ContentedNiche

People need to think before they let their fingers dance on the keyboard.

Over a year ago, I wrote a blog post about Ubuntu for another site. (If you don’t know what Ubuntu is, its the most popular Linux distro around.) The post was not meant as a Linux bash (no pun intended) but as a simple list of seven things that the developers could do to make their operating system better. Harmless enough. Well, every few days or so, it seems that some new raving lunatic Ubuntu fanboy happens to the site and leaves a scathing comment insulting my intelligence, my family, my dog (may he rest in peace), my blog, and just about anything else that pops into that disturbed little brain of his.

The comments always make me chuckle. People who don’t have the guts to leave their real email address but think its perfectly OK to hurl nasty remarks my way. Ah, only on the Internet. If you’ve never received such a comment on your website before, here’s one of the latest examples, unedited and left in its entirety for your pleasure:

OK, what teh f*** is youre problem. Ubuntu isn amazing os that is widely popular in the mainstreem world. the fact that most survers are running on linux shows only one thing, it is reliable. unlike windows, This os actually works. NOW, i dont give a dam about your failing nowlege but critisising ubuntu only shows that your a noob and cant wrok teh terminal. Only a**holes that want to be spyed up on by bill gates use windows. all tehy can handel is point and click. NO, you a**, the server you are running probably runs linux. so b4 you go about saying how bad linux is, lern to use it!

But these comments lead me to a predicament. What do I do with them? Hit the delete button and pretend they never existed? Approve them and then reply with a defense? Edit them to make the commenters sound even more moronic? Post the really funny ones on another blog so my readers can share in the laughter? It’s a real conundrum, though when I do approve savages like these, I always always remove their website address.

So what do you do when comments on your blog go bad? And what was the most scathing comment you’ve ever written or received?

It’s official. WordPress 2.7 is out. Go download it now.

And even better…it didn’t break my blog.

Sometimes you can feel like you just don’t have enough time to blog. Perhaps you have a full time job. A child or two to raise. Or maybe you just want to take some time for yourself and forget about the blog all together.

If you’ve been feeling like blogging is a lot of work, takes a lot of time, or is just too much of a consuming effort to make it worthwhile–think again. Here are 9 ways to find the time to keep your blog at the top of its game.

1. Set Aside Time to Blog
They always say the first step’s the hardest. They’re right. If you don’t have a lot of free time on your hands, forcing yourself to allot even a half an hour a day to blogging is going to tightly constrict your daily routine. However, there are two easy ways to go about giving yourself time to blog. First, you can add more waking hours to your day by getting up earlier or going to bed later. Second, you should evaluate what you do every day and see if there are times you can shave a few minutes from your activities. For example, if your favorite TV shows come on at a certain time, TiVO them and start watching a little later than when they start. You’ll save yourself at least ten minutes on an hour long show when you don’t watch commercials. Devote that time to blogging instead.

2. Let Your Computer Work for You
There are a number of ways to let your computer do the work for you. If your blog posts are formulaic, make a template of your average post and use that each time you draft a new post. If you manage multiple blogs, use blogging software instead of visiting each site’s dashboard one by one. If you maintain a general blog, bookmark all of the trend sites you use so that you can pop them open at once instead of doing it manually. The point here is that even though each little task may only take a few seconds, they can add up to save you plenty of minutes during a full day’s work.

3. Live By a Schedule or Calendar
We all tend to establish routines. Wake up in the morning, go to work (or school), come home, have some dinner, and so on. While your routine may be deeply engrained in your mind, if you actually map it out in a calendar program or on a piece of paper, you’ll often find that you may have more large breaks in your day than you thought you did. By maintaining a real calendar, you can plan your time more effectively and free up some valuable blogging time even though you thought your days were packed from morning to night.

4. Set (Realistic) Goals for Posts, Readers, and Subscribers
If you’re pulling 80 hour work weeks, don’t expect to be able to post 10 times a day. Easily the most common problem with blogging is that you end up setting these amazingly unrealistic goals when you first start out blogging and you find that you can never hope to keep them. I’m speaking from personal experience here. This started out as a daily post blog, if you’ve been with me from the beginning. In any event, it’s important to keep your head level and not fall into the trap thinking that you’re going to post way more than you could ever possibly hope for.

