Monetize Your Blog with Job Listings

SimplyHired.com's Job-a-Matic service allows any blog or web site owner to monetize a site with paid job listings. Target by industry and set your own pricing for listings you attract, and the company shares revenues with you 50/50. If your listings are on the skimpy side, Job-a-Matic "backfills" with relevant postings from SimplyHired.com's five million strong database of jobs. Click-throughs are rewarded with a 30/70% revenue split. You can target jobs by keyword or geographically, or both. (One down side — the service is currently limited to the U.S. only.)

Job-a-Matic generates a customizable listings page and lets you create widgets and ads that you can paste into your blog or site, as I have done at left below. The backfilled listings served by Job-a-Matic are attractive and easy to read, with some useful enhancements such as the ability to quickly and easily access geographically relevant salary information. Any listings you attract are added to the database, and promoted through SimplyHired.com's extensive network, which includes MySpace and LinkedIn.

The service debuted in February of this year, and already over 600 blogs have signed on. SimplyHired claims to be the world's largest job search engine and was lauded as one of the 50 Coolest Web Sites by Time magazine.

New Blogger Layout Conversion No Picnic

Whew! After hours of frustration, I have succeeded in moving this blog's template over into New Blogger. I did my best to maintain the same look and feel, but there are subtle differences. (You can see the old template by clicking on the thumbnail at left.)

And what a learning curve it's been. Hopefully, the results will prove worth it. One of the major benefits of New Blogger (and certainly my primary motivation in upgrading to widgets view) is the new labels/categories feature, evidence of which you can see at right below. Those who have been with me for a while will be familiar with the various not-so-successful code hacks and workarounds I have employed over the years in an effort to give this blog that all-important missing functionality.

I posted recently on the changes needed to get the 3-column Minima template that I give away here working properly in New Blogger layout view. That was a piece of cake compared to this blog's template, because of all the customization I had done. New Blogger didn't like my classic template at all, and the easiest approach to feeding New Blogger widget view something it could digest proved to be to rebuild it from scratch. I started with the 3-column Minima template, but you can only get so far dragging widgets around the screen. To get the functionality and look and feel I wanted, I had to delve into New Blogger's XHTML code, which is a whole lot more obtuse and less forgiving than Old Blogger's code. (Tip: all tags must be closed, even IMG tags, or they will generate error messages.)

More Internet Explorer Grief

Lots of challenges followed, including the usual crazy-making peek-a-boo float and IE box model problems. I employed an inelegant code hack (child selectors) to solve the latter problem and get the template performing roughly the same in both Firefox and IE. The peek-a-boo float problem was solved by adding {position: relative} to the div in question. There are still infuriating inconsistencies though, which I am at a loss to explain: the left padding of some of the sidebar contents seems to mysteriously reset for no apparent reason, jumping the headings and web badges all over the place in IE. I can find nothing in the code to account for this, and I'm truly mystified. There's a limit, however, to the energy I'm prepared to expend in pursuit of perfection.

Adding Post Auto Links

A tougher challenge, critical to the business goals of this blog, was getting the small WebLens badge that you see at the top of this post into the default post configuration. In Old Blogger, this was easy to do and I had previously shared the necessary code tweak here. In New Blogger's Page Element view, you can insert a link (or anything else) by adding a new HTML/Javascript widget to the center column. This will add the inserted object to the individual post pages. But call me obsessive: I wanted it to also appear on all posts on the main index, archive, and category pages. This required getting up close and personal with New Blogger's expanded widgets code view.

Trouble is, there is nothing obvious in the code to indicate where posts begin and end. Instead, there are plenty of convoluted loops, if/then/elses, cryptic widgets, and mysterious includables. See for yourself in the tiny snippet at right.

It took hours of trial and error to find the right spot to paste the link. After much experimentation, it finally came down to two possibilities, which I have highlighted in red. Pasting the link after either of these seems to work. I opted for the first, as you can see. I might never have solved this if it weren't for Bonnie Calhoun's fantastic blog, How Can I Do That?, which I found in the Blogger Help Groups. Her post on inserting Adsense code finally pointed me in the right direction.

Anyway, I hope you like the new look and feel, and — above all — enjoy the ability to easily find relevant posts on topics that interest you. Let me know what you think.

