My deliverability blog Spam Resource got about 398,000 visits in 2023. Is that good or bad? It feels good. It's been fun blogging about email, deliverability, mailbox providers, marketing best practices, and all that kind of stuff. Near the end of 2021, I slowly started to overhaul the blog with the hope of increasing visibility and traffic.
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
Hey, what's a Bacon Rodeo?
You might have noticed (or might not have noticed) that this blog now lives at www.baconrodeo.com. I've decided to move the blog off of aliverson.com and turn that URL into a sort of a calling card website with links to all my different blogs and projects and such.
Blogger Lookin' All Fancy 'n Stuff
Check out my fancy new Blogger template. After I re-skinned Spam Resource last week, I figured it was about time to update this blog, as well. I can't remember which tempate this is, but I got it from btemplates.com. It wasn't too hard to drop into place, and wow, it looks so much better than any of the default Blogger templates. It took a bit of time to add-in all the widgets I wanted, and to re-add any links that fell off when I swapped out the template, but that was no big deal.
If anybody out there wants help reskinning their Blogger-hosted blog to make it look a little better, don't hesitate to reach out. I'd be happy to help. I'm looking at you, Toni!
If anybody out there wants help reskinning their Blogger-hosted blog to make it look a little better, don't hesitate to reach out. I'd be happy to help. I'm looking at you, Toni!
Gizmodo: Thanks, but no thanks.
Tis a shame that Gizmodo doesn't get any sort of active feedback when I unsubscribe from their RSS feed, as I've done today. I'm a long time reader of their blog, but they've gone overboard today. The site is completely unreadable, and the posts are filled with crap and/or fake, made up stuff. I know it's April Fool's day, but it's just not funny. One joke (maybe) is funny. Screwing up a large, active site entirely for a whole day is lame.
So, goodbye, Gizmodo. You've been removed from my RSS reader.
And thank you, Engadget, for not doing the same thing.
So, goodbye, Gizmodo. You've been removed from my RSS reader.
And thank you, Engadget, for not doing the same thing.
On the Awesome Level of Discourse...
...in our [Rogers Park neighborhood] blogland community.
As I mentioned previously, Craig Gernhardt asks"Has Joe Moore created a hate in Rogers Park towards military personal?" No word from Joe on whether or not he has stopped beating his wife. However, in the mean time, I'm sure if a gnat farts in the Amazon rain forest, Craig will help us to understand how it's the fault of the local political machine.
As a follow up, Thomas Westgard takes Craig to task for publishing the Grodner police report with the names and personal information of witnesses left intact. Makes sense. Until the bit where Tom calls Craig "an irresponsible drunk."
I took issue with that in comments, and was rewarded with this from Tom: "Oh, now I think I understand your point, Al. You're saying that I should have gone after Craig on the point about the witnesses, but the attack on his drinking habits was gratuitous."
Tom agrees. "That might be true," he says, but then he goes on to call me a "lackey" because I dared to raise the issue. As he seems to have misused the word, I'm not quite sure what he actually meant.
Tom and Craig have a strange, synergistic relationship.
On another note, maybe I should try to ride the #96 bus one last time before it disappears in the doomsday scenario. I moved here from Minneapolis, which is a very, very small town as far as public transit is concerned. They don't have anything like the El, Metra, or the amazingly broad and wide bus coverage that we are lucky to have here in Chicago. I love it, as it has meant that I've had to drive barely once every few weeks, instead of daily, like I did in Minneapolis. And here we are, to the point where Illinois is about to throw away big chunks of the Chicago transit system. It's just amazing and sad. Mass transit is one of the things that makes the Chicago area special, and apparently not enough people realize it.
(ETA: This content was from my old Rogers Park neighborhood blog, now rolled into this one main blog.)
As I mentioned previously, Craig Gernhardt asks"Has Joe Moore created a hate in Rogers Park towards military personal?" No word from Joe on whether or not he has stopped beating his wife. However, in the mean time, I'm sure if a gnat farts in the Amazon rain forest, Craig will help us to understand how it's the fault of the local political machine.
