How to get more traffic to your blog

A mad scientist. Dr Alexander Thorkel (Albert ...

Image via Wikipedia

The title of this post is a shill. I can imagine thousands of people every day searching for this phrase, “How to get more traffic to your blog” or some such thing. Experiment #234, or whatever.

THE REAL point of this post is this: I was working in my dank cellar laboratory, mad scientist that I pretend to think I incorrectly don’t claim to not think I am, under the light of the moon and ancient candles, the din of my homemade equipment and iron tools filling my ears with a constant buzzing and humming that would drive lesser men insane. Owls screech in the distance and there is a wafting scent of mold. An occasional undefined and unrelated “knock” disrupts the monotonous buzzing of my instruments, but in a concentration so pointed it verges on the absurd, I pay no nevermind to the various diruptions.

MY DETECTOR WAS ALMOST COMPLETE. I will have freed all humanity from the chains and toil of a hundred years of malapropisms and mixed metaphors, a humanity whose greatest contribution to this universe was formerly nothing more than the pathetic entertainments of children, who feed nightly on the souls of those middlemen and self-proclaimed geniuses responsible for fleeting transactions between middlemen and other middlemen, an economy whose design and construction, not to mention its very walls and cloying decorations, are composed of nothing more than the faintest bovine defecations. This fecund matter has been distilled over time and regurgitated ad nauseum, if I may use such a cliche.

Oh, it wasn’t always this way. There was a time when a person’s futile mortal toil was rewarded with more of the same. Not so in this era. The very masterpiece I now write will contain no labor whatsoever. Yes: the machine has won, my friends. All manner of directed criticism is expounded without limit or bound, and every person who chooses to do so may, at their will (the smallness of which cannot be overstated) add to this infinite heap, this pile, this overflowing box of dreck and rumination. The words you read now are just one example, one grain of wheat in the paradox of a heap. It has become impossible to extract whatever wisdom or useful information

The burden of this weighed heavily on my small mind. Then, I found that utilizing the same tools we have utilized to wash our society with this thin layer of baloney, malarkey and hogwash could also be utilized to shield us from it! I had done it! THE BULLSHZZ DETECTOR HAD FINALLY BEEN REALIZED! My previous work, what I like to call “The Perpetual Motion Machine“, a device which uses no energy to run but moves constantly without ever stopping, pales in comparison. And now, I would unleash it to a public who would certainly be eternally grateful. And I would do it all for no remuneration, anonymously, that all humankind could benefit.

It was not to be so. I have been usurped , by THIS: Gobbledygook Grader. I will now withdraw again, to my rightful place as another object in some scheming billionaire’s calculus, waiting for them to inform me about what I ought to do next. No doubt it will involve a transaction between a series of middlemen.

Enhanced by Zemanta
Posted in Blogs, Bloggers and Blogging, Experiments, Marketing | Leave a comment

Gobbledygook analysis

I have been experimenting with analyzing marketing gobbledygook for some time now. I have just now (literally, just NOW) realized the ultimate goal of all this will be a “Gobbledygook Analyzer”, also known as a “b&#@!^&%$ detector”. Scientists have been working for centuries on this problem: that is, the problem of clearing the haze of gobbledygook and superstition to find The Truth.

With my newly acquired skills in the intellectual realms of logic, language, and computer science, I believe that the time has come to unleash the BS Detector on the world. Although it is still in development, the tool will enable the masses to crack the hogwash code and uncover what lies beneath. Stay tuned, batfans…

Enhanced by Zemanta
Posted in Experiments | Leave a comment

Printing Industry Jobs Keep Going Away

Nice going, Rick!

"I really don't care about your personal problems as long as I still have a job. Oh, and by the way Greeley, SCREW YOU."

