Pack a Mail Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Blog’

Maybe you started a blog and haven’t kept up with regular posts. Or you post regularly, but haven’t been able to build the reader community that you wanted to develop. Or maybe your blog just looks old and tired. As long as your blog is sleeping and not dead (give it a nudge to make sure), there’s hope!

Here are a few fairly painless ways to give your blog an energy boost and get yourself excited about blogging again in the process.

Check Site Analytics for Clues
Your first step should be checking your site analytics (if you don’t have an analytics tool set up, now is the time to do it) and your feed stats to see how people are finding your blog and what they’re reading. This will give you a good idea about what to focus on in terms of content.

Your blog’s awakening may be as simple as writing more on a specific topic, adding a new category or working on using more SEO-friendly keywords.

Change Your Theme
It may seem superficial, but blogs are often judged on their looks. If your blog has confusing navigation, an ugly header or just lacks something to draw readers in, it’s a great candidate for a fresh theme. If you’re using WordPress, there are so many free themes to chose from, and a number of excellent premium themes that can literally change the first impression your blog makes overnight.

You may also want to consider including more images within your posts, and possibly selecting a theme that uses thumbnails throughout the blog. Pictures work!

Line Up a Guest Blogger
If you’re struggling to post consistently, don’t have the knowledge and experience on a specific topic, or just want to add some variety, guest bloggers could be an option. It’s not always easy to find good guests, especially if you’re still trying to shake the cobwebs off your blog. But if you’re successful, the positive results can have a lasting impact.

Put the Focus on Your Readers
If you feel like you’re talking to an empty stadium, it may be because you’re not inviting anyone else to participate. Try relating your posts back to your readers by asking targeted questions when relevant.

Polls, contests and other reader-focused activities are a great way to build engagement, too. A captive audience won’t gather overnight, but with time and consistency, you will see a gradual change.

Post Something Controversial
One way to shake up a quiet blog is to get people fired up. Take a stand on a hot topic, post a rebuttal to a popular blogger’s perspective, talk about alternative ideas, or whatever it takes to generate some traffic and activity around your blog. Be warned that once you do this, the pressure is on to continue the fire with future posts, and you may have a lot of passionate comments to field (not a bad thing!).

Use Social Media
Get your blog set up to feed into your Twitter, Facebook and other social networking accounts, and be open to having dialogue about your posts off your blog. That’s right, all engagement and interaction doesn’t have to take place within your blog comments. It’s a win if you’re able to encourage people to click through and hopefully continue to follow along.

Add Video
Give your readers some great information and a peek at the “live” you. A video blog post here and there can not only make you more relatable and real, but you may be able to pull in the interest of a whole new audience.

There are a lot of ways to rejuvenate a sleeping blog. If you’re willing to go through some trial and error as you test out new ideas, consistently post relevant content and give your readers what they want, you’ll eventually hit your mark and be able to keep your blog awake and alert.

Have you experienced a comatose blog? What have you done to make your blog function more effectively?

Without a doubt, for a self-hosted blog, WordPress is the best blog CMS that you can get. However, being a popular and open source software, it also means that hackers have full access to the code which they can scrutinize to find any exploits they can use to hack into any WordPress-enabled site.

On the good side, one of the best things about WordPress is its plugin system that allows anyone to install any plugins or create your own plugins to extend its functionality, including improving security.

Here, I have listed some wordpress security plugins (and a couple of tricks) that you can use to secure WordPress blog.

All the plugins and tricks listed below are meant for WP 2.7 and above. If you are still using an older version of WordPress, it’s time to upgrade your blog.

Protecting Your Login

1. CHAP Secure Login

This plugin uses the CHAP protocol to encrypt your password.  The password is first salted with a random number (nonce) generated by the session, followed by the md5 transformation algorithm. This result is then sent to the server where it is decrpyted and authenticated. This is a zero-configuration plugin, which means you can use it immediately after activating it.

2. Stealth Login

Stealth Login obfuscates your login page by allowing you to define a custom login page rather than the default wp-login.php. In the event that your password is leaked, the hacker will also have a hard time finding the correct login URL. A good use of this is to prevent any malicious bots from accessing your wp-login.php file and attempting to break in.

3. Login Lockdown

Login Lockdown is useful in preventing a brute force attack. What Login LockDown does is to record the IP address and timestamp of every failed login attempt. If more than a certain number of attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, it will lockdown the login function and prevent any people from that IP range to log in.

4. AskApache Password Protect

This plugin adds an additional HTTP authentication to provide a second layer of defense for your blog. You can set up password protection for your blog using HTTP Basic Authentication, or you can choose to use the more secure HTTP Digest Authentication.

Note that this plugin might/might not work depending on your server capability. If your site does not pass the AskApache configuration tests (the tests run by the plugin to detect your server capabilities), contact your web host and see if they can make changes on the server side.

5. Semisecure Login Reimagined

This plugin provides a “semisecure” login environment by encrypting your password with the RSA cryptography

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Beautifully presented data always catches my eye and some of the infographics doing the rounds online at the moment are stunning.  Here are 9 of the best I have come across (look great and told me something new and interesting).

http://informationarchitects.jp/wtm4

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There are a select group of WordPress plug-ins & widgets I go about installing as soon as I have set up WordPress, sometimes even before I have activated my theme of choice. In no particular order, below are the plug-ins & widgets I install within the first 24 hours without fail and think you should too…

Contact Form 7

Have your site’s visitors send secure messages to your email inbox with out exposing your email address.

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The WordPress phenomenon has taken the art of blogging to a global audience, and not without good reason. It is aptly described by its creators as ”a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.” This only scratches the surface of what a true publishing force WordPress is though.

Its success can be attributed to three more obvious features; it’s free, simple to install and incredibly easy to use. Adopting WordPress allows designers, bloggers and casual users to create a web presence in just a matter of minutes. The latest incarnation of the blogging tool, WordPress 2.7, has taken all the winning attributes of previous versions and scaled new heights. Usability has always been a big part of WordPress DNA and 2.7 undoubtedly brings with it a host of major updates.

The Dashboard has been completely redesigned and brings together all the essential elements of posting into an easy-toaccess interface. Customisation and configuration are key elements that drive usability and ultimately improved workflow in WordPress 2.7. Beyond the more obvious aesthetically seductive Dashboard design, users are given control of content. Made up of several modules, these are all collapsable and movable. Users get to choose position, state, configuration and ultimately decide which modules stay to make their own customised interface. Beyond the Dashboard, a host of improvements have been introduced to give bloggers better productivity, improved functionality and far greater control.