I've been working on:

• Discount Shopping - Xmas.apmart.com is a great place for you to buy Gifts, Lights, Trees, Ornaments, Cards, and Decorations for your Christmas
• Cheap Cars for Sale - Cheap Cars for Sale, Discount Cars, Car Auctions including new cars, used cars, broken cars, every type of cars by dealers and private owners
• Christmas Shop - great place for you to buy Gifts, Lights, Trees, Ornaments, Cards, and Decorations for your Christmas

Those are 3 new site and blog hybrids. I've been quiet sucessful in getting traffic to those. Compare to binh.name the apmart.com is getting me both traffic and some money.

I'm not here to brag about money making, but that's what happening around this time I'm absent from binh.name. So far I've gained enough to pay my hosting, the dozen of domain names, and my food expenses. Still, I haven't really withdraw any money from my account for spending, yet.

Shall talk more about it.

From the beginning, I honestly complain about my current theme and tell the world that I need a new theme. After that I decide to really look at the new year themes and made a list of 5 Free New Year WordPress Themes 2008.

Brian, the owner of PlainBeta is very interesting young man. He immediately visit my blog after receiving a ping back and straightaway gave me some advices on lacking of professional information on the blog. Thanks to Brian I revised my About page to concentrate on explaining about Binh dot Name. So now you should go and look at that About page again to learn why you should stick to this great blog.

Brian kept on visiting my blog often for a few days till his contest close. I really like Brian for having very similar attitudes and interests. Brian's very good at understanding my requirements. The best thing about him is that he is young and knowledgeable.

The requirements I set, I myself feel scared if I need to do all of it by myself. As expected from a potential designer, Brian is not hesitated to take the challenge. He spent his valuable time to learn about the blogs that participate, unlike in other contests. I really don't like the idea of randomly pick the winner for a contest, because each person's effort is totally different.

Finally on 2nd Jan 2008 he personally emailed me to notify me that I won his contest. Here is part of the email:

Binh!

Congratulations!

You've won the custom blog contest!

Now, before I can start designing, I need to get some specifics. Yes, I have the information from your post, but I have a few questions

Yes, I already gave a lot of information on my post New Look for My WordPress Blog for 2008. However that's not enough for a complete design. The "but I have a few questions" resulted in few more email back and forth between me and Brian. Brian's questions made me feel I will need to write a post later on, about the future of Binh dot Name. So stay tune for my announcements.

Later on, Simon announced the Custom WordPress Theme Winner on his blog. I hope he won't take back the offer because he estimate that the theme worth more than US $1000. Well, I would say if he really complete

The fact is that, if Brian can design my blog he will be getting hell lot of freelance work because you will expect the new theme to be somewhat comparable to ProBlogger.com. Well said, it should beat the crap out of JohnChow.com's design.

Enough for the bragging, I'm eagerly looking toward to acquire the new theme. I hope it can be done by the end of this month. It will give me wings to fly high in the blogosphere sky. At this time I'm holding back a lot because my theme look too ugly and I don't dare to promote my blog.

1. Yeepage's comment contest, and
2. PlainBeta's free theme contest.

Well, I don't like the idea of combining few different things into a post, so this one is about the Yeepage's Comment Contest.I was only participating in commenting on Yeepage's blog naturally. I admit that I only skimmed over Simon's My dreaded 1st Contest… and had some quick thought about some strategy to win the game. I had the idea of checking out the latest comment on the side bar and take note of the comment number in the URL. For example from this URL:

http://www.yeepage.com/increase-rss-subscribers-2#comment-842

I can clearly see that the last comment is #842. Since Yeepage had giveaway for every 100th comment so I would watch over the x99 and jump in to put a x00 comment, which can make me win the contest.

Things never work exactly as it's planned to be. Time passed, tension passed, passion passed. I commented on Yeepage.com with only one intention: participate in the discussion. I totally forgot about the contest and posting my comments just for the sake of saying my opinion.

Good luck come to good purpose. Suddenly on 21st Dec he emailed me to notify that I won his commenting contest for $40 and invited me to leave a "thank you" comment on Dreaded Comment Contest Closes. Yeepage was indeed very fast at responding to people. He immediately sent me the $40 as soon as I notify him my PayPal address.

