The Better Blogging Series, Part One: 4 Reasons to Register Your Own Domain Name

This is the first installation of the Better Blogging series based on my proposed list of 50 ways to a better blog.

1.  Registering a unique domain name will make your website memorable.

A unique domain name is easier to remember and type into a browser — for example, amandasmith.blogspot.com versus amandasmith.com — and it sets you apart so that you are not just another face in the crowd.

2.  Registering your own domain name lends your website credibility and/or professionalism.

An individual domain name tells your visitors that you mean it. You didn't just sign up for a free website account and start doodling around with no real notion of how long you would be sticking around. It says that you are definitely here, and it says that you mean it. It takes you from looking kind of slouchy to standing tall. If you own your own space, people are more likely to believe in what you put into it.

3.  Registering your own domain allows search engines to recognize your website as its own entity rather than just a subdomain.

If your website url reads you.blogspot.com or www.freesite.com/you, a search engine will focus on the main domain name, blogspot.com, and your particular blog, which is relegated as a subdomain, will only be seen as a smaller part of a larger website. By registering your own domain name, such as you.com, you allow search engines to see your website as an individual site separate from its host, and your website will rank higher in searches. This is important if you want people to be able to find you and search for your content specifically.

4.  Registering your own domain name allows you to move your website seamlessly to any host you like at any time without altering your url.

If you decide to move from Blogger to Squarespace but don't own your own domain name, your url will change, and you will lose a lot of your traction with visitors and search engines. By owning your own domain name, you can maintain your same url if you choose to move your website hosting, and all of the links both within your website and to your website from around the internet will still connect rather than point at a dead url you no longer use. It gives your website a portability that it otherwise doesn't have.

Also, if you register your domain name over five years instead of just one, you have less risk of missing your renewal date and losing your domain name altogether to another interested party.


Things to keep in mind when registering a domain name:

1. Choose a short domain name.
   People are more likely to remember your domain name and spell it correctly if it is less than ten characters long.


2. Don't use counterintuitive spelling.
   If you want people to find you, spell it cuties.com, not kyooties.com.


3. Unless you have a specific reason for using a less common domain extension, use a more common one such as .com or .net.
   When people type a url into their brower, they will most likely try to end a url with a more common top-level domain than one like .tk or .info.


4. Make sure that you maintain control of your domain name.
   Register your domain under your own account and not that of a friend or your web designer. This way, you can update your account information at will, and your ability to renew or not renew your domain name will not be tied to another individual who may or may not be around for you to contact in five years.


5. Register your domain name over the long term to lend it further legitimacy in search engines.
   Search engines often rank domain names that have been registered for several years in advance above those only registered for one year, because long-term registration shows that the domain is expected to have some longevity.

Better Blogging: The Proposed List Of 50

I am working on a series about better blogging, and I've been tossing all of my ideas into a giant master list. So far, I've got 50 ideas, and they are as follows:

1. Register your own domain name.
2. Ditch the free templates that came with your weblogging service.
3. Make your site easy to navigate.
4. Have a good portion of your content showing above the fold.
5. Have your contact information where people can see it.
6. Make sure that your archives are accessible from the home page.
7. Do not have things on the page that actively do stuff outside the reader's control.
8. Font size should be large enough to be easily readable.
9. Font colour can make or break a reader's ability to follow your text.
10. Light text on a dark background should never happen.
11. Have a search box on your website.
12. Have a comments section, and make it easy to comment.
13. Have an RSS feed available and use Feedburner.
14. Have a permanent link posted for each weblog entry.
15. Organize your weblog into categories.
16. Keep unnecessary gadgets/widgets to a minimum.
17. Keep your sidebars clean and uncluttered.
18. If you have ads, make sure that they don't overtake your design or content.
19. Regularly check that all of the links in your template work.
20. Choose a good handle.
21. Do on your weblog what you love on other weblogs.
22. Think about what makes you different and let it show.
23. Write an About article and link to it.
24. Write on a regular basis.
25. Write about things you like.
26. Keep a running list of things to blog about as you go through your days.
27. Create titles that indicate what you are writing about.
28. Edit, edit, and re-edit.
29. Spelling and grammar always count.
30. Read your entries aloud to yourself before you publish them.
31. Write short paragraphs.
32. Include pictures in your content.
33. Write posts of varying lengths.
34. Stop worrying about always being right.
35. Be aware that someone you know will read what you write at some point.
36. If you write about friends and acquaintances, don't use their real full names.
37. Enjoy what you are doing. Pretend that you are your own audience. Entertain yourself.
38. Bare yourself, but set reasonable boundaries.
39. Remember that your commenters are human beings.
40. Be generous.
41. Don't write about work.
42. Don't speak ill of other bloggers.
43. Don't use apologetic language.
44. When you write about something that not everyone might automatically know or recognize, link to further information about it.
45. Read other people's weblogs and comment on them.
46. Do not leave comments solely to spam another site with your own website link.
47. Perseverance is key. Write. And then write some more. Do this for years.
48. Use less words to say more.
49. Don't overuse your thesaurus.
50. Read Tony Pierce's "How To Blog" and Rebecca Blood's "Weblog Ethics" and Mark Bernstein's "10 Tips On Writing The Living Web" and Elizabeth McGuane and Randall Snare's Making up Stories: Perception, Language, and the Web.

