I posted the following in each of the Battling-Series of Blogs

Blogger(s) Wanted

I am looking for individuals to write for each of the “Battling-Series” of blogs .. on a shared revenue basis. Bloggers will share in ad revenues generated by the site on an agreed formula (first $100 USD plus 60% of the excess). There is no guarantee of future earnings and these blogs are currently not earning any revenues at this time. However, I believe that the potential for future earnings is there.

If blogging for me sounds appealing to you ..
.. EMAIL >> hart (at) PetLvr (dot) com ..
.. with the following information:

* blog(s) that you are applying for
* sample(s) of your recent writing style
* are you blogging elsewhere?
* direction that you would take this blog
* anything else? ask. or tell me.

Sites Available

Battling-Addiction.com
Battling-Cancer.com
Battling-Depression.com
Battling-HeartandStroke.com
Battling-MS.com
Battling-Obesity.com
Battling-Schizophrenia.com
Battling-Stress.com

If you have suggestions for another ‘Battling’ series … feel free to suggest it.

There is a Forum (FYI)

Battling-Forums.com
Take care
HART (1-800-HART)
HART-Empire Network

In the meantime .. I will be posting Ezine and other “encyclopedic type” of articles to keep those blogs active – and generate some new frequency of postings that has been lacking in these blogs to date .. (and maybe make them eligible for Text-Link advertising opportunities sooner)

About Pinging etc

Blogwise.com

* In the past few days .. I’ve been thinking about ways to increase traffic – besides adding sites to my own directory listing – one was to make sure that my sites were included in other directories. The first one that came up in a google search was Blogwise. Now .. I checked – but I only had 2 of my sites listed. So, over the past weekend I had been adding all of my sites to their listing.

* But .. I’m not holding my breath .. look at their stats … 65904 blogs listed .. 86141 blogs waiting to be approved … 142 blogs added in the last 7 days. At this rate .. it would take 11.67 years before they included all these blogs waiting to be approved!

SO I TWEAKED MY FEEDBURNER ACCOUNT

I use Feedburner.com to manage my RSS feed and various settings .. and this is what I did for every blog that I have in my account with them … I double checked to make sure that my Pingshot was activated.

Goto … PUBLICIZE // PINGSHOT //

Basically .. when you publish content and it goes to your feedburner account and RSS feed .. this pingshot will supposedly also inform .. Technorati, MyYahoo, Bloglines, PubSub, Ping-o-matic, and Newsgator.

You can also select up to five other choices of services to ‘ping’ out of eleven others: Feedster, IceRocket, Weblogs.com, BlogBuzzMachine, Blogdigger, Syndic8, Feedblitz, BlogBlogs, Blogarkivet.net, Bloggrevyen.com, FeedCrier, and Google.

And Don’t Forget My WordPress Options

Sometimes .. in my wordpress option .. I automatically preset different pinging URLs … under .. OPTIONS // WRITING //

(The default) rpc.pingomatic.com/
(technorati) rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
(feedburner) www.feedburner.com/fb/a/pingSubmit?bloglink=%5BRSS FEED URL]
(google) blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
(pingomatic) URL Shortened

Sometimes, I just leave the default – it posts faster when I click publish – and hope that Feedburner really does distribute it to everywhere I mention in my pingshot.

Technorati Rank: 94,003?

It’s not a secret that I hate Technorati for my own personal reasons and do not use any of its features – whether they may be good or not … but sometimes my REFER stats take me there and I look.

Most of my blogs seems to range from a Rank: 2,181,696 (0 links from 0 sites) .. to a Rank: 219,554 (82 links from 16 sites) except for my PetLvr blog. It seems to have broken the 100,000 mark. It seems to be the only site that is being scraped by some other shady sites (but giving me a link to the original post, so I haven’t complained) .. and Technorati is showing current postings on this blog.

WooHoo! I’m one in 100,000!

* Whatever dude.

SmallOfficeHerald.com

Martin is busy putting the final touches on his site planning for a December 1, 2006 Grand Opening … and so far – I like the tweaking of his template. It’s nice and clean – Like the date at the top .. and especially the Classifieds page .. it’s different.

>> UPDATE: Oh! And the “More” (read full article) hilited line – Like that a lot actually. << Awww .. only for Aussies you say? YAH - Me too.

Our RSS Feed is now available by Channel

For this HART-Empire.com (HART-Empire Network) site .. you are now able to grab an RSS Feed for all our sites in one easy feed .. or by channel. The feeds follow the sections found on our network code in all of our sidebars.

