Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

Launching a new blog is a peculiar thing to do in many ways.

This blog for instance has been running for a little over four years now. From before that time I’ve had a domain sitting around which I basically just used for e-mail so I thought that I’d use it as something of a soapbox for a change.

It’s odd in some ways as it seems like forever since I started a blog totally from scratch.

What’s involved?

Well, registering the domain is the first step normally but I’d done that 10 years back for the new blog. Next is to get some hosting but then I’ve that already done. Then, it’s loading the software which takes about 20 minutes and another 20 or so to get the various plugins sorted out.

At that point, it’s ready to go but it looks pretty plain so you end up spending ages searching for a decent template for it before making that historic first post.

After that, you need to register it all over the place eg at FeedBurner to handle the subscribers, Technorati to get some blog type stats. Then you’ve to start adding it to blog aggregation services to pick up a little traffic although you can short-circuit that process by using one of the manual submission services to do it for you ($23 well spent).

Then it’s down to the slog of writing posts with no feedback from an audience for the first few months (which is why most blogs stagger to a halt after 2 or 3 months).

Oh, at some point you need to pick a topic for your blog too. In this case, not so easy as “soapbox” usually doesn’t appear as a blog category!

I thought that we were home and dry with the various blogs on the new hosting service and had just one last blog to move.

Apparently not though as the feed for this blog ain’t working which is probably why the number of subscribers has dropped off somewhat. Feeds are, of course, something that you don’t normally look at yourself so everything seems fine even if they aren’t and it was only when I tried to sign up for a new blog aggregator that the problem surfaced.

Anyway, I’m having another go at installing this blog, this time starting from scratch so it should be a clean upload but as the problem is related to some odd characters that WordPress saw fit to insert itself it might be a little while before everything is back the way that it should have been.

That’ll “just” leave the forum and the two directories to move over. I’m not really that bothered about the forum as such and it wouldn’t be a great loss if I just dropped it. The directories are rather larger though and need moving over.

It has taken AGES but finally Foreign Perspectives is over onto the new hosting service. Well, I hope so anyway as the last attempt a month or so back didn’t work out due to several technical hitches which I think I’ve resolved this time.

One big problem I find is that the blog has been on the go so long long (just into it’s fourth year!) that it’s very big and the photos that I’ve collected over that time amount to megabytes. Combine that and you end up with all kinds of time-outs when you try to use the normal (read: easy) ways of moving it.

Anyway, fingers crossed it’s operational now.

One of the oddities of blogging is that it’s very easy to change the overall look of a blog without affecting the content at all.

Now, on the whole outside the regular readership most people arrive on a blog by way of a search engine of some sort. Some are blog specific, some are generic like google but either way they don’t see the site until they click on the search result ie it doesn’t really matter what the blog looks like as far as these people are concerned.

It’s different once they get to the site of course and if you want to keep them as regular readers you’ll need a look that’s appealing to them. Oh, and some interesting content of course.

Anyway, now that I’ve spruced up the template for Foreign Perspectives, I’ve picked up several new subscribers which is one plus point for the new template.

Whilst this isn’t really an out and out financial blog as such I write about various financial topics from time to time as you’ve probably noticed.

What’s odd about them is that any time I write about something financial, I always get a little flurry of incoming links from an assorted collection of blog aggregation services. They’re always blog aggregators rather than real blogs too whereas any other incoming links are almost always from real blogs.

Why that should be the case I’ve no idea but it’s certainly handy in increasing the number of incoming links to the site.