The Dodge Retort

The Dodge Retort (TDR), my eclectic blog, celebrated its third anniversary on Tuesday. That’s third as in three weeks.  You know, Internet time.

This isn’t my first blog. I have done several others working for an employer and learned about a tenth as much in a year as I have in three weeks. That being on your own heightens your creativity and motivation is an understatement.

It’s noteworthy that on Tuesday, TDR enjoyed its best day in page views – 535. That might not sound like much, but starting 21 days ago at zero puts it is perspective. One colleague remarked that page views just satisfies my “vanity.” Perhaps. Page views by themselves aren’t the point, but building an audience and following is.

With this good start, I am confident I can build a substantial following. What’s satisfying are my efforts being rewarded with traffic growth. Best of all, I learn something new every day, sometimes every hour.

Am I making money? Of course not: this is a blog (I do make money from freelance writing, however). But sooner rather than later, someone will write the playbook on blogs making money.  I suspect joining an ad or affiliate marketing network (there’s about 60 of them)  is a bit like putting solar panels on your house and selling electricity back to the power company. On the sunniest day, you might make three bucks. And at my nascent traffic levels, I might make a penny or two. As Newsweek columnist Dan Lyons points out, he made a whopping hundred dollars on the day his Fake Steve Jobs blog hit 500,000 page views.

Former Ziff Davis colleague Joe Panettieri at Ninelinesmediainc.com which launched in January, 2008 may have it right. He and his partner are making money with three focused-technology blogs which they sell themselves. In others words, they’ve created a their own self-funded media company complete with blogs, events and newsletters.  That is the path Joe recommends and he seems to be making a go of it even though Nine Lives launched into the teeth of a recession. After all, publishing empires Ziff Davis, CMP and CNet were started in recessions, he points out.

BTW, it was  Nine Lives’ Workswithu.com blog about Ubuntu Linux web site that drove all that traffic Tuesday to a TDR netbook post.

What’s next for my blog?

I have bought 300Gb of hosting space and will move to WordPress.org which allows plug-ins (WordPress.com which I currently use does not). In other words, my blog, er web site actually, will become more robust. I will be able to add  scripts and choose among the 4,200 and counting applications for WordPress.

I’ll report back again after my sixth anniversary – sixth week, that is.

I gushed about WordPress a few posts ago because it got me up so quickly on the web within the powerful clutches of a full-blown and free content management system. I have learned tons in two weeks, but unfortunately that limited knowledge only made me realize there’s megatons still to learn.  So after two weeks, I have entered stage two in the evolution of my blog and web site.

That means investigating the more advanced features of WordPress as well figuring out how to use it with other applications. I’ve even entered WordPress Support, Forums and watched WordPress.tv videos which are quite good in terms of instruction. I did not my find answers to my questions so I’ll ask them here and make a few observations in this post. My goals are twofold: to make my web site better and to drive more traffic to it.

My central question is where do I insert HTML within WordPress when I want to add a new feature. For example, I wanted to add the Technorati “Fave my Blog” button which comes with code that makes that happen  (I claimed my blog on Technorati this morning will supposedly lead more people to my ramblings). Technorati provided the code, but that’s where the guidance ended.

I also wanted to to drop in a Technorati URL that pings it every time I update my blog. I had been doing these so-called pingbacks manually which is tedious and time-consuming. Any tedious and repetitive web work that can be automated should be.

Well, I have no clue as to 1) find the place where I should drop the HTML or URL within WordPress, and 2) once should I find it, where precisely should I put it.  So I searched the forums asking “How do I insert code for Technorati Fave button?”  I found several others  trying to do the same thing and mostly pulling their hair out because there was no easy explanation available.

I wondered if I could pull this off in the Widgets options which liven up your pages with elements and modules for such things as Delicious, a calendar and recent posts. But these are  automated check off items that add said modules or elements to your WordPress pages. There also is something call the CSS editor which is recommended for advanced WordPress users. I hardly fall into that group.

The CSS editor also raises the money question: it costs four bleepin’ cents a day to use. I was wondering when free would no longer rule, but the folks behind WordPress and many other web applications have been more than generous with their knowledge and expertise. Even the mother of social networks Facebook has been free although it’s now trying to sell advertising.

As for pinging blogs when I update, I found something called ping-o-matic, but near as I can tell, you have to use it after every update although it’s a tad easier than manually doing pingbacks within the WordPress editor. I never did get to insert that URL.

HEEEEEEEELP!

When one leaves their job without another to replace it, the first thing many journalists do is look for tools that can keep their name in the public eye.  I fit this mold.

One tool that has served me extremely well in the past few days is WordPress, a comprehensive and free content management system. Its developers  refer to it as a blogging tool, but WordPress rivals some of the most expensive content management systems I have used.  In short, WordPress is wonderful and I am grateful to its developers.

I was up with a sharp-looking web site and blog  so fast (this one) that a few followers asked: “How did you do that?’

I had a bit of an edge. I had used the WordPress editor as a blogging tool in my previous job as an editor-an-chief.  And I’d used others content management systems so I knew the posting drill. Anyone can figure out WordPress and should not shy away from trying it. WordPress also has its own traffic reporting system.

WordPress has been around since 2003 and in 2007, there were 3.8 million downloads so I am hardly on the cutting edge with it. I have barely sctatched the surface.

WordPress.org even has a future release schedule and developers polls users on their problems and what features they’d like to see in coming releases. As of this writing, there were 4,010 plugins for it and downloads totaling  20,363,588! I guesstimate I was about the 20,361,419th download.  And yes, there’s a Dummie series book on WordPress.

WordPress is a digital life force, operating as an Open Source project under the principal that software should be developed shared at no cost to the user. That’s a noble idea if not a bit impractical. But I sure appreciate it.