3 Column Widgets Compliant Blogger Template!

Success! In a previous post, I noted that the New Blogger supports my three-column template in "classic view," but rejects it in "widgets view." I am happy to report that I have solved the problem. After much experimentation, I now have a working three column version that you can open and edit in either HTML view or in "widgets" view.

It was much more than just a bit of badly formed XML. The code that the new Blogger uses for its "widgets view" is a radical departure from the XML that the old Blogger used. New Blogger uses variables, inserts several strange new tags into your code, and stores information differently. All of this is in support of a new user-friendly interface that enables you to add objects (Blogger calls them widgets) and change your blog's template without having to know a speck of code. The code structure underlying this, however, is finicky and much less tolerant of syntax errors than Blogger's previous incarnation of XML.

To get the 3-column template working properly in widgets mode, I basically had to rebuild it from scratch, from Douglas Bowman's new widgets-friendly 2-column Minima design.

Two Template Choices

As a result of this, there are now two versions of the three-column template.

• Classic: If you are using the Old Blogger (or if you are on New Blogger but don't anticipate needing to significantly modify the template), use the original 3-column version. Note that you cannot open this version in Widgets view. This means you cannot add newsreels, video, a label list, or any of Blogger's other new page elements. You can modify the template, but you will need some familiarity with HTML.
• Widgets: If you are on New Blogger and want the ability to easily customize the fonts, colours, or layout of the template's elements, and prefer to use a point-and-click interface, use the new Widgets version. You can make look and feel changes through an interactive point-and-click interface or by editing the HTML. This version also supports new Blogger features such as newsreels and video, and lets you take full advantage of Blogger's new support for category labels.
  

Changing Template Fonts & Colours

To modify the Widget template's current fonts and/or colours, open your Blogger dashboard, then click Layout / Template > Fonts & Colors. Choose the element you wish to modify from the list at left, then select the new font and/or colour you want for that element. Click Save Changes and view your blog.

Modifying Page Elements

I have designed the new widgets version to look as similar to the original as possible. It contains placeholders for your profile, blog archive, labels, popular posts, blogroll, and more. However, because of the way that new Blogger now handles information, some page elements will not appear in preview mode until you enter details for them, and you won't see the details in your HTML code at all.

To modify an existing element, click Template > Page Elements. Select the element you wish to modify, then click its Edit link and add the necessary details. You can change its title and/or default configuration any way you like. Click Save Changes when you're done.

Removing Page Elements

To remove an element, click its Edit link, then click Remove Page Element.

Adding New Page Elements

You can add new elements to either the left or right sidebar. To add an element to a sidebar, choose the sidebar you want to modify, then click its Add a Page Element option. You'll see a list of fourteen types of elements. Choose the one you want, then click Add to Blog. Blogger will prompt you to complete the title and/or other details. You can move elements around or change their stack order by dragging them.

Be aware that certain types of elements, such as link lists or HTML/Javascripts, can be added multiple times. Others, such as your Blog Archive, will generate an XML error if added more than once.

If you wish to change the widths, margins, padding, or border styles of the three columns, you will need to edit the HTML.

I hope you find these templates useful. Remember, before you make major changes, be sure to back up your current template.

A Fix for Screwy Blogger Feed Dates

After updating all 135+ of this blog's posts yesterday with the new Blogger's much-hyped "label" feature, I discovered, much to my annoyance, that Blogger's native feed now defaults to updated rather than published order — that is, feed contents are sorted by the date on which posts are modified not by when they were created!

For New Blogger users, unfortunately, this means that every time you make the slightest change to a post, including fixing a typo or correcting a broken link, it will jump to the top of your feed — regardless of how old or obsolete it is. If you do a batch of changes as I did yesterday, your feed will be a jumbled mess of outdated posts. If you subscribe to other people's Blogger feeds, you'll be seeing lots of recycled posts.

When I emailed FeedBurner about this, they informed me they can do nothing about how Blogger sequences posts. FeedBurner just grabs the original Blogger feed and reflects what's already there.

The fix lies primarily with Blogger, and involves a code tweak to your template. A quick Google search unearths lots of advice. The article that I found most helpful is this one from Kato Katonian, though I still had to comment out a couple of other lines in my template's header before his solution would work. Essentially, you need to change the feed reference in your blog's metadata to point to http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=published.

Once I made this change to my template, my native Blogger feed (Atom format) started working correctly, but FeedBurner (the more popular RSS format) still wouldn't pick up the new date sequence. That proved easy to fix, with a quick visit to FeedBurner to update the native feed address. (Click Edit Feed Details and paste the corrected address.)

