The Real Lance Brown

Facebook was giving away $50 in free ads to lure folks into trying Facebook Ads, and I took the bait. My ad’s not running yet, but here’s what I have so far:

I want to optimize the Hire Me page that I’m going to be sending people to before I launch the ad, but I hope to debut it next week sometime. I’m doing pay-per-click with a bid of $1.00 per click. So I should get 50 free visits to the page from this deal.

I was in a rush to get the ad ordered before the $50 coupon ran out, so this isn’t the most professionally-crafted thing I’ve done. I just used an existing pic…but I do like how the “Need a hand?” line happens to fit with my hand-waving self-pic. :-)

What do you think? I still have time to tweak or change it before it “airs”. (Before you ask, their limit didn’t allow the full word “with” in the headline. All I could fit was “wit”, so I went with the shorthand version instead.)

This is a really solid post from Joe Foley at WPMU:

15 Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers

I wish I was following more of the rules here. If you’re trying to get serious about blogging, bookmark that post and re-read it every day until you have internalized the tips in it. I can’t argue with a single one of Joe’s suggestions, and while I might be able to think of some to add to the list, there’s no need to even bother–follow his advice and you will have plenty to do (and all of it wise and effective).

I’m not a big salesperson, so I don’t want to belabor this, but my web host is having a 1/2 off sale today only, and it makes for a pretty great deal. (Around $2.50 a month for the basic plan.) It also happens to be one of the only places I have an affiliate account with, so I get a little kickback if you order via my link. (It doesn’t make a difference in the price you pay.)

Here’s some background on hosting: I’ve used about 6 or 7 different major web hosts, for myself and through web site clients of mine. To name some: Network Solutions, GoDaddy, Dreamhost, my current host (Hostgator), and a few others that slip my mind right now. I’ve also used a number of small local hosts, which I won’t name, because local hosts, as a rule, are a bad choice, no matter who they are. Hosting is not something that you should go “small” with, and without exception, I have run into numerous problems with local hosts relating to their smallness. Unavailability, inconsistency, and especially, not keeping up with the latest trends and standards. (Namely, in my line of work, WordPress-friendly hosting, which has always been a hassle with small-time hosts.

As far as the big hosts go, those first three I named suck. Dreamhost may suck the least of the three, because it is at least a place that is primarily focused on hosting. The other two do hosting as a sideline, and that puts them only just barely above local hosts in terms of lameness. Also, all three of those hosts use their own customized “control panels” where you administer your hosting/server, whereas decent hosts all use cPanel, which is a widespread and easy to use control panel. They also have their control panels hosted centrally on their main site (rather than on your rented server location), which means if their main site where everybody is croded in has problems, you can’t get at your hosting tools. I have had that happen at all three of those hosts, and it sucks, big time.

There are many large national hosts that use cPanel, and they are all probably about the same in many ways. Hostgator is definitely a leader of the pack, both in terms of success/size/client base, and in terms of ratings and reviews. They’re not perfect, but in my experience, web hosting is kind of like cell phone providers–they all kind of suck, and the best you can do is find one that sucks less than the others. Hostgator does not suck very much. I’m not crazy about their support, just because you end up having your ticket handled rather anonymously, and each response tends to come from a different person so the chain of communication can be frustrating, but I think you’ll get that with almost all large hosts. (And with small hosts, you’ll usually get one or two overworked people, who often aren’t available after business hours or on weekends, which is just plain unacceptable.)

I’ve been using Hostgator for around 8 years, which I think kind of says it all. Most of their plans support unlimited domains names, email addresses, databases, and plenty of disk space and bandwidth. (Way more than some of the joker hosts like Network Solutions, or Charter Communications, who I just found out only supports one domain name even on their top-end plan, and NO mySQL databases–required by WordPress and other blog/CMS software–on their two low-end plans. <– Ridiculous!)

