The dangers of Trading an Article for a Service

“If you’re good at something, never do it for free”, Joker, The Dark Knight Rises.

Even you would agree that the dialogue is super cheesy. Fortunately the meaning holds perfectly true for current blogging atmosphere.  Take examples of bloggers, the one of the things they’re good at is writing, so the obvious question, Why not use the skills and get something done for yourself. 

Usually bloggers benefit from their writing skills through advertisements. But new concept dictates the use of this indispensable skill as a barter system. In simple words, “You do something for me and I’ll write an article for you”.

The same was true until an unnamed blogger decided to barter his services for something he wanted. So he went in search for the same and one day found a suitable firm which was ready to provide a service unless and until he agreed to write an article for the firm.

What went Wrong?

But little did he know about THE PERILS OF TRADING AN ARTICLE FOR A SERVICE. Here is an email thread between the firm and the unnamed blogger, The names of the entities have been changed to protect identity. Find the Email Thread about Sam and Sue here.

How did it go wrong?

Let us discuss what went wrong and how could it be rectified. The major reason why such arrangements fail is because; neither party is willing to work with full efficiency in the beginning. This is because there exists no monetary transaction. This was the precise reason why barter system failed in history. For that failure the reason was you cannot equate fixing a window and a sack of rice. Similarly you cannot equate an article and a service unless there is professionalism in both the parties. What do I mean by professionalism? 

Professionalism in any task is shunning the informal way of working and adopting a mean result oriented approach towards things. It the main reason why corporates thrive and small businesses do not. 

How could it be Rectified?

So how do you get into professionalism? 

Easy, you make sure that you follow the following points.

Before agreeing to work

1. This is not a deal, neither the party is working for free, nor are you. It is best if you could determine the boundaries of your relationship, i.e.. What you are planning to do and what you are expecting the party to do.
2. It is better to create a proposal document (just one page) stating the responsibilities you and the party are going to undertake. Sign the document and send them the signed copy asking them to sign on the document. When both have consent for the jobs to perform on a paper, both the parties will have an incentive to complete the job in the best way possible. Also a signature would save you from legal difficulties afterwards (If they arise)
3. Preserve the email threads between the parties
4. Always set a deadline for the job to be completed. Break the job into parts. And include penalties in the proposal document if a part of the work is not completed within the stipulated deadline.
5. Also work out about the license of the final product, you can look at some articles on creative commons or thy types of licenses you can use.

On English and communication

1. You must write proper English. People won’t take you seriously if you write like a kindergarten student.
2. You write complete sentences and no abbreviations unless absolutely required. Remember you’re writing an email and there is a difference between email and a text.
3. Try and keep informalities out of the equation. This is a business deal and not a social network.

After and during the work

1. Periodically inform about the progress of the work. To keep things simple, try and give the progress report in a tabulated sheet at the end of the week.
2. Once the job is completed inform about it and ask about their portion of the work.
3. Always reply to a mail, a bucket full of misunderstandings can be avoided if you just reply or acknowledge
4. If you have made the proposal document, after completion of the works from both the parties, drop an email stating that the agreement has been carried on in the desired way and tell them it was a pleasure working with them.

Show your availability for future jobs if you genuinely find the party to be a delight.

Front image credit HDW

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The Secret to Organisation in Blogging (From the Backrooms of codemakit.com)

How do professional bloggers write such amazing articles every week? Some might even work on 5 to 10 articles at a time. Some work on just 2 to 3 really long articles with a lot of information locked up in a capsule. So the obvious question pops up, how can a blogger, manage to work on 10 blog posts at a time.

A professional blogger can work on up to 10 blog posts at a time. The multitasking allows them time and space to think about ideas both in quantity and in quality.

The average number is 8 however. Organizing is the key to better and efficient content creation. Once you organize everything you can hold large number of articles at a time. This herculean task is obviously difficult for any blogger who doesn't organize. Now organizing your blog posts is just like organizing a research, you need to divide information into chunks so that you can better manage it.

The Root Folder

Let’s have a look at a typical case of a windows blogger (i.e. at the backrooms of codemakit.com). The main blog folder is divided into 3 headers.

1. Blog Idea – It contains reading material, pdfs and pictures to help you understand the topics you’re working on.
2. Blog Pictures – Contains templates for new images, incomplete image projects etc.
3. New Articles – Contains all the new articles, that you’re writing, updating or written.

As is evident from the screenshot in the New Articles folder, the Posts Title is usually thought-of before the article is written and the complete post with images, article snippets, source articles and pages from other websites is then stored in the particular folder.

