I think the time has come to do the decent thing and ‘officially’ close this blog. I say officially as it’s been quite evident that I just don’t have time to take care of it anymore. If I’m honest, I’m not that hugely interested in blogging as a topic anymore either, and whilst I still like playing with the technical side of things, there’s plenty of blogs out there doing it better.

Since returning to work full time I just don’t have the incentive to switch on the PC every evening when I get home, much less write anything intelligible, so I think it’s time to close up.

I won’t delete the blog, as there’s some useful posts buried in there somewhere, and I’m not quitting blogging as I shall keep up my photo & random blogs, but they are more suited to infrequent posting (fortunately!). I shall still keep reading, and hopefully commenting a little more than I have done, but I won’t pretend that this is a live blog anymore.

Thanks to all those who came, saw linked & commented, and if anyone fancies taking Blog-Op on in whatever form, just shoot me a mail.

See you around.

Want to know the secret behind blogging success?

How to get thousands of readers?

Ten thousand subscribers?

It’s easy.

Write quality, original stuff about things that people are interested in.

Want proof? Check out Maki’s latest post on gaining 10,000 RSS subscribers, and you can see how he did it. I have to offer my congratulations as I’ve been a long time reader (and all too infrequent commenter!) pretty much since the start and can vouch for the fact that there’s never been any gimmicks, competitions or fake controversy.

Just thoughtful, well researched  quality information, plain and simple.

There’s no doubt that you can make money or grab some fleeting fame by riding the coat-tails of a passing fad, courting controversy or hitting all the key words, but to lay down solid foundations you need to know what write about, care about it and get that to come across in your writing.

On the plus side, if posting less frequently is a key to success, I’m well on the way to fame & fortune

Nice one Maki, and here’s to the next 10,000.

Apparently the going rate is $30, or $19.50 after Sponsored Reviews have taken their cut.

I’d forgotten to delete my blogs from Sponsored Reviews once I’d decided to stop doing paid posts, mainly because I’d only had two offers in the months that I’d been signed up with them, so I was surprised to see a task from them in my inbox tonight. Imagine my further surprise when I discovered that it was a 200 word post promoting ‘Escort services’ in the north of England.

If you were in any doubt as to whether it was anything more innocent than simple prostitution a quick glance at their homepage will set you straight:

Many of our clients want to enjoy a pornstar experience (PSE) with an uninhibited girl like the ones they’ve seen on screen. Always eager to meet the needs of our gentlemen, we’re happy to represent some stunning pornstar escorts, who you’ll find as thrilling as the naughty films they’ve starred in. Be warned though, these girls can be wild!

Lovely!

Now I’m no shrinking violet, I’m not offended or outraged by the worlds oldest profession, but I do find it amazing that Sponsored Reviews are hooking up with this kind of advertiser. This isn’t a ‘naughty’ website with a few pictures or videos, it’s a front for prostitution.

I’ve been an avid supporter of paid posts, as I think they’re a great way for the individual blogger to make some serious cash, but if this is the way the market is going, I’m glad I’m out.

Would anyone accept this review? Am I being over sensitive? Maybe I’m getting old……

Does your blog have a 404 Page? Do you know what one is? And even if you can answer yes to both questions, are you making the most of it?

Page Not Found

A 404 error is what’s generated when somebody searches for a page on your blog that is no longer there, or indeed may never have existed. For example, if you once had a post titled ‘List of top webhosts’ which you then deleted for whatever reason at a later date, the URL to that post would still live on in search engines for some time, and still bring people to your blog. So when they arrive, and the page no longer exists, they will receive a ‘404 - Page not found’ error.

If your blog template has a ‘404.php’ page then that is what the visitor will see, if not they’ll just get the standard error page provided by your webhost. Typically, it will be short and to the point and will simply say something like ‘The page you are looking for no longer exists’.

Goodbye!

Typically at this point, the visitor will shrug their shoulders and move onto another website, and this is why a lot of people customise their 404 page to include a search bar, adverts or maybe even a related posts tag. However, this far from perfect, as the search bar requires effort on the part of the visitor, ads will take them away from your site and much as I love it, the related posts plugin output is often far from accurate. So what if there was a way to get Google to search your blog, and provide a list of pages all from your site relevant to the visitors search term…….

Ask Apache

As ever when you’re on WordPress, the answer is simple - download the AskApache Google 404 plugin and follow these simple steps:

1. Install the plugin on your blog and activate it.
2. Visit the Google Search API page, signup and get your key. You need a Google account, but if you’ve got Gmail then you already have one.
3. In your blog dashboard, go to ‘Options’ and then ‘AA Google 404′. Select the existing key, delete it and then paste in your new key. Hit ‘Update Code’.
4. Open up your 404.php file using WordPad or a similar text editor (not a word processor). Find the line containing your error message (i.e. ‘The page you are looking for is no longer here’) delete it, and replace with this code: <?php if(function_exists('aa_google_404'))aa_google_404();?>
5. That’s it!

If your chosen theme doesn’t have a 404 file, and some don’t, then just create one. Just open up your index.php file, strip out everything related to the post content, leaving the calls to the header, sidebars and footer intact and then paste in the line of code from ‘4′ above in place of the post content. Save as 404.php, upload it and there you have it.

Themes are coded differently, so I can’t give you exact instructions, but if you get stuck mail me your index.php file & I’ll have a look.

