My Junkyard

Hmm, i’ve installed akismet spam manager directly when I installed wordpress. Untill now It has cought about 850 spam messages (in under 4 months). I’m woundering what idiots are sending this spam and who benefits from it.  I’m talking about spam via the comments btw.

Could it be that I’m just lucky and none of the spam seem to do any harm. All that is in the spam messages are a bunch of links and I never ever click on one. So no harm done? 

I really should install this new WordPress 2.6.2 version. The dashboard software of WordPress has been telling me to upgrade to this new version for many weeks….. but hey, I’m not complaining even the old version seems to work just fine. Maybe I’ll try the new version a little later today……..

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Since I started this page about 2 month ago I slowly see an increase of visitors. Some of my guests actually wrote something via comments. If I have to believe all the ” experts” only 2% of webblog visitors give feedback or add something via the comments. 

I guess I’m lucky I don’t need to live of this blog I started with zero visitors per day and now I’m up to about 50 visitors per day. The funny thing is that I don’t have a clue where they are comming from…… 

Google searches are not really hitting my pages. I don’t even have a pagerank (help me get it . I’m still wondering how get higher into these search engines. 

Naturally I’ve tried to get more visitors via digg or technorati. But these just temporarily bump my visitors counts. Some of the sites I’ve visited about this subject say that it takes at least half a year to get some steady visitors. I’m not sure if this is the case but I’m sure hoping this will be the case in a few months.

I still have not found out what my motivation is to write things online. I like getting some news out before it becomes “public” on all the major sites. What gets me writing things? I have no idea.

In my statistics I see a lot of people looking for a hack of an operating system called Vista. I’ve written about a one click Vista Activator before. Maybe I’ll take it away, they are just looking for a cheap way into a bad OS . Other products I’ve written about like Medialink to stream music / movies etc. to a PS3 also give a lot of hits. The thing I don’t like is that people are looking for serials instead of a good story about a good program like medialink (no I don’t have shares).

Checking my stats daily was one of the things I did in the first two weeks when I started this blog. Now I check it ones per week. I have stopped looking at it daily because it didn’t make me any happier No or just a few visitors and no clicks on any links on my site. They probably just left as soon as they entered the page. 

I like to receive some feedback on this post. Maybe you have some good experiences blogging. Let me know ! 

PS probably no-one reads this since I did not add a picture… Hopefully the experts are wrong

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Please read Part 1 before reading this entry. You’ll find information about installing wordpress and theme selections.

3 Struggle to get pictures on my blog

How can this be an issue you think? Well I’m not the only one who had this problem. Today actually it still is a problem… But I got a good working workaround that suits me fine. I use a Imac to write all this and sofar the Safari browser never let me down. But uploading pictures with Safari seems impossible. I receive an error. So let’s try my windows browser Internet Explorer then. I can easily run windows with Parallels but hey, it doesn’t work either….. It seems to be a bug in WordPress. lucky as I am WordPress comes with a solution. A small upgrade to a newer version out since this week. Quickly I tried to upload some pictures, without result in Safari…. Trying to use Internet explorer gave me the results I wanted. IT WORKS , yes, but only via booting Parallels and running Internet Explorer. I can live with this for a while, no biggy anymore. WordPress please solve this for us mac users

4 Get noticed by google and yahoo

It’s fun to write things, it gives a surtain peace of mind I find. More fun is when people actually start reading things you write and comment on it. Well to be honest I haven’t got that many responses yet. The few I got I really enjoyed. It’s a nice feeling that someone read your entry on a blog, trust me. The interaction part is what I’m hoping for, so if your reading this let me know

First thing to do is to get people notice my site. Hmmm, how to do that? Maybe simple shout it on some bulletin board? That doesn’t sound to friendly to me, I personally hate that, it’s more or less spamming. So maybe I can get search engines to notice me like google and yahoo and many others? How to do that?

Google has a nice site for webmasters (hmm guess I am?) http://www.google.com/intl/en-US/webmasters/ There you can add your site and get all kinds of tips on how to get noticed and improve your site.  It takes time for google to take your site into their search engine and I think I might need to do more, but what?

Yahoo Is also pretty easy, you can submit your link here . There are several options and I went for the free one. Why pay right? I have no idea if I might the right choice here but hey if only some find me…

If you have any good tips on how to promote this blog please let me know via a comment.