Other proposed solutions include an inventive gizmo from a Yahoo-owned Web 2.0 feed aggregator named Pipes. This tool lets you bring in any feed and output it in corrected date order, among many other things. It may help with correcting other screwed up Blogger feeds, though using it to fix your own feed would require current subscribers to re-subscribe.

If you have found other fixes, please drop a comment here.

3-Column Template Fix for New Blogger

Update: Widgets version now available! See this post for details.

With apologies for the long wait, I have finally gotten around to investigating why some people were having trouble bringing my 3-column template into the New Blogger's HTML editor. One of the reasons holding me back was my own reluctance to embrace anything new from Blogger, but I finally took the plunge this morning, and so far so good. It's also the first time I have posted in a couple of months due to a heavy workload. Anyway, on to the topic of this post ...

The good news is that there is nothing wrong with the original 3-column Blogger template, found here. The problem was with my instructions (sorry), which were perhaps not specific enough. Some people evidently saved the HTML version of the template displayed when you click the link. That only gives you part of the code (which works fine if you're using Firefox, by the way). If you use IE, however, you need to open the template, view the source code, and then save or copy and paste into your template editor. IE does not display all the code, including the stylesheet and the all-important doctype declaration at the top.

Please be aware that this three-column layout will not work as is with the new Blogger's layout mode which uses something called "widgets." It works fine when pasted into their classic template, but it's generating XML errors in "widget" mode. I am working on a widgets modification, and it should be forthcoming shortly.

Hope this clarifies things, and again, apologies for the long delay in finally getting this information to you. Happy blogging!

Disabling the Blogger Navbar

Here's a great tip from reader Matt Mc. Matt commented in response to a post about customizing your Blogger template that he finds Blogger's default navbar annoying. Blogger doesn't let you disable this feature but Matt shared a short snipped of CSS that you can add to your template to suppress it.

I tested it out and it works great, though I have re-enabled it on this blog, as I don't mind the navbar and its search feature could be useful to you. (For readers new to blogging, the navbar is the black horizontal bar at the top of this blog, just above the header graphic. It offers some useful functionality and is intended, in theory at least, to deliver traffic to your blog from other Blogspot blogs.)

Turning Off the Navbar

Here's how to disable the Blogger navbar:

1. Open your template and locate the style section at the top, just under the <$BlogMetaData$> tag.
2. Find a space between two other styles, and type the following code:
   #b-navbar {
   height:0px;
   visibility:hidden;
   display:none
   }
3. Save your changes and view your blog. The navbar should be gone.

Once again, the elegant simplicity of CSS saves the day. Technically, this combination of style declarations doesn't really turn off the navbar; it just hides it from view.

Note: there is some question as to whether disabling the navbar violates Blogger's terms of service, though I could find nothing specific on their site relating to this.

Blogger Categories Redux

Stumbled across yet another way to compensate for Blogger's annoying lack of categories functionality. This topic has been well covered here in the past, but in the interests of thoroughness, check out David Nicholson's Blogger categories hack. Me, I'm happy with my Labelr solution.

100 Posts and Counting

With publication of the previous article, Random Bytes reached the 100 post milestone — a feat that seemed inconceivable when I started this blog. It's hard to believe I've had that much to say. When I started blogging, I worried about finding things to write about. Today, the primary challenge lies in managing my favourites, which are bulging with links to sites and topics I hope to cover in this space. That, and finding time to post. Oh well. Onwards and upwards :-)

Blog Stolen Again!

Well, I guess imitiation is supposed to be the sincerest form of flattery. But I must confess that, this time, the main emotion I felt on seeing yet another unauthorized copy of this blog floating around the Internet was extreme irritation. At least, now I knew how to proceed.

A few months back, I posted about the shock of learning someone had cloned my blog, and the subsquent struggle to get the illicit copy taken down. This time around, I knew exactly what to do. The offending copy appeared at http://www.pkblogs.com/weblensblogs and at http://www.inblogs.net/weblensblogs. A quick WHOIS check revealed that these sites are hosted by DreamHost.com.

I fired off an email to DreamHost's abuse reporting address, citing the infraction and the name and contact information of the offender (all of which is usually available through a WHOIS query).