As a follow up, Thomas Westgard takes Craig to task for publishing the Grodner police report with the names and personal information of witnesses left intact. Makes sense. Until the bit where Tom calls Craig "an irresponsible drunk."
I took issue with that in comments, and was rewarded with this from Tom: "Oh, now I think I understand your point, Al. You're saying that I should have gone after Craig on the point about the witnesses, but the attack on his drinking habits was gratuitous."
Tom agrees. "That might be true," he says, but then he goes on to call me a "lackey" because I dared to raise the issue. As he seems to have misused the word, I'm not quite sure what he actually meant.
Tom and Craig have a strange, synergistic relationship.
On another note, maybe I should try to ride the #96 bus one last time before it disappears in the doomsday scenario. I moved here from Minneapolis, which is a very, very small town as far as public transit is concerned. They don't have anything like the El, Metra, or the amazingly broad and wide bus coverage that we are lucky to have here in Chicago. I love it, as it has meant that I've had to drive barely once every few weeks, instead of daily, like I did in Minneapolis. And here we are, to the point where Illinois is about to throw away big chunks of the Chicago transit system. It's just amazing and sad. Mass transit is one of the things that makes the Chicago area special, and apparently not enough people realize it.
(ETA: This content was from my old Rogers Park neighborhood blog, now rolled into this one main blog.)
Here's why I'm starting this [Rogers Park] blog
Rogers Park is a cool and vibrant community. It also has a lot of active bloggers. This is awesome, and I love it. The problem is, there's a subset of bloggers who post weird, abusive and over-the-top things to try to get a rise out of their neighbors.
I've felt deceived a few different times now. Sucked into reading an interesting neighborhood blog. Learning about the politics of the neighborhood, what's going on, who's who, etc. Then, out of nowhere, a blogger posts something offensive or insulting, to make it very clear that THEY'RE ABSOLUTELY RIGHT and everybody else is ABSOLUTELY WRONG AND SHOULD BE PUNCHED IN THE FACE. I think a blog's credibility is damaged when this happens. I think smart people usually act (and write) in a reasoned and restrained manner. When a blogger is doing the opposite, it give me pause. I think that when I don't know a lot about a given situation, that misplaced vitriol, hatred and screaming on a blog are stumbling blocks to understanding. In short, it doesn't help, and it doesn't sway.
I'm not sure where I'm going to go with this, but here's where I'm going to start, by sharing a couple of the crazy things that I've seen lately on local blogs that I thought were just, well, lame.
Tom at Rogers Park Bench posted this loving tribute to North Korea and tyranny in general, entitled "The Left's Historical Support for Tyranny." He seems to have thought better of it and yanked the post back. It had already been pushed out via RSS, so I was able to screen shot it from my Google Reader feed. Gee. Thanks for implying that everybody with even slightly differing politics than your own must obviously be supporters of communism and tyranny.
In a disappointing display of "do as I say, not as I do," Tom documents an instance of this happening on Thomas Westgard's Rogers Park Rake. In this case, Westgard tried to subtly sneak in a Nazi slam against Don Gordon, according to what I saw on my RSS feed. He also had a change of heart, and pulled it back, but not before it was seen by multiple readers. In the post, he compares Don Gordon to Vidkun Quisling. A Nazi reference (even 'subtle' or indirect) is something that I consider to be an argument of last resort. It says that one has no more words, no more brain power, no more ability to actually deconstruct somebody, or their argument, through intelligence. It's the online discussion equivalent of an eight-year old flipping out and throwing rocks on the playground, mad because he can't get his way and doesn't have the words to explain why.
I've been on the internet long enough to already be familiar with Godwin's Law. Apparently not everybody else is.
Comments from the Original Post:
Thomas Westgard said...
