• scissors
    December 23rd, 2006HARTQuickies

    * Alternate Title: Quickies – December 23, 2006

    (but I like the next subject title better …..)

    * Christmas Slowdown – Traffic Wise

    In about 2 hours .. our own local Food Festival begins and ends on Wednesday December 27 for Brunch by joining our families and relatives for lunches, dinners and yes – christmas too.

    This past week, I wouldn’t call it a “Food Fest” .. but, more or less a “Chocolate Festival” and/or “Cheese Ball & Cracker Festival” because, well .. my wife found a few good recipes and is now off work here at home until the new year 2007!

    We have been visiting people .. lots of people! And, everybody has food or treats on the table!

    MENTAL NOTE: Include “dieting” on 2007 New Year’s Resolution List

    But – I still am finding bits and pieces of time to log into my email, check my bloglines, read my daily reads of blogs, add a comment here and there, surf MyBlogLog readers blogs .. but, I am seeing less posting .. and also noticed that what is happening to other people’s blogs .. also is happening with our blogs .. a SLOWDOWN. I still am reading many posts .. but, they are also ‘QUICKIES’ (like this one) .. basically wishing their readers a happy holiday and merry christmas.

    Yup … there’s lots of traffic at the local shopping sites and malls around time and the main routes .. but the traffic sure is slowing down here on the internet.

    Actually – everywhere I look (that has public stats) .. it seems that the traffic peaked Thursday .. and is now crawling to a standstill – hopefully until Xmas and Boxing Day .. and then will get back to normal levels. Well, at least that’s what CLUE I am getting from this all, and will try to stay away from the computer until Boxing Day … even to check for new Spam Emails!! ~~

    Traffic This Week at HART-Empire.com

    The nice thing about not having much traffic, is that the graph doesn’t have to fall as hard in its downward direction like these two sites 😀

    Traffic This Week at Problogger.net

    Traffic This Week at Gawker.com

    * It’s nice to see that in general, people are getting off the computer and slipping back into reality mode and (hopefully) celebrating the holidays with their family, friends, loved ones and PETS!

    Merry Christmas Folks! See you on Boxing Day!

    (wow … look at the traffic on those OTHER two graphs, eh? We’ve got a long way to go!)

    oh .. and ALL THE BEST IN 2007 .. but, I’ll probably add that on my New Year’s Eve Posting

  • scissors
    December 22nd, 2006HARTHmmmm Things

    uuumm …. nope! Don’t look at me~ They’re not MY tips!

    I’m one of those “instant messenging” type of people who honestly believe that one should type like you talk. I guess the first major platform that I chatted the most was with PowWow .. where you can actually SEE the other person typing as they type it. It’s not like the MSN Messenger of today that you have to click SEND before the other person sees it. It was soooooooo annoying to watch people correct their spelling while they type!

    I’m lucky – I can type really really fast – as fast as I can talk, with almost 99% accuracy. I left off the 1% because, I am not perfect and do type mistakes – but, I immediately recognize when my fingers hit the wrong keys … even when I’m not looking at the screen.

    I do have some guidelines that I give myself with respect to my blogs .. that is to click SAVE AND CONTINUE before I click the PUBLISH button. This way, I can give it AT LEAST a once over.

    If I’ve taken the time to do a lot of research, linking, created supporting data, and added extra calculations and other important items to my blog post .. then, YES .. I go out of my way to double check my grammar and spelling and also save it as a draft to leave overnight. This way, I give it a fresh look in the morning. But, honestly .. that’s not too often that I do that.

    You know what? It’s good to find sites like the following, to refresh your thinking and embed some techniques to help you “get it right”- most of the time – in the first place! I highly recommend that you bookmark these two pages from the Dumb Little Man – Tips For Life blog … and if you don’t – at least give it a ONCE OVER read!

    I know that I’ve started to and plan to read every word – at least once! There is some great tips and advice here.

    40+ Tips to Improve your Grammar and Punctuation

    50 Tools that can Increase your Writing Skills

  • scissors
    December 22nd, 2006HARTQuickies

    * Picture Festival going on at PetLvr.com

    I’ve figured out a way to “Blog-This” pictures from Flickr and display them every 2 hours over in my PetLvr blog from 0:01am December 22, 2006 throughout 11:59pm December 26, 2006 … Nobody has sent me any pictures of their pet yet. I guess there really are too many blogs out there and social bookmarking systems .. everybody wants to post pictures of their own dogs in their own account or in their own blog!

