So far we’ve covered:

• Writing Your First Compelling Content
• Planning Future Content

Today we’re going to look at some of the key pages on your blog that can be worth setting up.

Why ‘Pages’ are Important

When a new person arrives on your blog there are a variety of types of pages that they may look for that will help them to decide whether they want to remain connected with you (or that will help them to actually make that connection).

Many blogs come with some of these set up by default but you’ll want to personalise these defaults as much as possible and possibly create some new pages of your own. These might include:

• About Page – setting up an about page is really important – it’s one of those pages that a new reader will head to in order to help them work out what your blog is about, who is behind it and to decide whether they’ll keep reading it. Read more on how to do it at Add an ‘About’ Page to Your Blog and How to Write Your “About Me” Page.
• Contact Page – some bloggers get a little nervous about being contactable either out of a fear of being overwhelmed by emails or over privacy concerns. While I get this – there are many benefits from being contactable (it opens up opportunities to be contacted by potential partners, advertisers, other bloggers, the press and readers) and there are ways of safeguarding your privacy. If you use WordPress there are numerous contact page plugins that will help you to set up a page that will safeguard your privacy.
• Subscribe Page – most blog templates have subscription buttons and links built in by default – however not all of your readers will be familiar with what they mean or how to use them. While most of us as bloggers understand what that orange RSS symbol means – many will not. Over at my Digital Photography site where I have readers of all levels of tech savyness I have a subscription page which outlines the different subscription options that we offer. This page is visited a lot and converts very very well both with RSS and Email Subscription methods (note: later in this series we’re going to explore the idea of ’subscription options’ to help you think through how to let readers connect with your blog).
• Other Pages – there are a variety of other types of key pages that you might want to consider setting up, depending upon the goals of your site. These might include a ‘Advertise with Us‘ page, ‘Press‘ page, ‘Disclaimer‘ page, ‘FAQ‘ page, ‘Resources‘ page (if you’re selling something for example), a ‘Privacy Policy’ page, ‘Testimonial‘ page (if you have some good ones from previous customers), a 404 page, a ‘Resources’ page, an Archives page etc. Not all of these would be relevant for new blogs but for more information on these and others – I’ve previously outlined 20 types of pages that bloggers should consider.

What pages have you got set up on your blog?

Position Links to Your Pages Appropriately

Once you’ve set up the pages that are important for your blog it is also important to think carefully about where you’ll link to these pages on your blog. Having the pages is one thing but you’ll also want to think about how you’ll be driving traffic to them.

This will depend upon your blog’s design but as with anything – make sure that the pages that are most important to you (for example an ‘About Page’ or a ‘Contact Page’ might be included in this category) ‘are linked to prominently on your blog. This might mean setting up a navigation area across the top of your blog or having one at the top of your sidebar.

Other less important pages might be linked to from your About Page or even in your footer (in this case I’d be putting things like disclaimer pages).

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

The First Week of Your Blog: Set Up Key Pages

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Create Your animated 3D Logo Tonight

Let’s have some fun tonight at our relaxed Friday session: create your 3D Logo and make it spin!

For tonight’s participants we have a great logo creator in store which you may want to try out … and keep for future use.

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Bianca Logo

or click on the below to see the animation:

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Bianca 3D Logo

The Download link will be disabled in 3 hours from now!

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

Build your Flash Website

For the purpose of the March Ycademy online seminar, we will equip Seminar Participants with a professional Storyboard software. The tool allows you to plan your site. Working with a Storyboard will save time and provides a great way of communicating with customers.

Example Storyboard

This is a sample based on screen-shots to show the defined layouts by the Evolution Script.

The storyboard is not really populated, except that it indicates which xml script is concerned. More tonight at the call.

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Storyboard PDF

The storyboard can also be exported in form of a movie as the case may be:

Click HERE for a sample.

Join tonight’s call to see more from the Storyboard!

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

WP Best  NewsPaper Theme

Choosing a new theme  to use for a website is not a decision to be taken lightly. There are a few issues to consider carefully and it all really depends on the main purpose of the website. Once the purpose is agreed upon then choosing the correct theme is a more simplified process. One of the best themes around that I know  of  is the WP Best Newspaper Theme  – a theme that can be applied to most any purpose as it is so adaptable and can be used as a basic platform for most anything.