The funny thing about what happen is that:

1. I did not comment for money
2. I did not use the strategy I planned.
3. The strategy I planned didn't work.

"What?", say you. As stated by Yeepage on his post Dreaded Comment Contest Closes, the way he counted the comments is via the Comments admin page, which greatly differs from the number located in the comment URL.

Well, the world is round and unfair. Some people might have taken the comment contest as the motive to participate in discussion. I on the other hand just do what I do for my own passion and got a reward.

Here is another thing to brag about. Thanks to Simon, the owner of Yeepage.com personally invited me to participate in that Definitive List Of StumbleUpon Articles post. At that time I was lacking in visiting Yeepage.com. At the right time, Simon was the main cause that made my comment the 400th and became the contest winner.

Thanks to that contest my relationship with Yeepage.com has increased 1 level. Thanks Simon for giving me the money, enough for few months hosting with this cheapest best hosting I ever used: FastDomain.com.

• Problems
• Analysis
• Answers
• Recommendations

Problems

Here is the quote of what Nealey wrote:

Hi Binh,

First I want to thank you for all your help.

I tried to create a blog for my used cars site but found it difficult. I want the blog to have the structure of a web site. Can you have a homepage , and then a link list to the other sections of the blog? I don't like the way posts work. Can you have pages in a blog? If so how? I havn't done any research on these questions myself yet. I think the help centers are useless. I'm going to try looking for answers, but any help is appreciated.

Thanks,

Nealey

(Source: http://www.binh.name/?page_id=85#comment-158)

Analysis

I was about to ask Nealey to provide more information so I can provide more accurate help. In this particular case the required details are:

1. The blog URL, to see how it is currently organised.
2. Type of blog platform, to see how it can be organised.

After checking her comment I found out the URL to her blog and hence found out the required information as follow:

1. Blog URL: http://usedcarsunder1000dollars.blogspot.com/
2. Blogging platform: Blogger

Current look:

Since this article is focused on website structure, I will not talk about the AdSense placement on the blog. And because this is hosted by blogspot.com, I will talk in the context of Blogger blog.

Answers

Question: Can you have a homepage, and then a link list to the other sections of the blog?

Answer: Yes, you can make a homepage and sections like a normal website would have.

Blogger still help you structure your blog "like" a website, even though it is under-featured compare to WordPress and other blogging platforms.

In fact, blog is just a sub-type of website that has automatic date-based listing of posts. For that reason blog is much easier to manage. Anyone can write blogs, but not everyone can make websites. That's the beautiful of it and that's why it's taking over ordinary websites.

How to create a custom homepage on Blogger.com Blog

Blogger is not that straight-forward when it comes to create a custom homepage. This is not a typical and easily known process. It could be called a "trick to create custom homepage on Blogger.com".

To create this homepage, you need to create a special post following these steps:

1. Create a post and write it as it is a homepage. It will be used to replace the homepage.
2. Set the post date to a long distance future date. This will make it always stick on top of other posts on the homepage.
3. Do you notice in Blogger dashboard you have a link called Settings? Click on it.
4. In the Settings page click on the Formatting link. You can locate the Settings tab right below the header in between Posting and Template tabs.
5. In the Formatting page, locate the first setting box, you should see something like this: "Show [7] [posts] on the main page". Change that number [7] to[1].

Sum up, If you follow the process and complete the trick, you created a sticky post and display only that post on the homepage. In other words, you created a custom homepage for your blog. Congratulation!

How to link to other sections of the blog

OK, this is straight-forward and require very little technical knowledge. However, it require a little more of deep thinking in English and trials. I myself got confused at first, too. Sometimes the big boys forget the Keep It Simple Stupid principle and they unknowingly cause difficulties for users.

The answer is: using Labels. Why? Label in fact is a word used by Blogger.com to refer to Categories, or Sections. Category is a standard word in the web development world to referring to group of inter-related web pages.

Firstly, in order to have a website structure you need to create categories. How? When you create a new post, try your best to create/select a proper label for it. A proper label should be 1 to 3 commonly used words. Each label suppose to be grouping many posts together. If you create 1 unique label for each post, you failed.

If your blog haven't already display the categories, follow the following steps:

1. Open the Template tab.
2. On the Template page, locate the Add a Page Element link where you want to place the links to your labels (categories).
3. On a pop up window called "Choose New Page Element", locate the Labels element then click ADD TO BLOG.
4. On the "Configure Labels" page you can change the settings for your liking. I recommend changing Title from "Labels" to "Categories" for common understanding.
5. When you are satisfied with the settings, click SAVE CHANGES button to finalize the process.