The Details

The folder system of storing the articles is presumably better and much more organized, so it removes the searching time and avoids the hassle.

Now the complete blog folder (i.e. main folder) is filled with such individual folders containing one article each along with the source media. The folders can then be divided into four parts.

1. Articles under construction – The majority of articles are under construction and most articles are either incomplete as per content or images/video or those which need more research.
2. Completed - The articles which have been completed in every sense in the author’s view. They are touched only on the day of publishing.
3. Articles to be Updated – It contains the articles which has already been posted long time ago but now needs a major remodeling, as with the passing of time, some articles become outdated and Some non-essential.
4. Update – There are pieces of information which is needs to be added to an already posted article. It contains updated media (i.e. an image to spice up the article or a video to make it more interesting). This update will not contain the article as a whole but just the media to be added.

This helped you in

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Some Extremely funny Comments

Nearly all webmasters encounter spam on their websites. But a few have the time to properly read the spam before deleting it. On reading spam comments, you find that even spammers have a funny bone. A creative individual would always find new ways to do things. Such is the creativity displayed by spammers while dodging the inbuilt blogger filters. The following are some examples of such comments where spammers tried link building as well as humor creation.

The following anonymous comment was left at an article few months back, Though the comment has been deleted, but its still funny to see the situation of the spammer, who gets up at 6 in the morning to spam and tries to sell twitter followers.

The shaving mirrors has been one of the most loyal spammers on codemakit, this was until a message was displayed near the comments section about nofollow attribute and its usage in comments section. The following comment was left at How many Internal Links do I need to be in top 500? Even then it’s comment is usually filled with text followed by an obvious link.

The following comment was left at Include a favicon in your site, However it has been removed for obvious reasons, The guy tries to explain that the article is rife with spelling problems and then attaches a link to help lose weight fast at home.

The anonymous comment spams at 7 in the morning, but the one thing that gives humor to the comment is its flattery flavored semantically incorrect text. Again a link to get followers (what do you think of a guy who wakes you up in the morning to sell twitter followers.

You can also view another article laced with more funny comments at Some Funny Comments I

These were,

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Some Funny comments

Have you ever read some really stupid and funny comments on a website? Here are some comments which will prove that even comment spammers have a funny bone. Some workaholics get up early in the morning to comment some sh** at someone else’s blog. Some even go to the extent of writing a larger article in the comment box than the original one itself!
One thing you could do is to remove such comments if it brings negative energy to your blog, But if you're worried about link juice passing from your blog to the spammer's blog, or google penalising YOU for spam comments, The best way to add a NoFollow attribute to your comments section, which I have done and the spammers don't seem to know it yet.

So here are some examples with some musings from Mohit Jain.

The guy comments on 7 in the morning, the time amazes me because, not many friends of mine get up before 9:00 in the morning. Such type of spammer often creates unsolicited sentences with meanings so deep that you’ll drown trying to figure it out. Also not to mention occasional jibber-jabbers followed by an obvious link.

The following comment was observed in the article “Faults in your SEO and how to rectify them”, which is one of the most popular ones on codemakit. But the “wicked” comments will still prevail. The generic comments usually work on every second website. Such spammers always get through the blogger’s comment filters unabated, that is because of the originality and detail that they present. Want to know about my suggestion? Use that creative mind of yours to whip-up some new content please.

A recent post "Potato Blogger and Lazy Blogger Syndrome" highlighting the differences between a potato blogger and a lazy blogger was hit with an off-topic comment. This one even showed some emotions. Or that might have been a result of lack of sleep. This insomniac woke up at 4 in the morning, just to remind the author, that he has some problems with the comment interface, rest assured, he has started a great blog.



Another comment spammer has gone to Himalayan heights in promoting his web page. Though codemakit is a web development and design website, this anonymous spammer has poured his heart out gargling about a battery.

 

Not all spammers are evil, some are pushed and some are ignorant about the good and bad practices of SEO.  Now, not everyone has perfect English but that doesn't stop them from malpractices, resulting in penalty. Another thing you must remember about comment link spammers is they always speak so well about your website. So much sweetness is the cause for diabetes in many urban bloggers.



The following comment was approved for the article, “Things you should know before applying for a creative commons license to your blog” He says, the post cannot be written any better, well guess what, I can still think of 10 odd ways the post can be altered and amended. What strikes further is the connection between Creative commons licenses and dating advice for guys.