The WP Best Newspaper  Theme based on the Semiomantics NewsCast Script is an all time favourite with many online publishers. The Best WP Newspaper Theme is one of many themes developed and tuned by Semiomantics. The theme utilises an attractive layout, magazine or news, that introduces both text and graphics and is suitable for countless online applications such as gardening news, car sales, real estate, holidays just to name a few.

Best WP NewsPaper Features

Here are just a few of the features that make this newspaper theme administratively friendly: 

* Easy to admin area – navigate through various sections with ease
* Media Gallery for both images/photos and video
* Auto image resizer – easily display photos and images
* Easy to use category navigation
* Countless Widgets increasing flexibility of layout and composition.
* Banner Ad Management area
* Small Ad Management area
* Ideal for product integration
* Easily adapted for Social Network Marketing

As with any other newspaper, the ad management areas can be used to sell advertising space to clients or as an advertising space for personal products or affiliate marketing.

The Newspaper theme is also  very much a firm favourite with many marketers who use it as a platform  to display products with both images and detailed product information creating a very eye catching display. You can take any plain site and turn it into an attractive  feature-rich portal. With its ease of customisation its a quick and easy way to have a professional looking site.

Best WP NewsPaper by Semiomantics

Not everyone has the time  to take out from their busy schedule or  business to learn how to set up a site nor how to configure it to reach the highest performance levels on search engines  as is needed to successfully market products online. At Small Busines Consulting  we take the time to listen to your specific business requirements to provide you with the best possible solution.

Best WP Newspaper Theme Performance

WP Best Newspaper Theme is a finely tuned Semiomatics script with unequaled high performance on Google Top 10 ranking and stability. The Best WP Newspaper Theme by Semiomantics is only available at selected eShops online  – it comes, set up, configured, fully optimised and delivered to you upon completion of your order, ready to use.  All work on the site is carried out by a licenced Semiomantics Consultant to provide you with complete customer satisfaction.

Working From Home News adapted as a Home Business Online Newspaper with the latest home business news.  

Gardentalk News adapted as an online Home Garden news and tips newspaper and product advertising.

Author: Zo Nicholas, Media, Marketing, Publishing. Co-Founder of YORGOO, Ycademy,YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader or Subscribe by Email.

Read more..

• Garden Talk News
• NewsCast Script by YORGOO
• Hidden Treasure in my garden
• Creating images for YORGOOpress
• Creating rotating headers with YORGOOpress
• YORGOOpress: project update
• Working from home news developments
• How to promote your business with YORGOO
• International Women’s Day 2010
• Branding and Logo Design

Many factors will come into play when it comes to choosing a niche to blog about – but the following are those that I tend to pay most attention to:

1. Your Interest in the Topic

I started out blogging on topics that interested me – but as I began to see the potential to make money from my blogs began to experiment with topics that I had less interest in but which I thought would be profitable.

What I discovered in creating these blogs that had potential for profit, yet which I had little interest in, was that I couldn’t really sustain them. I had little to say on the topics and when I did write something I suspect that those who read my content could tell that it was a topic that I was not passionate about. As a result the traffic did not come, I did not become known for the topic, nobody linked up and the blogs were far from profitable.

On the flipside of this – the blogs that I did have an interest in and a passion for have flourished. My interest in the topic is not the only factor that made them successful but I suspect it is a fairly important one that underlies much of the success and profit that I’ve had.

One question to ask yourself in choosing a niche is ‘What are YOU about?’ Choosing a topic that reflects you means you’ll be in a position to be able to find enough to write about and you’ll write it in a way that engages with the topic and your readers.

2. The Popularity of the Topic

You can have all the interest in the world around a topic but if nobody else shares your interest you’re going to be fighting an uphill battle to build a blog that gets much traffic.

This doesn’t mean you need to choose the most popular topics going around – in fact they may not be a wise choice due to the competition also targeting those niches – however you will want to choose a niche that has some level of demand for content.