A big thumbs-up to DreamHost! Unlike Blogger, they were fast to respond and very co-operative, advising me that — once again — I needed to file a formal complaint under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. But before I even got that far, I heard back from DreamHost: they had contacted their customer to warn that a complaint was coming. That was all it took. The offending copies were gone in less than 24 hours.

Making Old Blog Posts Findable

One of the challenges of creating a blog that's useful to readers is the default date order of content. Unlike a traditional web site, which is structured thematically by subject, blog articles are posted in chronological order. Once they pass off the index page, posts are grouped in monthly archives where they are also listed chronologically. This presents a big challenge in getting older posts found, especially in Blogger which (unlike Wordpress and some others) doesn't offer a way to categorize posts.

There are, of course, blog search tools like Technorati and others, but I find that the vast majority of my blog traffic still comes from Google, which you might reasonably expect to ferret out old posts based on the user's keyword choices. Unfortunately, however, Google doesn't seem to crawl blogs as deeply as it does traditional web sites (perhaps because of the date structure combined with the abundance of outgoing links on many blog index pages).

I have found that Google indexes posts in a hit or miss fashion. When users search on a topic that has expired, if Google has not captured that specific post, it is likely to direct people to your index page, where the article lived at the time that Google crawled the page.

Determined and/or lucky users may find the post in Google's cache, on an archive page, or through a link from another post. My stats have shown, however, that the majority of people landed on my index page, gave it a quick scan, and headed promptly for greener pastures, never finding what they were searching for.

Fortunately, there is a simple solution: after publishing each new post, take a second to submit the post's permalink directly to Google's Add URL page. I have been doing this for months now, and have seen a massive change in my stats. Fewer users are landing on the index page; the vast majority of people are going directly to the relevant post. Random Bytes is getting read, and people are finding what they need. (Note: for this to work, you need to ensure that you have enabled individual post pages in your blogging software's dashboard.)

Just in case you're wondering, while Google's Add URL page discourages this practice, nowhere does it state that submitting multiple pages from the same site is a policy violation.

And of course, remember that links from other blogs and web sites are still among the most important ways to get found and indexed by Google.

Hope this helps.

Blogger Hacks: Uploading Template Backgrounds

In my previous post, I stated that, if you wish to use images in your template's background, you'll need to host them elsewhere since there's no way to upload them directly to Blogger for this purpose. Reader Paul Sutherland quickly set me straight, outlining a clever trick I'd never thought of but which — on reflection — is at obvious as the nose on your face.

As we all know, Blogger allows you to upload images for use in individual posts. Paul's hack takes advantage of this ability. Here's how it's done:

1. Create a new post as usual.
2. Upload an image to your new post (click the Add Image button).
3. While still in post edit mode, switch to HTML view (click the Edit HTML tab).
4. Find the code for your image.
5. Copy the image address (it starts with http://).
6. Return to the main Post screen and discard the temporary post.
7. Open your template and paste the image address into the appropriate spot, as per the instructions in the previous post.
8. Save your template and publish.

Thanks Paul! Great tip.

Template Background Hacks and Generator Tools

Random Bytes has had a facelift. For those who have been here before, the new look may be a bit of a surprise. If you popped by yesterday afternoon, my apologies. This blog's look and feel was evolving minute by minute, as I experimented with colours and backgrounds.

I think I've got something I like now, though, so it shouldn't change too much more. I felt it was time for a fresh look, especially since the old look and feel has been propagated through the blogosphere with the growing popularity of my three-column template.

For the new design, I wanted to focus on simplicity and readability. The first priority was eliminating the background mouse graphic, which had cluttered up the design and drawn some negative feedback for slowing page loads.

Creating Background Colours and Patterns

In choosing a color palette, I opted for a monochrome colour scheme, staying with green to tie into WebLens (albeit subtlly). I wanted the blog contents to display against a background colour or pattern, and found Rails2U's Background Image Maker indispensable. This useful tool allows you to generate any size background rectangles for tiling. You can specify desired color by dragging sliders or entering a hex code. The tool allows you to choose between stripes, dots, and gradients, and supports full PNG transparency.

There are also plenty of free online sources of background rectangles for tiling, such as the collection at GRSites. (If you use these, be careful of placing text directly against a busy background. Place a white or coloured background behind the text first, as I have done here.)

Adding Backgrounds to Your Blog

You can use the images produced by the tools mentioned above as your blog's main background as I have done here, or place them behind various CSS elements, as you seen in the sidebars and post titles of this blog. For this re-design, I finally settled on a striped green background for the main page and a subtle green gradient to use for emphasis and visual interest.