I'm familiar with Godwin's Law as well. In fact, if you go back on the Wikipedia post on Godwin's law far enough, you'll find the Westgard's Law analog I put up there several years ago (since removed). The Quisling post was a deliberate reference to Godwin's Law. Part of the point was that the epithets being thrown elsewhere had reached the point of absurdity, and by putting up a post that invoked Godwin's Law, it would point out exactly what you saw. Thank you for noticing, although you didn't carry the point over to the other blogs. Oh, well, can't get everything.
I'm mystified by your perception that the criticism of Gordon in the Vidkun Quisling post was either subtle, or quickly drawn back. It was about as unsubtle as a criticism could be (in fact, isn't that the point of Godwin's Law?), and it stayed up for days. First you think I'm Godwin-level wild, then I'm subtle. Which is it? Perceiving Godwin's Law was good, but Al - your only accomplishment was to read what I wrote! (albeit incompletely) By assuming that only you knew of Godwin's Law, you relieved yourself of the necessity of further thinking why I might deliberately transgress it. By using your own timeframe for how long a post "should" stay up, you set yourself up to see what you wanted to see.
Okay, fine. I'm looking at the future now anyway, which is why I took the Quisling post down (along with the rest of it). Unlike certain other people, I'm not interested in having these discussions follow people around on the web for all eternity. If Don Gordon wants to retire from politics, I suppose I'll let him, although his silly lawsuit needs to die before he can claim retirement.
I'm curious, though, if you can defend your analysis of the Quisling post from where we sit today. You described it as the (forgive the paraphrase) argument of last resort, when the mind fails and the words become the functional equivalent of foaming at the mouth and undermining whatever rational argument may have gone before. The irony of you calling me stupid, then claiming the intended meaning of my post as your own invention, within the same sentence is an irony I've wallowed in a bit too much already, perhaps.
But looking forward - do you perceive that Craig and Mannis have themselves not gone into a Godwin-like foaming zone, most recently e.g. pursuing the operator of a laundromat with righteous indignance, or taking the time to reveal to the world that I sometimes possess drywall?
And more importantly, the things that you truly can control, namely your own blog: If the other blogs are "bad," however you choose to define that, what have you written in your blog that overcomes or outpaces them/us? Whether I, or Craig, or Mannis, have fallen into a pit of blogger foolishness that you alone are able to perceive... Unless there's an irony in this post that I myself am failing to perceive, you started this blog and put up this post with grand intentions of setting it all straight with the writings of Al Iverson.
How's it going?
From the looks of your blog, I would say not very well. There are thousands of people who do nothing, who don't even try, but most of them refrain from passing judgment on others, at least publicly. It's easy enough for you to snipe from the sidelines and pass judgment on the qualities of others, without putting out the work, or taking the chances. But I hope you don't feel yourself to be greatly elevated by the accomplishment of attending no meetings and producing no work. The dead fish stuck to my aquarium filter is accomplishing that much, and it smells better than the logic of your arguments.
Come to think of it, the fish does attend the meetings that occur in my office. The fish also keeps its blogging commitments, which in its case are none. The fish passes judgment on no one, and thus is never wrong. Now, that's worth thinking about.
May 22, 2007 12:09 AM
Al Iverson said...
I love how this turns into a debate about Craig and Tom Mannis, like I secretly must be some stooge of theirs because I take you to task.
As far as taking down old posts, doing so denies a new reader the opportunity to get a sense of history. Regardless of what you wish it would say about you, it very strongly suggests that you're unwilling to stand by what you write. If you're so sure that it needs to be taken down to move forward, get past the anger, "you've made your point," etc., then I would suggest that it wasn't appropriate to begin with.
I patently reject any sort of 'how dare I question you' because I supposedly have yet to do anything that outshines you. When you're the yardstick of how I should be measured, I'll care. Until then, I don't.
Actually, that reminds me. Could you let me know when you do something that outshines me? I'd hate to miss it when/if it finally happens.
May 22, 2007 9:45 AM
Kate Harding said...
Also, you should probably remove that dead fish from your aquarium.
May 22, 2007 9:51 AM
Jocelyn said...
I think your take on the use of Nazi rhetoric is spot on.
Also, I was not familiar with Godwin's law so thanks I just learned something new.
