Not sure if I got to tell it on this blog, but I still go to school. I am a part-time student at Baruch College which is part of CUNY system. My major is Entrepreneurial Management. I am an average performer at school. Learning in academic environment things that I was supposed to know from running my own business is a tricky thing.That’s why I always preferred to learn on my own, even if that results in lower grades.Any self-learning tool, including online courses, computer based training, manuals, forums and FAQ lists are only as good as the person who’s reading them. That’s why whenever I make another mistake – there is no one else to blame except for me. No matter how good CBT course of manual has been compiled.
Author: Zealus
As any blogger I can’t help but look at the stats now and then. At certain moment I realized that I don’t see Alexa in list of visiting search engines. I also realized it’s wrong. So I ventured in depths of my memory and just before hopelessly sinking there I remembered someone posting about Alexa redirect and how that helps your Alexa score.
What I did was I gave out just one redirect link (http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.dontdateguy.com) to our friends’ blog DontDateGuy.com on a not very crowded forum and watched stats afterwards. In just several hours I saw a tremendous boost in Alexa’s “curiosity”. Alexa was going over the site like there is no tomorrow, superseded by Google only (but who can beat that guy, eh?). For last 8 days (since the blog became active) Google hit it 143 times, Alexa 93, Yahoo 65 and Ask.com – 27. Comparing to this blog where Alexa also wasn’t showing up – pretty impressive to me.
So I have set up some more redirect links to two aforementioned blogs and will keep watching what will happen by the end of the month.
UPDATE: Alexa’s redirect doesn’t work now. Guess it got abused too much.
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Blogging Editors – My Wish List
At various moments I tried to use different blogging tools. Most of the time I blog using WordPress admin interface. However, sometimes I feel like I need a special piece of software, that would help me work the words.
This post was written with the help of yet another (after Windows Live Writer, Writely and many others) blogging editor – BlogDesk. It successfully imported categories from existing blog (had troubles with encodings on my Russian blog though). It tests login and upload procedures on set up of the blog. It is, however, missing some features I’d like to see implemented. So what this boils down to is the Blogging Editors Wish List:
- Starting WordPress 2.3 tags are built-in feature. I want to see my list of tags in the editor.
- Unicode support.
- Custom fields support (I just created a hack for my blog and it works through custom fields)
- Posts Map. Now this is something coming from software projects or similar. I want to be able to form a map or a tree of posts. For example – I have a main post (About Widget One), then I have several posts that link to the main (How I Used Widget One, How I Didn’t Use Widget One, Why Did I Spend Money On Widget One and so on). Then I create couple of more posts that extent some of the previous posts. I want to see this as a tree or a map. This way I immediately realize if there is a possibility to expand some more on existing topics, maybe even discover some things long forgotten that could be resurfaced for various reasons.
- Ability to download all posts into the editor. With simple posts structure of a blog (especially with self-hosted, like WordPress) it must be a breeze. Having an offline backup is a huge thing, having an offline backup in your favorite blogging editor – humongous! This feature along will attract thousands of users.
- Word counter/analyzer. Something similar to WordStats plugin for WordPress. It counts words, sentences and calculates readability for your post based on Gunning-Fog, Flesch-Kincaid and Flesch indicies.
- It looks nice (perhaps even skinnable), loads FAST and doesn’t clog your resources if it sits in the background.
Sometimes I feel a real urge to write something like this myself. The only problem that I have is that I want this editor to be very inexpensive.