To add a background pattern to your blog

1. Open your template and locate the CSS for the body tag.
2. Between the opening { and closing } parentheses, add a background declaration pointing to where the background image is hosted, as in
   background: url("http://your-domain-and-filename.png") repeat;
   (Note that you will need to host these images elsewhere, as you can't upload them to Blogger.)

The repeat attribute controls tiling, telling Blogger to replicate the graphic both horizontally and vertically, as I have done in the main background here. To repeat only horizontally, as in this blog's post headings, change the repeat attribute to repeat-x. (For vertical repeats, it would be repeat-y.)

To add background tiles to post headings

1. Open your template and locate your blog's CSS post declaration.
2. Add the above code, but with repeat-x. Note: you may need to move the opening post div tag above the date header, to get the background behind everything. Depends on the effect you want.

To add background tiles to sidebar elements

In this blog, I could have placed a background gradient or texture behind the entire sidebar, but I wanted to use them to emphasize certain sidebar contents. To do this:

1. Create a style specifying the desired formatting, such as
   .BlueGradient { background:url("http://your-
   domain-and-filename.png") repeat-x; padding-top:2px;}
2. In the HTML, locate each set of sidebar elements you wish to emphasize, and enclose each within your new div, as in this example:
   
   <div class="BlueGradient ">
   <h2>Archives</h2>
   <ul class="archive-list">
   <BloggerArchives>
   <li>
   <a href="<$BlogArchiveURL$>">
   <$BlogArchiveName$>
   </a></li>
   <BloggerArchives>
   </ul>
   </div>
3. Save your changes and view your blog. You may need to adjust margins or padding to get the effect you desire.

For more on adding backgrounds to your blog, see this earlier post. Hope this information helps, and let me know what you think of the new design.

Getting Paid to Blog: Don't Quit Your Day Job Yet

It sounds too good to be true. I'm sure there are many bloggers — myself included — who would like to see their costs offset, or their time investment rewarded, but is it really possible to earn significant income through pay for content schemes?

Several companies want you to think so. AdSense-sponsored content has been around for donkey's years, of course, but other revenue models are emerging with the explosion of blogging and other Web 2.0 phenomena.

PayPerPost is the latest player on the market. They act as matchmaker between bloggers and advertisers who are seeking people to write about their products. PayPerPost publishes a list of advertiser opportunities on their site. Bloggers review this list, select a topic, and create a post. Once approved by PayPerPost, the post must remain live for 30 days before the blogger is paid (via PayPal). From a professional writing standpoint, payments are miniscule, ranging from $2.50 to about $20 per article.

Squidoo has quite a different approach. Organized like a directory, the site is a collection of articles on various topics (called "lenses") grouped into categories, rather like About.com. Bloggers are invited to create lenses on topics that interest them, and can link back to their blogs. There is no limit on the number of lenses you can create. You earn "royalties" on the lenses you write, based on a share of Squidoo's AdSense and affiliate advertising revenue. The company claims it distributes 50% of after-expense revenue directly to lensmasters.

Another company that wants to pay you for content is Associated Content. The site operates as a content syndication service for text, audio, video, and images. Unlike Squidoo, which derives revenue from advertising, AC resells content and offers cash up front. Your submission is reviewed by an AC content manager and, if accepted, you'll receive an offer within five business days. Payments range from $3 to $40.

In addition to these, numerous blogging networks claim to pay you to blog, out of income derived from advertising revenues. These include:

• BloggerParty
• WritingItUp
• BlogCharm
• Weblogs

ShigOdani maintains that, for those bloggers who do blog for money, payouts average $5.00 to $50.00 per month. Not exactly enough to retire on. What has your experience been? Does your blog produce income? What revenue programs do you use, and why? Drop a comment on me below.

Three-Column Template Generator!

I have blogged a couple of times recently about ways to create 3-column templates. These posts have provided free templates for you to grab and customize, both for blogs and for regular web sites.

If you don't care for my designs, or if customizing them is beyond your comfort zone, you might want to try Firda Beka's Firdamatic tableless layout generator. This easy-to-use tool gives you a choice of two or three columns along with several customization options.

Best of all, you can use the code generated by Firdamatic for a regular web site, or click through to XML versions of the code for blogs. She has one for Blogger / Blogspot users and another for Moveable Type. A great resource. Thanks Firda.