June 13, 2007 9:42 PM
Fargo said...
Welcome to the neighborhood! I hope that you don't think all the verbal nastiness represents the 'hood as a whole. There are lots of good people and cool places to eat and hang out. That's why it's one of my favorite neighborhoods in the city.
C'mon over to
http://fargocats.blogspot.com/2007/08/on-blogging-and-civility.html
Your $0.02?
August 4, 2007 4:40 PM
I've felt deceived a few different times now. Sucked into reading an interesting neighborhood blog. Learning about the politics of the neighborhood, what's going on, who's who, etc. Then, out of nowhere, a blogger posts something offensive or insulting, to make it very clear that THEY'RE ABSOLUTELY RIGHT and everybody else is ABSOLUTELY WRONG AND SHOULD BE PUNCHED IN THE FACE. I think a blog's credibility is damaged when this happens. I think smart people usually act (and write) in a reasoned and restrained manner. When a blogger is doing the opposite, it give me pause. I think that when I don't know a lot about a given situation, that misplaced vitriol, hatred and screaming on a blog are stumbling blocks to understanding. In short, it doesn't help, and it doesn't sway.
I'm not sure where I'm going to go with this, but here's where I'm going to start, by sharing a couple of the crazy things that I've seen lately on local blogs that I thought were just, well, lame.
Tom at Rogers Park Bench posted this loving tribute to North Korea and tyranny in general, entitled "The Left's Historical Support for Tyranny." He seems to have thought better of it and yanked the post back. It had already been pushed out via RSS, so I was able to screen shot it from my Google Reader feed. Gee. Thanks for implying that everybody with even slightly differing politics than your own must obviously be supporters of communism and tyranny.
In a disappointing display of "do as I say, not as I do," Tom documents an instance of this happening on Thomas Westgard's Rogers Park Rake. In this case, Westgard tried to subtly sneak in a Nazi slam against Don Gordon, according to what I saw on my RSS feed. He also had a change of heart, and pulled it back, but not before it was seen by multiple readers. In the post, he compares Don Gordon to Vidkun Quisling. A Nazi reference (even 'subtle' or indirect) is something that I consider to be an argument of last resort. It says that one has no more words, no more brain power, no more ability to actually deconstruct somebody, or their argument, through intelligence. It's the online discussion equivalent of an eight-year old flipping out and throwing rocks on the playground, mad because he can't get his way and doesn't have the words to explain why.
I've been on the internet long enough to already be familiar with Godwin's Law. Apparently not everybody else is.
Comments from the Original Post:
Thomas Westgard said...
I'm familiar with Godwin's Law as well. In fact, if you go back on the Wikipedia post on Godwin's law far enough, you'll find the Westgard's Law analog I put up there several years ago (since removed). The Quisling post was a deliberate reference to Godwin's Law. Part of the point was that the epithets being thrown elsewhere had reached the point of absurdity, and by putting up a post that invoked Godwin's Law, it would point out exactly what you saw. Thank you for noticing, although you didn't carry the point over to the other blogs. Oh, well, can't get everything.
I'm mystified by your perception that the criticism of Gordon in the Vidkun Quisling post was either subtle, or quickly drawn back. It was about as unsubtle as a criticism could be (in fact, isn't that the point of Godwin's Law?), and it stayed up for days. First you think I'm Godwin-level wild, then I'm subtle. Which is it? Perceiving Godwin's Law was good, but Al - your only accomplishment was to read what I wrote! (albeit incompletely) By assuming that only you knew of Godwin's Law, you relieved yourself of the necessity of further thinking why I might deliberately transgress it. By using your own timeframe for how long a post "should" stay up, you set yourself up to see what you wanted to see.
Okay, fine. I'm looking at the future now anyway, which is why I took the Quisling post down (along with the rest of it). Unlike certain other people, I'm not interested in having these discussions follow people around on the web for all eternity. If Don Gordon wants to retire from politics, I suppose I'll let him, although his silly lawsuit needs to die before he can claim retirement.