Anyway, today, until 10 PM PST, Hostgator is offering 1/2 off on all their hosting plans. The 1/2 off is on the first payment only, so it’s best to pay for a year or more up front to get real savings. But, for example, you save over $60 on a year of their Business Plan (which is good if you need to have an SSL/secure server for a shopping cart). Of if you go with the cheapy plan, it’s $2.48 a month if you pay for 3 years, or $3.47/mo if you do a year up front. ($4.47 if you do 6 months up front.)

Those are very good prices. If you have or know of a host that is cheaper than that, they probably aren’t a great host.

So there you have it. If you click here and go buy a plan from Hostgator, I get a little check in 3 months, and you get a sweet deal. If you feel like I’m being lame by trying to get the kickback, you can use this non-affiliate link, and let Hostgator keep that kickback money to themselves. The price for you will be the same. And I recommend Hostgator enough that I still think you should host with them even if you don’t use my affiliate link.

If you do the affiliate link, I’ll also help you out by answering any questions you have in getting things set up there. Just contact me here or on Twitter.

So go ahead! Time’s running out. Thanks for reading.

Oh, by the way, I recommend using 1and1 for registering your actual domain names. They are cheap and easy to deal with. (I have no affiliate deal going with them.)

Confused about WordPress, and don’t understand what’s up with its dot-com and dot-org variants? That’s about to end!

What is WordPress?

Basically, WordPress is a piece of software made up (primarily) of many PHP files, which work together, in conjunction with a database, to serve up pages and blog posts. (The way they display is controlled mainly by a Theme, which is made up (primarily) of PHP template files.)

WordPress runs on a web server. You access and use it via the Web. If you install it, you install it on your web site/host – - not on your own computer.

What is WordPress.org?

That software described above is available for free download at WordPress.org (and via various “one-click”-style installers at many/most web hosts). To use that, you need to own a website domain that is already hosted somewhere. (Thus, this version is sometimes called “self-hosted”.)

If you install “dot org WordPress” at your own web site, you can use it for free and do whatever you want with it. But just as you have full power, you also have full responsibility for operating and maintaining that WordPress installation. You might need to do some online learning to really get underway, and while there are lots of WP support resources on the web, no one would be around to hold your hand. (Your host will almost certainly offer little to no help with WordPress, beyond maybe helping you get it installed.) A lot of business owners in this situation will look to a WP professional like myself to help them get squared away, or get their theme tweaked, etc.

WordPress.org is backed by the WordPress Foundation, and its mission basically is to spread WordPress across the globe, and to keep making it better while making sure it remains free and open source forever.

What is WordPress.com?

WordPress.com is a free blogging service as well as a for-pay WordPress host. It uses basically the same software as above, but it’s hosted by the WordPress.com people. (Which makes this the “hosted” version of WordPress, vs. the “self-hosted” dot org version.)

With the free account, you get a blog at something like yourname.wordpress.com. It’s not as pimped-out as it could be if you had it hosted on your own site, but you can definitely get off and running with it.

If you pay for their hosting, you can use your own proper domain name–basically getting you to the state that a “dot org” version user is in, except you have the creators of WordPress as your hand-holding guides and hosts. But you also get less control over your actual WordPress installation. (You can’t add plugins, for one thing…you’re stuck with their handful of widgets.) Those WordPress.com people have to manage a gazillion blogs and sites, so they have some limitations in place on their WordPress installations. And they are a for-profit enterprise, so they will definitely hit your wallet a bit, especially if you want to get more features or control.

WordPress.com is run by Automattic, a for-profit company started by WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg.

Which one to use

Which one you should use really depends on your situation and your priorities, as well as your access to tech help and/or your willingness to learn new things and get your hands dirty.

“Self-hosted” WordPress.org is infinitely more powerful than its commercial cousin, due to having full access to all features, plus the ability to use plugins. (And I don’t mean it’s a lot more powerful–I mean it is literally infinitely more powerful.) But it might be scary or confusing to dive into; you could end up daunted just trying to get it installed, and you will probably have lots of questions early on. Push through that, and you could end up with an awesome slick site with hundreds of pages and tons of neat features for essentially free.