There are many ways to do research on this whether topics are popular – here are three that I use:

1. Google Trends – do some searches on Google trends for keywords around your niches (and compare them) and you’ll see whether the topic you’ve chosen has been growing or shrinking and how it compares to other topics.
2. Market Samurai – I’ve written about the potential ofhttp://www.marketsamurai.com/c/problogger(affiliate link but it gives you a free trial)tool for optimising posts on your blog for SEO – but it is also a useful research tool in looking at the popularity of topics – particularly the module that allows you to assess how many searches are being done on different tools in Google.
3. Your Local News Stand – perhaps one of the simplest ways to look for popular topics is to head to a local news stand and look at what publications are being sold there. Not only look at the topics of magazines – but check out what is being written about as hot topics IN the magazines and you might find an emerging sub-niche to focus upon.

Ultimately you’re looking for topics that people are interested in, passionate about, want to learn more on and/or that people want to talk about and interact in a community around. There is an unlimited number of topics and ways to tap into them. Watch TV, talk to your friends, head to a local library, read a newspaper – see what people are into and you could just identify a topic worth exploring.

3. Competition

One of the factors that I see some bloggers failing to acknowledge in the choosing of a niche is how much competition (and how strong the competition is) in their potential niche.

The danger in choosing some popular niches is that you might be competing against some very powerful sites in those niches. While this isn’t always going to be a factor to stop you exploring a niche it should definitely be considered and it can perhaps help you to shape your niche to be something that will give you a competitive advantage.

There are a variety of ways of assessing the strength of competition in niches.

One of the simplest is to simply do some searches on Google to look at how many sites exist for keywords on your topic. This won’t give you an indication of the power of the competition – but it will give you some indication on the ’size’ of competition and it will identify some sites that you will want to be monitoring.

Market Samurai (mentioned above) is one tool that can take your analysis a little deeper. As highlighted in my recent optimising posts on your blog for SEO post it has a module that will not only show you how many competing sites there are but also how strong they are (around a number of factors). It’ll also identify what type of level you’ll need to get to in order to compete with them.

As you begin to assess your potential competition in a niche don’t be completely put off by niches with lots of strong competition. Instead as you analyse what other sites are doing look for opportunities in two areas:

• ways to differentiate yourself – as you look at other sites look for gaps in the topic that they’re not covering or things that perhaps you could do that might differentiate yourself. Perhaps there is a sub-niche that everyone is ignoring, perhaps they all ‘look’ the same, perhaps they all approach the topic in the same sort of ‘voice/style’. These things could be things to explore in offering an alternative to the established sites.
• ways to interact and leverage the competition – as you look at other sites look for places that you might be able to connect with, contribute to and leverage in the building of your own site. Perhaps the competition has the ability to submit guest posts or articles or perhaps they have a forum area for interaction. Find ways to be a genuine contributor to your competition and you might find ways to help build your own site indirectly.

4. Is the Topic Sustainable?

Another factor that I see some bloggers neglecting in the choosing of a niche is consideration of whether the topic is one that they’re able to sustain.

This partly relates to the interest and passion that the blogger has for the topic – but it also relates to the topic itself and whether it is dynamic enough to have content written about it on a regular basis.

• Will it be possible to keep new content flowing on this topic?
• If the blog will be a ‘news’ blog – is there enough news or developments happening on this topic to keep reporting on it?
• If the blog will be a ‘how to’ type blog – Is the topic deep enough to be able to come up with enough tutorials or tips?

A number simple exercises to help assess the sustainability of a blog (depending upon the type of blog you’ll be developing):

• Brainstorm topics – set aside 10 minutes to brainstorm topics for blog posts. Do you run out of ideas or are they flowing easily? This will give you an indication on how many posts you’ll be able to write.
• List ‘problems/needs’ of readers – if your blog will be a ‘how to’ type blog list off problems or needs that your potential readers might have that you could tackle.
• Google News – if your blog will be a ‘news’ type blog – check out Google News for your keywords and see how often news is breaking on the topic. Is there lots of news or is this a topic that only has occasional news breaking?
• List Products – if your blog will be a ‘product’ related blog – do some research into how many products there are in that category and how often new products are released.

Got the picture? Really it is about doing a little analysis of the topic to see if there is enough in it to keep producing new frequent and regular content. If there’s not enough – perhaps consider either another topic or a different format for your site (blogs tend to do best when they’re updated but you could create a more static site).

