Blogging Fool

I created the Blogging-Fool site to track my own journey through understanding this whole blogging thing.  At the time, I had only installed and run a couple of test blogs, but much has transpired since then and I am now almost four years deep into a process of learning that continues to change and morph and warp into new pathways and discoveries.

This site is my way of giving back, and unlike many other sites that ultimately squeeze you into a sales page, there is not ulterior motive here but to share ideas with the blogging community and aspiring bloggers.  So in order to share the wealth of knowledge I have gathered I need to hear from you:

What do you know, what do you want to know?  What questions do you have that I can help you with?  It will help me to better determine what sort of readers are landing here and better address your reasons for arriving.

Whether you want to know what the best blogging platform is, what to look for in a theme, the definition of SEO, LSI (latent semantic indexing), affiliate marketing or contextual ads, keyword phrase research, how to write a good title or what to write about, I am happy to discuss it with you.

Put the Blogging Fool to work by leaving your question in the comments section to this article.

To your success,

KMS, the Blogging Fool

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WordPress, the blogging platform from Automattic has without a doubt become the de facto framework for serious bloggers, with thousands of plugins and themes available and huge active community of independent developers.

One of the more esoteric elements and hurdles for WordPress over the years has been trying to get it to play catch up with the power of social networks, and to this end, a sort of elaborate and extensive hack class WordPress MU (multi-user) was developed that allowed WordPress to act more like a social networking destination wherein users could view and exchange content and messages across registered profiles. WordPress MU is capable of scaling to tens of millions of pageviews per day, supports unlimited users and blogs and allows different permissions on all of those different blogs

Well the hack seems to have gone pretty well as WordPress MU is now going to be merged directly into WordPress proper. The caveat is that you won;t simply be able to merge a non MU and an MU site together and be on your way, but now setting up an MU WP site will be a heck of a lot easier.

Version 3.0  will also come with the new Twenty Ten default theme, a welcome upgrade from the customizable, but now venerable Kubrick default template.

To learn more, or to download the WordPress 3.0 Beta 1 installation files and try it out for yourself, visit the official WordPress blog.

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Automattic just won’t let anything slide, now will its community of developers and users. The fourth in a series of .1 updates created to address possible security issues that could be exploited by malicious users or even registered contributors, WP 2.8.5 includes the following key changes:

* A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen.
* Removal of areas within the code where php code in variables was evaluated.
* Switched the file upload functionality to be whitelisted for all users including Admins.
* Retiring of the two importers of Tag data from old plugins.

The update for custom WordPress installation can be easily applied from the admin panel and it is strongly recommended that you do. When last we check, there was even a 2.8.6 release cooking. We may have to wait just a little longer for 2.9 but at least we will sleep more soundly knowing that the doors have been locked.

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One of the most interesting things about the service, when Twitter first launched, was the way in which the users customized the service to meet their needs – from circuit bent plant feeders that alarmed them when they needed watering to (the soon to be obsolete) hash tags.  But in the meantime, beyond the CNN and Ashton Kutcher and downtime hype, the essential value of this platform is being overlooked.  I want to briefly share my thoughts about how to choose the right people to follow on Twitter in order to understand how to unlock its potential.

One of the things to consider when using Twitter is that following celebrities and famous sports stars right away is sort of defeating the purpose of Twitter, because you are simply going right back to listening to the mainstream; Twitter can serve as a bona fide news service, and to assume that it is just a way of stalking popularity is to miss out on its real virtues.  One of the beauties of Twitter is that you can find niche experts on subjects far closer to your heart and, if you choose just the right ones, the sort that understand the right pacing of a good Twitterstream and the right way to compose those Tweets, you can actually create a perfectly customized data stream for yourself that will keep you both informed, engaged and inspired and never bothered by this amazing new technology.

Information Wants To Be Free – As in Free Speech, Not Free Beer

Consider creating separate Twitter accounts depending on your interest, something akin to creating information channels, or separate subject tabs in iGoogle.  For example you might create a Twitter account that just follows food writers and recipes.  And maybe you can create a second Twitter account that is just about robots and artificial intelligence and the latest tech news.

You don’t have to have followers in order to enjoy your Twitter account – too many people who come to Twitter become too quickly obsessed with gathering followers.  This is counter intuitive and secondary to the benefits of the medium.

Be Your Own Tastemaker

Acquiring followers is really only important if you have a product to promote or have serious issues with popularity – obviously we all want to have a message get out there but until you really learn the ins and outs of Twitter, you may not know how to best use the platform for conveying your message.  I recommend first following great Tweeters and once you have really fine tuned a great Twitter stream, you’ll be that much better at doing it yourself and the followers will then start to come as you interact and reply to the people you already admire. Furthermore, consider using the “Favorite this Tweet” option – the little star beside any given tweet if you are using Twitter proper. This is an often overlooked but powerful feature for handpicking the best of the bunch as they whiz past.

To link people to your top picks of the day, simply append

/favorites

to your twitter URL. For example if your Twitter account is http://twitter.com/ConstantChange then just link people to http://twitter.com/constantchange/favorites to show off what you felt was most recently relevant.

By aggregating an excellent collection of Tweeters to your profile, you will have a robust, bleeding-edge, pro-level source of insight that will ping you as it happens.  Who knows, before long you may even forge a relationship with some of your heroes, leaders in your field of interest, or better yet, become one yourself.

Follow my Tweets @ConstantChange

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