Congratulation, now you know how to properly create categories for your blog-based website.

Question: I don't like the way posts work. Can you have pages in a blog?

This question is asked before I explained how to create a website structure on blogger.com blog. Now, is it still a valid question? If not, please read more.

Unfortunately you can't create pages on blogger.com. The blogging platforms like Drupal, WordPress, Joomla and many more do let you create pages though.

Recommendations

If you still not satisfied with how blogger.com work, please consider migrate to WordPress.com. If you go for WordPress.com you have 2 options:

1. Get it for free, but can't monetize.
2. Upgrade to premium account and pay so that you can display ads.

I'm using WordPress self-hosted package and it has much more powerful than blogger system. You can also consider to self host your own blog-based website using WordPress. This option give you a lot of flexibility. However it require you to have at least some technical knowledge in order to install and configure it.

Other than those, I'm having my own project in mind that can benefit you. I intend to to help non-technical knowledge people to set up their online business. I may give free help and supports too.

StumbleUpon is very similar to Digg.com, Del.icio.us. However it is more blogging oriented, and hence more friendly to bloggers.

A peer's testimonial

I, myself overlooked StumbleUpon. But that's about to change. After I read Sujoy shares his own experience after submitting his own blog posts onto StumbleUpon. Sujoy claims to have few hundred unique visits a day thanks to using this social network. I found him via Yeepage's love links.

My own analysis

Yesterday I tested it. Today result is amazing.

Test results

My personal record before using StumbleUpon:

• Saturday Nov 16: 34 visits, 140 pageviews,
• Sunday Nov 17: 56 visits, 102 page views,

Then after I stumbled my own pages, I got:

• Monday Nov 26: 226 visits, 411 pageviews
• Tuesday Nov 27: 416 visits, 773 page views (still counting)

Can you see the difference? StumbeUpon alone sent me 548 visits during 2 days making it 49.86% of the whole life time of this blog.

Evidence

Here are my screen-shots of what happened:

No page stumbled, 33 visits:

Stumbled, 416 visits:

Top traffic sources, 548 from StumbleUpon:

I don't know why, but this particular page is getting so many hits, 241 landing from StumbleUpon and 449 page views in total: Article: Importance and The Right Way to Submit

Unfortunately there is a very bad tendency with Stumble users, they don't click ads. I got 0 clicks from 700 impressions. 0% CTR, what the heck. For 2 days, I got over 1500 page views, but no ad clicks. crying)

What's next

I'm very happy with the result from testing out StumbleUpon. What I need to worry now is serious layout and professional writing. I would like my writing to be as simple as possible so that everyone can understand. Please always give me feedback so that I can improve.

You see, I always share everything I learn from the blogging world. So for a easier experience, feel free to subscribe to my RSS feed via email and stay up to date with my findings.

I still have some doubts, is it my ads suck, or is it they don't like to click ads? Please do feed me your opinion, I'm really hungry for it.

JohnChow.com, the first reviewer for rssHugger did sign up himself for the first spot. He was the first, and so far the only paid member on rssHugger. Undoubtedly he got the number 1 position and... perhaps he may keep it for very long till Shoemoney.com or some other big blogs come into the competition.

I, myself is proud to be one of the very first takers and I recommend you to do the same. It's not an affiliate program so you can take my words for it.

The program is absolutely free and I'm sharing the secret out: be one of the firsts and enjoy the flood of traffics. The last day yesterday it grow from 20 to 83 blogs listed. The number of new RSS feeds are making me worry, everytime I refresh I see the count increase.

What's next?

Don't forget to check out how RSS on rssHugger looks like. I will be reviewing more blog directory as I go along, so don't hesitate to subscribe to my RSS feed for latest posts.

What do I mean?

I want to share my personal thoughts as well as professional thoughts. Those thoughts often come quickly and I may forget it later on. So I would like to post it as fast as I can to keep it and share with others. But then... people hate personal stuff mixed in a professional blog, and I want mine to be professional niche blog.

The decision is not made yet, but I'm having a thought of separating my website into multiple blogs. It's a very complex issue.

I started searching for an answer... well here is some interesting piece of information if you have similar problem.