5. Is the Niche Profitable?

This won’t appeal to everyone as not all people want to monetize their blog but if it’s a goal to make money from your blog then you’ll want to assess the potential for profit before you start.

There are a few ways to get indications on whether a niche will be profitable – including:

• Google Ads – do a simple search on Google.com for your topic/keywords. Look at what ads Google is serving for those keywords over on the right side (or above the search results). Doing some analysis of these ads can be useful on a few fronts. For starters they’ll show you if any advertisers are actively targeting those keywords. This is handy to know if you’re planning on running AdSense on your blog. It will also be handy to check out who is advertising as they could be potential direct sponsors of your site. The other useful thing to note is whether any of the ads are for products that have affiliate opportunities as they could be products you could promote as an affiliate.
• AdWords Analysis – another related way to check on the value of a niche is to do some analysis of how much people are willing to pay as advertisers in the Google AdWords program. Just knowing there are advertisers is a healthy sign but they could all be just paying a cent or two to have their ads appear. Using the AdWords Keyword tool will give you a bit more of an indication of what people are paying to rank highest for their ads.
• Affiliate Products – speaking of affiliate products – do a little hunting around to see if you can find any products online that have affiliate promotions that you might be able to promote. Sometimes this is as simple as Googling ‘keyword affiliate product’ but other times you’ll want to check out affiliate networks like Commission Junction or PepperJam (aff) to see if they have any relevant products listed for your niche.
• Brainstorm Potential Products of Your Own – what could YOU sell directly to readers? As you’re pondering a niche it could be well worth while keeping in the back of your mind potential products that you might be able to develop to sell from your blog. These might include information products (e-books, training etc), membership areas (where people pay a monthly fee for extra teaching, community etc), personal services (coaching, speaking etc), a physical product relevant to your niche – or something else. More and more bloggers are turning to developing their own products as ways to monetize their blogs so keep this option in your mind from the beginning.
• What are others in the niche monetizing with? – one of the quickest ways to work out whether there is potential to monetize a niche is to check out what other sites are doing to make money on that topic. Check out the biggest sites first and look at whether they run advertising (and what sort), whether they’re promoting affiliate promotions, what kinds of products/services of their own they sell etc. You might find that you come up with a quick list of things to start monetizing your own site with very quickly by doing this.
• Market Samurai – I know that Iv’e mentioned Market Samurai already in this series but it’s a tool that also has a monetization module that allows you to look at the profitability of a niche. In fact there are a couple of tools within the Market Samurai system that are worth using when assessing the profitability of a niche. One is in the ‘keyword research’ module which gives you options to look at three factors including the Adwords value of the work, the SEO value and some assessment of whether people are searching with the intent of ‘buying’ or just surfing for ‘information on the keyword. The other module allows you to search for affiliate promotions relevant to your keywords (very handy).

6. What Else Do You Bring to the topic that You Can Leverage?

Previously when I’ve covered the topic of how to choose a blog niche I’ve stopped after exploring some of the above points. However there are almost always a number of other factors that individuals bring to certain topics that can make those niches more sensible choices.

I guess ultimately it comes down to looking at what you have at your fingertips that you will be able to leverage to help you get your blog up and running and working really well.

There are many factors that might come into play including:

• Expertise/Experience – you might be someone with years of experience in the industry which would give you a real head start in the creation of content and also building authority and profile in the niche.
• Contacts/Network – perhaps you already have some good contacts with other bloggers and web site owners in the niche that you’ll be able to leverage to help you promote your blog.
• Established Sites on Related Topics – maybe you already have another blog, newsletter list, website, forum or site on a related topic that you could use to help you launch your new blog.
• Repurpose-able Content – some people already have a lot of content written for other purposes that they can use as the basis for their new blog (for example I met one person recently who had been training in an area and who had already created hundreds of documents for offline use that could easily be used on a blog).

This list could quite easily go on and on. Essentially you need to do a bit of a SWOT analysis of the topic and see what strengths and opportunities that you uniquely have that will help you to get a leg up into this topic.

Sleep On It

My last advice on choosing a niche for your blog is to take your time and don’t act too hastily. While you don’t want the process to drag out too long – I look back on the 30 or so blogs that I’ve started over the years and wish I’d taken a little more time going through this process. I went through a phase where I impulsively started a series of blogs that I quickly knew were not right for me – if I’d only given the ideas a little time to breath I might have discovered before I started that perhaps there were better ways to use my time going forward.

