Just got a check from Linkshare, the affiliate account for iTunes. Nice!
But does the amount for $1.24 mean I’ve been naughty?
All kidding aside, thanks to all who have supported this site with purchases through one of my affiliates like Amazon, Google, and iTunes.
If you need to buy something from Amazon.com, consider Pulpconnection’s Amazon Store with products featured on this blog. Click on the AMAZON STORE link in the header to enter the store.
Or you can enter with this link. Thanks for your support!
The Twilight saga’s New Moon is having such a profound impact – on the perception of Young Adult books, on movie sales, on life lessons, on perturbing thoughts, on the rise of the Twimom phenomenon, and yes, even on blogging. For me, here are six blogging lessons learned from New Moon.
What’s happening in the dreamworld of your blog? Do you know? Have a dreamcatcher ready to really see what’s going on with visits, referrers, keywords, popular content, and much more. With popular blogging dreamcatchers like Google Analytics, Sitemeter, and Lijit, you can capture and analyze the unseen dreamworld of your blog.
Even the eternal, almighty Volturi know the importance of protecting their image, and you shouldn’t discount the power of images for your blog. Pictures, images, and videos are a great way to make your posts pop and are a valuable traffic source. From the top 25 traffic sources for Pulpconnection, nine of them are referrals from image search engines.
In the blogging business, you’ve already heard the phrase “content is king.” That’s still true, and the content of your blog is extremely important. But almost as important is the appearance of your blog. If readers are transfixed by the beauty of your blog, they’ll stay longer and take in more of your beautiful content.
If you’re not an artist or designer like me, get a theme that’s beautiful to begin with. Head on over to DIY Themes and admire Thesis. Thesis is a beautiful starting point.
How do you talk with your pack, your blogging community? Sure, all blogs allow comments but for wolf-like telepathy, try another commenting system like Intense Debate, Disqus, or Echo. Improving on notifications, spam protection, and integration, these systems constantly keep you connected to your pack.
Be it an onslaught of wolves or a rush of network traffic, are you ready for the chase? Will you be unprepared and suffer the fate of Laurent, or will you be cunning like Victoria and have WP Super Cache installed? With WP Super Cache, your blog will be able to keep up with the pace of fast attacks and survive to fight another day.
Plain and simple. Young or old(er), guys or gals, werewolf or vampire, rock hard abs are hot. No blogging lesson from this other than rock’em while you got’em!
So, let’s visually review six blogging lessons learned from New Moon.
Got that?
I can’t deny it. I am Taylor Lautner’s boy toy, and I have been blessed. Look at this past week’s search results for Pulpconnection, domination by the New Moon hunk.
From recent analytics, I knew I <3 Twilight, Jacob and Taylor Lautner, and these latest stats enforce Team Jacob’s fandom. But would I have guessed that pimping out Jacob Black would turn into a blessing?
In December 2008, I made the switch from Google’s Blogger to WordPress, and Pulpconnection visits tanked. Links and URLs broke or changed, ruining Pulpconnection’s standings with search engines. But look what happened in October and November 2009, activity finally caught up with and exceeded averages from one year ago.
That’s the blessing of being Taylor Lautner’s boy toy! So I’d like to say thanks to Taylor, he of the washboard abs.
Greetings! Pulpconnection is now more sexy, more intense, with more satisfaction. At least with WordPress plugins that is. In a never ending voyage with WordPress and its limitless plugins, I’m experimenting with a few new ones after previous additions and deletions.
Freshly added are:
And as I learned the hard way, I need to balance all this plugin bling with overall performance of Pulpconnection. Can’t have the site crash with all this sexy, intense satisfaction.
…if the Google Analytics stats for Pulpconnection indicate anything. See what I mean?
Of the recent top ten keywords, seven of them relate to Twilight, Jacob, and Taylor Lautner (and his underwear). I’m kinda surprised that Seth Sundberg aka Franco Metcalf made the list.
Oh by the way, New Moon rises on November 20, 2009.
Wow! After reading this article about making serious money on Twitter, I have to check out the advertising services, ad.ly and SponsoredTweets.
