Only 12 more days to go for $100 + massive prizes!

OK yea, a large part of this post is self-serving, however it definitely should help others along the way as well.

Back in the beginning of December I was getting fed-up with the uselessness of the wordpress dashboard and went looking for quick and easy ways to check incoming links. Although many link checking tools were mentioned, all but Google alerts fell way outside my immediate criteria…..

Something simple to merely check who is currently linking to me so I could link back/thank them in some way.

Most, if not all backlink checking tools, were not made for such simplicity. The wordpress dashboard was perfect until they changed the way it reads pages…but I’m not going to get into that now, there are blog articles all over with people complaining about the same thing.

This review is in congratulations to Yan for winning my first contest. My apologies for not getting to it until now…..I guarantee though, it is worth the wait. *wink*

What can I say about Yan Susanto that you can’t already read about. The man is definitely a force to be reckoned with in the blogging community.

I don’t mean this in a “problogger” kinda way (although he does blog full time) but in my opinion, he has one of the most helpful and useful blogs out there……and NO *attitude*, which is extremely important!

You see, Yan (also known as the smiling blogger) runs ThouShallBlog.com, which is quoted as, and certainly is Blogging Tips for Beginners.

He’s got a lot to smile about. Let’s take a small clip right from his about page (linked above)…

Happy Halloween! Past Present or Future, depending when you read this; I won’t be posting tomorrow

I realize I promised this to be a monthly thing here when I started it in June, sorry about that.

With so many things happening, not the least of which, my sudden yet unavoidable 2 month disappearance, it just hasn’t happened…I’ll try much harder from here on

For those too lazy, hehe, to click the link above, this is where at the end of each month I do a round up of the best of the best posted here during that month.

Just in case you missed or forgot anything juicy Now let’s dig into those archives! (All links should open in a new window.)

JULY (Slow month)

1. A very popular tip for bloggers regarding comments. Ranking heavy-weight in most popular posts!

We’re back in business baby!

As it turns out, it was my Social Bookmarks plugin that did the dirty deed! Apparently it uses the scriptalicious library which is known to interfere with jquery.

I installed that just one day before installing the other 2 plugins I mentioned. After hearing this, I did go back over the comments in between and noticed only a couple had CL links attached.

I suppose it started failing immediately and ended completely around the time the other two were installed. Oops, but a good assumption at the time.

I’m not sad the other two are gone though, they were giving me issues on their own as well.

Now I have to look for another social icon plugin that does not use either scriptalicious or effects.js.

Any ideas? Ah well, I’m just happy as a clam to have my comment baby back! (I know you are too )

Hello everyone,

By now some of you have begun to notice that my CommentLuv plugin is out of action. I’m sorry, I was really hoping to have it working before too long.

This is also why I haven’t responded to comments in the past day or so, which I’m going to get to right after this post; here’s what I think happened…

I installed one plugin that was meant to clearly show backlinks of what blogs were linking to what post within this blog.

Very cool I thought as it is much clearer then looking at trackbacks. I also installed a 2nd companion plugin who’s sole purpose is to help the first plugin work.

As far as I can tell, one or both of these did a serious screw job on my inner workings and took out CommentLuv…..so far I don’t see any other problems, which I suppose is a really good thing.

Well, there’s not much to add to that, except to ask several followers - happy now? I am!

Also to any other 4yo techies - get this plugin, oh my god is it super simple and works like a charm!

I have mine set to back-up once daily, as I figured every hour was a little TOO paranoid LOL.

In conclusion to what’s probably my shortest post ever, I ask…Do you back-up your blog? What do you use and how often do you use it?

Never stop pushing forward!
Dennis

Sorry for the wait, I had a bunch of comments to sort through Congratulations, we have two contest winners!

1. Yan and his BloggingForBeginners blog for suggesting the “Most Popular Pages“, thanks Yan! (As you can see in the left box, that will go in as soon as I find a decent one…..Alex King’s no longer seems to be working properly.)

2. Wiehanne from WiehanneContest for the suggestionS of my RSS Subscribe Box & my Social Network buttons, thanks Wiehanne! (I didn’t know just how far below the fold my RSS really was until this…it was above the fold on my screen.)

Congratulations you two! You have until Friday the 24th to claim your prize. As a reminder, you can pick ONE of the following…..

A Site Review - (Click link to see exaclty what you will get if you choose this.)

In my ever vigilant effort to make a clean looking AND user-friendly Blog for everyone here, I am trying one more plugin to try and get the combination of post snippets on-site, while having full feeds go through the feed.

if you recall, I first attempted the Full Feed plugin and it was a disaster. I then thought it would just be best to change the look of the Blog a bit, and publish full posts.

Neither you nor I liked that very much.

When suddenly…..on one of my blog commenting escapades I ran across Colin King, a true geek :-). A great guy, a real swell fella; seriously.

I was conversing my woes to him and he told me of (or reminded me of) the Optional Excerpt right here in the WP ‘write’ admin. I had seen it many times of course, but never knew what it was for.

UGH! Broken links everywhere. Is there anything more annoying to a site owner?!?!? Not only that, but you can easily lose business; perhaps a LOT of business depending on the circumstances.

If it’s a blog you can very easily lose readers if they find too many broken, non working links. Reader loss could quite possibly mean revenue loss, both in the present AND future…most will never return.

Think especially of new readers full of hope, glee and anticipation in finding a new blog in their niche of choice…what a let down. Not to mention how unprofessional it looks, especially if it’s more then 1 or 2 links.

You also have to be aware of the SEO ramifications that can occur due to too many broken links. Search engines, especially Google will not appreciate it…not one bit. Links, incoming outgoing and internal are the backbone of Google ranking.

Every blogger wants to know the one and only true *secret*. “How do I know what my readers want to read?” The simplest and best way is to just let them tell you.

Learn a very cool, easy and free way to connect with your readers and learn EXACTLY what they want…

It’s called Skribit and allows you very simply to find out exactly what your readers want to read…no magic involved.

It’s an awesome looking tool for gathering and prioritizing the marketing topics you want me to write about here on D.S.W.M.

The whole idea is that YOU as a reader can now add your questions/suggestions right on the widget and also vote up the ones that others have added. This in turn helps me know which are the main questions or concerns y’all may want me to address.