So take your time – share what you come up with with a trusted friend or two – do a little research into the topic and then, when you’re ready and are in a good position to make a decision – ACT!

Also keep in mind that you might need to go through this process with a number of topics before you find one that fits for you. You’re unlikely to find a topic that fits all of the above criteria perfectly – but hopefully something will stand out to you a little to help you make an informed decision.

Questions for Discussion:

1. What other factors would you say come into play when choosing a niche?
2. If you already have a blog – what were the most important factors for you in choosing that niche?

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How to Blog: How to Choose a Blog Niche [6 Tips]

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Create your 3D Logo

Ever wanted to create your own 3D logo? And get one of these Hollywood looks or glow like on Broadway?

Well, it’s possible!

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Yorgo Logo

A bit of color, a nice font, a bit of bevel, some light and a shadow and you are in the race. Of course you can choose some more fun colors and textures or even neon light, your imagination is the limit.

Once you have finished your basic design, add some animation to give it this touch of the rotating Big Mac on next corner’s Junk Food kiosk. An axe to rotate around, a .GIF format, a background to drop the shadow on, yeahhh you may even add some music and you are ready to rotate on top of the Empire State Building … or as the case may be on the Eiffel Tower.

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Yorgo 3D Logo

As these images may stress my transparent image handler on this site, I have loaded the two images to a separate page HERE.

PS: If you are interested in learning how to create your logo in animated 3D format, just register for the March 2010 Ycademy Seminar and build the most smashing site you have ever owned!

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

I was fortunate enough to at SXSWi two years back and it was one of the best conference experiences that I’ve had – so I’ve made it a priority this year to return.

My schedule is pretty open. The main thing that I’ll be doing is a book reading this Friday night. I’ll be talking about some of what Chris and I have included in the 2nd edition of the ProBlogger book (due out next month).

The book reading is on at 5pm, Friday 12 March on the Day Stage. I hope you’ll come!

For those of you involved in the Third Tribe there is a drinks/meetup the next evening (on Saturday 13th from about 5.30pm) at a bar called ‘Lovejoys’ at 604 Neches Street (2 blocks north of the convention center).

Note: I originally thought that my reading was on Saturday and we’d do one after the other…. but I messed up the time so the book reading is Friday and the Drinks/Meetup is Saturday. Sorry for the messing around 3rd Tribers.

Other than that I’ve got a pretty open few days and am looking forward to checking out a few panels and keynotes and doing as much networking as possible. If you’re at SXSWi I’d love to meet you – feel free to come up and say hi any time!

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Let’s Meet at SXSWi!

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Daar-us-Sunnah WP Mosque Theme

Designing a Website for a Mosque is a challenge, namely a cultural one. The beauty of Muslim religious art and the spiritual guidance by the customer need to flow into the web design. The site’s functions needs to take into account a defined set of rules to respect.

We are right now facing this challenge as we are custom tailoring a website for the Daar-us-Sunnah Mosque in London. The Semiomantics Site Smith is developing a framework in the respect of Muslim culture, tradition and spirituality.

This project is sponsored by Global Sports US, London.

WP Best Mosque Theme for Daar-us-Sunnah

The first draft of the WP Best Mosque Theme shows already some of the features:

The features include:

• Brand new Showcase Slider
• Full Width single page layout
• Drop-down for Categories and children pages
• Footer and sidebar widgets + custom Ad widget
• Stylish headers without SEO loss
• Option for image logo or stylish dynamic text logo
• Automatic post lengths
• Threaded Comments, 7 deep
• Gravatar and widget ready
• Tableless code
• Cross Browser Compatible
• Wordpress 2.9.2 Compatible
• Special Theme options control panel for easy customization
• Over 50 easy customization options

WP Best Mosque Screen-shots

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WP Best Mosque white

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WP Best Mosque black

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WP Best Mosque dune

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WP Best Mosque dune single post

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

warning: there are lessons and even actionable advice in here, but it is buried inside a story. I write stories because I love you and don’t want to bore you and because if you laugh then chances are that you’ll remember the educational bit, too. There’s actual research that this works – it is not just because I am in love with bloviation but hey, tomato tahmahto.