Another post on creative commons, about “Which Creative commons license would suite your website”, a spammer spent atleast 10 minutes of his evil time, to write something profound and interesting. Such comments always relieve the author of the burden of his website, why? Because, such comments are a classic example of train of thought which takes the reader through anything and everything.

These were some

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Potato Blogger and Lazy Blogger Syndrome

Potato and Lazy Blogger syndrome are urban blogger conditions very commonly discussed yet very difficult to diagnose. The symptoms are evasive and so are the solutions. So, how do you know if you’re a potato blogger? There are several theories stating the obvious but first you must understand the premise. The widely accepted definition of a potato blogger is hereby presented: 

A potato blogger is one who presents copied or banal content taken from other websites and presenting in his own words.

And as you may have guessed, there is a slight difference between a potato blogger and a Lazy blogger.

Lazy blogger	Potato Blogger
The blogger is uninterested in the whole blogging scenario, He finds the task of managing the Blog tedious and unworthy of his time	A potato blogger is never uninterested in the management of his blog; He is just uninterested in the generation of new ideas.
Does not post the articles regularly and If posts at all, deteriorated articles are often encountered.	Tries to post as regularly as he can. Even if that means a deteriorated article.
Does not reply to the comments or moderate them(removal of spam comments) and does not experiment.	Replies to the comments with full enthusiasm and vigor. Also moderates the comments with equal force and experiments.
Lack of research in the articles.	Lack of sufficient research
No engagement in social media	Enthusiastic social media intereaction
Blog may die after some days	Blog will struggle for some days
The source of blog visitors will diminish	No change in the blog visitor source

Lets Get you out of this mess.

People find that goal setting is one of the things that stops you from falling in the endless vicous spiral. One technique which has received nice reviews is the Pomodoro Technique. It is a method of time management developed by Francesco Cirillo, the technique consists of dividing the complete work in intervals of 25 minutes each. The Five steps as outlined in wikipidea are

1. Fix on the goal/task at hand
2. Set a timer on 25 minutes
3. Start the work
4. Stop when the timer rings
5. Take a break before starting the cycle again

Often people are bogged down with the quantum of work. They are so mismanaged in their own ways that they forget their own style and adopt time saving but treacherous ways to solve their problems. It can be either way round too, some people are perfectionists. When the person finds that the work at hand needs to much attention, he first forestalls and then abandons the task altogether.

So what to do to get you back on the track?

Ready set, Go!

Try the pomodoro technique but this time set the time limit to 10minutes only. Force yourself into the action and even if you repeat just three cycles of pomodoro with what you do not like, you will make considerable progress. For Example, You do not feel like researching then writing for a topic. Do one thing, sit for 10 minutes, and for the first cycle, spend the time researching on the topic in question, then take a break. In the next cycle take down the research, assimilate the points and start writing, even if you don’t feel like it, even if you feel like you’re gonna retch right now. But, if you love your creation and do not want to see it die, you will have to bear the pain.

Kill all the Distracting Elements

Is your room alignment or the furniture orientation distracting you? Or are you distracted by the sounds of blaring horns coming from your window? Or is it your own housemates? Think about it, remove the distractions, keep something that will help you soothe your mind and help your concentrate. Switch off your television, remove the headphones and start blogging. You will feel how it clears your mind.

Where’s the Motivation?

Bloggers often find it difficult to keep them motivated during times of depression. This is because at such times, the blogger does not spend nice amount of time to his blog, the blog suffers and certain dreadful things happen, that too all at once. First your visitor count will drop, then your bounce rate will increase, then comes the number of unique visitors and then at last the image of the blog. All these things together force the blogger to go into a vicious spiral which he cannot escape. In these times a blogger must find inspiration as well as motivation. Look at other blogs, see how the’re doing. Find out the PageRanks of your competitors. Find out their style, read your comments be motivated, love your creation once again.

What are you among the two?

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Registering a Domain with godaddy.com for a Blogspot blog

The following post is for those who have just bought a domain or is thinking of buying a domain from godaddy.com and would like to host their blogger blog on that domain. This post is just a walk through.

The complete article is broken into six points,

1. Buying a domain
2. Pointing Goddady.com towards Blogger
3. Note on the process
4. Pointing Blogger towards Godaddy
5. What will happen
6. Note on the process

Buying a Domain

You need to create an account in Godaddy.com

1. The signup button is just on the top left corner of the website
2. After completing the formalities and registering you will be provided a customer code. In future, you need to sign in using this customer code and your password only.
3. Once this is done, just type-in your desired domain name and press enter. If it is available, then well and good; if it’s not then you’ll have to find another combination of your domain name and the suffixes like .org, .com, .net etc.
4. Once that is done, you will have to check out from the location towards the billing area.