* HART-Empire Network II – (All Blogs In Our Network)
* HART-Empire Network II – (Pet Related Blogs)
* HART-Empire Network II – (Entertainment Blogs)
* HART-Empire Network II – (Shopping Blogs)
* HART-Empire Network II – (Opinionated Blogs)
* HART-Empire Network II – (Small Business & Finance Blogs)
* HART-Empire Network II – (Sports Related Blogs)
* HART-Empire Network II – (Health & Fitness Blogs)
* HART-Empire Network II – (Personal & Security Blogs)

I have included the above links in all the sites .. being the RSS Feed URL and the actual URL of the site. In all cases, if you prefer to receive one daily update of all posts in our network or by channel .. the option to subscribe via email is also provided in the sidebars above.

HART-Empire Network II – How I Created Each Site

I have created a secondary site .. HART-Network.com (HART-Empire Network II) and each site is a separate and unique blog created specifically for this purpose. I created the first site in the root and setup MySQL database options in the wp-config.php file. After it was created, I just copied the entire root and subfolders into a NEW folder on my local hard drive, and then uploaded into unique sub-folders for each channel. I would change the tables in the config file only before creating the new blog. For instance, the default wp-config-sample.php suggests tables of “wp_” but, I use tables that identifies the blog. I might use “network_” and “pets_” and “shop_” (etc etc) as the tables.

I should note that I am using the WordPress Default 1.6 by Michael Heilemann as the THEME for each blog for a reason. It has widget support .. and you can easily modify the header colors and shading and font. I should mention, that if you come regularly to any of these sites .. I will be changing the colors often just for the heck of it! Here’s how the screen option looks.

When I first create a new site, during the 5-minute install .. I would play with the header and then fix the options the way I like. More on that in the next section.

This Is How I Created Each New Blog

* I copy all the files into the appropriate directory
* I set the wp-config.php variables accordingly
* I do the famous 5-minute install
* I login with the password provided, go to USER and fill in my details, and turn off the rich editor.
* I go to PLUGINS and activate the ones that I want ..
* I modify OPTIONS similar to the way I prefer them – in all my blogs (I like to have another one in an open tab)
* I create a new feedburner feed for the blog (see below – I did it this time in conjunction with setting up my widgets)
* I decided to add google adsense link unit under each header, and the links above for each sites’ URL and RSS Feed
* I decided to not include all of the syndication buttons that I normally have in my sidebars (like on this blog)

All in all, the first one took me about 30 minutes, but each subsequent one took 10 minutes to do the above process. When it came time for the last item (adsens and links) I did all of the sites with the same code to make things simpler and faster using copy/paste and it sure speeded things up.

Why and How Am I Using Widgets

Yes .. there is such a thing called widgets … in wordpress – you need two things:

* The Sidebar Widgets Plugin
* A WordPress theme that can utilize widgets in the sidebar

Basically, if you have a theme – you can do whatever you want with it and your sidebar – even if you activate the widget plugin. But, once you start playing with it .. the widgets takes over and your sidebar is organized the way you want. You just grab and drop a widget box in the order you want. And, you can create many text widgets and RSS widgets as you like. A “Text Widget” is basically a section block that you can insert anything into it. It uses the heading CSS just like any other heading (Archives, Meta, Etc) and it’s obvious pretty flexible. The RSS Widget is a great way to bring some other RSS Feed headlines into your sidebar. For all of the sites .. I have standardized the widgets so the RSS widget includes the main 100% feed of all sites – but only the last 10 headlines. Check it out. And, you can see the order of widgets each of my blogs now have – based on the following image:

* In TEXT 1 – I am using the feedburner codes for (1) large RSS button, (2) Feedburner count and (3) Email subscription option
* In TEXT 2 – I left blank for the heck of it – for now
* In RSS 1 – I just include the RSS feed of the HART-Network.com site and added a description
* In TEXT 3 – I have just copied the standard Network Stuff that all sites have in our sidebars.

And .. How Am I Getting All of These Feeds?

If you are an owner of a little network of blogs yourself .. I highly recommend this technique. Although, it is quite a dangerous plugin – if you ask me .. because people can literally steal your feed .. and place it on their blog. The way that I am doing things, is that if you click on the title of any post that is retrieved, you will jump to the original post on the original blog that it was written. However, you can set your options to leave the permalink as part of the same blog, instead of the source blog.

If you are using this feature – PLEASE! GET PERMISSION FIRST! Don’t be a dooty!~ or whatever they are calling those who steal feeds and earn money from that… // But – to me, internet is about sharing so this is how I did it:

* FeedWordPress Plugin – just like any other plugin .. you copy the files into your plugin folder, and activate it
* There is an update-feeds.php file which must go into your wp-content folder
* You modify the options in the OPTIONS section
* You add RSS Feeds under a new option in the LINKS section
* I setup a cron job directly through my cPanel of my host server to run the update-feeds file every fixed period of time.

And that’s it! Neat, huh?

