The Blog Peoria Network

I’ve spent some time investigating this, and I’ve made a change that will cut back on spam blogs, otherwise known at “splogs.”

Basically, I’ve renamed the file that lets people sign up as users and get their own blogs. The link is on the front page. This will, I think, foil some of the robots that search for WPMu signup pages. Eventually, news member signups will be moderated, which means I have to approve them.

Unfortunately, this breaks the link on so many member blogs. I’ll be going through the theme files and changing the links.

Why is this important to members?

First: Spam blogs take up resources. They soak up bandwidth.

Second: I like to run a list of member blogs and most recent member posts on the front page of this site. I have plans to make the front page of this site the place to go to see content from this community’s citizen journalists. I can’t do that if on any given pay have the blogs on this site are gibberish and long lists of links to bestiality or incest sites.

By the way, users who use Widgets on their sites can paste code that lets them show fellow Blog Peoria Project members. Just paste the following code into a PHP Code Widget (you have to approve the plugin, first, and be using a widget-ready theme).

The code is:

<?php list_all_wpmu_blogs(’50′, ‘name’, ‘<p>’, ‘</p>’, ‘updated’) ?>

I’ll be adapting the default Blog Peoria Project theme to automatically include this script.

Also, members can activate the RSS Feed Widget, and direct it to show the Blog Peoria Project Members Feed:

http://blogpeoria.com/wpmu-feed/

And as I’ve announced here before, I’ll  eventually be moving Peoria Pundit to the Blog Peoria Project. I’ll be leaving the current site up so the thousands of incoming links won’t be broken. It’s just a matter of notifying advertisers of the new address, and building a theme that has room for the ads and the links to BP members.

I know. I’ve been threatening to move all Peoria Pundit posting activity here for as long as there’s been a Blog Peoria Project. This time, it’s personal.

And after that happens, I’ll be doing more marketing to folks who really ought to be posting here. The new Blog Peoria Project will be truly a network of Peoria blogger/citizen journalists, businesses and organizations.

Someone has deliberately corrupted my core files. Anytime anyone uses a widget in their blog, the site re-directs to a pharmacy site. The solution is to temporarily dewidgetize your side and use the default sidebars.

If your site now loads normally, do nothing.

I am going to upgrade to the latest version of WPMu as soon as time permits.

THIS is what I spent most of my day off trying to figure out.

Here’s some exciting news for Blog Peoria Project members who want to drive traffic to their sites. I have installed and activated a new plug that generates single RSS feeds for posts and comments for ALL Blog Peoria Project member blogs. Ive used these feeds create links to the 10 most recent Blog Peoria member posts and comments made to Blog Peoria blogs.

If you are looking at this site shortly after I wrote this post, you might see links to some spam blog posts. That’s because I installed the plugin before I EVERY BLog Peoria member get a little expire. The URL for the feeds can be copies my right-clicking on the orange “RSS” buttons on the top of the sidebar lists. I do encourage members to place these site-wide feeds on their blogs. A feed with a dozen or more new posts a day is going to be read more than a feed that gets one or two updates a day.

Even more good stuff is coming down the pike.

To put it in language a high-priced consultant would understand: These new feeds a tool in our belt that will allow us to leverage the synergies of a hyper-local community-based multi-blog site for maximum benefit. As more blogs join up to partake in all this synergy, critical mass will be reached.

Instead of a static blogroll that required your hard-working admin to manually add new members, this site now lists the top 50 active blogs, in order of their most recent update. I hesitated to do this before, because spam blog creation was so heavy, such a list would be almost exclusively spam blogs.

Contact me, and I’ll tell you how to do this on your Blog Peoria site, provided it uses Sidebar Widgets.

Yep. There are some big changes going on around here. More to follow.

NOTE: This ran in Peoria Pundit on June 29th, 2004. I’m re-running it here as a service to all the young bloggers out there:

In honor of this afternoon’s visit by WEEK anchorman/reporter Mike Dimmick (and the young cameraperson whose name I cannot remember correctly, I’m very sorry), I am presenting this post: “How to Blog.” Some of what I discuss here touches on Mike’s generally thoughtful and sometimes probing questions.

They plan to run the story sometime in late July during their 10 p.m. newscast.

1. Buy a computer. Oh, sure. You probably think you can make do with a budget computer, the kind they advertise for around $499, printer and monitor included. Fat chance. You’re gonna end up obsessing about how everything will be absolutely wonderful if your system were just a little bit faster. So go buy the biggest, most expensive system you can afford. By “can afford,” I mean take out a mortgage.