Pointing from Godaddy towards blogger

Now that your billing is done and you have a brand new domain etched out under your name, you will have to point the domain towards blogger or google. In Godaddy.com this feat is achieved from the zone file records. The following steps show you how to reach the zone file records:

1. First log in to your account manager from the top left portion of your screen
2. Then click on domains tab, the tab will open and your selected domain will be visible. Click launch
3. At this page go to tools menu and select DNS Manager from the drop down list.
4. Now you’ve reached the DNS Dashboard
   
5. Notice the top left navigation bar, Under the Home tab you have 3 settings, Dashboard, Zone File Editor and Advanced settings.
   
6. Click on Zone File editor and you will be greeted with the following page. In this zone file editor, find the CNAME attribute, for Godaddy look for the ‘host name’ as ‘www’. Now, edit the ‘points to’ parameter as ‘ghs.google.com’
   
7. Now find the ‘A host’ attribute, For ‘A Host’ you need to create 4 different records. Click on ‘Add Record’ button located on the top left potion of the page. Now for ‘host Name’ just type ‘@’.
8. For the ‘points to IP address’ enter the following IP address for Google ‘216.239.32.21’. The same procedure has to be repeated for 3 more times with ‘host Name’ as ‘@’ and the IP addresses as ‘216.239.34.21’ ‘216.239.36.21’ ‘216.239.38.21’.

Note Goddady.com towards Blogger

Now the obvious question which comes to everybody’s mind right now is what are Zone files and Zone records. When you buy a domain name from any vendor, be it godaddy or google; Every single domain will have a zone file and each zone file will have zone records. Godaddy supports upto 20 zone records. Now these zone records contains the domain name server information which links the particular domain name (your domain name) to the specific IP address.

Regarding Zone records, the above discussed CNAME is an alias for a host, using it you can have more than one DNS name for a host. If you talk about ‘A Host’ it maps the IP address to the host name.

Pointing from Blogger to Godaddy

Now that you have completed the formalities from Godaddy’s end, Its time to complete the bridge from blogger’s end also. 

1. Now, to update your Blogger settings First thing you need to do is wait for atleast an hour before the changes made by you in the DNS take place. Usually the changes are reflected within an hour.
2. Now Go to the settings tab in your blogger dashboard,Click on ‘Other’.
3. Now in the publishing subsection you will see a link to ‘add a custom domain’.
4. Click on "Switch to advanced settings."After the http you need to enter the domain name you just registered on godaddy.
5. Now once you’ve entered the complete URL and clicked on the ‘redirect’ option, you need to wait again. 

Usually the change is observed within half an hour but in some cases it might take even upto 24 hours. If it still isn’t working, then you need to contact the representatives at godaddy.com

What will happen?

Once all the steps are complete, these things will happen,

• You will always see the blogname.com instead of blogname.blogspot.com until your domain expires
• All the links that once pointed to blogname.blogspot.com will point to blogname.com

Note Goddady.com towards Blogger

Before I conclude there is another question, What is this missing files host?

There are times in huge websites when certain resources cannot load properly, for example images or videos. So what does the website developer do when he’she is confronted with such a situation. He creates a backup of the resources and instructs the website to fetch the resources from the backup if the original returns nothing. Similarly if you have a missing files host and you are trying to fetch www.blogname.com/image.jpg and you do not get the image you can use the host and get the files from www3.blogname.com/image.jpg. But for blogger users this might come as a shock to some that google’s blogger has discontinued the use of File Transfer Protocol (FTP) on its websites after the first of may 2010.

This gave you a walkthough on

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Why not to submit your site to several websites?

When trying for higher listings, you resort to submitting your website to several other so called "Search Engine Directories" or "Blog Directories", The obvious reason behind this endeavor is to increase the links pointing towards your site, which makes it look cooler in the eyes of search engines. But wait, What's the catch? If you think it through, Some questions would pop-up in your mind. 'Why would a website, which has too many contacts and thus has the ability of submitting a blog/site to more than 1000 websites at a time, would even think of submitting your blog/website to them? Whats in it for them? Are you going to come back to the site? No (so no new visitors). Are you going to reffer the website to your friends? No (If you do, you're competitors' websites will also gain the same popularity, So no mouth spread marketing. So what are they doing here?'