If anybody needs more detailed questions answered .. feel free to ask in the comments. In the meantime .. if you are a subscriber to the HART-Empire Network Blog (HART-Empire.com) or the 62-151 Media Group Blog (62-151.com) .. I have added those RSS Feeds to be included in the SMALL BUSINESS & FINANCE CHANNEL feeds.

Enjoy~

Feist – ListenToFeist.com

* I like the navigational grid of options that one can do to explore this site. It’s almost .. “fun” to surf this site! Just like it is with the Don’t Click It site!

* Is it just me .. but .. is this starting to piss anybody else off too?

I’ve been seeing this plumber guy a LOT this past weekend!

From the Bloggy-Network – BloggyGeek & BloggyPro

From the Cutline Demo Site

* I like the “div” overlay and fixed positioning of the network graphic and link (on the bloggy sites) and a favorite or popular post (on the cutline demo site) directly on the masthead t0p graphic. Of course, it looks better when the links work completely – when you click on the little graphic you go to the link, and it doesn’t affect the title and name of the blog – so when you click on the title – you go to the home or start page.

Bloggy-Network should be doing this on all of their sites .. it’s a good idea!

About Backups

* For most of my blogs, I use the two plugins WP-CRON and WP-DB-BACKUP to backup MySQL Database and email it to my gmail account. Currently, I am at 9% capacity. Google is great that way! And, when space starts to become a factor, I will just delete the oldest backups.

* For some of my blogs, the WP-CRON does not work and I have to manually perform the backup of this plugin myself, to my gmail account.

* For one of my blogs that the WP-CRON didn’t work, I had managed to set up a wp-cron script directly through my cPanel of my server to do this automated backup automatically .. but I never documented how I did it .. and have yet to figure it out on the other ones I do a manual backup.

* My PetLvr account is a mega account with many domains and domain aliases. I wish I did it differently, but when I created my first blog – I created a MySQL Database and left the tables to start with “wp_” .On my next one, for instance for 1800HART.com/blog/ .. I use tables to describe the blog .. so, in my config.php file the tables start with “1800HART_” .. and so on and so on. Despite what I do – there is no way any wp-cron or wp-db-backup plugin will either manually or automatically backup my entire MySQL Database. So what I do .. is just do daily backups of the core files of the blog only – for each blog. It seems to work, but it’s quite fragmented and I’m not backing up all the tables .. like the stats, the refer files, some I probably don’t use anymore, and others.

* So – for this mega MySQL Database – once a week I manually backup the database through MyPHPadmin tool, from my cPanel on my server. I carefully follow the same directions that I always do when I want a “good” backup ..

* This MySQL Database is 223 MB in size. Sometimes I worry about how big it can go .. although, my ISP suggests that it can be as big as 2-4 GIG in size … and I shouldn’t worry yet – although, it might not be a good idea to creating new series of database tables created by any new wordpress installation – which, I stopped doing last September 2005.

* I’m more worried about me forgetting to backup the database one weekend, and then forgetting the next weekend – and so on and so on – and then something bad happens.

* Have you’ve seen the designs out there that I like?

I would like to sponsor a wordpress template for the community .. suitable for my own network site and the individual sites .. based on some of the suggestions I made about what I like in a few designs out there as listed in the above category in conjunction with a designers unique vision of design.

I’m looking for new, cutting edge, valid, clean and unique designs .. that would work sensibly on pet related sites or health and fitness related sites or small business related sites and any type of site that is out there. Something that is user friendly for all situations for the reader.

I would want to share a link on this new design .. and I will host the download site and demo site on my server. Having a theme starting with HART ..like HART-theme .. would be cool 🙂

Preferably, for myself .. I would like to see a template that works for both wordpress and wordpress MU installations.

Also, for myself .. I would be interested in the design and creation of new logos, mastheads, graphic titles etc for my own sites within the HART-Empire Network and for the channels (pet related, opinionated, entertainment, etc – see sidebar)

Given that .. I am cash poor .. I was wondering if any interested designers would be interested in the following:

* Fixed text-link ads or banner ads on any site and as many sites of mine in the HART-Empire Network for an agreed monthly price value per blog and for as little or as long as you want – as part of a contra or reduction of price.
* Balance to be paid monthly out of my online advertising revenues I am receiving every month (text-link-ads/google adsense) – What I earn online into my paypal account 100% will go to pay off the balance.
* Work performed could start after the first paypal payment but advertising could start immediately

If this interests you – please FIRST look at the above category URL, that I linked above, for a start to brainstorming ideas and get in touch with me using my contact form button off of the top menu.

I know it’s tough out there .. and what a good design can be worth .. but I am only interested in getting a new one at this time under the above conditions. However, nothing is written in stone and I am negotiable and will consider alternative options.

Thank-You.