(FYI: If you don't see two side-by-side columns on Firda's site, resize your window: she's got a vanishing float thing happening at certain window sizes.)

Need Inspiration? Check These Journalist and Author Blogs

To prepare for a recent talk for my local PWAC chapter on why writers should care about blogging, I dug around to see how other writers, journalists, and authors approach blogging. I found that some authors use their blogs to aggressively promote books sales or to publicize their freelance writing services and other activities. Others use their corner of the Internet to create dialogue, promote columns and articles, and build relationships with readers. Here are a few examples, along with sources of more blogs by authors and writers (as opposed to blogs about writing).

• Greg Bear
  Hugo and Nebula award winner science fiction author Greg Bear seems to enjoy using his blog to converse with his readers.


• Daisy Dexter Dobbs
  Romance author Daisy Dexter Dobbs is a prolific blogger who enjoys interacting with readers. Her blog is also a good source of other writer blogs.


• Lynn Viehl
  Viehl uses her blog to sell current books and to promote upcoming titles. Great source of links, though Viehl could tell us more about herself.


• Seth Godin
  Well-known tech pundit Seth Godin uses his blog to promote sales of his various books. He has a blog, All Marketers Are Liars, devoted exclusively to his upcoming book by the same name.


• Tess Gerritsen
  Medial thriller writer Tess Gerritsen uses her blog for self branding purposes. In one post, she admits she still struggles to overcome the label "romance writer" and laments the pigeonholing created by labels in general.


• Crawford Killian
  There is perhaps no more prolific blogger than author and web writing guru Crawford Killian. He maintains no less than ten blogs, all of which are accessible from the one linked here. He uses his blogs to promote his books and provides an excellent collection of writing-related links. His blog, Ask the English Teacher, is a good source of links and information on grammar and web writing.


• Terry Glavin
  Author and journalist Terry Glavin uses his blog to promote his books, columns, and essays.


• Colby Cosh
  Canadian sports columnist Colby Cosh claims his blog has been visited more than one million times since its advent in 2002. It features odd headlines from around the world and an interesting blogroll highlighting Canadian journalists and bloggers.

More Blogs By Writers, Authors, & Journalists

• The Author's Dilemma: To Blog or Not To Blog
• Authors' Blogs (massive alphabetical list)
• Cyber-Journalist Blog List (scroll down for independent journalist blogs)
• The Writer's Life List of Writers' Blogs

PWACers who want to get started blogging will find links to everything you need in this blog or on WebLens' blogging tools page. Just explore the categories at left above, or type the term you want to know about (RSS or social bookmarking, for example) into the search field above to pull up posts on that topic. If you'd like a presentation on blogging for your PWAC chapter or writers' group, please contact me through the comments feature on this post.

Blog Promotion: Do Traffic Exchanges Work?

If you're reading this, chances are you've come from one of two sources: you have found this site through a Google search or, more likely, you're here from one of the traffic exchanges I participate in. Between them, Blogazoo, Blog Explosion, and BlogClicker are responsible for about 30% of the traffic I receive here every day. The rest comes from Google and other search engines and from links from other blogs.

Blog traffic exchange sites work on the principle of "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours." Once you sign up, you earn credits by surfing other people's blogs, which the traffic exchange site serves up on a scheduled rotation. Your banked credits enable your site to be inserted into the rotation, usually on a 1:1 or 2:1 ratio. Others will view it because they have to (there's usually a mandatory minimum amount of time one must spend at a blog to gain credits). You can also buy credits if time is at a premium, which is what I have chosen to do. Either way, the result is guaranteed traffic.

But is it quality traffic? Debate rages online as to whether these sites are really useful in terms of building a long-term loyal reader base for your blog. I see this myself in my own stats. People deposited here by one of the exchanges spend barely 5 seconds scanning this blog, then they are off to earn the next credit. There's a chance these visitors may find something useful, but it's minimal since they've been directed here entirely at random.

Compare that scenario to someone who has found this page through a search engine query. Their need at that moment is highly specific, and the search engine directs them to a page containing the keywords they queried. It is likely they will find what they're looking for, if not from the information in the post concerned, then by following links to other posts or sites. My stats confirm this behavior. These visitors stay longer, explore the blog more thoroughly, and are more likely to become regulars.