    * What do you think of this? www.techwonderful.com/

    You just gotta Luv that MyBlogLog widget on the sites .. because if I have a few moments, I really do surf the communities and websites of the reader’s face that pops up in my sidebar. And, the above site was one of my readers (sorry for pointing you out).

    I’m just not sure that I get the point of this site. I think I would prefer more of a site that summarizes stuff like the One Big Gadget site does .. with feed links, rather than the whole site like TechCrunch .. but, that’s just me. Why wouldn’t I just go to the site directly .. instead of viewing it through someone else’s server and frames?

  • scissors
    December 21st, 2006HARTQuickies

    * OMG! Is it December 21, 2006 already? My How Time Flies!

    I just want to wish everybody Seasons’ Greetings and all the best for 2007!

    My how time flies. EATING SEASON starts tomorrow night and ends on Monday night for this household .. but, we hope to get some celebration during the holidays with family and friends during this EAT-FEST.. if we can 😀

    * Attention: PetLvrs With ‘Pictures of Pets in a Christmas Theme’

    Well, it’s been 5 days since I posted the following announcement, and still no emails .. comments .. attachments .. pictures .. *sigh* .. oh well! At least I’ve got two willing papillon dogs (Maxxie and Sophie) and a cat (Zeussie Pussie Cat) plus two unwilling participants (Cousin Sammi and Cousin Alfie) .. They’ll help me out! And .. you can too, if you want – Please!

    Announcement

    From Friday December 22, 2006 00:01am until Tuesday December 26, 2006 11:59pm .. I will be posting only pictures of pets in a Christmas theme. This could mean pictures of pets in santa costumes, next to a christmas tree, opening presents, jumping out of a wrapped box .. etc etc etc.

    I will be posting mostly pictures from online social sites (i.e. Flickr, etc) .. but everybody is welcome to send me your own picture of your pet in a Christmas theme directly to my inbox!

    Send your pictures to .. hart (at) PetLvr (dot) com … with subject “Pet in a Christmas Theme” for consideration

    By the way .. if anybody reading this knows of a way to “BLOG-THIS” pictures in Flickr.com directly to one’s own blog in DRAFT mode … can you please email me or get ahold of me on Google Talk? 1800hart (at) gmail (dot com) for Google Talk.

    * SEO For Everybody – Even for me!

    I can’t believe what a mess all my blogs are .. speaking in a uniformity type of manner – different versions, different plugins, different layouts, different codes, etc .. but that’s to be expected. In the upcoming month or so, I will be trying to standardize these sites a little better. This would include such blank statements as me trying to pick and choose similar plugins that are set for ALL my sites .. to make things easier.

    I started a folder in the root of my hard drive called “Plugins” and sub-folders for each version of wordpress that I still have. I am just copying all of the plugin folders in my wp-content folder online to the appropriate version. Then, when I upgrade to the latest version – a decision will be made.

    In the meantime – I have spent this past week (since last Sunday afternoon .. in my spare time between jobs and during stress relief) – by adding and activating two specific plugins to every single blog that I have

    > Autometa Plugin (this has all been done!)
    > Google Sitemaps Plugin (about half way)

    I’m not sure about the Autometa plugin.. that is not sure that it’s working to my benefit. If you go to any permalink page and view source you can see something happening though. I’m pretty sure that the Google Sitemaps is a good thing to create .. although I am finding it does not work with any sites that I’ve used DagonDesign’s DD Sitemap plugin – because I created a page in WordPress called sitemap. I’m leaving those 6 sites of mine until last. All in all .. another experiment to see if these two items -with me doing absolutely nothing extra – will make any difference.

  • scissors
    December 19th, 2006HARTHART-Empire Network

    This post is part of the Problogger Group Writer Project for December 2006. For more details on how you can participate, please go to: Problogger Group Writing Project Reviews and Predictions.