Another local Colorado printing plant closes. RR Donnelly in Greeley will lay off 177 workers. Maybe they will lay off the genius who came up with the idea of making phone books their major line of business in 2011? What are they going to do? Compete for dwindling jobs. It just keeps getting worse, even as the economy “improves”. Sorry about the bad news. Read this article if you can. I wish I had some kind of answer for these folks, but I don’t. By the way, the unemployment rate in Greeley is already 11+ %.

Enhanced by Zemanta
Posted in Employment Issues, Printing | 3 Comments

How to Make Your WordPress Blog Not Run Faster by Using a CDN That Goes Out of Business and You Suddenly Realize After the Fact That Maybe It Wasn’t Such a Good Idea In the First Place

Image representing SimpleCDN as depicted in Cr...

Image via CrunchBase

My difficulty instituting a CDN continues

I had been using a CDN, the acronym for “Content Delivery Network”, to deliver the pictures on this blog to your browser. The reason for doing this is to speed up the load time of the web page and it certainly fit in my “Experiments with WWW” or whatever I’m calling it. A CDN stores your pictures/videos/whatever (content that is larger than the rest of the html in a site) and when the page loads your server doesn’t have to spend a bunch of time pushing that heavy content around, it can focus on the simpler and faster html  and associated scripts.

But, what happens when your CDN provider gets shut down and you didn’t even notice? Or get a notification? And what if that happens at exactly the same time that you upgrade your caching plugin, which leaves a file on your server that breaks the website? And not just your website, but the other three websites on the same host? What happens is that even if you put your server right side up again, all of the pictures that you call on the deceased CDN no longer answer.

Oh MY GOD this is SO boring!

 The CDN I was using was called “SimpleCDN“. As I recall, they offerered 150Mb of storage, and up to a Gb download per month for $FREE. I’m using MAYBE 10% of that. I could pay some “cloud” service like Amazon $100.00/mo. And there are others, most of which are as expensive. SimpleCDN “fit my needs”, as they say. Apparently, SimpleCDN were using a hosting service then reselling it as a content delivery network. This article explains it better than I will, so you should read it if this type of thing is interesting to you. So the host shut them down. Hit the kill switch, with no advance notice. UH OH! Now you have subscribers who are using your service to run their websites, and they all go dark (sort of, I mean, their content wouldn’t be visible if the page tries to refer to stuff on the CDN server).

Two lessons I learned from this experiment:

  1. You get what you pay for. This is an immutable natural law. Whether it be for Graphic Design, a CDN, or a bottle of wine.
  2. If you want your blog to stay online, you MUST do some maintenance and pay attention to all the stuff you have tacked on to it.

 

Enhanced by Zemanta
Posted in Experiments | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

How to Make your WordPress Blog Stop Working by Trying to Make it Run Faster

I finally found the time to update this blog, hopefully some fresh content will finally get me a third reader.

Why I haven’t posted since March, 2010:

I decided that enough is enough and after having been laid off by no less than three printing/marketing places, then suffering through unemployment along with the other thirty million Americans like me, I went back to college to get my BS. That is, an official BS, not the BS I usually deal in (HA!). Thankfully, I have been working during that time, and so was left with very little time left to write on this.

Why my blog went off the air:

I thought that the internet had, like, ghosts or something that would alert me to problems. Let’s say you installed a plug in on your WordPress blo, in order to make it run faster, as an “experiment in www”. Then let’s say that this plug in, out of the goodness of its heart, creates and deploys what’s called an .htaccess file all up in your server’s face to get it to do its bidding. Now, this is a long story, and I’m not going to bore myself with the details of it, but let’s say that the plug in did this WITHOUT TELLING YOU. I’m not mad at it (I am kind of mad at it). Now, when you put a(n) .htaccess file on the root folder of your webserver, usually that’s okay, it actually needs those instructions. But when you put that file in a subfolder on a server, and you point a URL to that subfolder, apparently you are then FORBIDDEN to enter. As in “403 Forbidden“. After a couple days, I was able to find the .htaccess file that was hurting me, hid it, and voila, my site pops back up. Thankfully this is my own thing and I’m not running it for someone else, otherwise I might be looking for yet another job. Thanks a lot, W3TC!!! But I will not give up on the whole CDN thing. Once I nail it down I can pretend to be cool by saying my website utilizes a cloud-computing architecture, or some such gibberish. {I did not know the word gibberish was spelled with a “g;”. I’ll be darned.}