It happened to one of my readers and he shared the story with me. "Frustrated with low visitors and constant nudges from his competitors, The person went online, in search of new ways to make his blog fly. He landed on a website which claimed submission to more than 1200 search engines. After being asked to enter email address and some information, he was asked to enter his blog's name and address. Until then every thing went smoothly. But the downhill came when he opened his mail box. It was flooded with emails and spams (A total of 58 new unwanted emails in just a day).

It is clear in the above case, that the website had links to several spam websites too and  along with authentic search engines of google, yahoo etc, spammers were also included in the list. Now do you understand, how would a website like this earn, The spammers would pay the list to include their names. Also the spammer would earn when he/she sells the list of email addresses and names to large corporations for spam promotional emails and email phishing. 

The figure depicts the share of search volume by search engines from Karmasnack (July 2012). As is clear from the figure, Google's share is highest about 88.8%, Followed by Microsoft's Bing, taking 4.2%. China's Baidu owing to much larger population and usage comes on number 3, followed by yahoo.

If you look closely, The websites boasting for  over 200 search engines, even if true (and I'm not saying it is.) would come under 0.5 %  of the total search volume.

Now, most professionals know such trap and they do not indulge in such practices. But, there are some, who are relentlessness and keep visiting such places and submit to the sites, They are least bothered by the spam and to be safe, they use disposable email addresses, Their practices are unencumbered and are powered by hope of more visitors. Such people are "despowner" i.e. Desperate Web Owners, who are unsuspecting people, not from the web sphere like Lawyers, Doctors etc who mean well but fall into such traps. Take simple advice, Do not fall in the trap. Use your logic and apply other methods to optimize your website. 

Some of them are : 

1. Use simple but effective SEO Techniques (understand, how rankings work).

2. Intelligent use of Keywords

3. Reduce loading Time of your website

4. Communicate with your readers

5. Improve feed Visibility.

6. Popularise your website through social networks like facebook.

7. Get your website checked for errors.

This was all about,

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How easy is my website's navigation?

You've created a splendid website, with huge bucket loads of features and function, but are all its functionalities accessible to your users. Are all your buttons working? Have you put alt.text in all your images? Are there problematic hyperlinks in your website that you're unaware of? 

Or for even smaller mistakes like Are there empty header tags in your HTML code? Such small mistakes must not be over looked, as they make you look good on the bot diary, which finally makes you look good on the books of giant search engines like Google or Bing. Correcting such small mistakes would also lead to an improvement in your page rank, Alexa Rank, ASR ranks etc. Long story short, It will give you higher Visitors and more money for monetized developers.

The following are the most common errors.

WebAIM Started in 1999 is a non-profit organization within the Center for Persons with Disabilities at Utah State University. The people there have come up with an excellent Idea of pointing out a website's Mistakes, Though the feat might not look much, but it is a golden oppotunity for web Developers who have not got enough time to check their code, regularly for mishaps,

WAVE 4.0 Development Team consists of Aaron Andersen, Jared Smith, Diogenes Hernandez as the project heads.

WAVE offers four types of reports:

1. Errors, Features, and Alerts
2. Structure/Order View
3. Text-only View
4. Outline View

The WAVE online tool, helps analyse the website on the basis of small mistakes in coding and accessibility, The tool Displays your website in their own window and mark the areas found to be faulty.

On preliminary Examination, I found out that my blog has huge number of accessibility problems, But It is natural for such big a site and necessary corrections would be done in the near future.

After analysing your website, If you need to looks upon the Legend to find out what do the errors mean,

This was all about,

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Listen and download Free Sound clips

Freesound is another great and website which has a collection of huge archives of sounds and sound effects, 

The website is very frequently updated and gives the opportunity to the users to browse through the sounds, listen them and Download whichever and whenever required. 

The important thing that makes this site tick is that all these sounds are uploaded by music enthusiasts like you and me, So no charge for downloading and uploading whatsoever. The site is filled with graphical representation of all the sound clips it contains. 

 

The site was developed by PixelShell, a small web design studio founded by Dmitry Fadeev and Myles de Bastion, specializing in creating elegant and usable websites through simple, streamlined and accessible design.

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How to get feeds of websites to your email in just 5 seconds?

For the purpose you can use a bookmarklet, i.e. of  Feedmyinbox.com.
Feed My Inbox is a Brightwurks idea.

Using The Feed My Inbox bookmarklet pops up a window where you can subscribe to any feed(s) on the page you are browsing. Simply drag the link to your browser bookmarks toolbar to install it.


Here is a detailed video from feedmyinbox.com
explaining the working.

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