    I applaud other bloggers out there willing to discuss openly their online business plan, their earnings, costs, obstacles and feelings and moods and stories and expertise and so on and so on and everything else in between! Today I write this post not to openly discuss my own online business known as the HART-Empire Network .. but, in hopes to win some JUICY random prizes from Problogger! 🙂 Haha .. just kidding! But seriously folks … I’m just like you .. trying to figure out what the heck is really happening out here, and trying to make something out of it. I am not a Problogger (although sometimes by the amount of time that I spent it would seem that I am) .. but if I could seriously make money with this I would seriously consider becoming a full-time Problogger. As such, this post is me .. HART (1-800-HART) .. trying to figure out what the hell really happened in 2006 and add some thoughts where I hope to take this network in 2007 …

    Status Of The Network

    I still consider the HART-Empire Network to be a network of blogs, rather than one of those typical ‘Blog Networks’ or even other name like “new media” or “magazine” or “portal” etc. I did not attempt in any way to recruit new members or blogs into this network, and despite having a “Join This Network” button directly on the top menu of this site and at the bottom of every network code in every sidebar in every blog part of this network .. there were no takers or askers.

    Blogs and sites that I put online during 2006, in date order

    (January 1, 2006) The-Singers.com (January 9, 2006) CurlingBlog.com CurlingBlog.com/kleibrink/ CurlingBlog.com/gushue HART-Empire.com (January 28, 2006) Battling-Cancer.com Battling-Depression.com Battling-MS.com Battling-Shizophrenia.com (February 27, 2006) Battling-Obesity.com Battling-Stress.com (March 5, 2006) HBSMC.com Battling-HeartandStroke.com Battling-Addiction.com Battling-Forums.com (June 30, 2006) DogLvr.com CatLvr.com (August 8, 2006) BirdLvr.com FishLvr.com HorseLvr.com (August 11, 2006) HART-oscope.com AndYouRetire.com (August 17, 2006) 62-151.com (September 13, 2006) PlanetEarthPeaceParty.com PlanetEarthResearchFoundation.com (September 25, 2006) Medieval-Site.com (October 12, 2006) The-Furniture-Site.com (October 29, 2006) HART-Network.com hart-network.com/pet-related/ hart-network.com/entertainment/ hart-network.com/shopping/ hart-network.com/opinionated/ hart-network.com/small-business/ hart-network.com/sports-related/ hart-network.com/health-and-fitness/ hart-network.com/personal-and-security/ (December 10, 2006) The-Lingerie-Site.com Item-Site.com

    Summary of These Additions

    The Battling-Series of blogs came into being when my mother-in-law was diagnosed with cancer on January 18, 2006. It was a total shock to everybody, and she passed away May 26, 2006. Ruth’s husband Chris has multiple sclerosis and my brother is schizophrenic. And to top that off – everybody could lose a few pounds and get back into shape! Ruth and I were talking about possibilities of a new health and fitness channel and it seemed like a good thing to do. I personally wanted these sites to be both a celebrity type of blog (look who’s got this disease now) and an inspirational blog (people battling the disease talking about it). The hope was to be another blog out there bringing about greater public awareness, if I could.

    The LVR-Series of blogs came into becoming an expansion of the PetLvr blog’s breed information category. If you want to know about dogs, look at PetLvr blog. If you want to know about breeds of dogs, look at DogLvr blog. That simple.

    The SITE-Series of shopping sites were an expansion of certain categories of my 1-800-HART’s Picks blog and certain categories. I wanted to separate the Medieval site .. because in a way, it tied into my HARTandYVONNE site, with our 2002 Medieval wedding and all that etc. I also wanted to separate the furniture categories because I think of all the categories, this is one that I can purposely expand outside of a ‘strictly shopping site’ into much more .. like a home improvement, building tips and other house renovation topics besides furniture. I recently created a lingerie site because I like to look at lingerie .. Guilty! 🙂

    I’m glad that I created those HART-Network.com sites (HART-Empire Network II) that aggregates all the RSS feeds for each channel into one feed. I’m using a combination of a plugin plus cron jobs setup in my cPanel on my server to accomplish this .. each sub-site and main site searches all associated blogs in the channels every 2 hours for an update and posts it automatically. Neat, eh? This domain was actually registered before HART-Empire.com but, at the time in October 2005 .. I thought it sounded too .. infomercial. (Join The HART-Network and receive the fabulous prize behind door number two!)