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For those who have been following this blog now that there have been some difficulties. Difficulties in several areas. Let me sum them up and tell you how I (think) I’ve solved them.

1. Installing wordpress at my own hosting provider
2. Getting a theme that I like
3. Struggle to get pictures on the blog
4. Get noticed by google and yahoo – promote my blog
5. Add ads to my blog

1 Installing wordpress at my own hosting provider

I’ve written about this earlier, the main issue was that i’ve never had a blog before. First thing to do was selecting a hosting provider. I ended up at one.com. Why? Basicly because it was the cheapest one I could find. I had no idea how long I would be doing this blogging and I did not want to start with a huge budget. Today I have mixed feelings about my choice for one.com but hopefully it will suit me fine in the future. 

So, how to install? Basicly it was very simple, just do the following:

• Unzip the package you’ve downloaded from www.wordpress.org
• FTP all the files to your site (your hosting provider tells you how)
• Run the installation script via a browser. You can use the 5-minute installation guide provided by wordpress.org
• Be sure to know what your databasename and accounts are (provided by your hosting party)
• Than a problem…. ??? It stopped? Now what? I noticed that it stopped running the script. In the address bar I saw that it ended at something like ****-step3 , so I decided to change the 3 in a 4 and it continues to run. So far ok.
• It’s done and it’s working (as far as I can tell)
• Now I needed to modify the standard wordpress installation to my liking…

2 Getting a wordpress theme I like

This is the simple part (is it?). Via the wp-admin tool (wordpress admin tool) you can easily go to the wordpress theme library. Here you can select a theme, there are hundreds maybe even thousands of themes… Select and testdrive the themes you like. The testdrive gives you an impression of what you’ll get if you install that specific theme on your blog.  I couldn’t choose between some of them so I downloaded 4 themes and tried them all. There are several different options per theme. It depends on what the designer put in them.  Today I use the Mukka-mu theme after testdriving several other thems. Thanks for the theme !

I’ll continue this topic later, If you need more information on a subject just let me know via a comment.

UPDATE , continue here

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Wel I started this page basicly to get some frustrations out on the net. Some decent misuse of power and computers in general. Besides that I would like to show all of you some decent mac applications and things that keep me busy. Whats on my mind and what is frustrating me….

Offcourse starting a page like this is in principle low cost. It’s only a few dollars per year so what? Well, some people make a lot of money writing blogs, thats all they do? Can you live of a blog? I assume you can if you have pages about hacking / porn and things like that. But how can you make a small blog like this at least turn break even? I’m really interested in that. It’s not the costs that are making me think I have to urn some money, no, I’m just woundering in general….. So what can we do?

For starters, for now the only way to make some money seems to attract a lot of people to your blog and make them click ads? There are several companies like google who provide ads like this one below:

But does that work? I myself never click on these links…. So why would someone else click on it? They seem to addept to the stories on the page? So maybe some people might be triggered. Some might even be click happy

Interesting a big crowd seems to be the trick. What are your experiences on making some money? All the links I get via google feel sponsered and end up in being sale pages for adprograms

How to get more hits / money etc. I have no clue. I need to maybe redesign my site and make it look much nicer. Besides that I need to get into the top searchresult at google and yahoo. But how to do that? A lot of questions and I intend to find answers !!! Send me you tips and experiences via comments or mail (checky@myjunkyard.nl)  and lets break even  

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Yes, it seems to work. I’ve installed the wordpress software at my hosting provider one.com.

I’ve read some horror stories before I started and was a little nervous about it. But it was fairly easy to do! This doesn’t mean I didn’t run into issues but all of them seemed my own mistake. Not knowing anything of webservers and php I still managed to get it up and running within an hour. The 5 minute install was helpfull and reading this would have helped a lot! However it’s running now. I will focus on the layout know for a bit, trying several templates which are provided by numberous members. I still have not found one that suits me well… I will adjust the layout for the next couple of days and then start filling this blog with my junk.

UPDATE 28th of April

I’m not to sure one.com is such a good deal at the moment. Several times it has seemed impossible to reach this page. I think they overload their servers… My site doesn’t attract a whole lot of people but at least it should be able to be reached. However since i’ve updated to wordpress 2.5.1 it seems a little faster. Be sure to check some other users experience with one.com. I will update this again in a few weeks to see if things improved.

Leave a comment with your experiences.. 

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