“Hosted” WordPress.com is convenient and turnkey, and you get “24/7 support” from the people who know WordPress better than anyone else. Of course, since their WordPress installations are relatively limited, most support probably deals with basic issues involving their limited set of tools and features. But if you’ve seen (and been freaked out by) the full WordPress menu set, you might prefer a more scaled-down version. And your ambitions for your web presence may be such that a WordPress.com might be the perfect simple solution for you.

I’m such a huge fan of what the WordPress folks have brought into the world that I’m more than happy to see people spend money on their dot-com services, even though it’s a limited version of WP, and even though I generally make my bacon from business owners who are forging into the denser forest of dot-org WP. ;-)

If you want some advice on which way you should go, you can always tweet me at @freeWPadvice–I’d be happy to help you figure it out (and as the username suggests, I’ll do it for free). If you’re not on Twitter, hit me up some other way and I’ll talk to you there.

Every now and then I come upon a stylesheet that someone created which is hard to read–sometimes, even hard to look at. (Like when everything is all jammed together with barely any line breaks.)

Call me spoiled, but I like to see my CSS styled like this:

.prev {
width: 225px;
padding:7px;
float: left;
}

.next {
width: 225px;
padding:7px;
float:right;
}

#headerimage {
position:absolute;
left: 425px;
top:4px;
width:270px;
}

not like this:

html,body,div,span,object,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,p,blockquote,pre,a,abbr,acronym,address,big,cite,code,del,dfn,em,img,ins,kbd,q,samp,small,strong,sub,sup,tt,var,dl,dt,dd,ol,ul,li,fieldset,form,label,legend,table,caption,tbody,tfoot,thead,tr,th,td{margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;outline:none;font-size:100%;background:transparent;border:none;text-decoration:none}b,i,hr,u,center,menu,layer,s,strike,font,xmp{margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;outline:none;font-size:100%;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;background:transparent;border:none;text-decoration:none}font{color:#333}center{text-align:left}body{line-height:24px;font-family:Georgia,Times,”Times New Roman”,serif;color:#333;background:#fff}h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6{font-style:normal;font-weight:normal;margin:0 0 21px 0}h1{font-size:1.8em}h2{font-size:1.7em}h3{font-size:1.55em}

Luckily there is a sweet-ass tool on the web that will take something like the messy block above and pretty it up, a la the pretty bit above that. This CSS Formatter/Optimizer has all sorts of settings so you can fine-tune your results, and it can go both ways…if you want to condense your pretty, spaced-out CSS into the solid-block format (for a smaller file size and quicker load time), you can do that too. There are a lot of neat specific options, so you can auto-modify your stylesheet to suit your taste.

I’ll be using this any time I run into a stylesheet that someone else created in their own wack way–which happens a fair amount. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from ~10 years of PHP/CSS template-based work, it’s that every template/theme creator does things his or her own way. This CSS Optimizer tool will go a long way toward bringing things to my standard–or yours.

It’s not 100% clear who made the web tool, but I had to guess, I’d say credit goes to Florian Schmitz, the creator of CSS Tidy (the desktop software that the web tool is based on). Thanks Florian – great tool!

You remember my post about how I love WordPress plugin people? In it, I mentioned the very cool phenomenon where one would randomly stumble upon some humble plugin author, and discover that said author has a whole page filled with eyebrow-raising plugins of every type. Stumbling onto such people with such pages, I said, was one of the experiences that helps open your eyes to the real vastness and variety of the WP plugin universe.

Witness: Christopher Ross, and his eyebrow-raising page of plugins.