Is there anything else related to better blogging that you would add to this list before I dive into the series?

How to Back Up Your Weblog In Blogger, Movable Type, Squarespace, Typepad, and WordPress

I have been blogging at Schmutzie.com for nearly eight years, and I try to make a regular practice of backing up my weblog entries, because I have heard terrible rumours of people losing their weblog data to hackers and general internet chaos.



This morning, though, I came across this tweet from @Issascrazyworld, and it had me running from where I was reading tweets in bed to my computer to check on my internet babies:



@Issascrazyworld's weblog loss happened when the servers that hosted it were hacked, and she has lost nearly three years of her weblog. This kind of thing breaks my heart. Our weblogs are our homes on the internet, the frameworks that house our personalities and hearts and often careers online, and this kind of loss can seem insurmountable. This is why I decided to round up a few short articles to help you back up your weblog data and try to keep your work safe.

How to Back Up Your Weblog In Blogger, Movable Type, Squarespace, Typepad, and WordPress

Blogger:
How to Create Backup for Blogger Blogspot Blog

Movable Type:
Backing Up and Restoring Blogs

Squarespace:
Squarespace is already fairly secure, but you can also export your journal entries or site data for extra weblog data protection.

Typepad:
Backing Up Your Content

WordPress.com:
How to Backup Your WordPress Blog In Three Easy Steps

WordPress.org:
Backing Up Your Database or the simpler WordPress Backups.

Backing up your weblog on a regular basis will save you both insanity and heartbreak if some terrible nastiness should befall your website.

Now go forth and ensure your weblog's safety! And do it every week! And spread the word!

Hotlinking Is The Devil's Candy, or Why You Shouldn't Hotlink

Recently my spouse and bidness partner Schmutzie wrote an article on copyright and intellectual property and the foul practice known as hotlinking. After a few emails from our readers, we decided to talk a little bit more about hotlinking - and more particularly, why you should never do it. Bottom line: if you read this article and then go hotlink, you will end up in a special hell.



What is hotlinking?

Hotlinking, properly known as inline linking, is the practice of linking to an image or other file from a different server than the one hosting your web page. If done without permission from the author of the web page on which the image or file originally appeared, this is a bad thing. Why?

1) That image is not yours to host. If you’re linking directly to an image on a different server, there’s a good chance that you don’t have the right to display it on your page. If you’re using the image for commercial purposes - ie. trade or endorsement - then you’re probably violating copyright. But for most of us, that’s not the main reason to avoid hotlinking.

2) You’re stealing bandwidth. Every time someone loads your page, his or her browser calls your server and downloads the HTML document. The browser reads the document and then loads elements of the page - video, audio, images, javascript, etc.

The communication between browser and server incurs a cost in bandwidth. If your HTML page on server x tells a browser to go to server y and grab files from there, the bandwidth cost is shouldered by server y. Images, audio and video take up a lot of bandwidth. If your web page gets a lot of hits and you’re hotlinking, then someone else is paying the bill for your popularity. Jerk.

3) It’s a security risk. Chances are that the greatest risk you run when you hotlink is a broken link, when the original server changes file locations or shuts down. But if a server administrator is in a nasty mood, you could find yourself displaying offensive or embarrassing images. In some cases you could even leave your web page open to significant security risks.