I have big love for tech. You could not pry my dishwasher out of my house without bloodshed and death, most likely yours. And the internet? Don’t even get me started. I want to french-kiss the web. In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s my job or at least my blog’s mission statement.

Still, I’m more of install (or pay someone to install) and hope-it-works kind of gal. I want the fuss without the muss.

And I have this theory about tech: some key pieces of hardware and software make a huge difference and everything after that amounts to tweaks and hacks. But the good tech, like a great love, (initially) inspires awe, affection, and respect and make your life much better on a daily basis. You think: how did I ever live without you, front-loading washer? We wasted so much time.

And then, after the infatuation fades, you get on with your happily functioning and newly-enhanced life and start taking your love, machines, shockingly-white-whites and programs for granted.

I like it like that. I like low-maintenance relationships (don’t tell anyone) and I LOVE that electricity just works and I don’t have to think about it. I like finding the right things, that work, and let them do that in the background. Nearly invisible function is hawt.

WordPress is one of those key pieces of tech that made a big difference in my life. It is like a long distance lover. I don’t quite understand it and I should probably spend more time with it but damn I like it a lot. It does me right, mostly virtually.

Actually, let’s be honest: I LOVE WORDPRESS. My blog is my boyfriend. I adore it. I spend all my time with it. Because of all the fabulous people who love me up in the comments, my blog sates my unabashed lust for attention – which, in turn, has started saving me from terrible IRL relationship decisions.

(Wordpress is saving the world from needy girlfriends. Someone call the Nobel Peace Prize Committee.)

So the thought of someone getting their sweaty, malicious hands on my boyfriend blog and doing dirty things to it makes me nauseous.

It happened to a friend of mine, Kelly Livesay. One of her blogs was hacked and posts and theme modifications deleted.  It happened to journalist Helen Mosher. If you Google her name, the first search result is now “Cheap Viagra Online”. This is not – perhaps obviously – what she intended for her blog. It happened to Robert Scoble, who lost two months of blog posts and gained a very serious sense of personal violation.

And that sense of violation is exactly the prompt for this post: the movie The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo completely FREAKED ME OUT (capitalization absolutely appropriate and required).

Do you know The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo? It is the first of a trilogy of books by Swedish author Stieg Larsson who completed this epic series and then promptly dropped dead. It is a gripping book and it almost killed me, too. I read it in five hours.

And then I got my hot little hands on the movie. Lisbeth, the main character and dragon-wearer, is one tough chick. You don’t want to mess with her. She’ll hack you.

Because that’s what she does. Lisbeth is a freakishly talented hacker. She works as an investigator and conducts her investigations from the convenience of her laptop. She gets into your computer and reads your naughty e-mails, your work memos, your sexts, your bank statements, your browsing history, and then uses that information as she sees fit, for her clients, or herself.

And if you’re on her side – I mean, who doesn’t want her to catch the lady-killing villain? (the villain) – then you’re with her, all the way, as she uses her scary powers for good.

So: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Wrenching read, haunting movie. Great entertainment, especially if you’re looking for a new reason to become deeply paranoid about all the ways people can screw with you online.

Robert Scoble’s not kidding when he says that he feels his virtual house was burgled. Thanks to this paranoid movie, I now feel his paranoia pain and I’m deeply worried about my boyfriend blog.

Still, I don’t  understand the point of hacking blogs, so I asked my friend Dave Doolin (Website In A Weekend), who knows Serious Stuff about WordPress, code, programming and How Things Work.

Kelly Diels: What’s the point of hacking a blog? Why would someone want to break into a blog and make it say BUY VIAGRA! instead of just building a sex blog to sell Viagra?

Dave Doolin: Honestly, I’m not really sure, but I’ll hazard a guess: it’s cheaper to spray spam by the trillions than it is to create your own site and work at building traffic. It costs next to nothing to hire people to send a e-mails, so even a really tiny conversion rate generates profit.

Kelly Diels: So how do we keep hackers out of our blogs? On your site, you recommend that bloggers change “Admin” to something specific and then delete the Admin user, so I did that, and Amanda Farough told me to make a unwieldy, ridiculous password that is actually a sentence with random capitalization and characters.

