The Hobby Webmaster Blog

As I was going through the blogs last evening, having found why my background image was not displaying in my footers, I had one site that stubbornly refused to co-operate. The footer image did show up as expected but I was also adding a white background behind some text in the body below the footer. I had written the rule for the background to be just wide enough to contain the text, but it was stretching across the page. I checked and rechecked the punctuation and syntax and it all seemed right. I had finally left it to proceed with the other blogs.

Today I revisited the site. I finally located the problem. I had added a rule long ago when I was having a problem with this and had forgotten what I had done. I finally opened my include file and found that I had something there that was causing a conflict. (Checking here I found the same code in the include file, but I had never added the css code, so there was no conflict here.) I removed the offending code and deleted the spare rule from the css and the problem went away. Now everything is beautiful, mostly.

On to the plus. I have just added a blog, Live Sound Mixing Tips, to the Mixing Live Sound site. I made a second post in the blog today. The post was long enough and seems to me to be useful information, so I just finished submitting a slightly adapted version to EZine Articles. It will take a few days for the article to be accepted as EZine does manually check all submissions. Two editors look over each article, checking for different things. Article approval has been quite fast but they have warned that approval time may increase. They have added a number of editors as the article volume has increased to try to keep the approval times reasonable. I have a number of other articles that I need to submit in support of some of my other sites.

I have had reasonable response (click through to the site) to a couple of articles and no response to the other two. One of the articles that has not produced clicks directly was picked up for reprint on another site. I have not been able to track any response to it with my analytics though. Maybe people on that site are checking the article but not clicking on the links in the resource box.

The resource box seems to be the key to these things. The word ‘free’ in the resource box will improve the click through rate. I keep forgetting this when I put together a resource box. I did have it in one box and that box has brought the most click throughs. The other key to getting people to visit the site is to offer some quality information. That is the case with the other article that has brought visitors and with the latest article, I think. I do need to remember about the word ‘free’ though.

Css code is very picky. Leave out a curly bracket and the browser will not read the rest of the code. Place a colon where a semi-colon should go and things get crazy.

I have had some display issues with the footer in my blogs. I had built a skin.css file and added it to the folder. I got the file path right and the skin was working except for the footer. I never could figure out why it didn’t work, but it was only the footer image that I could not get to display, so I passed it off as unimportant. I just shrugged as thought that was the way it was going to work. There are several levels of folders to a WordPress blog. I thought maybe it was something in one of the other folders that was causing the problem.

I just set up the new Live Sound Mixing Tips blog. While setting it up I was making some tweaks and adjustments. I was looking in my skin.css file that I had copied to the folder and noticed that there was a closing curly brace missing on my nav rule. I put in the missing brace and updated the file. When I checked the site I had my footer background image as I had often wished.

Somewhere along the line (a few times, I am sure) I typed a colon where the code calls for a semi-colon. That does not work, I promise.

I have been going through my other blogs making the correction and a few other tweaks this evening. I am beginning to be quite comfortable with the untheme theme. I will copy the fresh css files to my blog master copy, the one that I copy to a new location when I set up a new blog. That will save a lot of time the next time that I set up a blog.

I went a little further than I have with my other blogs on the Mixing Tips blog. Check it out and tell me what you think.

I have established a new blog for my Mixing Live Sound site. The Blog title is ‘Live Sound Mixing Tips‘. This is a long tail search term that I see occasionally in my analytics reports, so I should rank well for the term with the blog. This might draw a few additional visitors to the site.

I will be posting tips to help with mixing live sound. I hope to post at least once a week to the blog. I will try to end the posts on an interrogative note to elicit comments. Good comments are free original content for the blog, and the more content the better.

I have also given an invitation for guest posts on the topic of live sound for the blog. I hope that some will take me up on the offer. That is an other way to add content and value to a blog.

I spent a bit of time this evening setting this one up. I had deleted the old blog folder on the server after the break-in to my site. It was an earlier version and required immediate update  anyway. But I had most of the tweaks done to that one. I keep a base file on the server and copy it to any site where I want to place a blog. WordPress is a major piece of software so it takes a bit of time to upload. Copying on the server is very fast, so it saves a good bit of time to upload once and then copy where needed. There is a one click install option available from my host, but with the one click install a new database is created for each blog. By installing the blog myself I can share a database between several blogs. There are 100 databases available to me with my hosting account, but why use them needlessly?

If you are interested in sound check out the new blog. You are, of course, welcome to check it out even if the subject matter is out of your field of expertise. Tell me what you think about it.

I have been working for a couple of days on a face lift for the old Pennies for Wink site. I have just uploaded and tested the first phase of this face lift. There is a new look, I hope a bit more interesting, to the home page. I added several catalog pages and a directory to those pages, as well as left nav access to the pages. I redid my top and bottom navigation bars as well and added some pages that are long overdue.

I still need a ton of content for this site. I have an articles section that is completely unpopulated. I will write some articles and look for some good, relevant ones to reprint. I do see search engine traffic to some of the reprint articles on the Mixing Live Sound site. Original content is much to be preferred, but I am not always inspired to write. Of course, the site will need some promotion as well as content if there is to be any significant amount of traffic.

The domain name is not one that will be easy to promote. There needs to be some focus for a website and it is best if the domain name contains a keyword that is related to the site theme. I purchased this domain name before I became aware of how things work. I do have a few good domain names, more by accident than design. It would be nice if I could get this site to work well enough to pay its rent, at least. The education is worth something.