To see it in action, just click on this URL for Blog-Op which doesn’t exist: http://blog-op.com/missing/

Attempt to visit a similar URL for your own blog (assuming you don’t have a post titled ‘missing’!) and you’ll see the difference. What’s the point? Well for one thing Google will provide the closest matches to an existing post on your blog, and for another it asks nothing more of a visitor than a single click, thus keeping them on your blog. And now you know how to customise your 404 page, there’s nothing to stop you doing more like adding some adblocks, or a personalised message.

Thanks to RT for putting me on to this excellent plugin.

Wherever you are, have a good one and don’t eat too much!

Red Christmas by krisdecurtis

My earlier post on reaching 5000 spam comments captured by Akismet raised some interest, as several commenters with blogs of similar ages have suffered more like 30,000 spams and asked what my plugins were.

So, in approximate order of how they intercept spam, here they are:

Bad Behavior: This one stops spam before it reaches the blog, specifically the PHP focussed spambots. By reading their ’signatures’ and the use of blacklists, know spammers are prevented from accessing the comments section of your blog. This is an essential plugin, as aside from reducing spam from a few thousand a day down to dozens, it also prevents a massed spambot attack from taking your site offline.

More than one blogger that I’m aware of has been taken down by their host because a spambot attack was putting too great a strain on their shared server.

Simple Spam Filter: This is the clincher I feel for reducing spam on your blog, as it’s configurable by you, and is fully adaptive when spammers change their tactics. It comes with a list of simple spam words, which if it reads in the comment, will then challenge the commenter to prove they’re human by simply clicking a button to submit their comment. As a spambot won’t be able to confirm they’re human, the comment will get nuked.

The key here is that you can add to the list, either through just typing them in, or getting the filter to review your current spam folder, and then just selecting the words you want blacklisted. So, when the spammers had their recent bizarre attack of commenting ‘nice blog!’ or ‘Holy Tuesday!’ I just added the words ‘nice’ and ‘tuesday’ to my blacklist. This took the number of daily spam comments reaching Akismet down from 40+ to 4. Of course, after a while you can then remove words from the blacklist too.

You can get the original from the link above, or you can try the tweaked version from Stephen of More than Scratch The Surface.

Akismet: Yep, it comes with every installation of WordPress, but any spams getting through the first two will usually be caught here, so make sure it’s activated.

These three plugins took my daily spam moderation queue down from 400 to 3 or 4, most of which are human submitted rubbish. If I could wish anything for Christmas, it would be a painful death for all spammers…..

Any other complementary plugins  available that are worth trying?

David has recently returned from a long break to find some tool has stolen his domain name by methods as yet unknown.

As a result, he’s got his blog back up at DavidAirey.co.uk, as it was the .com that was stolen.

So, if you’ve linked to David in the past, or have him in your blogroll etc. please change the .com link to point to the .co.uk one.

Cheers

In a year and three days. When you consider that I also employ two other plugins that catch spam before it reaches Akismet, the true total may be 5 times higher than that - all that bandwidth and time wasted.

I can’t believe that there’s so many morons in the world who actually click on some of this stuff either - I keep saying to myself that I’m going to make up a top 10 list of the most ridiculous spam comments I’ve ever received, but then I think life’s too short.

Spam. Do you want fries with that?

No, it’s not because of Googles insular approach to link leaving, but because of this:

See the Blogger comment box? An unexpandable and unscrollable  box where over half of the comment field is obscured, and you have to hope there’s no typos.

Is this happening to anyone else? It’s happened in the last week or so, with no obvious changes on my part. Really, I’m totally sick of Blogger right now, and my heart drops whenever I visit a new blog and find it’s hosted there - it’s getting to be such hard work to engage with the blogger, that I find myself moving on to a blog on a decent platform.

Blogger users: Sorry I’d love to comment, but it’s hard to write more than a one liner when you can’t see what you’re writing.

Birthday Cake by DeeM

Amazingly enough it’s been one year (yesterday in fact) since I started this blog. Although it never really did go completely as planned - I envisioned contributions from dozens of different bloggers, with a few regulars - I found enough to talk about myself, and for a while built up a little reputation.

Since going back to work, and the associated slowdown on the blog going back a couple of months, things have obviously quietened down, but it’s cool to see how many people do pop up when I get round to posting, and it’s certainly the cream of the commenters

So as you can see, I’ve implemented a few of the recent theme suggestions, thanks to K for the colours, and the pointers and/or past help from RT, Michael, Claire, Brown Baron and the continued visits from Webduck and Madhur whose blogs I don’t visit anything like enough.

I’d Just Like To Thank….

While we’re on the Oscar speech trip, other cool bloggers that I knew before they were famous and who were far too generous with links and Stumbles etc. are Maki (I remember the Blogspot days!), David Airey and Andy Beard.

Bloggers who no longer seem to be with us (hopefully only in an internet sense) include Scott from the excellent, but short lived Savvy Affiliate, Matt , and the recently resurrected Brett at Monetize your blog - thought we’d lost you there!

Then there’s BlogAboutYourBlog where I used to, but just don’t have the time anymore Carol who was one of my earliest supporters and contributers, Kai, and some of the new guys like Stephen and Rhys.

I apologise to all those I’ve forgotten, but I’d like to thank you all for coming - I still get a buzz out of comments all these months on - and I hope it will be worth you visiting for another year.

Hey, I’ve paid for the hosting, I may as well use it