Who knows, I might have found yet another way of getting the money to roll in like this last venture!
Had to do some tuning to Pulpconnection after a rash of meltdowns and poor performance. Thanks to the duo of @ryankanno and @mirthlab, I made a few changes hopefully for the better.
There were a few other minor changes I made (like bumping up my DreamHost Private Server memory just a tad), and overall, performance has been more stable. But boy, the withdrawal from all the blogging bling (like this one) is hard to deal with. 🙁
In recognition of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Pulpconnection is temporarily going pink. My usual lime header now features a pink grapefruit along with pink typefaces.
Thanks to some prodding by @mirthlab, I finally got around to “mobilizing” Pulpconnection. What does that mean? I installed an alternate theme that kicks in when Pulpconnection is viewed by a mobile device like an iPhone or Blackberry. This theme is more compact and will then load faster without all the widget bling that you’d normally get.
Thanks to WPtouch, the mobile version of Pulpconnection looks like this.
I’ve been asked about the Thesis theme for WordPress now and again so here are a few words why I’m a fan of Thesis.
Yup, I am a fan of the Thesis WordPress theme. I was a little apprehensive paying for a WordPress theme since there are good ones freely available. I forget the exact reason why I went with Thesis, but I’m glad I did. I think it was reading through the Thesis docs and user guide that convinced me. Or it might have been the many sites that started using Thesis as well.
Why Thesis? It’s easy. Plain and simple. Many of the common customizations of blogs can be done with some CSS knowledge. With Thesis, you don’t necessarily need to know CSS, even for somewhat complex customizations since they are all configuration items of this theme. What to show, what not to show, how to show it (font, size, etc) are all controllable by Thesis via checkboxes, drop down menus, etc. Thesis has defined styles for notes, alerts, drop caps, and frames around images to make your stuff look good without having to figure out the CSS.
Thesis makes common changes easy to implement. It has dedicated sections for adding scripts in the header and footer. You can change your RSS syndication feed to Feedburner for example. I know these are not hard changes to make, but Thesis puts these common options right in front of your face.
There’s a plugin called Thesis OpenHook that makes placement of items on a blog even easier. Thesis has these defined hooks where you can stick code/text. With OpenHook, it better exposes these defined areas so you can place items exactly. For example, there’s placement for Before Header, After Header, Byline, Before Sidebars, Before Sidebar 1, After Sidebar 1, etc. so you can easily place a Google Adsense ad, images, or anything else you can imagine.
Lastly, the Thesis support forums are actually good. There’s a lot of activity and really helpful people. If you have questions, issues, or want to know how to do it in Thesis, it’s probably covered in the forums already.
Oh yeah, the Thesis creator, @pearsonified, is on Twitter and frequently points out 3rd party mods and changes to Thesis, so you can see how others are using this theme.
I’m sure I missed something describing Thesis, but for me, Thesis is the ONE thing that got me off of Blogger and on to WordPress full time. I was always looking for a solid theme to start Pulpconnection on WordPress, and once I started with Thesis, I got so far so quickly there was no turning back.
First, I need to apologize to Kanye West for poking fun at him. Right after a few Kanye posts, Pulpconnection experienced a service meltdown that I couldn’t repair. No, it wasn’t a storm of traffic that brought this blog down, just a runaway Apache web service. This out-of-control service sucked up all my hosting resources leaving nothing to power the pulp. See the prolonged spike in the red line? Not good.
After some troubleshooting on my own and even after suggestions from “The Genius” Ryan Kanno, I still wasn’t getting anywhere. I was about to file a trouble ticket with Dreamhost when I saw their Live Chat feature. I tried it, and Max responded. I told him my issue, he looked into it, and as a seer of all, Max discovered and repaired my renegade apache service. All in a matter of minutes. Thanks Max!
Max also politely pointed me to a wiki article about WordPress fine tuning, and now I got WordPress Super Cache running to help tame things.
Lessons learned: Dreamhost live chat good. Enable caching for WordPress good. Angering Kanye West bad.