I found Christopher when I found his External Link to New Window plugin, which makes all your links to external sites automatically open in a new window, so people also stay at your site when they visit links to other sites that you post. I’m glad I clicked through from the plugin search results and ended up at his actual site, or I wouldn’t have found the other 25 plugins he has created. And they are cool plugins. Check them out on his site where they have full descriptions and download links, or on his user page at WordPress.org, where you can see how (appropriately) popular his plugins are, and go right to their pages at that site. Then, if you install the WordPress.org One-Click Install Plugin ahead of time, you could install every one of Christopher’s plugins in probably 52 or 78 clicks. That might sound like a lot of clicks, but if you consider all the neato new tools and functions you’d be getting, and the fact that the total financial outlay would be $0.00, it’s a pretty amazing deal.

In fact it’s so amazing, that you should actually give Christopher some money, if you dig his plugins and have some money to spare for appreciation of them. (You can donate via PayPal right on his plugin page.) But even if you don’t/can’t, go check ‘em out, and install 1 or 2 or 26 of them. If all goes well, you should feel a cool little rush, from the realization of all the possibilities that must be available in the world when things like Christopher’s huge page of free WordPress plugins exists.

Thank you, Christopher Ross! I love you and what you do, and have ordered my readers to love you as well.

Here are a couple other great plugins from Christopher’s big page:

Auto-Copyright – adds a copyright message to your footer that (here’s the brilliant part) automatically sets the date range based the dates of your earliest and most recent posts.

WordPress Admin Quick Menu – Add your own menu cluster on the side in the WP Dashboard area, with whatever links you want, including external sites (like Google Analytics maybe, or your other WP dashboards, or help pages for your clients…you get the idea.)

How about a fundraising thermometer? A frame blocker? A login redirect plugin? Those, and 20-odd more. All from one person.

This is why I love plugin people.

Thanks again, Christopher!

Michael at B-Sides Narrative posted this tweet after I helped him work out an issue with the way his WordPress blog posts were being handled by Facebook:

@freeWPadvice You're a rock star, man. The work you did on my template fixed the Facebook-sharing problem. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

3/10/2011 8:48 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@BSidesNarrative

Michael

I help people out with WordPress for free on Twitter at @freeWPadvice. Send me a message there if you need help, and I might be able to get you squared away just like Michael!

WPSnipp.com has provided a little snippet of code that will add a “horizontal rule” (or <hr />) button to the default editor in WordPress.

What’s a horizontal rule? It’s one of these lines:

In my opinion, that should definitely be a default button in the WP editor, but since it isn’t, you can use WPSnipp’s little snippet and add it to your installation. Cool!

WordPress – Add horizontal rule button to editor – wpsnipp.com

Matt Ryan at The Frugal Geek has a guide to the best ways to easily capture a web page as an image for saving, editing, etc. I installed one of the recommended Firefox addons, as part of my “Make things easier so you’ll actually do them instead of putting them off, Lance!” campaign.

How to Capture a Web Page as an Image « The Frugal Geek

Light Stalking has featured a bunch of online image editors that sound really promising: 5 Of The Best Free Online Tools for Quick Photo Editing.

Do you have a preferred online image editor that you use?

Open Site Explorer is a “Link Popularity & Backlink Analysis Tool”, which means it tells you what sites link back to you, and how valuable or popular those sites are. You have to get a pro account to get full data on the value of all your backlinks, but they will show you the links themselves for free.

While you can see who has sent you traffic recently via your referrer logs/site stats/analytics tool, that won’t necessarily show you all the sites that link to you overall. I have a few sites that are older (read:out-of-date) and a lot of the sites that link to them may be a bit dormant, which means they probably won’t all turn up in a given month’s site stats. But Open Site Explorer seems to be keeping track of the big picture.

For example, it shows PNAC.info having 4,825 links to it, which includes all the various pages on all the various sites that have linked to it over the 8 years it’s been up (I’m assuming). By comparison, my relatively-unknown and newer lancebrown.org (this site) shows 605 links altogether (which sounds better than it is; they’re only from 47 “root domains”).