Dave Doolin: Yeah, those two things are a good start. You do want a long, complicated password. The other thing that everyone should do is read the WordPress Development Blog and Other WordPress News. They’re both in your dashboard, and they’ll keep you up to date on the latest hacks and security threats.

(I studiously ignore those two boxes in my WordPress dashboard but now, as of right this minute, I’m going to pay attention.)

And, now that I’m paying attention, I checked in once again with Amanda Farough, who is my designer/developer/chief-cupcake-sharer/coder-extraordinaire. She takes care of my site, because, as I mentioned, I like my tech to work but I’m not really inclined to make it work myself.

Kelly Diels: So, Amanda, what are we doing to keep my site secure? And by “we”, I mean you. What advice do you have for bloggers to keep their blogs on the unhacked side?

Amanda: Here’s my security short list:

1. Change your .htcaccess to protect your database name and password by adding the following line of code: <FilesMatch ^wp-config.php$>deny from all</FilesMatch>. In the event of someone hacking your blog, they won’t be able to determine where your tables are, protecting you from losing everything.
2. WP-DB-Backup is your new best friend. Get it emailed to you once a week or, if you’re really paranoid, once a day (note: Dave Doolin said we should do it once a day and I heart paranoia. That’s totally where I’m living right now. Thanks, Dragon Tattoo conspiracy). Don’t trust your server or your email server. Save copies of the database to your local drive as soon as you get the email. That way, you’ve got two copies: one on your email server and the other on your local drive.
3. Update Wordpress every single time you’re prompted to. These releases are the blogger’s equivalent to driver updates: they fix holes in security, functionality, and usability. If you’re running 2.8 when we’re on 2.9.2, then run that update. You’ll be glad you did.

And that – according to my friends in the know, because trust me, I didn’t know – is the short story of how to keep your blog safe and out of the sweaty, dragon-tattooed hands of malicious hackers itching to delete your hot copy and sell us sex aids in your name.

WordPress Security Summary:

• Get rid of your Admin user account
• have a long, complicated password
• keep up to date on WordPress tips and news by reading WordPress
  Development Blog and Other WordPress News
• BACK IT UP, baby
• Protect your database name and password
• UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE

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Kelly Diels writes for ProBlogger every week. She’s also a wildly hireable freelance writer and the creator of Cleavage, a blog about three things we all want more of: sex, money and meaning.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Blog Security: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Scares Me Into Taking It Seriously.

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The book just came out this week, and last I checked it was in the top 30 books on Amazon.com (#1 in the Time Management category). I predict that this book is going to be a huge hit and a long-term classic in its field.

I met Michael at a leadership retreat in January, and we spoke on the phone for about an hour last week to discuss some of his ideas. He shared what I considered some truly elegant workflow management strategies, so I was eager to read his book and learn the whole system he developed. I’m seldom impressed by time management books these days since I’ve read so many of them, but I must say that Michael’s Workday Now system impressed the heck out of me.

I’ve been gradually implementing changes to my own processes based on Michael’s ideas, which are so intuitively and logically sensible that I can easily see they’re going to make my workflow management significantly more effective. Many of his ideas made perfect sense because he was often one or two steps ahead of me in terms of refining workflow processes I’ve been using for years now.

It’s hard not to compare Workday Now (WN) to David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD), which has been an extremely popular time management book, especially in the blogosphere. GTD deserves its position as a classic in the field, but in my opinion WN presents a superior overall system. I loved GTD when it first came out, but I had to make numerous tweaks to the system to make it more practical for me, and there were certain elements of the system that bugged me, like the tediousness of the weekly review, the potential for truly massive Next Action and Someday/Maybe lists, and the questionable Waiting For list.

The WN system is in many ways similar to GTD. Both of them start with a bottom-up approach to time management, encouraging you to first take control over the out-of-control elements of your work in order to reduce stress and restore a sense of order to your life. Both involve creating and organizing task lists and identifying next actions. Both stress the importance of processing your email inbox to empty and not using it as a surrogate to-do list. Both systems are complete in the sense that you can trust them not to leave loose ends if you work them as the authors propose.

