling point for. I do however see this easily becoming my dream “cloud computing” device. A simple and steady web interface that can easily jump onto any wifi hotspot and go.

I also need to check how qik works from this. Yes I did write this whole post on the tiny keyboard, now I guess I know how blackberry users do it.

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

• How to build a UHF HDTV Antenna….CHEAP!

Security Experts Nationwide expert witness professional firm.

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

Posted By Creeva Murkado to Journey To Get Paid at 4/10/2008 06:29:00 AM

Yesterday on my main blog I wrote a quip on my battle for the search term “creeva” in google and how many hits it brings back.  It flucuates up and down and was more of a joke then anything.   However I started thinking about it a little more deeply last night.

I’m a huge crossposter, I don’t deny it.  My friends can track me down and find me whereever.   I manage to get new readers by utilizing diffferent sources to store my data.   When I wrote a blog post on my main blog, it gets copied or notification goes to many other sites.   The path it takes is that I write an article when I click publish it sends out the article to my myspace, my live spaces account, my vox account, my tumblr account, my suprglu account, my facebook news, my old blogger page, my xanga account, my livejournal page, my multiply account, and a google group for back up (that one is private though).   On top of that livejournal also sends it on it’s way over to my dandelife account.  I’m also copying things over to www.creeva.net which is my by beta testing blog.

If I listen to a song that get’s scrobbled to my last.fm account, upload a picture to my flickr account, digg a story, favorite a video, share an RSS news item, write an article on a blog other then my main (like this article) or mark something down in all consuming; these all get pulled into my main blog, which at that point goes through the data dissemination process all over again.

This is data portability at it’s finast (at least for the content side of the equation) and I work it well.   Some people prefer to go to a single location and that’s fine, that is what I have a main blog for.   Get everything from everywhere all in one location.   Google loves the idea of everything in one place, it’s their whole mantra.   However you will get penalized in Google for having duplicate content.   So my google score will drop theoretically the more places I cross post to that it indexes.

So by disseminating my content to everywhere in the world Google will penalize me in it’s search ratings.   It seems my main blog still gets the most traffic and it’s hits don’t suffer.   So all and all I don’t truly mind.   However I’m sure that sometimes I do suffer when my vox account for example rises to the top instead of my main account.

How can Google truly and actively support data portability when it’s anti ethical to it’s search rankings?  I can understand that it’s an attempt to fight spammers and such, but we all end up hitting pure spam BS blogs all the time.  The crap floats and rises to the top while the rest of things drown in the data deluge.   I don’t think that google necessarily needs to adjust it’s algorithm but in the coming months or years it will need to take it into account.

–
Posted By Creeva Murkado to Journey To Get Paid at 4/10/2008 06:29:00 AM

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

Time for bed - you know I really should have twittered this instead of posting it on the blog.

/shrug.

Originally published at Creeva's World 2.0. You can comment here or there.

This is originally from Journey To Get Paid.

So you have your own blog but it’s something such as creeva.blogspot.com or creeva.wordpress.com, Both of these are acceptable, but if you read my previous about brand management you’ll know that building your audience to your personal brand can help get you a larger following.

Do I need a domain name?

In all honesty I can’t fully answer that question for you. What I can do is give you some pointers on how to choose a domain that can be personal or directed towards your target audience. There are a few questions you should ask yourself before you register any domain name:

• What are you trying to do with your site? Is it a personal site? Is it a tech site? Is it a business site? Now none of these really have any bearing on if you’ll ever make money - or at least that is out side of the scope of this article.
• While some people are just trying to drive massive traffic to their site, what do you want to do? There are loads of spam blogs out there that just show ads and may get thousands of hits a day. I think this people have ethically sold out, but I’m not here to judge you so pay me no attention. You could register a name based of typos and drive traffic that way or come up with something unique that helps you stand out from the crowd. The more unique the site is the more cliquish and faithful your users may become, but this is at a sacrifice of larger traffic goals. This is one of the things you need to consider if your going to be driving traffic to your site. The name is part of the brand and can make or break some sites.
• Is it worth the cost to you? There are many benefits to owning a domain name. Essentially at under ten dollars a year it really is a cheap investment, you can host your website, have personalized e-mail, and build upon your brand name in ways that aren’t really possible with blogger or wordpress hosting your site without owning your own domain to redirect them to these sites. Over time I’ll be writing more articles on what you can do with your own domain name and choosing the correct hosting service

How do you choose a name that’s right for you?

The questions here are similar to those from above so I won’t rehash them. My suggestions is make it memorable so no omgihavefreestuff.com. Choose something that something something about you or at least your site. Your brand is something you’ll build. Do not choose anything too long, this makes it harder for people to remember your address and it will effect traffic from return users. The shorter the better.

I personally know the agony of choosing a domain name for a project. A couple weeks ago for a project I was working on with some others I spent a good 10 hours running domain names by other people. We had a few that could work and others they thought were great for personal blogs, in the end it’s still an ongoing discussion - and we’re looking how we are going to proceed with that project. Not all of my domains that I have purchased have taken this long. I settled in on journeytogetpaid.com in a matter of minutes and had it all set up with the blog running within an hour of conception. Your strategy and length of time it takes to decide on a domain name is only limited by your creativity and your ideas.

Who do I buy from and how much do I pay?

Like everything else this is a personal choice, but let’s look through what I look for. First and foremost I check out price. I would not pay more then $9.99 for a domain name in this day and age and most people look at that as too high of a price. With coupons and cheap registrars there is no reason you need to pay $9.99 a year. The prices I usually go for is between $6.99 and $7.99.

Normally I register all of my domains in one spot and this is with goDaddy.com and they’ve served me well. Some people have issues with goDaddy.com, namely there are stories of yanking a users registration at a drop of a hat if there is a complaint (spammers be warned your domain will be yanked for e-mail spamming from what I’ver heard). Because of this I decided to track down another registrar that is not goDaddy but also is offering domains for $6.95 (not a bad deal, huh). The second company is Blackbeltdomains.com. This should give you two choices to choose from at around the same price range. The latest goDaddy coupon code I’ve used “OYH3″ - this will get you $6.95 .com domains.

Hopefully I have given you something to think about now go ahead and grab yourself a domain.

UPDATE: Wanted to let everyone know I received an e-mail from the original “owner” of the “OYH3″ code.  To support this user and get his other coupon’s go to his page that contains all of his godaddy coupons.

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Posted By Creeva Murkado to Journey To Get Paid at 2/07/2008 09:19:00 AM