    Other individual sites came into being for a specific reason .. like . The-Singers (it’s my last name) HART-Oscope (I had a similar blog on blogspot) and the Planet Earth Sites (Don’t ask! – but watch for this is the summer of 2007) etc etc.

    Milestones During 2006

    * David Sifry from Technorati called me a splogger and banned all my sites from Technorati in April 2006
    * In October 2006 my sites took a beating during the Google Dance wrt Page Ranks ..
    * October 16, 2006 marked the 1-year blogiversary of the HART-Empire Network
    * PetLvr reached its 2000th post October 27, 2006

    Bloggers Wanted for Battling-Series of blogs

    I am pretty much seeking bloggers to take over my health and fitness blogs .. with the disclaimer being, that I’m not actually seem to be seeking people too “actively”. Currently, there is not much traffic nor is there much revenues being generated. Two good reasons NOT to come on board! But .. it’s not earning revenues and I have to figure out ways to do that .. because it sure would be nice to just hand over some existing revenue base to go along with the blog to a new writer. In the past I have left it in the hands of such sites and organizations that rank its eligibility on Alexa rankings, and page ranks .. and once rejected it is quite hard to get a second chance. If any of you are reading this, and interested .. give me a shout.

    Outlook of HART-Empire Network in 2007

    I must assume that unless I can find bloggers, the same results will occur as you see in the above graph during 2007 that occurred in 2006. My offline business is my meat and gravy, and that’s accounting, income tax preparation and consulting. Most of my offline work happens in the first half of the calendar year. For the second half of the year, as I rebuild lagging network traffic and blogging empire! All in all, I hope that I am still here – “With My Zircon Encrusted Tweezers” – on my second anniversary in October 2007.

    Estimated Revenues for 2006

    I’ve spent about $1000 USD on web hosting between my two sites – believe it or not .. DOWN from 2005. I pay $9.oo USD inclusive per year per domain registered and renewed through Chuga (and you can count the domains above). There are additional costs and revenues associated with product sales, and Ebay sales and other sales .. but strictly speaking from revenues earned by my blogs in the HART-Empire Network in 2006 .. extrapolating expected sales during December 1-19, 2006 for the entire month .. here is what I will probably earn in the year:

    Google Adsense – $800.00
    Chitika Minimall – $75.00
    Amazon.com – $100.00
    Text-Link-Ads – $1,050.00
    Private Text Link ads – $1,500
    Clickbank Products – $45.00
    CafePress products – $55.00
    Other Affiliate products (sharesale/cj/linksynergy/private sites) – $40.00

    >> Total $3,665 USD

    Not bad, but where the heck is all that money? Spread that over 12 months and it gets eaten up really fast. At best, some sites were redirected into Ebay purchases, or transfers to my bank or credit card for minimum payments, or used for domain registrations ..

    For 2007 my hopes is to get as much possible value to my sites to be eligible for more revenue opportunities, and I have signed up with some other sites .. but yet to earn revenue .. with sites like Performancing .. Linkworth .. BlogKits .. Linkconnector .. Vizu Polls .. etc. If there any sites out there wishing to advertise on more than 40 blogs that I personally control covering at least 31 unique domain names, for a bulk price .. I am willing to discuss and consider offers! Text Links. Banners. Whatever.

    Goals For 2007?

    My financial goals remain the same as it was for 2005 and 2006 that I have wanted, since I started blogging in May 2005. I hope to accumulate and earn enough revenues to take my wife on a deserved vacation over the XMAS holidays of 2007 now .. because she deserves it most! So, in order to do that – I figure AT LEAST 2x’s or 3x’s my 2006 earnings will be the goal to reach.

    I do have plans for a few non-blog sites .. For now .. the immediate plans for 2007 will be a new facelift for the blogs .. and learn better SEO practices. I have slowly started implementing some ‘social’ practices on my sites .. and honestly, it’s not making much of a difference – but, a difference is noted for the good. I’m willing to continue with these social experiments over the next few months and see how this all progresses. Other than that? Live. Learn. Prosper.

    call HART crazy .. but

    .. that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

  • scissors
    December 17th, 2006HARTQuickies

    MyBlogLog Communities

    You know .. I’ve enjoyed watching who is reading my blogs, and following the links at times surfing other members’ communities and sites.