What’s different about WN, however, is that it focuses your attention on a specific time horizon, looking approximately 10 days into the future. This is called the Workday Now Horizon. Michael suggests that somewhere in the 1-2 week range is the natural time horizon people use when thinking about their upcoming to-do items. Beyond the 2-week range, most of us think of our to-dos as being somewhere “over the horizon” and not of immediate concern. We don’t need to deal with them until they become more urgent.

This Workday Now time period is further subdivided into the Critical Now (tasks which are truly urgent and MUST be completed today) and the Opportunity Now zone (tasks which are pending within the next 1-2 weeks but which don’t absolutely have to be done today. All other tasks and projects are placed on an Over the Horizon list.

The Opportunity Now zone is limited to 20 tasks maximum. It’s an evolving list that you’ll update each day. Once you complete your Critical Now tasks for the day, you set to work on your Opportunity Now tasks as time permits. The nice thing about your Opportunity Now list is that since it’s fairly short, it keeps your attention focused on what needs to be done soon. You aren’t distracted by tasks and projects that are weeks into the future; this was a problem with GTD’s Projects and Next Actions lists, which could grow massive in size for busy people.

If you end up with more than 20 items on your Opportunity Now list, you have to push some of them onto your Over the Horizon list. This disciplines you to consider only on what can be accomplished within the next week or two when planning your current workday. Then at the end of each week, you can review your Over the Horizon list and pull some items onto the Opportunity Now list.

I really like this method of managing tasks because it offers an elegant way of balancing urgency and importance. Urgent tasks are a business reality. They must be dealt with in a timely manner. In the WN system, the truly urgent tasks are given top priority, and less urgent but still important tasks are given the next priority. By managing urgent tasks effectively and not allowing them to overwhelm you, the WN system helps you get control of your workflow, thereby freeing up time for important but less urgent tasks. This is a very practical approach because it doesn’t compel you to over-organize long-term tasks and projects that you may never get to. In fact, WN assumes that you probably have more to-dos on your plate than you can reasonably complete. WN helps you take control of the urgent with a simple yet effective approach, so you soon become less urgency-driven.

WN fills in a lot of holes and solves many of the weaknesses of GTD. I would say that overall, WN can be more complex than GTD if you implement every element of each system, but I think WN will be much less burdensome to manage. WN’s complexity is presented in layers of different options. The core WN system can be managed with nothing but a pen, two pieces of paper, and only minutes per day. I’d say that you can begin putting WN into action and getting results with it in less than an hour after you learn it. The basic GTD system takes a lot more work to implement because you must do so much pre-processing up front, typically on the order of 2-3 days’ worth. As you get comfortable with the basics of WN, you can then begin adding more layers of refinement to suit your particular situation.

If you’re already familiar with a system like GTD or if you use some other planning or workflow management system, then you’re way ahead of the game; you’ll likely find the extra subtleties in WN to be particularly useful; their practicality should be readily apparent.

What I described above is really just the first third of the book. The second third explains how to integrate higher-level goals into your life, including how to activate them with emotion. The final third explores how to connect your workflow to a greater sense of life purpose or mission. These sections are well-written too, but since these topics overlap my own work so much, I didn’t personally get as much out of them. However, I agree wholeheartedly with the strategies Michael presents in these sections. I especially like his idea of setting goals that balance vision (the passionate image of an outcome) and targets (the specific deliverables to be achieved).

My only real criticism of the book is that I felt that the second and third sections could be better integrated with the low-level workflow management system in the first section. The lack of top-to-bottom integration was a major weakness in GTD, and while WN goes much further in achieving such integration, I still felt it stopped short of the completely integrated top-to-bottom package I was hoping for. Nevertheless, it gets pretty darned close to that ideal, closer than any other book I’ve read to date.

I give Master Your Workday Now! a huge thumbs up, and I highly recommend it if you’re at all interested in improving your personal effectiveness, getting your e-mail under control, and aligning your actions with your life’s purpose. This is not a book to be read in a single sitting and tossed aside. This is a book you’ll want to keep as a reference, so you can refer to it again and again. I expect you’ll gain powerful and practical insights you can apply from nearly every chapter.

Visit the Master Your Workday Now! website to learn more about the book, or order your copy on Amazon.com. This is an amazing book that could help you take your personal effectiveness to a whole new level.

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© 2010 by Steve Pavlina.