Some different type of blogs

I stumbled on this interesting Bloggst.com site and found a few nice definitions which I would like to learn and share. Some types of blogs include:

• Personal
  Mostly centered around the author and his or her personal ramblings on everything that crosses their minds.
• Blogging
  Focus on the topic of blogging.
• Technology
  Focus mainly on various aspects of technology, be it the latest and most sexy gadgets from Apple, or just plain old Microsoft stuff.
• Marketing
  Centered around the different aspects of marketing and promotion, such as for instance Search Engine Optimization and more.
• World Wide Web
  From the latest Web 2.0 startups to various Web Development tips and tricks and everything in between.
• Art and Culture
  Music, movies, paintings and everything else that defines our cultures.
• Money
  About everything related to money, which is an important factor in all of our lives, and cause for both joy and concern for most of us.
  
• Self-development
  Focus developing yourself as a person both professionally and personally.
• Writing
  The art of writing is something that is enjoyed by many, and the blogs in this category write about just that.

What's the answer?

I can write enormous personal stuff, amble of web stuff, a lot about technology, many marketing, some art, some money, some self-development, and some writing.

What do you think? What decision should I make? To hold back and write less, or to write more but separate the blogs?

How about yourself as a blogger, what would you do?

Yesterday I checked my blog and was too surprise about something... the actual weight in term of Kilobytes. By saying that I mean, our blogs are not just heavy, they are too heavy.

Shocking Findings

I checked my own blog and here are some shocking results:

• Over 512KB for the home page and
• Over 380KB for single post.

Currently most blogs have too heavy home page, extra heavy category pages, and heavy single post page. A very good example is John Chow dot Com. His home page cost over 1MB of disk-space and bandwidth.

Avatar:

• Each normal avatar is about 2-3KB, some abnormal avatar is 30KB.
• Too many avatars add up too much weight on the page.

Advertisements:

• Curved AdSense and Image ad normally is > 25KB each unit (bad).
• AdSense plain text ad, simplest design < 5KB each unit (good).
• Square image ad or banner image ad also > 25KB each unit (very bad).

Widgets:

• Each widget need to get a request to the server and download JavaScript code
• Each widget have their own theme design elements, especially heavy graphic.

Solutions

After finding out it's too heavy I decided to fix it right away, and here are the steps:

• The widgets from MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog was cleaned out into a single page called "Community".
• Remove all Image Ad
• Remove curved AdSense for Content. Replaced by the most simple one possible
• Replace widget by using tracking code only.

Unfortunately the BlogCatalog doesn't have tracking code, so the use of a widget is a must. However, I tried to reduce it to the minimum.

Outcome

After all the elements are rearranged as mentioned above, here is the outcome:

• Homepage: 213KB
• Single post: 119KB

After implementing the "Christmas Theme" and enabled the Post Teaser plugin, here are the results:

• Homepage: 198KB
• Single post: 123KB

The different is abvious:

• Homepage: from 518KB to 198KB, save 320KB, 2.6 times faster loading time
• Single post: from 380KB to 123KB, save 257KB, 3 times faster loading time

Just one small bias, this mainly concern the first hit. Consequential hits don't have that much saving because the images are not reloaded.

What's next?

This is only the result of analysis and some quick solution. If you would like to know more about how to conduct the testing and the reason behind doing all this, then I will post another entry soon. There is no Poll at the moment, so please leave a comment on this page to let me know you.

I will be open to help anyone in checking their blog against this problem. I'm willing to help you improve your blog too, just send me a request.

1. A few of my blogs have been there for as long as it was up (good).
2. I see my unclaimed Binh dot Name blog have 7 authorities (good or bad?).

"What is Authority?"

Answer 1: Ownership

I got really surprised and asked myself over and over again: "Hey! That's my blog, how come it have 7 authorities already? Who are those people got onto my blog". I click on that "Authority: 7" button again and again a few times just to find out who owned my blog. But each time it would lead me to the blog profile... so annoyed and disappointed, I was.

Then I asked myself: "Am I being noob?"

Is it sort of JOKE? At my very novice first impression I thought someone took over the ownership of my blog. And even worse, I thought 7 people got a hand on owning my blog.

Answer 2: Membership

The joke didn't end so soon. I tried to search Technorati site for some hint, but maybe it's just for experts, so I couldn't really find an answer to it.