I'm curious, though, if you can defend your analysis of the Quisling post from where we sit today. You described it as the (forgive the paraphrase) argument of last resort, when the mind fails and the words become the functional equivalent of foaming at the mouth and undermining whatever rational argument may have gone before. The irony of you calling me stupid, then claiming the intended meaning of my post as your own invention, within the same sentence is an irony I've wallowed in a bit too much already, perhaps.
But looking forward - do you perceive that Craig and Mannis have themselves not gone into a Godwin-like foaming zone, most recently e.g. pursuing the operator of a laundromat with righteous indignance, or taking the time to reveal to the world that I sometimes possess drywall?
And more importantly, the things that you truly can control, namely your own blog: If the other blogs are "bad," however you choose to define that, what have you written in your blog that overcomes or outpaces them/us? Whether I, or Craig, or Mannis, have fallen into a pit of blogger foolishness that you alone are able to perceive... Unless there's an irony in this post that I myself am failing to perceive, you started this blog and put up this post with grand intentions of setting it all straight with the writings of Al Iverson.
How's it going?
From the looks of your blog, I would say not very well. There are thousands of people who do nothing, who don't even try, but most of them refrain from passing judgment on others, at least publicly. It's easy enough for you to snipe from the sidelines and pass judgment on the qualities of others, without putting out the work, or taking the chances. But I hope you don't feel yourself to be greatly elevated by the accomplishment of attending no meetings and producing no work. The dead fish stuck to my aquarium filter is accomplishing that much, and it smells better than the logic of your arguments.
Come to think of it, the fish does attend the meetings that occur in my office. The fish also keeps its blogging commitments, which in its case are none. The fish passes judgment on no one, and thus is never wrong. Now, that's worth thinking about.
May 22, 2007 12:09 AM
Al Iverson said...
I love how this turns into a debate about Craig and Tom Mannis, like I secretly must be some stooge of theirs because I take you to task.
As far as taking down old posts, doing so denies a new reader the opportunity to get a sense of history. Regardless of what you wish it would say about you, it very strongly suggests that you're unwilling to stand by what you write. If you're so sure that it needs to be taken down to move forward, get past the anger, "you've made your point," etc., then I would suggest that it wasn't appropriate to begin with.
I patently reject any sort of 'how dare I question you' because I supposedly have yet to do anything that outshines you. When you're the yardstick of how I should be measured, I'll care. Until then, I don't.
Actually, that reminds me. Could you let me know when you do something that outshines me? I'd hate to miss it when/if it finally happens.
May 22, 2007 9:45 AM
Kate Harding said...
Also, you should probably remove that dead fish from your aquarium.
May 22, 2007 9:51 AM
Jocelyn said...
I think your take on the use of Nazi rhetoric is spot on.
Also, I was not familiar with Godwin's law so thanks I just learned something new.
June 13, 2007 9:42 PM
Fargo said...
Welcome to the neighborhood! I hope that you don't think all the verbal nastiness represents the 'hood as a whole. There are lots of good people and cool places to eat and hang out. That's why it's one of my favorite neighborhoods in the city.
C'mon over to
http://fargocats.blogspot.com/2007/08/on-blogging-and-civility.html
Your $0.02?
August 4, 2007 4:40 PM
Ten Tips on How To Blog
Everybody should have a blog. Everybody knows something. Get out there and show the world what you’re a subject matter expert on. Knowledge deserves to be shared, and blogging is an excellent (and easy) way to share it.
Here’s my top ten list of dos and don’ts when it comes to blogging. I see a lot of blogs that don’t follow this guidance, and it amazes me. Don’t they want to be taken seriously? I’ve only been in the game for, oh, six or seven years, and I’m still honing my craft, but it’s already clear to me that there’s a right way, and a wrong way. Here’s what I’ve learned.
