John Dilbeck Musings

I am slowly making progress in converting all of my blogs over to WordPress (with the single exception of John Dilbeck And Friends which will continue to be powered by Manilla.)

The more I use WordPress, the better I like it.

One thing I’ve been doing is using categories rather extensively on several of my blogs.

On Syndicate Your Ad, I have a category for every state in the USA, all the provinces in Canada, and other countries as I need to create them. The reason for this is that each category has its own RSS feed and I syndicate those feeds on dozens of Squidoo lenses and other websites.

I’m way behind in blogging these offers, but I decided it was best to take the time I needed to create an infrastructure for promoting the offers. Now that I’ve almost completed that, I’ll get back to updating the blog this month or next. Then, it will be easy to update it every couple of days or so.

I’ve tested several other blogs to see how well they work when generating multiple RSS feeds based on category, and after several months of use, I’m going to convert all of them over to WordPress. As far as I’m concerned, it offers the best value in terms of power, flexibility, extensibility, and ease of use. So, the others will be ditched.

All of this takes time, but by the first of 2007, or so, I’ll have everything working as I want and can spend just a few hours a week keeping them updated.

So, now I have an easy way to generate information that flows from blog to lens, website, and other blog.

Now, I’m thinking about how I can complete the flow back to the originating blogs or if that is even something that needs doing.

I got the idea a few minutes ago when I was looking at my newest lens: Dolly Parton.

On the top right corner of the lens, there is the standard icon for RSS feeds. When I looked at it, the feed showed my description for the lens and it was repeated as a link item with the date of last updating.

As far as information is concerned, it doesn’t look too interesting to me, but it does look interesting in terms of the date of last update. I’m wondering if this is one of the mechanisms Squidoo uses to rank lenses in terms of “freshness” or recentness of update.

How can I use that for myself?

I still don’t know the answer to that question, but I’m going to be musing about it the next few days as I go about my marketing efforts.

Do you have any thoughts about it?

Over the last six months, I’ve been doing a lot of work to learn more about blogging and syndication, using a variety of tools.

One of the things I wanted to do was to create multiple blogs on specific topics. I’m interested in, and do, a lot of different things, and I didn’t want to confuse someone who was reading a story about marketing in one message and then one about nonprofits in another and making customized t-shirts in a third.

How can you build a readership when your blog has no focus?

So, I decided to use the easiest tool I could find: Blogger.

I built about two dozen blogs and learned how to syndicate them on multiple sites using javascript, iframes, and php. Things were going great, and I was getting ready to turn my attention away from building the infrastructure to writing more about the topics to which each blog was devoted.

However, about a month ago, Blogger installed new software, apparently, and I started going through a round of being blocked, then whitelisted, then blocked again, and so forth. Finally a couple of days ago, I had had enough of it and decided to move all my marketing, affiliate marketing, and network marketing blogs off Blogger. But, I didn’t want to lose what I’d written.

So, I registered Blog Feed Syndication and archived over 20 of those blogs there. Since they’ll no longer be powered by Blogger, they are suspended until I find a new way to do what I want without having to do a lot of extra work in the process.

I’m testing WordPress for this, but really don’t know enough about it to make a determination if that’s the way I want to go or not.

Ideally, I’ll find a way to blog in one place, choose separate categories for each posting — as I can do here with Radio Userland — and generate a separate RSS feed for each category that can be syndicated as I want. So, I have some learning to do over the next few days.

I did decide to leave my Cherokee County, NC Blog and Murphy, NC 28906 Blog on Blogger for now. Since they do not have the marketing characteristics of some of my other blogs, perhaps they won’t trip the new algorithms that have caused me so much trouble over the last few weeks.

(Update: September, 2006 - I’ve restarted both those blogs using WordPress and I’ll be reloading the old postings from the archives to the new blogs as I have time.)

In the meantime, I believe I have archived my test postings from my blogs so I can access that information and use it again, if I need to do so.

One lesson I’ve learned, again, is not to trust a free service enough to try to build a business around it, especially when their terms of service tell me my only recourse is to stop using the service if I don’t like what’s happening.

I’m old enough to have learned that lesson decades ago, but I keep making the mistake that I can trust people I don’t know, systems over which I have no control nor influence, and the inevitable gremlins that find new places to live.

Back to the drawing board, one more time.

A few months from now, I’ll probably laugh about this new opportunity to have a learning experience.