Mr.Gadget breaks into Top 10 Australian Blogs
I was pleasantly surprised to see the Mr.Gadget website rise into the Top 10 of the Top 100 Australian Blogs earlier this week. It’s an honor to be listed with other fantastic blogs, most of which I have on my Google Reader / RSS list 
Kudos to Meg for putting this list together and maintaining it @Blogpond. Make sure that you wander around her site and check out the other cool articles that she has written while visiting the list
Go Go Mr.Gadget Team!
Popularity: 19% [?]
Regularly Check Your Wordpress Files: They Could be Hacked
Last night I got a bit of shock when I discovered a strange URL in my Wordpress header file (header.php). I cut and pasted into the URL field of my Firefox browser to find that it was some placeholder site that was selling domain names!?
I believe that this could be associated to a vulnerability if one of the older versions of Wordpress that I had running.
Once I realised what was going on I immediately removed the offending link and did a scan of all the other main Wordpress files (index.php, footer.php, comments.php) just in case.
I’ve found this forum thread on DigitalPoint where other Wordpress users talk of similar hack problems especially with redirects from the wp-blog-header.php file.
How to Avoid These Wordpress Hacks:
1. Keep up to date with latest versions of Wordpress
2. Check your main Wordpress files regularly
3. Check your web stats - normally a good sign of a security breach is a visible dip in web traffic
4. Change your password regularly (I know it’s a pain)
5. Visit the Wordpress Blog for the latest news
Please feel free to share your stories and tips below.
Popularity: 32% [?]
MyBlogLog Authentication
Guys, please ignore this post as I’m just claiming this blog on MyBlogLog. The main reason I’m doing this is because I’ve activated “MyAvatar” on the comments section of the Mr.Gadget website. The intention is to help readers build up the community feeling by being able to recognise fellow readers/commenters.
Undergoing MyBlogLog Verification
Popularity: 22% [?]
5 Simple Tips To Double Your Google Adsense Revenue
This year has been very fruitful. In particular, the advertising revenue for the Mr.Gadget website is now doing 4-figures every month, which is very pleasing since I only opened advertising slots in May this year. While far from being a 6-figure blogger, I can now comfortably pay for my daily-latte-fix without negatively affecting my personal budget.
Having sold all advertising slots for the next 6 months, I thought it was an opportune time to take a closer look at Google Adsense revenue again since it was my the first advertising programme I signed up with. I installed it over 4 years ago with acceptable, not super, results.
Here’s my graph of earnings over 4 years (2004 - 2008):
As you can see, revenue has been up and down over the years never clearly breaking the $10 mark at any point. However, with a little over 2 hours worth of tweaking on the weekend, you’ll see that August 2008 improved remarkably; where we are hitting over $20 a day now.
How did I achieve the significant increase in Google Adsense revenue?
Popularity: 48% [?]
Learning from my Digg Effect Failure
Earlier this week I wrote a post on the “10 of the most annoying things about the iPhone 3G“. Having written an article on the Top 10 things I liked about the iPhone 3G and having a bit more time to play with Apple’s new wonder, I thought I’d give a rounded view to someone interested in buying the phone. Before I knew it, I had hit the 1000 word mark, which is quite long compared to my average blog posts - normally around 100-200 words. I was passionate about the topic, which most of the time reflects in one’s writing and ultimately positively affects the overall feel of the post.
Minutes later, domfosnz, an active Digger, submitted it to Digg. Through the magic of promotion and networking, it slowly garnered enough votes to make it popular enough for the front page. This took around 200 Diggs to get there. I’ll write more on methods to get website pages front-paged in the weeks to come as I have only been active on Digg for a month and still experimenting.
What is Digg?
For those who don’t know what Digg is, it is one of the world’s most popular social-bookmarking sites where users can ‘digg’ (positive vote), ‘bury’ (negative vote), comment and submit website pages. Logically, the website pages that attract many diggs in a short period of time are deemed as newsworthy and propelled to the front page (sometimes referred to as “fp”) of Digg.
How many users does Digg have?
Two sites estimate (listed in ref below) that Digg has over 2.5 millions users; you can imagine the amount of traffic a website would receive even if a small subset of the total Digg population visited a front page Digg story.
This is the Digg Effect : the massive wave of visitors rushing through the internet to check out a freshly front-paged website link, where most of the times, even the most robust servers crash. A website can receive between 20,000 - 100,000 visitors within a couple of hours. To many, having this amount of traffic is both a dream and a nightmare.
Yes, My Server Crashed
To be quite honest, I thought that my website was sturdy enough to handle the Digg Effect. I have a dedicated web server (my website is the only one on the server), dual quad-core Intel processors and 2GB of RAM and SCSI drives hosted by one of Australia’s premier web hosts. Yet, if you read halfway through the first set of Digg comments, you’ll see people complain that my website was pictureless and the Digg mirror site kicking in. This is the point where my server crashed.
Digg Effect statistics
As for the number of visitors I received via Digg, it ended up being close to 35k new visitors. Around 30k more than my usual daily traffic.
What I’ve Learned from the Digg Effect:
1. Diggers don’t click on ads as much as my usual traffic: I predominantly use Google Adsense ads on my site and normally pull in around $10 a day. On this particular day, I ended up with around $14. This shows that Diggers are usually more focussed on reading the content to which they were directed to rather than be distracted from ads.
2. Need to install some form of caching for Wordpress: there are a couple out there but WP-Cache seems to be the one of choice. This makes static versions of pages which eases up the load on the servers which would normally have to perform queries to present blog pages which are database driven.
3. Be ready for a barrage of comments from Diggers: some are applicable however there are many that aren’t. This is the Internet and you’ll get passersby who don’t even read the post in it’s entirety and make random remarks. Most important thing to remember is don’t take it personal. Be happy that you received more traffic that will have good long term benefits such as more incoming links to your site and more exposure.
4. Always do spelling and grammar checks before publishing: I do this most of the time, but I forgot to do it for this one as I wrote it quite quickly in between meetings. Always, always do a spellcheck and get someone with superb editing skills have a readthrough. I deserved all the flack I received for the minor mistakes I made.
Surviving the Digg Effect
For those who think that they’ll experience the Digg Effect soon or want more ideas on how to better prepare for it, read Ivan’s excellent article entitled “Surviving the Digg Effect”.
Digg Effect References:
- How Many Users Does Digg Have? #1
- How Many Users Does Digg Have? #2
- What is Digg?
- About Digg
- What Digg Means for Servers
Popularity: 45% [?]
New Version of Wordpress (2.6) Now Available
If you are considering starting up a blog, I would highly recommend that you use Wordpress. It comes with everything you need to start a blog and is expandable with the options of adding widgets and plugins. I started using Blogger 5 years ago and just moved to Wordpress in December 2007. Since then my traffic has increased as was able to apply more SEO (search engine optimization) techniques to my Wordpress blog than Blogger.
A new version of Wordpress has just been released today. So whether you have an existing blog or commencing one, make sure you update/grab this version from the Wordpress Website.
The main enhancements of Wordpress 2.6 are:
- Ability to use previous versions of draft posts/pages
- Improved “Press This” button functionality: allows you blog on other web pages quickly and incorporate their images and text.
- Inclusion of image captions
- Preview themes before your audience does
- Gears functionality: caches image and CSS files on your PC for faster performance when writing
Below is a video of the changes in Wordpress 2.6:
Wordpress is a great blogging foundation. We’ll write more on growing this blog and optimizing it for search engines in the upcoming posts.
Popularity: 38% [?]
-
Connect with Arnold
-
Friendfeed