2. Get on the Internet. Any computer system you buy is going to include pre-installed AOL or MSN software and an offer for “free” dial up access. Free dial up access is the Internet-geek version of free crack.

Skip the middle man and sign up for DSL or Cable broadband access. Peorians are lucky in that there is plenty of competition and the rates are low. Seriously. It’s not that much more expensive that one of the
better dial up plans. You will not be sorry. Trust me.

3. Develop a brain. Because there is nothing more annoying that a stupid blogger.

4. Buy a dictionary. Because spell check misses too dam mulch.

5. Here comes the blogging part. Start off on Blogger . Serious bloggers do not use Blogger. Except those serious loggers who run quite nice blogs on Blogger. So start off with a free Blogger blog, then migrate over to pMachine or Moveable Type if you like it and want a full-featured version. The Blogger.com interface is easy to use and lets you do a very basic blog without knowing how to code anything.

UPDATE: At the time I wrote this post, I was using pMachine and was soon to mov to Moveable Type. I’m now using Word Press, which is the easiest to use and is the least vulnerable to spam because of build in protections. People who want to use their own domain can install and upload the latest version themselves, or check to see if their host uses Fantastico, which offers really simple automatic installation of the most recent free version. Or, they can go to Blogsome or Blogneo and sign up for a free WP site located on a subdomain.

6. Content. Content. Content. It’s amazing how many people think the public wants to read about the mundane details of their lives. Trust me: No one cares. If you don’t have anything to say, stick to the dead-tree journal you keep in your sock drawer. If you are not bringing people in to visit your site, you might as well not even have a blog. Do something to entertain the reader

7. Bloggers do it daily. Serious bloggers that is. Some people can get away with posting weekly or monthly. My rule of thumb: Have at least one post a day, even if it is a post saying you will have no other posts. Also, even Blogger lets you post-date a post. If I know I’m going to be too busy to blog, I hold a few back by post dating them. Here’s a secret: I do that with my “eye candy” posts.

8. Write about what you know. I know Peoria. I know newspapers. That’s what I write about. When I stray from these things, that’s when I usually get my ass handed back to me and have to apologize.

9. Link to other bloggers. Do it in your posts. Do it in a blogroll. Sign up with Blogrolling.com .

10. Learn the basics of HTML . This will let you do what you want to on the page. If you are going to post images or links within the body of your posts, you will probably need to know how to do it using HTML.

11. For God’s sake, be careful. There are a ton of sites about blogging and HTML, but precious little about how communication law and basic ethics apply to the blogging community. Basically, bloggers have the same First Amendment protections as journalists who work for televisions and newspapers. But, they also have the same responsibilities. YOU. CAN.GET. SUED. If you don’t have a working knowledge of the difference between a statement of fact and an opinion, you are better off not writing smack about your neighbors’ sex lives, OK?

12. Do not blog about work. Trust me on this one. Even if you do it anonymously, someone will find out.

13. Obey copyright laws. Now, pardon me, I have to post another Drew Barrymore update and some Eye Candy. All kidding aside, don’t reproduce entire works belonging to someone else. Post a couple paragraphs, then your own comments and observations.

14. Don’t forget to go to sleep, eat dinner, take medication, etc. All of these things, I have done.

15. Hotlinking — placing on image on a post when that image is stored on someone else’s server — is a bad idea. Yeah, folks with memories know that I used to do it. I stopped. It’s theft of services and its bad design, cause when the other guy takes the image down and disables hotlinking capabilities, you will have a broken image on your site. If you want to post an image, download the software at Hello.com
and learn how to use it. Fair warning: It’s a free service and there is some “spyware” involved.

16. Keep the color scheme simple. There is a reason newspapers are not red with yellow letters. I have visited sites with embedded music files that start playing when you open them. I have not visited these sites twice.

17. Unlike a diary, which can be burned, a Weblog can never be destroyed. Thanks to Google, virtually all sites are cashed somewhere and it will show up on a search request somewhere. Maybe that person is your future boss or the divorce attorney hired by your spouse. That post about how you got loaded on weed and tequila and went and picked a fight at the gay bar might seem freekin’ hilarious when you were 19. But, it won’t seem quite as amusing when you are 25 and applying for a security clearance.

