Live Truly

In between classes, holidays/fam events, flu, and workouts, I’m working on updating and cleaning up most of my sites, including this one. The theme update is the first step. I think it’s nice and clean.

I’ve changed the blog theme to the Zinmag Futura. However, I don’t need most of the flashy gizmos, and so I disabled them. But I love the thumbs and the rotating front page featured and slide/glide menu. The only issue I’ve had was with the thumbnails links not working correctly (discussion thread), but hopefully that gets cleaned up soon. Also, I just found out that Zinmag Redox had exactly the things I wanted without the extra features (for anyone that wants to save an hour or two in setting things up).

I added Sociable and Akismet, I love these two plugins. My amazon link plugin (which really speeds up getting the book pictures) doesn’t work with the latest version of wordpress. I also used the built-in tag cloud feature of wordpress. In the future I plan to add a photofeed and a connection to 43things.

I’ve also been cleaning up the categories. I don’t have it fully planned out, but the plan is to simplify and make them more natural. Most of the book posts will go into the book categories, financial stuff will go in its own category, job stuff in its own category rather than being split among three or four. I don’t know how relevant this categorization stuff really is since I don’t believe in categories (tags are a far better metaphor for describing the world) but nevertheless we all categorize things to help us make quick decisions (for better or worse) so for now I’ll play along. It’ll also help with the thumbnails (for posts which don’t have a specific thumb, adding category-based generics makes sense).

OK, time to go study. Have a great day.

When I first started this site, I was just going to write about the books and experiences that helped me find my path in life. I think I’ve stuck closely within those bounds, but have strayed and gone off on random technical-for-a-newbie and money-making schemes tangents. I don’t know if these are really outside of the journey, because these are things I’ve spent time on and tried or thought of trying, but, for you few (or none) returning readers, I’ll try my best to stay within the realm of the original purpose.

Perhaps I’m missing something, but it really seems that the whole make-money-blogging thing really isn’t worth the time or the space it takes. Unless you’re really writing about things you care about and would or have been doing it for nothing before, I don’t see much point in doing it.

Well, that’s my insight of the day: if I’m going to blog, it should be on topic, meaningful and good.

I just noticed on craigslist that there are a whole bunch of people starting split profit blog sites. Here’s one I joined (reference link). I wonder what keeps these people accountable to the promise of giving half? There seems no way to track it yourself.

It’s a cool idea though. I think the right approach would be to start one of these sites too. I wonder what it would take. Many of the companies use drupal. I have yet to explore this. Actually, I probably won’t get to explore this for quite a while.

I like the idea of these blog centers because they let users write about whatever they want, and at the same time they let companies advertise. The only problem is, most of the stuff is trash, but then again so is most of the stuff on the net. Are these Xanga, Blogger, LiveJournal wannabes doing the right thing with their endeavor? I don’t think it’s terribly useful, but there’s nothing wrong with it either.

I updated my other site to WordPress 2.0. It seems nice, I just wish all my plugins and theme mods worked with it. I’m going to have to wait until I finish several projects and until that site is running smoothly before trying anything on this site.

It’s not just the lack of RSS buttons. I’d like a clean usable theme for this blog. Something with breathing space. Does anyone have suggestions? I really like Connections (the current theme), but Landzilla and the Northern Web Coders are also really nice. But I think even simpler might do the trick. Maybe I’ll just use the ProBlogger Clean theme here too. Does anyone have some clean and simple and usability friendly theme suggestions?

My friend sent me this link to Ten Google Optimizations, which he got off of del.icio.us. I thought I had most of these covered, but upon further inspection, it’s a lot more hardcore. Very useful suggestions. Here are the summaries and surprises:

1. Make Google Sitemaps - “…You need to create separate sitemaps on each subdirectory, folder you have. Prioritize your root directory first. To be effective you need to have at least 100 .htm files on your root directory….”

2. Add all your content to google.com/ig/ (top left). (This let me realize the value of rss buttons and their lack on the current layout. This is also a really cool tool kind of like delicious.)

3. Add your website address (google.com/addurl/). (I almost forgot this one!)

4. Add scribbles and testimonials for your friends on orkut, mentioning your url one liner with your posts. (This one sounds a bit spammish to me)

5. Add your url to your signature, profile, and on topic emails in your gmail account. Google scans emails, so it my help ratings. (I never thought about this one. It better only be in on topic emails)

6. Start a blog and post your url’s on a Blogger, in your profile, entries, and all. Try to have it near the comment box. (I thought engines could detect this kind of stuff. I understand that blogger is nice since Google owns it now)

7. Add your xml content to Yahoo. If a big site like Yahoo has you, Google likes that too. Add it to Yahoo profile and to 360.yahoo.com. (This is so cool. Never knew about 360. dmoz might be worth a try too)

8. Search for “google” and network with the webmasters. Learn your things first and offer good questions and conversations. Arrange link exchanges where appropriate. (I like this one as long as the exchanges are on relevant topics)

9. Use googlegroups to make lists promoting subjects relevant to your site. (Perfect if you have real updates, not for spam)

10. List your site on froogle.com. If you sell products, have your own ecommerce payment system, or use a third party merchant account provider. (I wonder if Amazon Associates counts?)

For the full article check out www.discussbiz.com/ftopic144.php. Even without optimizing, many of the services mentioned are simply worth using. 360 seems so clean, as is google’s ig. There’s also a wordpress Google Sitemaps plugin.