Open Site Explorer seems like a pretty good tool for checking out your site’s overall connectedness on the Web. Do you have other similar tools you can recommend?

The New York Times did an investigative piece on how JCPenney.com was able to cheat Google for months, giving it top-ranking listings in dozens of widely-varied commercial terms: Search Optimization and Its Dirty Little Secrets. Depending on your perspective and whether you like dangerous shortcuts, this is either an inspirational or cautionary tale about using “black hat” tactics in your search engine optimization efforts.

(NYT tends to phase out free access to their articles over time, so I can’t promise that article will be available forever. If it’s not, you can try a Google search for the article’s title; someone has probably archived a copy of it.)

Subscribing to my blog’s feed is more accessible and easier than it has been in the past. First, I added a more prominent RSS icon, which you can see over to the right. Then I added a Feedburner-based email subscription signup form. So now it’s easier than ever to set yourself up with regular updates from me, via your favorite feed reader, or via your inbox. Which is awesome, because remember how you were wanting to subscribe to my blog but didn’t know how, or were too lazy or something? And here we are working it out!

Nothing like solving problems–especially important problems like you not getting up-to-the-minute updates from my site. I’m breathing easier already, and as far as I’m concerned, so are you.

Clare Lancaster at ProBloggingTools has been nice enough to compile a simple checklist of the 9 most straightforward ways to draw attention to your social media accounts. The short answer is: “promote it in various places”, but Clare has nailed the most important places, and explains why they are important quickly and concisely.

Print Clare’s list out if you must and use it as a checklist; make sure you are taking advantage of most of these methods, or you can’t say you are seriously supporting your own social media efforts: 9 Practical Ways to Start Attracting an Audience to Your New Social Media Account.

Today on Twitter I posted a link to an old blog entry of mine, originally from my presidential campaign site, called “The USA-PATRIOT Axe”.

Since Congress is currently in the process of slithering through another renewal of some the lamest parts of that law, it seems like a great time to visit that old post of mine, which I think still holds up pretty well after about 8 years. So here you go:

The USA-PATRIOT Axe

May 25, 2003

This article (“Patriot Raid”, by Jason Halperin) gives the “USA-PATRIOT” Act some perspective — a first-person one. He experienced a raid while eating dinner at a restaurant in New York City, where the agents involved claimed the “USA-PATRIOT” Act as the legal cover for the raid and their conduct during it.

If you know anyone who says, “Don’t worry about the Patriot Act…it only applies to terrorists and immigrants…if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to worry about…the Patriot Act is just providing law enforcement with the tools it needs…”, make them read this article. Twice if necessary. Make them acknowledge the reality of it. If they want to continue thinking the above thoughts, fine. But they need to make sure they aren’t playing fast and loose with Pastor Martin Niemoller-style excuses and evasions.

The USA-PATRIOT Act means machine guns in your face, and boots kicking in doors where you are, doing your innocent and ordinary things. Not just the terrorists and the guilty, not just the immigrants and the minorities…you. You, sitting there in a restaurant eating dinner. …

Read the whole entry here.

Not much to be said here…Diana Adams at Ink Rebels has compiled a tremendous list of prompts to help you get unstuck if you ever don’t know what to blog about: 100 Sources of Blogging Inspiration

I’ve been planning on writing one of these “things to post about” posts myself, but it’s becoming increasingly unnecessary. Between Diana’s awesome list and the resources I linked to in this blog post here, the pool of potential content ideas is growing very wide and very deep. We may need to reclassify it as a pond soon.

Here’s a tip: bookmark this post, so you can find Diana’s list as well as my other post with three other lists on it. That should keep you busy for a while…unless you’re posting like 10 times a day or something (in which case you probably don’t need our help coming up with ideas anyway).