    So, I finally decided to put up those Who’s Who That is Reading Me block of faces in the sidebar, just before the meta/admin section. If you have signed up with MyBlogLog .. your picture should show up! And, if you are ashamed and do not anybody to know that you are actually reading my sites … well, you can just “X” out your picture too!

    I have place the “Readers” widget onto 4 sites at this time:

    * callHART.com/crazy/
    * PetLvr.com/blog/
    * 1800HART.com/blog/
    * HART-Empire.com

    I’m not really sure exactly how the community works .. I know sometimes that I receive emails that I have been added as a contact of another MyBlogLog user .. and when I do I immediately go and add that person as a contact for myself too! I once signed up last year, and in the past 3-4 months .. I suddenly have been seeing a lot of this going around. And I think it’s cool!

    I’m not really sure if I’m supposed to be adding myself to communities or, if memory serves me correctly, the community should KNOW that I am a reader because I visit them quite often. Perhaps someone could enlighten me .. Should I be adding communities myself?

    PS: I wish I could have created HART (1-800-HART) as the user name … that shows up on all the other sites that I visit .. but, the login procedure did not allow for spaces or hyphens or brackets. So, I just signed up as PETLVR … hoping that I could edit my profile to show my real name (HART) … but, it won’t let me do it.

    So .. if you a caricature like the one on the top left of my MastHead header graphic on your site .. please feel free to add me as a contact, or to your community, etc etc .. because .. you should know – that’s me! And, we’re friends, right?

  • scissors
    December 16th, 2006HARTAnnouncements

    YamRoll.com

    I was trying to figure out what the frick I was watching when the lights when out this morning and found this site about the show:

    What I liked about this site, is that it takes human scribblings and uses them as art and structures in the website .. like the entire box, as you can see is not just a box .. the scroll bar .. the type of stuff you can do with the mouse when you go to “stuff” or “characters” section .. etc.

    It’s not a blog, it’s just neat. Thumbs up to the designers!

  • scissors
    December 15th, 2006HARTReviews

    IndiaOnlineToday.com

    This isn’t a blog .. just a website .. that is … SIX (6) COLUMNS WIDE?

    Ouch! Too Much.

    No comment other than that.. I need to take some aspirin pills now to calm my wandering eyes and splitting headache after looking at this site.

  • scissors
    December 12th, 2006HARTQuickies

    * Our Network Code Just Got Smaller

    You might have noticed that our network code in the sidebar shrank this morning .. it did … I believe it was 10 sites that was removed from the network code today.

    RUTH is in the process of a reorganization of all of her sites, deleting a bunch, consolidating a few, creating a couple more … etc .. now that she is all settled in after her recent move mid-November 2006. Once I get a final list I will update the code .. so, you can watch for that! There’s no sense to make another post about it, but it should be by the end of this week.

    Speaking of that link .. I see that I need to also update our BIO page too 🙂 I’ll do that at the same time as above.

    * WordPress Guest Article

    It’s hard NOT to notice that guest article in the dashboard of every friggin blog that I’ve updated today by Aaron Brazell on the WordPress Development Blog. Since Aaron shares the first name with my father .. I’ll give him a link out and congrats with that. It sure beats the old 46 day old Ronan WordPress 2.0.5 notice. I actually wanted to read Aaron’s article!

    And .. what was great news was it for the masses who uses WordPress blogs?

    Absolutely nothing of great importance to us regular wordpress bloggers and users … . (it was written to the developers and writers of plugins) … however, now I have to keep reminding myself that someday soon I shall havee to update all of my blogs from the versions of 1.5.2, 1.5.3, 2.0.1, 2.0.2. 2.04 to the new and upcoming version 2.1

    to: AARON and OTHER DEVELOPERS … Is there any way you can automate the update process on these blogs? It takes forever to upgrade 40-50 blogs … by the time we can finish .. there’s always a newer version coming!

    Okay. I said. I was just putting it “out there”. It was a rhetorical question.

  • scissors
    December 11th, 2006HARTQuickies

    * The Lingerie Site

    I know just what you are looking for christmas this year…

    Another Lingerie and Apparel Blog !

    …. eh?

    Related Posts with Thumbnails
  • « Older Entries

    Newer Entries »