5. Find Images Before You Write
Finding images takes time. Lots of time. Do it well in advance during the time between when you think up a good idea for a post and when you actually draft that post.

6. Knock Out Several Posts Each Day You Blog
Have a day with a particularly long amount of free time? Use it to your advantage to plow through several posts at a time. Long, short, whatever. The more posts you can do in a sitting, the more backups you have in case you are unable to get a post done later in the week. This tip goes hand in hand with using the publish at a later date feature built into WordPress. Schedule your posts as necessary to avoid missing your self imposed deadlines.

7. Take Notes and Save Bookmarks
Whenever you think of a great topic to post about, write it down. Did someone else think of it first? Save their post as a bookmark and incorporate some of their ideas into your own posts. Just don’t plagiarize their ideas or their verbiage. Being able to maximize your time means minimizing the amount of time you sit in front of your computer trying to think of what you should write about next. You’ll never have to fear writer’s block again if you write down ideas well before you write about them.

8. Spread Out Your Research Over Time
This goes with point #7. If you’ve been writing multiple posts a day and thinking up ideas for posts in advance, then there’s no reason you shouldn’t be doing your research in advance too. Once you have your idea in hand, do whatever research you need to in order to write your post. Heck, you can even do research for posts while you’re at work, talking on the phone, or watching your favorite sitcom.

9. Brainstorm On the Go
Finally, brainstorm about your blog, your theme, your posts, and your pages while you’re away from your computer. Then bring those ideas to fruition when you finally sit down at your computer. If you’ve finished up with all of the tough mental work before you get to work on your blog, you’ll find that the ideas have a lot more room to run. Changes to your theme come faster. Posts flow better. And you might even experience that magical moment when you realize that this whole blogging thing you’ve been trying out may just be successful yet.

Image by Wordle

Tiger and his wife, Elin Woods, are expecting their second baby. A big congratulations to them. According to various sources, they’re expecting the child in the late winter.

Great news for Tiger and Elin Woods–but this is a blog about blogging, writing, content, and the like. Not about sports stars and their children.

But what can celebrities like Tiger and Elin Woods teach us about blogging?

Sometimes you have to jump on the bandwagon and jump on it fast. Riding the trends is a great way to get your blog out there into the limelight and even stir up a new audience while you’re at it. That’s exactly what I’m trying to prove with this post.

So why did I choose Tiger and Elin Woods and her pregnancy as my topic of choice? I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading about the positives of using tools like Google Trends to help boost traffic to a blog. For some people, it seems to work like a dream–possibly bringing in thousands of unique visitors in a matter of hours. Just as good as social bookmarking without all of that high school popularity contest crap to go along with it.

By capitalizing on what’s hot at the moment, you can cash in on the hoards of visitors looking for a specific topic. Just give your piece its own unique spin and see where it goes from there.

However, a word of warning. Do try to keep your blog posts on topic when you’re recruiting ideas from Google Trends. Otherwise you may risk alienating your readers–which will ultimately show that you care far more about attracting uniques than keeping people coming back time and time again.

August was a great month for Contented Niche. With quite a bit of traffic flowing in, I’m pleased with the success this blog has experienced so far.

But now is the time to take it in a new direction. I’ve noticed that resource posts and other, longer, articles are drawing in the most attention, so I’m going to focus on those for a few months until I can sustain my numbers at a comfortable place. Then I’ll be back to daily posts and see where things go from there.

Does this mean I’m not going to highlight some of the best and most unique icons and WordPress themes? Of course not, just not as often.

And did I mention that I’m hard at work on building a few themes of my own? I don’t want to give any set in stone deadlines, but expect to see the first one posted by mid month.

So expect to see the changes come this week with fewer, but better (and certainly more in depth) blog posts to come.

Oh, and if you have any suggestions for a post you’d like to see, just drop me a comment below.

Thanks for sticking around.