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My wife and I have had a blog site for awhile but just recently we’ve started actually blogging on it. So quickly one night I added a new theme, updated the old version of wordpress that was on the site and added a few plugins for lightbox images and flickr images. Tested it, all was working so like the cobblers kids and their shoes, I would post sometimes but never gave the sites structure a second thought, till this week. I was showing a co-worker our site and realized it was taking awhile to load, it was my own site and I was ready to head to another site just to stop the loading.

It was time to figure out why my site was slow. There can be many reasons why the site is slow, a couple of the things to check are: Your Web Host, I’ve been with ours a long time and knew it wasn’t them. Routing over the Internet, this is usually when you notice your site is slow just one day, but usually is fast. By going to the run command in windows, typing in CMD and then in the command window type: tracert www.yourwebsite.com you will see the hops it takes to get to your site and the time it takes to get there. The lower the number the better, numbers above 100 maybe a problem. There isn’t anything you can do about this, but these problems are usually fixed in a day or two. This again was not my problem.

How to tell what is running slow on your site

To find out why my site was slow I needed a way to see each item loading on my site and the time it takes for them to load. The tool I chose was Firebug. Firebug is a plugin for Firefox (which you’d better be using by now!!) Download Firebug and install it into firefox, after restarting Firefox, you’ll see a small image of a roach in the bottom status bar of FF.

Using Firebug to test your site

Using Firefox, go to your website, once there, click the roach and go to the net tab. The net tab will have check boxes, check them and hit the enable button. your webpage will start to reload, as it’s loading you’ll see status bars showing how long it takes each item to load (see the header image). My problems were all  in red, not because they took so long to load but there were files missing, the slow site was caused by when the site would load, it couldn’t find important files for a couple of the plugins, so it would keep searching till it timed out. You may not have this problem, but you’ll be able to see if images are to large, javascripts are having problems or if you’re just loading to many objects.

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Technorati Tags: Blog, Browsers, Clients, Firebug, Mozilla Firefox, Plug-in, WWW

This week I started using Zemanta, a firefox plugin that boast:

Simple point & click enrichment of your blog posts (and emails). In real-time, while you type. We suggest tags, links, photos, and related articles. You save time and aspirin

At first glance, my thoughts were that this was just another way for a company to give me a small amount of help for adding a list of links for their benefit to my blog, but being the trusting soul I am, I decided to give it a try.

My first blog post with Zemanta, I wasn’t completely impressed, since I know html and always create all my post in html instead of visual mode, I thought adding an images to my post wasn’t that big of a deal, but as I started typing more to the post, even more relevant images started to show.. ok 1 point for Z!

Next adding related articles to my post is a plus, I had wanted to do this long ago with another service that had come out but they were (at that time) only offering this to larger blogs. Yes, I could do a search and find related articles but this saves a lot of time..  2 points!

At this point I saved and posted the post, thinking the plugin was ok, but not sure I’d use it a lot, but that would soon change. As I was editing my post I noticed the Links section of Zemanta, talk about a time saver, it finds keywords within your post and gives you choices of different links to point those keywords to. All these links and related articles links can be opened in a new window so you know exactly where you’re pointing your visitors.

The last part of Zemanta that I use are the tags, I had been tagging my post but noticed the tags weren’t showing on my new theme. I realized that my theme didn’t show tags, but by adding the wordpress plugin “WP tags to Technorati” the plugin auto showed all the tags on my site without me changing code within my theme.

With the above listed content, options of adding your own images and related articles from friends rss feeds and all the upcoming options (like Zemanta in email) that they are adding, I see Zemanta as a useful tool for any blogger no matter the size of their blog.

(BTW, last i checked there is a difference between the firefox plugin and the wordpress plugin, The Firefox plugin has more options and Links, I disabled the wordpress plugin)

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Technorati Tags: Blog, google, Mozilla Firefox, Plugin, Technorati, WordPress, Zemanta

I have friends that ask me how I end up with hundreds of hits even when my site hasn’t been updated in months (Which I’m changing lately!) They think that someone needs to buy traffic through Google or have some secret, the truth is, you can find traffic, it takes your time but doesn’t cost a dime.

Find your audience…

With most blogs you write about certain things, your site may be about a special sport, cakes or what ever, you have your niche. (This step doesn’t work on sites like mine since it’s topics are so broad, which also doesn’t translate into great traffic, but that’s for a different post). Once you know your niche, join a couple groups and websites that discuss your niche or have a forums. This is probably where I should add, DO NOT spam these boards, if you write a blog about something it better be something you love, so it should be easy for you to join in real conversations with people on a forum and if allowed add your site link to your signature.

Another way of finding your audience is use twitter, using a site that does Twitter Alerts like http://tweetbeep.com/ you can watch the twitterverce for words like cupcakes or Mustangs, once you get an alert that someone used that term, follow their twitter. They will probably talk about the term again, in which you can chime in, or at the least they’ll visit your twitter page to see who you are, there they’ll see your link to your site about CupCakes and either follow your twitter or visit your site, maybe both.

Research your post…

Some may call it long tail, I just call it doing what other aren’t. Before you even write your post, you usually have an idea of what it’s going to be about, so do a couple searches on your topic. If you find that there are millions of hits for your topic, change it a little.. If you want to write a story about making cupcakes, you’ll see by doing a search there are tons of those post, but if your story is about creating giant birthday cherry cupcakes, you may not only get hits for cupcakes but also birthday cupcakes and giant cupcakes. (don’t ask why i’m on the cupcake kick tonight) Adding that extra little detail never hurts. Searching will also give you an idea if your post is something that is popular now or not, http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends will tell you what the hot searches for the day are, this is also a good place to look if you have writers block, you can search through the popular searches and find something in your niche.

Watch for more information like the above, subscribe to my RSS feed

Technorati Tags: audience, Blog, google, Online Communities, Social Networking, stats, traffic, twitter

For a couple months now I’ve been testing new software called Boxee. Boxee allows me to watch many of the online video sites on my television. As of now there are different versions for different OS’s, some allow Netflix while orhers have ABC, still lacking behind is the Apple TV setup, but they are slowly working on it (it’s the hardwares problem not Boxee’s).

Right now I have the appleTV setup, I use it mostly to watch shows on hulu and Joost, but I have also installed a 2 TB server that I can copy all my movies to off of DVD. Boxee will then list all my movies with info on each, I choose what i’d like to watch and the movie starts, no worrying about finding the dvd, scratching it and I always have a backup.

As boxee adds more and more resources, I can see in the near future that I can drop cable and watch the shows i want when i want. Too bad i still will have to pay the cable company for internet. I setup 2 AppleTV’s with boxee, one for myself and another for Scott Janz.

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Technorati Tags: Apple TV, AppleTv, Boxee, Cable television, drop cable, Hulu, Joost, Netflix, Television

First off, if you’re not using firefox for internet browsing, get your butt over to firefox.com and download it. Firefox allows you to have addons or plugins that help you with daily task, One of my favorite is Diigo. Diigo allows me to share bookmarks with others or just myself. While I don’t care about sharing with others, I’ve installed Diigo on my work computer, home computer and both laptops. This allows me to always have my all my bookmarks on all machines and they are also searchable, using your tags that you added when you saved the bookmark. There are other pluging that do the same thing and i’ve used those in the past but with diigo I can also leave myself notes on each page and highlight areas, for when I return.

Technorati Tags: bookmarks, Browser, Clients, delicious, Diigo, favorites, Mozilla Firefox, Plug-in