Think of a hotlink as a hole that you've opened in your site. Ultimately you have no control over what comes squirming through that hole. It’s that simple.

But my Blogger/Wordpress/etc. blog lets me hotlink to other images. If hotlinking’s so bad, why does it do that?

It’s all the internet’s fault, really. Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) was designed to allow anyone to link to any page or image, from any server. Unless specific security measures are put in place to prevent linking, you can build a web page that links to multiple servers. Without this functionality, the web would be a very different - and poorer - place.

The linking options in most blog editors reflect this basic HTTP functionality. But unless you have permission to link, don’t do it. In any case, it’s safer to host the images yourself.

But I have a free blog. I don’t have my own server. Do I?

Even though you haven’t purchased a physical server or rented space and bandwidth on one, your blog is hosted on a machine somewhere, and that machine is a server. For example, If you have a Blogger blog, then your blog is hosted on a Google server.

Is embedding a video from YouTube considered hotlinking?

When you embed a YouTube video on your web page, then you’re linking directly to one of their servers, and it’s YouTube (or Google, actually) that pays the cost of the bandwidth. Sounds like hotlinking, yes? The difference in this case is that YouTube is providing the embed code, which means that YouTube is implicitly granting you permission to create an inline link to the hosted content.

Similarly, you can embed images and slideshows from your Flickr site because Yahoo is granting you permission to link directly to its servers.

How do I stop some thieving weasel from hotlinking my images?

If you’re hosting your own site, I recommend that you visit this tutorial on creating an. htaccess file to stop hotlinkers dead in their tracks. If you don’t host your site (ie. you have a free blog) then there’s not much you can do to prevent it - but if you discover it, then you can do the following:

1) contact the hotlinker and request that he or she cease their heinousness;

2) change to the path to your image file by simply renaming the file and then updating your links;

3) replace the hotlinked image with something else - for example, a message that simply says “This site steals bandwidth”.

Five Reasons Why Auto DMs On Twitter Are Bad and What They Tell Me About You

On Twitter, I tend to follow back just about anyone who follows me. Whether I continue to follow them, though, is up to them.

It only takes one wrong move to completely lose a follower or to find yourself blocked and reported for spam, and that wrong move is frequently an auto DM. An auto DM is a direct message that is instantly sent to your new followers, and, for a variety of reasons, it is a good rule of thumb to avoid using them.

Five Reasons Why Auto DMs On Twitter Are Bad and What They Tell Me About You

1. Auto DMs are spam. Your auto DM is untargeted and impersonal, which tells me that you would rather drop commercial spam on the down-low than actually converse with me as an individual.


2. Auto DMs alienate you from your followers. People can smell a robot a mile away on Twitter, and your automatic welcome message or push to buy your product will unplug a follower from your message within seconds. Your lack of interest in personal engagement will translate into your followers' lack of interest in you.


3. Auto DMs destroy your credibility. Your auto DM will come off as a sales pitch, whether it is one or not. Throwing a sales pitch at a follower before you have built more of a relationship with them makes you look untrustworthy.


4. Auto DMs increase your risk of being unfollowed. Your auto DM, being as alienating and sales-pitchy as it is, will irritate your followers, because it is pushy, impersonal, and makes them feel devalued. It will inspire them to unfollow you rather than stick around to find out what you have to offer them.


5. Auto DMs can result in the suspension of your Twitter account. Many people block and report as spam any accounts that auto DM them with useless information, so, along with losing followers, you might lose your Twitter account altogether.

Twitter is social media, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that social media is about social engagement, so imagine, if you will, that your Twitter followers are fellow guests at a dinner party to which you have been invited. When it comes time to introduce yourself to your fellow dinner guests, do you send a robot in to shove a few sales flyers into their breast pockets before you even say hello?

No, of course not. First, that would be ridiculous. Second, it would be rude and offputting. Third, that kind of behaviour might just get you ejected not only from that particular dinner party but also from any future dinner party, as well. And the icing on the cake? No one would be sad to see you go.

The auto DM is usually a dead end communication-wise. Instead, take the time to engage in conversation with your followers on Twitter. Connect with people. Talk with them, not at them. Listen to what they have to say and share. You'll find that a few dedicated followers are worth far more than a large number of followers who no longer want to hear what you have to say.