So, are the traffic exchanges a waste of time? I don't think so. I have seen a handful of people originating from these sites stop by to post comments. A few have become regular visitors (maybe that's you?). Any traffic is better than no traffic, and repeat exposure builds familiarity and confidence. In fact, advertising research shows that repeated exposure to ads enhances credibility and aids brand awareness, message recall, brand opinion, and purchase intent. I remember learning, in a marketing course a million years ago, that it takes 5 to 9 ad impressions before the average consumer responds to an advertisement's call to action. Does the same apply to blogs? I think so. Each time you see this blog appear in an exchange rotation, your sense of recognition grows. The posts will vary. Maybe eventually you'll encounter one that's relevant to your interests. Ultimately, it's all about content.

If you wish to try out blog traffic exchanges, there are lots to choose among. Here is a short list to get you started:

• Blog Explosion
• BlogClicker
• Blogazoo
• Blog Soldiers
• BlogAdvance
• BlogMad
• BloggerSwap
• BlogMosh
• BlogXchange
• Virtual Loop

No endorsement implied, other than for the first three listed, all of which have produced good results for me (in terms of raw traffic).

Some of the most common complaints about exchanges include poor rotation, too many low quality blogs, and the risk of viruses or trojans.

If you have had experiences with any of the sites listed here, please drop a comment on me. Rants and raves equally welcome.

Tools for Taming Your Feeds

It seems to me that most of the Web 2.0 apps emerging every week are devoted to some aspect of retrieving and organizing Internet content. Every day, there are new tools for sharing favourites. Likewise, the ability of RSS to push relevant content to our desktops has led to a swarm of online applications for reading, organizing, and managing feeds.

Good thing too, because it doesn't take long to start feeling overwhelmed once you discover this potent automation tool. I'm struggling to keep up with the daily flood of posts provided by just nine feeds — and that's probably a fraction of the volume inundating the seriously feed-addicted. RSS has put us all at risk of information overload.

I have test-driven several of the feed readers linked from the sidebar at left below, but it was not until the recent discovery of two new tools that I began to feel that I might just be getting the chaos under control:

• Pageflakes is a higly customizable web organizer that combines a feed aggregator and reader with several useful desktop tools. You can add as many new feeds as you wish, organizing them on separate tabs for ease of access. Accept the default setup, which includes an address book, to-do list, notepad, weather, local movies, and more, or customize your desktop by choosing from a huge list of applets. You can append everything from mini spreadsheets and calculators to custom searches. I LOVE this application so much it has become my new browser start page.
• Netvibes is a virtually identical tool (I'm not sure which came first). Like Pageflakes, you can add new feeds, organize content and tools onto separate tabs, and customize the interface. It doesn't offer the selection that Pageflakes does, but it has one especially nice feature: you can color-code your different feeds for at-a-glance recognition. E.g. you could have all your web design feeds coded green, your pop culture feeds blue, and your mainstream media news stories orange.

I find both of these applications more intuitive and easier to use than the other feed readers listed here. Now, if I could just marry them, I'd be truly happy. For the time being, I'm using both of them to fend off the information deluge.

Blogger Template Hacks: Changing Fonts

When I created this blog, I accepted the default font specified in Doug Bowman's Minima template design: an attractive serif typeface called Georgia. I thought it was time, however, for a minor facelift to tie in more closely with WebLens' look and feel. Fortunately, changing fonts is quick and easy with the CSS built into Blogger's templates. Here's how, for those new to this:

1. Open your Blogger template and find the CSS for the Body tag.
2. Between the opening { and closing } parentheses, add the following code:
   font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif;
3. If there are other font declarations for the body tag, make sure they don't specify a different font. In the original Minima template, for example, the body style contains this code:
   font:x-small Georgia,serif;
   I removed the word Georgia and left the size specification as is. (If you wish, you could roll the two statements into one, for more compact code. It would look like this:
   font:x-small "Trebuchet MS", Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif;)
4. To vary the font size, try changing the size declaration. xx-small will reduce the size; small or medium will increase it. These are relative font sizes, which means that they will scale based on the user's default settings. There are many other ways to specify font size, such as %, ems, and pixels, but we'll save this discussion for another time. (Be careful here: changing font size can lead to overflow problems.)
5. Save your changes and re-publish your blog.

That's all there is to it. The steps described above will apply the specified typeface globally to your entire blog. If you wish to make the change selectively — to headings or sidebars only, for example — locate the CSS for the element you wish to style and insert the code there instead.