I hate to be a stickler here, but before I praise Heidi Cohen’s excellent list of affordable ways to pervasively promote your local business blog, I have to take issue with her title:

24 Ways to Promote Your Blog With NO Budget, NO Time & NO Resources

A reasonable person could think from reading that title that the “24 Ways” mentioned could be achieved with no budget, no time, and no resources. But that reasonable person would be getting deceived by hype. And upon discovering, after briefly suspending disbelief enough to think the title’s promise could be true, that in fact it is the exact sort of hyperbolic overstatement that the reasonable person quietly suspected it would end up being, the reasonable person would have his mass-media-cultivated shell of righteous cynicism hardened by at least one additional layer.

I’m the reasonable person in that scenario, by the way. As are you. And we shouldn’t be toyed with. That’s all I’m saying.

The reality of that title is as sad as it is obvious: there’s not a single one of those 24 things that can be done with NO budget, NO time, and NO resources. Each item on the list involves an action verb–which, as an editor, I applaud. But, as an amateur scientist, I can tell you that nothing which involves an action verb can be accomplished without using either time or resources, or both. “Make”, “Use”, “Work”, “Write”, “Offer to help”, “Place a computer”…these are not things that do themselves.

So I deduct major style points for the over-the-top hyperbolic title, and for reinforcing the cynicism of an already-cynical generation. It puts an unfortunate cloud over things–but I still think the list itself is worth checking out.

The true promise of the article is stated in the second paragraph, which has the more grounded and accurate heading “24 Low cost tips to promote your blog”:

“The most important step is to start looking for low cost/no cost promotional opportunities for your blog. It’s easy but it’s not always obvious. Here are twenty-four low cost ideas to help you get started.”

Low cost. Not zero time or money, which is impossible, but low cost, which is both possible and desirable. (But which does not make for as exciting a headline, unfortunately. Stupid boring reality!)

OK, good-natured (but serious) ribbing aside, Heidi’s article has some really great ways to up the ante on your blog promotion efforts. A lot of them involve putting a promo blurb about your blog in places you might not have thought of,  some others involve local outreach and partnerships, and still others deal with squeezing more win-win juice from your existing customers and foot traffic. They are 24 solid suggestions…and while every single one takes time or resources, and most of them will cost at least a little money (unless you own your own print shop), they are all definitely in the low-to-no cost range. And some require as little as a pen and a piece of paper.

Pick a handful of those things to do now, and make sure all the print-material-related ones get worked into your next print shop order, and you’ll have a lot less to worry about when it comes to promoting your web site locally.

Have more low–or-no cost ways for local businesses to promote their blogs? Might as well post them in the comments at Heidi’s post, since I’m suggesting we all go check that out anyway.

I might go post a comment about linking to your neighbors and getting listed in the web business directories, both of which I posted about here recently.

If you want to comment here, you could chime in on article titles that overstate their promise. Do you think I’m being too hard on Heidi regarding her hyperbolic title?

As long as it conveys something useful, informative, entertaining, or otherwise engaging, a blog post doesn’t necessarily have to be a full-length article.

It’s OK to post a short blog post sometimes.

Just a quick post to mention two resources I bumped into recently: MoreofIt and SitesLike. Both sites do basically the same thing, which is suggesting sites that are similar to the one you provide. I first stumbled onto MoreofIt when looking for alternatives to ToonDoo, the online comic creator that I use to make my comic The Little Things. (Turns out that Toondoo appears to be as good as the others, as far as I can tell. If you have a favorite online comic creator tool, let me know what it is and why you like it, please.)

I lost track of MoreofIt later that week (and didn’t remember the name), so I did a Google search to try and find it again–and that’s how I found SitesLike, which does essentially the same thing. Come to think of it, you could presumably find more of similar-site finders by entering either of these sites into the other one. ;-)

Aside from finding sites with these tools, if you have a website, there is another action item you can take: SitesLike has an add site tool.  (I couldn’t find one at MoreofIt; if you know of one for them, please let me know.) So you should probably take a second to add yours, if there’s a chance it might not be in there already.