7 Lessons I’ve Learned by Starting a New Blog
Posted on November 3, 2007
Filed Under Meta-Blogging |
Image credit e=mc cuadrado
When I first started blogging, I had a blog on Blogspot. I didn’t pay any mind to anything beyond selecting one of the templates available by default. Then I just started posting.
Nearly 3 years ago, I moved Radioactive Liberty to it’s own domain. I bought my domain name and hooked up with hosting from Midphase Hosting. They installed WordPress for me. Everything was ready to go, except that it wasn’t. There isn’t much that you get by default with WordPress, and I had no idea what the Hell an FTP was, or how to use it.
Von Ralls to the rescue!
Thankfully, Von Ralls, helped me with everything I needed to know. He showed me how to get set up with FTP and how to use it. It turns out, the hardest part is knowing how to set it up to connect, which still isn’t all that difficult.
Beyond that, it’s really just a file browser that allows you to manage files on your server, as opposed to your hard drive. In fact, I now know that you can set up your file browser to connect to your server via FTP.
I’ve come a long way in 3 years. I’ve even helped others set up a website from scratch, and maybe as we go along, I’ll cover some of that here.
Over time, I learned about installing plugins, upgrading wordpress, search engine optimization (SEO), keywords, and much more. I guess the natural and slow progression of implementing new features and acting on new knowledge with Radioactive Liberty distorted my image of what it would take to get a site off the ground, when starting from nothing. It’s taking significantly more time and effort than I expected
Even the act of moving RL to it’s own domain wasn’t exactly the same as starting from the beginning. In the process, I imported every post I had written while on my blogspot blogs.
Right off the bat I had hundreds of posts in my archive. As I write this post for Humor Blogging, I currently have one single, solitary post published. This will be the second.
What 3 Years of Blogging has taught me
Thankfully, once you’ve gained experience, there are benefits that can never be taken away. Let’s take a look at some of the mistakes I’ve made, and some of the things I’ve done right this time around.
Learning from Experience
Post Slug in URLs - When I started RL, I used the default permalink structure. At first I thought it was cool to have a URL that was nice and short. I didn’t think anything about SEO, but I also didn’t consider the user need to hover a link and have an idea of where they would wind up if they followed the link.
This time I didn’t mess around. One of the first things I did was change the permalink structure to include “post slugs.” The great thing about WordPress is that you can edit the post slugs, so you can still have a neat and short URL if you want to .
Look at my introductory post. The URL is http://humorblogging.com/blog/welcome/ That certainly isn’t a long, awkward, ugly URL, but it’s also descriptive. Best of all, a reader can have an idea of what will be on the other end.
Descriptive Post titles - Using descriptive post titles is good for the search engine results, but it’s also good from the human user perspective as well. It may be hilarious to title a post, “So that’s what it means,” when you put it in the context of the entire post, but will it get read in the first place with a title like that?
Perhaps loyal readers will read it, but it’s unlikely those following a search engine result, or a social media submission will. Be clever within the post. Be descriptive with the titles.
Formatting - I’ve learned to write for reading on a computer monitor. Unscannable blocks of text lines without sub-heads, boldface, or line breaks may be the way the teachers said to write in school, but it’s not conducive to writing on teh intertubewebs.
Dedicated Blog Page - I’m planning from the start to grow the site into more than just a blog, which is something I never considered when I started Radioactive Liberty. If you typed http://humorblogging.com/ into the browser, you’re redirected to http://humorblogging.com/blog/ In the future I will create a proper homepage on the top level domain.
Unfortunately, I had trouble knowing how to redirect this. Von Ralls to the rescue! Again. Von helped me out with the necessary code to redirect the top level domain until I can build a professional looking landing page.
Feedburner - Right from the start I added my feed to Feedburner, and redirected it with the Feedsmith Plugin so I can track the stats of my feed subscription.
Sitemap - I’m using the Google XML Sitemaps plugin to create a sitemap. It lets search engine bots see all your posts on one page, so they can fully index your site. I’ll cover more plugins in depth in the future.
Finally, I’ll finish with a new lesson learned. It seems no matter how much you learn, there are still mistakes to be made.
Check Your Plugins
When I got everything set up, I installed all my plugins, and noticed that I was getting an error from the database. It said something about no wp-categories database. For some retarded reason, it didn’t occur to me to simply deactivate my plugins one by one and see if one of them was the source of the problem.
Instead I wasted a lot of time deleting all my WordPress files, deleting my database, creating a new database, and reinstalling WordPress. The end result was that I wound up with the exact same database error message. I wanted to literally throw my computer, but then it hit me.
Maybe it’s a plugin. You think? Way to go Wile E. Coyote: Supergenius.
I deactivated all my plugins and refreshed the page. No error message. I re-enabled them one by one, refreshing the page each time and looking for the error message. It turns out one of the plugins was causing the problem, so it remains deactivated. If I would have thought of that in the first place, I could have saved hours of time.
What mistakes have you made, and what have you learned from your mistakes?
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Comments
9 Responses to “7 Lessons I’ve Learned by Starting a New Blog”
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Glad to help anytime, Fitch! Now shutup and start writin’ some funnies!!
I’m working on it.
YAY! Funny! Well soon…FUNNY!
The most painful thing I have learned blogging is that it is unrealistic to expect people to gravitate to my blog under the force of my own personal magnetism.
Promotion is a lesson that I have had to learn the hard way.
P.S. I like this new blog. Thanks for the link.
So much easier to start a blog when you have done it once I think. The beauty of experience after all.
One big lesson I learned is the importance of a name. You can’t have a domain name and a site name be two different things. It just will not work.
I was dumb enough to think we had gotten past that point, but even with 80% of the population online at some point every day having an easy to remember name is important.
Sometimes I completely forget all that I have learned about marketing in life and college. Der! hehe
Good one, Brent. People don’t know you exist unless you make them know. Spread the word.
Chris, It goes beyond having a matching Name and URL to having a good name and URL. Easy to remember is definitely a key part.
Why settle for good when you can have perfect? Good is too mediocre.
I agree on being aggressive on promotion. I’m going to do more of that with the new blog. Go get those readers!
You should have called it imjusttoofuckinghilarious.com
Nah, that name is too long. There are way too many places it can be misspelled too. I’d have to buy like 50 domain names to cover all the possible errors and have them all redirect to the right place.