Some Font DOs and DON'Ts

The code snippet above illustrates the recommended way to specify a typeface for the Web. Suggesting alternates allows you to control which typefaces people's computers substitute if they don't have the first font specified among their system fonts.

Using a relative font sizing unit, like the keywords small and x-small shown above, is also recommended since this gives users control. Specifying absolute font sizes — in pixels, for example — deprives users of the ability to change font size, leaving your page not very useful for those with impaired vision or aging eyes.

Font Lingo

For those unfamiliar with typesetting terminology, the terms serif and sans serif derive from Latin, and refer to the presence or absence of the little "feet" you see on each character in a serif typeface such as Georgia or Times. A sans serif typeface lacks these, making for a cleaner look. Sans serif type is often recommended for onscreen viewing. (The embedded screenshot illustrates how this blog looked before this post. You can decide which you like best.)

Hope you found this post useful. If so, please support Random Bytes with a link from your blogroll. Sign up for our feed for more on this topic.

Getting Blogger to Respond to Content Theft

If you were here a week ago, you'll know that I was furious about my blog being copied wholesale — title, description, posts, categories, web badges, even my profile and photograph. The person's motive for this left me bewildered, as the cloned site linked back to me all over the place.

I have since learned that such theft is becoming quite common, usually motivated by an intent to exploit your content for displaying the thief's AdSense ads. But this idiot left my original ad in the duplicate version. He even left my copyright message intact, for pete's sake!

Concerned about being penalized by Google for duplicate domain spam, I responded immediately with a post about the problem. I then began the frustrating process of communicating with Google and Blogger to let them know that the duplicate content was not mine and to request removal of the offending site.

It took a week, and numerous emails back and forth to Blogger, to get the cloned site removed. That process is worth sharing here in case you encounter similar content theft.

The initial response from Blogger was not helpful. I received a terse boilerplate reply informing me that:

Blogger is a provider of content creation tools, not a mediator of that content. We allow our users to create blogs, but we don't make any claims about the content of these pages. In cases where contact information for the author is listed on the page, we recommend working directly with this person to have this information removed or changed.

There was no contact information on the cloned blog other than my own, and no way to reach or communicate with this person. A battery of emails ensued between me and Blogger. Eventually, Blogger responded with an email containing a cryptic clue:

Based on our policies regarding content removal, we are unable to remove the content in question. However, please be aware that your blog has been reviewed, verified, and cleared for regular use so that it will not appear as potential spam.

Aha! Someone has reviewed the situation and given Random Bytes the seal of approval. But who? Blogger? Google? Both of them? Only when I asked why would Blogger not have policies around this type of illicit use and pointed out that this is a clear violation of my copyright, did Blogger respond with helpful information. That email acknowledged that Blogger does indeed have a policy of responding to notices of infringement under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It also outlined, in detail, the process for filing such a notice. You can find the content of that email in this text file.

I followed the steps described in that email a week ago. After one final email entreaty from me, Blogger removed the offending site yesterday. Interesting journey, and encouraging to know that these faceless companies will act when pressed hard enough by their customers.

Lorelle on WordPress has published an excellent series of articles on this topic. For more on how to protect yourself from content theft, visit these links:

• What to do when Someone Steals Your Content
• Finding Stolen Content and Copyright Infringements
• Growing Trends in Content Theft
• Splogs + Scraping + AdSense = Fraud
• EFF: Bloggers' Intellectual Property FAQ
• Check for Copyright Infringement with CopyScape
• Wikipedia entry: Digital Millennium Copyright Act

Blog Piracy Alive and Well

My blog has been highjacked! I don't know how or why this has happened, but someone has cloned my blog index page — categories, feed, web badges, and all. Even my photo.

The cloned copy is at http://dtfka2.blogspot.com/ and it's identical to this blog in every way that I can ascertain. I saw this URL in my blog stats this morning. Imagine my shock on checking it out. (Hopefully, this link won't be live by the time you read this.)

I have no idea why someone would do this. I have contacted Blogger, Google, and this jerk's ISP, and await their response(s) with great interest.

The posts all link to this blog. My concern, of course, is that Google will consider this a duplicate domain, and penalize ME!

I'm also bewildered at how this could happen. Has anyone else had this experience? Please let me know. I would also like to know how we can protect ourselves against this kind of thing.