18. Use Haloscan or some similar service to let readers make comments to your posts. Repeat after me: The Web is interactive, the Web is interactive. The Web is interactive,

19. Let readers link to your articles by setting up permalinking capabilities. Blogger does this automatically. This puts you ahead of many professionally-run sites that don’t allow this because their
companies are run by idiots.

20. Do not put a visible hit counter on your site. How many visitors you get is no ones business but your own. It looks goofy, too.

21. In the name of merciful heaven, do not run huge images. By that, I mean two things. A photograph that is too wide will screw up how the entire page appears on the screen. Also, use some image editing software — Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop Elements — to reduce the number of pixels in the image so it doesn’t take too long for visitors to download. Remmber, you migyht be getting 4 mB/second download speeds, but the guy reading your site mught be on a dial up out in the boondocks getting 28 kBs/second on a good day.

22. Get thee to w.bloggar.com . This is a nifty desktop utility that I used constantly when I was using Blogger. It’s the closest thing to a M.S. Word-like interface that lets you click a button and send a post to your site.

23. Remember: The more time you spend on the blog, the more success you will have. If you just slap something together, it will look slapped together.

24. If you do decide to pay for server space — by paying $5 to $10 a month for hosting — remember, these sites place limits on bandwidth, the amount of data that can be downloaded from their servers every month. If you post a ton of pictures or audio or video files, that takes up more bandwidth because those files are larger. Also, the more visitors or hits your site gets a month, the more bandwidth is used. I was able to get along with 5 Gigabytes of bandwidth a month until I stopped hotlinking (stealing other people’s bandwidth). When I found myself getting a lot of search engine hits, my bandwidth got eaten up in a day. My advice: If you are at the point where you have outgrown Blogger and you want to spread your wings, select a hosting package that provides a minimum of 10 Gigabytes a month. It is better to have too much than too little.

25. Have fun. ‘Cause you ain’t gonna make any money at it.

[tags]blog about work,rules for blogging,MT,Moveable Type,Word Press,pMachine,blogger[/tags]

East Bluff Barbie has a funny post about some of the porn spam she receives.

Folks, be sure you are using the Akismet plugin. Just activate it on the Plugins page, then click on “Akismet Configuration” in the sub-menu and enter this site’s WordPress API key: “b7a782e0688d” and be sure to NOT use the quote marks.

It’s NOT perfect, as some spam does leak through, and some legitimate comments don’t. It is the best out there, though.

They are:

• 3-column Pressrow.
• Royale
• DailyBlogTips (1.2, 1.2 and 1.3)

I have not tested any of them, therefore I am making no promises. Anyone who tried to use them will be able to tell if they are Widget ready. Any member blogger who I know personally and who wishes to make direct changes to these or any theme’s code, let me know and I’ll give you access and a password.

Solution: The Blog Peoria Project.

Sign up for a free site (donations accepted) and you will find a free already installed utility that lets you automatically import your posts from Blog*Spot to Blog Peoria. If you’ve been using Blogger’s own commenting system, you will even get to keep your comments.

That’s what I did with my old, hardly used heinleinblog site. I went from heinleinblog.blogspot.com to heinleinblog.blogpeoria.com.

Blog Peoria offers close to 200 pre-installed themes. Some of the blogs include a “sidebar editor” that lets you add buttons and counters, even BlogAds and Google AdSense.

Just follow the simple instructions. I’ll even help if you need it, but I do charge a fee for creating a template JUST for your use, with all the bells and whistles. But the vast majority of recreational bloggers can do very well with what I have already installed.

Technorati Tags:
word press, blogger import, robert a heinlein

UPDATE: OK, I’m going to recommend no one use this plugin for the time being. The problem is that in order for it to word, there needs to be a change to the user’s templates. That change causes an error message on ny blog using the same that doesn’t have the plugin activated.

 I’ve added a new plugin that might make it easier for members blogs to be found and read by others.

The plugin is called Bunny’s Technorati Tags. To use them, go to your Admin >>> Plugins and activate the plugin. Then go to Admin >>> Write. Directly below the large “Post” field where members can write their blog entries, there’s a long strip called “Tags.” Once the post has been written, users can use the “Tags” field to create a list of words that describe a post.

When you publish your posts, the Technorati site is notified, and those tags ack of signals that the post is about these topics. When Technorato users search for those keywords, your blog entry pops up on the list.

Trust me, I get about 100 hits a day because of Technorati Tags.

And it’s also a good idea to go to Technorati, sign up and claim your blog.