I, being a human finally realize what it means by looking at other blogs listed on Technorati. Still, the concept was misunderstood. I thought it was the number of people who added my blog to their favorite list, or maybe it's members of my blog community like in MyBlogLog. But anyway, I got calmed down and put the issue aside for a bit.

Answer 3: Non of the above

That's enough to make me laugh, when 6 hours passed, I posted 2 long posts, and read many pages of blog, still got the misconception in mind.

When things are done, I decide to search for "What is Technorati Authority" on Google, and found this page: What is Authority? Finally I realize, it's Technorati who plays the game of creating new English term.

I strongly agree with Micro Persuasion about the term "Authority" and its very natural English meaning:

According to the Oxford Dictionary, authority is:

a) the power or right to give orders, make decisions, and enforce obedience

Hmmm, Technorati link counts don't let me boss anybody around.

b) a person or organization having power or control in a particular, typically political or administrative, sphere

Hmmm, nothing about links here.

c) the power to influence others, esp. because of one's commanding manner or one's recognized knowledge about something

There was a noticeably very long comment from Deepak explaining the word Authority in Technorati use. Regardless of how acceptable his explaination is, it's just an excuse from a "blog authority" who try to alter the meaning of an English word just for the sake of "being authority".

Conclusion

Well, I feel Technorati should admit it's improper use of the word authority in place of the word popularity or more simpler term "inbound links". Making novice people wondering around not knowing a term, just doesn't make you any cooler. Even if it's too late, or too ashamed to admit it, then at least Technorati should:

Describe term Authority everywhere it present, especially right after the sign-up complete.

The blogosphere is not a game world, we consist of real people, and real readers. So please consider using some term that's more simple to understand. Perhaps the "high authority" people in Technorati should think about the KISS principle. Use the KISS and you may get real kisses.

(Just in case people don't know, KISS = Keep It Simple Stupid, kiss = using your mouth to kiss. )

I started posting my blog entries with WordPress because I felt that's a necessary initiative. However, I strongly need to consider few things.

Website structure

The biggest issue I'm having is the website structure. I'm still wondering whether

1. putting niche topics on separate subdomains, and so using WordPress MU to power my site,
2. or just a single blog like right now with categories as niches.

Technically speaking, WordPress MU is capable of helping me separate the niches pretty well. SEO point of views, the 2nd option is much better, though require some serious initial design.

As for the niches, I have a few expertises and a few hobbies.

My expertises include:

• Software development
• Web development
• Software reviews
• Website reviews
• Reporting

My hobbies include:

• Photography - armature level, mostly common things and discoveries
• Giving opinions - just about anything I my find interested in having a say
• Learning - that's strange, but yes, I like to learn new things, and write about it.

Theme Design

The design is not finalized, yet. The design is a very important factor in retaining readers and building brand image. Hence, I need some serious time off writing and reading to do redesign the theme I chose, which is JustSimple.

URL structure

As you can see, my URL is still in ugly form. Earlier I wrote about the good URL structure choices, but since then haven't got good replies yet. I may need to visit some forum and invite people over for some feedback. Mean while, I still need to keep it like this.

WordPress Plug-ins

I installed and tested many WordPress plugins. So far I am very pleased with those:

• AdSense Manager
• All in One SEO Pack
• Google Analytics
• Google XML Sitemaps
• Inline Posts
• Permalink Redirect
• Post Teaser
• Subscribe To Comments
• wp-cache

The list for all plug-ins are long. Hence, I will keep it for another post summarizing those plug-ins and tell what worth using. The above plug-ins are nice to use, but new ones come out pretty often so they not yet for my permanent usage. For example recently WP Super Cache comes out and claim to take over 10,000 hits without a trouble.

Blog Directories

Yes, I have found out about those blog communities and was so surprise they existed and they really help. Recently as I go along learning, I stumbled on and signed up for the following:

• MyBlogLog.com
• BlogCatalog.com
• BlogFlux.com
• Technorati.com

I'm looking toward signing up on more directories. I will write review about each of them while I go along.

What's Next?

I planned to post about 10 articles a day. But due to those burdens I am delaying the writing. Struggling to start-up something does give much learning experience. I will be sharing my experience as I go along. Stay tuned for my progress on growing this baby "Binh dot Name" which ought to be a giant.

What about your blog? What do you plan with it? How will you achieve your goals?