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Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Everything has a price!

Trying to get your blog looking the way you want it to, if your not a technical person, can be, not to put too fine a point on it, a complete pain in the arse. Since I started blogging, I've managed to become fairly au fait with Blogger, understand basic html changes that I can make in my template and how to put in other bits n pieces on the template. Great, marvellous, wonderful, except a lot of the nice little extras that you get on the web have bloody scripts in them that open pop-ups, ads etc and that bugs the shit outta me. Ok, even if it only my mother that reads this blog regularly, I personally hate all that crap when I go surfing and want to avoid it like the plague on my own blog.

So I have removed the tag-board, the referrers list and a few other bits cos I ain't clever enough to work out (a) which one was causing the pop-ups (b) how to stop that happening and still retain the extras on the blog! If there are still pop-ups or anything else annoying on the blog when you log on please let me know either in comments or via my email.

By the way, does anyone know of a good website that offers advice on the tech side of blogging; templates etc. that isn't aimed at getting more adverts etc. onto blogs and that isn't too technical (for us non-IT heads that blog)

Also, just wanted to say whey, hey to Damien Mulley who managed to get almost 30,000 visitors to his blog in just one day, due to his well-written, witty (and instructive to some!) piece on how to use google to get a girl and get laid - respect!


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17 comments:

Anonymous said...

You are going through what I like to call the "I really need Wordpress" phase of your blogging life ;-)

I moved off Blogger last August for many of the reasons you mention but also because of the brutal comment interface, the inability to auto-track who is referring to your blog and mainly because of the lack of control.

Whislt I am a big fan of what Matt, Donncha and the lads are doing over at wordpress.com, the lack of control is still an issue. That's why I went with my own hosted version of wordpress.org. Total control, thousands of themes and thousands of plugins to extend the functionality however you like.

Of course it ain't free but hosters like Blacknight in Carlow do a good deal for bloggers (€43 per year plus vat) and offer a one click install of Wordpress so you don't have to become a MySQL expert. You also would have tons of help from all the Wordpress users in Ireland. Check em out at blacknight.ie. Kieran Murphy over at icecreamireland.com went that route and is very happy with them.

Givvis a shout if you need any other info or help.

Curly K said...

Thanks for the tips, Conor, I will bow to your much greater knowledge on this one. Mind you hadn't considered paying for any services or anything. Not a money issue, just haven't ever thought of myself as a serious blogger where the shite I spout warrants that sort of respectability in techy terms, if that makes sense.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the link. Oh and you're a serious blogger if what you write is for you and not for ad revenue. :)

Curly K said...

Thanks Damien, I'm definitely not interested in ad revenue and truly hate annoying pop-ups on sites.

Anonymous said...

Don't underestimate that ad revenue. I'm very very close to making my first $10 in 9 months of AdSense. Just a few more cents and I can give up the day job.

The other kinda nice thing about getting your own host is that you can decide your domain name. Oops, just checked, someone already had curlyk.com!

Curly K said...

Yeah Conor that $10 will really come in useful with baby number 5 on the way, if only you could be as productive with AdSense!!

Anonymous said...

I went with Blacknight and their starter pack recently when I was having my "difficulties" with my previous host and for something like 40E they're hosting all three of my blogs for me (that'd be the main one and two photo sites).

I started on blogger too, and what drive me around the twist was the lack of categories.

Anonymous said...

I'm glad you got rid of whatever it was that made the popups pop up. The system at my work is very sensitive and frequently those type of things bring up a big "ACCESS DENIED". Unfortunately all the ACCESS DENIEDs are logged somewhere cos they think you're surfing for porn or similar!

Curly K said...

Winds - think I may be going that route very shortly.

Cat - You must become my official feedback person for what is going wrong with the site. If crap like that starts happening again, please let me know and I will try to fix it.

Anonymous said...

If you do that, don't delete your blogger profile. A couple of sites which became defunct and got deleted had their user ids re-registered with questionable content.

Curly K said...

Winds - good thinking Batman, was going to leave the profile anyway. It probably brings the most visitors - they're all beguiled by the picture of the pretty lady which is not me!!!

Anonymous said...

ah damnit i'm disillusioned. It's not you?

Curly K said...

Winds - nope, I chose a picture that I thought was obviously not me from my descriptions but thought if Twenty et al could use poetic license with their photos so could I. Wouldn't mind looking like her though - I could too, if someone is very drunk and the lights are really, really low!!!!!!!

Anonymous said...

In my mind you are much better looking than that etherial photo. Also much more gutsy and discriminating. I find that image of you to be like a bit of poor wallpaper that I have to put up with. After a while it's no longer distracting because I have you in another place.

I don't think anyone believes the descriptions bloggers make of themselves. Do you? I'm attracted by the writing and especially the energy and subtlety. But I'm also hooked on your revelations about your quest for "the one". Or is that something else I'm making up.

As one of your greatest fans, I'm delighted to see you getting the recognition you deserve.

On a more technical note to Conor and Winds: is it possible to make a seamless transition from one form of your blog to another? To link the two forms so that readers can easily cope with the fact that you've moved from one form to another?

Whatever happened to Damien's idea of a workshop for bloggers? (Forgive me if it was someone else's idea.) I'm a bit further back than Curly K on the technical ability, so I'm looking for the beginners pack.

Anonymous said...

Wordpress has an import tool to pull all your Blogger posts (and comments) into your Wordpress blog.

I did that last year on 4 years of data and then did one last post on blogspot pointing everyone over to my new blog. I think I held on to all 10 readers.

Don't know about a blogger workshop but there is a blogger meetup being planned for August in Dublin. Check it out here

Anonymous said...

Hot news live from the Blogosphere is that Google have just announced major Blogger upgrades on the way.

Some are very useful (like categories), some techie (like ATOM 1.0 support) but overall it now puts them only two years behind Wordpress ;-)

If you are sticking with Blogger then they are all worthwhile changes.

Anonymous said...

Curly K...just exactly what I needed, thanks. :-D