Anyway:

Buried deep in this post is another reason I am back on this experimental blog. I DID in fact set up a site for someone else, and I will probably need to test some stuff out over here to make sure everything paechy before I deploy it on my client’s site. Here it is

StudioLazerus Logo

StudioLazerus

So, go check it out (yes, I am telling you what to do), buy some jewelry for yourself and your loved ones, and stay tuned to see the results of further experiments in www and in real life as well.

Enhanced by Zemanta
Posted in Blogs, Bloggers and Blogging, Experiments, Marketing | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Gobbledygook find of the day

Snotty Gobbles
Snotty Gobbles — seriously, “snotty gobbles”

Below is crap writing at its finest; that is, at its worst. (Did you see how I did that? I used the phrase “at its finest” in an ironic way, where the literal definition of a word or phrase is intended to actually mean the opposite of what is being said.)

From a local “Integrated Branding Communications Company”:
“All of our Brands are crafted around a strong narrative that is competently delivered on by management and the organization, is relevant and scarce to the customer, and, compared to the competition, offers a sustainable competitive advantage.”

Maybe I’m just not very hip to the whole “Integrated Branding” scene, but what exactly does this mean? I’m imagining these people in a large Theatre of Branding, where “strong narratives” are “crafted”, perhaps something like:

The Jeff Lazerus Online Museum of Marketing Gobbledygook and Hogwash is proud to bring you lovingly hand crafted integrated communications built around a strong presence inside of and around the various brand crafted narrative which has leveraged our experience in integrated leveraging of managed narrative properties built around a strong craft built organizational advantage to the customer and the constituents of the clients’ customers, with a foundation in message delivery that goes straight to the heart and mind of hand crafted brand business meta-branding delivered through and around the leverage that only our powerful preposition and noun repurposing technology can provide around of in with.

Posted in Marketing | Leave a comment

Captured a bear on Google street view

Posted in Experiments | Leave a comment

The Shocking Tale of BookLocker v. Amazon

Bangor, Maine based BookLocker has won a suit against Amazon.com which claimed Amazon violated anti-trust law. The complaint was that Amazon used intimidation and other mafia-like tactics to shut down a publisher’s ability to use their own printer by attempting to force these publishers to use Amazon’s own POD printing business, BookSurge (now called CreateSpace).

cartman

You will respect Amazon's authoritah!!!

Let’s say you are an independent publisher, a niche publisher or a small digital printing company. Read More »

Posted in Printing | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Awesomest comment spam comment of the day

In my continuing series of comment spams that are totally genius, I give you the following, copied with no editing whatsoever:

my God, i thought you were going to chip in with some decisive insght at the end there, not leave it with

MY GOD! Not leave it with what? WITH WHAT???

Sorry pal, no decisive insights on this blog, and I really don’t have enough traffic coming here to warrant the spamming effort you are putting into this.

Posted in Experiments | Leave a comment

Spam Comment of the Day

SIERRA MADRE, CA - MAY 29:  Spam, the often-ma...
Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I now spend more time deleting moderating spam on this blog than I do actually writing. Annoying as hell. Although, I found the wording of this one to be pretty amusing:

“The first thing that will happen will be the termination of Lustig’s disastrous buy allegra grab me and pelted towards the door. The policeman there grabbed at me— then folded

Just read that a few times. I removed the link but left the formatting for humorous effect.

Happy Holidays!

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
Posted in Blogs, Bloggers and Blogging | Tagged , | 2 Comments
  • Enter your email address:

    Delivered by FeedBurner

Bear