So, stop by the site and check out the changes. Leave me a comment or a suggestion as to the progress or direction that the site should go. There are comment boxes on the pages and there is a blog associated with the site. I have installed the KeywordLuv plug-in along with a do follow plug-in. There is a post about the update there. You could leave your comment on the main site or go to the blog to leave your comment.

I am adding a number of pages to the Pennies for Wink site. It had needed some love, and now it is getting it. I have been specking Amazon store pages for addition to the site. Of course catalog pages particularly enclosed in Iframes do not add any value to the site in the way of content. I will be adding a content page for every catalog page at the very least. I am also putting up a directory page with a small blurb about each of the catalog pages so that there will be a little text connecting to each of the pages until I get the articles in order.

As I have mentioned (somewhere), I installed the KeywordLuv and Do Follow plug-ins on the Pennies for Wink Save a Penny Blog. These plug-ins allow commenters on the blog to get a keyword backlink for their site. This encourages thoughtful comments on the blog posts. Of course that means that I need to make some posts worthy of a comment so that they have something on which to hang a quality comment.

I now have three blogs with the KeywordLuv plug-in active. These blogs also have a do follow plug-in installed. That means that a commenter can have a keyword link to his site that is a do follow link. The search engines will follow the link and find the site. You will get credit for a backlink which may help in your search engine results position.

I have now had one comment by a user that understood how to work with a blog and the plug-in. The display does, in fact, work as it is advertised. There was not really any doubt, but I have now seen it in action on one of my blogs.

The Save a Penny blog on the Pennies for Wink site is where this action took place. The commenter left a relevant comment to the post to which it was attached. I approved the comment and it is now live. The commenter has a live do follow keyword link for his time. Thanks!

If you want to build some back links check out the blogs at Before You Buy a Website, Selling On Your Website, or Pennies for Wink. Those are the three that have the needed plug-ins installed. I ask that you leave a comment that is relevant to the post on which you comment. I don’t want comment spam or links to bad neighborhoods, but I will reward a thoughtful comment from one with a quality site with a backlink.

I have begun to lavish a bit of attention on the Pennies for Wink site. (I could certainly use a few pennies about now.) This site has only had a couple of pages and a couple of stores, but no real content. I will be trying to think of what I could do as far as content is concerned. I will add the usual suspects as far as auxiliary pages are concerned, but I need to provide the site with a focus and build some content around that focus.

I did add the KeywordLuv and Do Follow plug-ins to the blog earlier. I will try to provide a post worthy of comment from time to time so that people can reasonably take advantage of the opportunity. KeywordLuv alters the way that a name is displayed so that there is a natural appearing keyword link to the commenter’s site, and the do follow plug makes the link do follow so that the link may be considered a backlink by the search engines. I have seen it said that Google checks no follow links, but I would not depend on that as a fact. Other search engines probably do not count the links even if Google does, but Google does nearly own the market.

This blog is not set up with the plug-ins, but it is a regular stop on the comment spammers tour. I put up the scoreboard at the bottom of the right column so you can see how many attempts there have been.

I will post when the update is complete and live. Feel free to swing by and leave me a suggestion as to where you think that I should go with the site. There are comment boxes on the pages of the site, or you can go to the blog and get some KeywordLuv!!

I had thought that the update to Before You Buy a Website was complete, but in my travels this evening another topic was called to my attention. I had discussed navigation options in one of my articles but did not really discuss links and linking. I wrote an article and added another link in my website basics section this evening. I do expect to think of more topics but I would also like some suggestions.

If you check the page and think of a topic that should be discussed please leave a comment either in the BLOG or in the comment section on the main site. An advantage to leaving the comment in the blog on the site is that I have set that blog up for do follow links, so you can leave a comment and get a backlink to promote your own site. That blog is also set up with a plug-in called KeyWordLuv. If you leave a comment with the format of ‘name@your keyword’ in the appropriate box the display will read ‘name from keyword’ as the comment source.

I have been working on an update to my site Before You Buy a Website. I have added a section on website basics. This is a series of overview articles on many facets of owning and operation a website. They are designed to introduce a prospective webmaster to some of the common terms and concepts of the industry.

These articles cover many topics from the planning stage on through the development and uploading of a website. There are many things to think about. The articles introduce prospective website owners to concepts that they may not have thought about. How can you ask a question about something if you don’t know that something exists? This is phase one.

At some point, if there is a demand, I may go on to phase two. Phase two would examine some of these topics in greater detail and perhaps recommend some solutions to some of the problems. But there are other fish to fry, so I am not going to schedule a timetable for further expansion of the site. I will try to promote this site a bit and see if there appears to be interest.

I started out to do a few minor tweaks to the Before You Buy a Website site. I was going to add an about us page and a contact info page, and redo the site nav in light of the additions. The site only had a small amount of content and there was not much reason for people to visit. I decided that since I was there I should add a few pages of real content to the site.

The original intent of the site was to offer a warning about some of the more unsavory practices that go on on the web. I had a few pages on various subjects. I decided that those needing this advice would be people that are new to website ownership so some basic information about the web and site building and operation would be in order. I quickly thought of about five topics that would be good to discuss.

As they say, ‘one thing leads to another’, and by now I have a dozen new pages under construction and the list will probably get a few more titles before this is all over. I have been uploading new pages to the site daily for the last couple of days, so the amount of content available is already well advanced from just a few days ago.

I also installed a couple of plug-ins to encourage commenting on the site. One of the plugs makes the links ‘do follow’ and the other allows for a name with a keyword text link. These links will eventually show up as backlinks in the search engines so they can help with the search engine ranking for contributors pages. I do have the blog set for manual approval of all comments, so I should be able to keep spam comments to a minimum.

Stop by and see the new pages and watch the site grow!