Adam’s Peace

Yesterday, after making a couple of additions to my blog, I realized that I needed to make a few more changes, rather than simply adding some links and widgets. I have a purpose in life, and one of the ways that I work to accomplish this purpose is to write in a blog. Now, I’ve known for quite some time that my purpose will not be completed in my lifetime, and will probably never be completed, but recently, I have been feeling pressure to increase the reach of my work. I estimate that a few hundred people have visited this blog during its lifetime, both as Adam’s Peace and as AskTrina. Compared the the millions of people who have access to the Internet and can read English, this really is a small number. Of course, I don’t expect everybody who can to find my blog, but I know that I can do better.

So, I am now a professional blogger. I have not quit my paying job, and my performance there will not be changed, but until I can safely pacify my ego, that is one of the main labels that I am putting on myself.

This means that the blog itself will undergo even more changes in the near future.

One of the catalysts for this change was when I added the MyBlogLog widget. With that service, people add screenshots of their site on their profile, to give prospective readers an idea of what to expect when they click the link to your blog. Well, when I came to take a screenshot of this site, I felt a little ashamed. I stuck with the default theme because it is easy to add items, and I’m not the most visually artistic of people. I haven’t put in the necessary work to make my blog stand out visually.

Another thing that I did last night was add the top ten blogs about professional blogging to my RSS reader, and I began to read their archives. One thing that stuck with me is that site branding is important. People need to see your site and instantly recognize it. Some great examples of site branding are Steve Pavlina’s site, Jennifer Lynn’s Broke Ass Student, and John Chow dot Com. (I also highly recommend these sites for their content, not just how they look.) I took a hint from Jennifer and John, and as part of the branding, I am adding some of my wife’s photography to the title bar. I’m also planning to one-up them, and I will be adding a few of her photographs, with them rotating through randomly. (My favorite of the images I chose is of two of my cats, Seven and Lola Trixybell Phoenix the Destroyer Snow [yes, that’s her full name. We just call her Lola], with Lola about to pounce on a toy that is off camera. We’re also adding a quote that says “Joy does not light gently on my shoulder like a butterfly. She pounces on my lap, demanding that I scratch behind her ears.” to that picture, as well as other quotes on the other images.)

With the new template will come some search engine optimization. I’ll have two sidebars, one, the left sidebar, will hold the content that I want indexed first and quickly, and the right one the content that is more interesting to people, but isn’t as important that it gets indexed. This means that the blogroll will appear on the left, where links to other people’s sites will get more exposure, and the right will hold links within my site. (My reasoning is, if Google is already indexing my site, then it will find those other pages anyways, eventually. The people who I add to the blogroll are people who I feel are just as important as my own content, so they’ll come first.) Of course, Google will ignore the widgets and such, so they’ll appear based on how people view the site, rather than worrying about the search engines.

The ads will remain. Sorry folks. The problem is that if I’m ever going to have time to write in my blog as often as I want to, I need to be self sufficient financially. The ads won’t be any more obtrusive than they already are, and I have already learned my lesson about placing an ad inside the post. Yes, I had more clickthroughs with that ad, but I felt that it compromised the articles too much. I’ll be experimenting with other ads, and if someone would like to buy ad space, they are more than welcome to contact me, but I draw the line at annoying graphics, and pop-ups/unders are strictly forbidden. (If you do ever get a pop-up/under while visiting my site, contact me just in case I have to chase out a bad advertiser, and get AdAware and Spybot S&D.)

There are a couple more features that I will be adding, and they should be fairly obvious when they do appear, but I would like to point out a plugin that I just added that I like a lot. If you look in my sidebar, you’ll notice a new section just above the Categories section, which is titled Top Commentators. This is there to reward those who participate in expanding the content of the blog. It is a reward because it expands your search engine ranking when you get on the list. Unlike the comments section, which is protected by “nofollow” tags (prevents spammers from getting a higher Google ranking), each link will get indexed by the search engines, just as if you had been added to the blogroll by hand.

I also want to make it easier for people to follow up on the comments that they make, so whenever you make a comment, there is an option to subscribe to the thread. What this does is it sends you an automatic email whenever someone else posts a comment to the same article. It makes it a lot easier to see what others have said about your comments, so that you don’t have to check back randomly, and maybe even forget about your comments entirely.

For those who also want to implement these plugins, they are Show Top Commentators and Subscribe to Comments.

Now, why am I talking so much about blogging in a blog that is supposed to be about peace? It’s because I hope to encourage people to help increase peace in their own way. I firmly believe that competition is impossible, because my goal is not to own some mysteriously abstract market share. My goal is to increase peace in the world, and in order to do that, I need help from everybody who is willing to help. If you choose to blog about topics that increase your peace, then I want to help you to reach as many people as you can, just as I am stretching out to reach as many people as I can. Besides, I can’t think of every method of increasing peace on my own, and the methods that work for me may work differently for you. If you share your methods, then we all benefit.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 1:14 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.