- Publish an RSS feed. If you’re coding pages by hand in HTML and expecting people to come back to your site every week to look for new pages, you’re trapped in the twentieth century. Feedburner’s a bit coy regarding the number of RSS feed views they see, but the number’s large, and growing larger every day. Feedburner’s publishing over 663,000 feeds, all of which were set up by somebody wanting to read a site, or publish info from a site, using RSS. That’s just published feeds – the number of page views for all of these RSS feeds is undoubtedly in the many millions. It’s not hard to publish an RSS feed, either. Most blogging tools (like Blogger, which I use) already come with this feature built-in.
- Optimize your content display for RSS. Sign up for your own RSS feed in something like Google Reader, an easy-to-use feed reader. Make sure the content is presented in a way you’re comfortable with. Just about every day I read some blog post in a non-descript
- Add a footer to your messages (or just to your RSS feed). This actually can help you overcome limitations with how your content is displayed in an RSS reader. I add a footer to my anti-spam blogs that says, “Posted by Al Iverson. I welcome your feedback, contact me at
.” It helps brand my content as written by me, and helps to get my name out there. I think that’s very important if you want people to know who you are. It also helps for people who just casually stumbled across your blog, people who don’t already know you. Make sure they’re able to recognize you and give you credit for what you’ve posted! - Use your real name. I read (but generally don’t take too seriously) a few anonymously-registered blogs. It gets confusing when some of those sites describes itself by saying “I and me,” but they hide who “I and me” actually are. Professionalism and ethics demand that if you’re going to share something with the world, you should put your name on it and stand behind it. Hide your name, and you’re telling me (and the world) that you’re afraid of criticism, afraid of people knowing that you’re saying a certain thing. It definitely makes me think twice about why somebody wouldn’t want to publish something under their own name.
- Have a feedback/contact me link. You’ll learn from your readers. Sometimes what you’ll learn is that they’re morons, but that’s fairly rare. Most of the time, they’ll share something insightful. It might even make you reconsider your point of view, or give you ideas for other things to write about. I go so far as to actively solicit questions via email. I don’t always have time to respond to each one personally, but it helps keep the “idea well” full of things I can write about.
- Argue with data, not with emotions. If there is one thing I am tired of, and won’t listen to anymore, it’s sturm and drang from other technology geeks about how a process MUST be implemented a certain way, BECAUSE IT’S THE RIGHT THING TO DO (even though they have no supporting data to prove that it works). If it’s the right thing to do, prove it to me. I realize that it’s not all about business ROI, and that’s fine. But if you’re going to tell me that I’m wrong, or I need to change my thinking, the case is not made via anecdotes and warm fuzzies. People in cults “just believe.” Smart people want proof. Show me what % lift in clicks process X gets you, or show me how Y% of spam is blowback when measured against your mail stream. Not all data is perfect, but data is a far better starting point for a discussion than, “this one time this guy had this problem and it was blocked because of Z.” That will only occasionally reproduce well as shared knowledge.
- Stay on topic. Print this one out and tape it to your computer monitor. Tattoo it on your forehead, backwards, so you can read it in the mirror when brushing your teeth in the morning. Stay on topic!!! When I read your blog about spam (or VoIP), I want to learn about spam (or VoIP). Not what kind of cereal you had today, the fact that you sat next to an ugly girl on the plane, nor your thoughts on religion and bar fighting. Nothing drives me away from your blog faster than off-topic ramblings that have nothing to do with the professed topic of the blog. Sure, an offhand comment in the context of an on-topic article is to be expected here and there. But save the “I ate cereal today” posts for your “Cereal and Ramblings” blog. Link to it from your topical content blog if you must, but don’t confuse the two, as you’re talking to two vastly different audiences. Those audiences are not as compatible as you think.
- Post regularly. Yeah, I suffer from this, too. I get distracted and don’t have time to write something for weeks on end, sometimes. But I try. And I try to stay ahead by writing new posts and articles ahead of time. Saving them up, and releasing them once or twice a week. That way I am slowly building up the content of my site, but can take a break here and there when I need it. More than half of the time you see me post something over on Spam Resource, it’s really something that I wrote a few days ago and saved to publish out at a certain time, or at least a few days after my last post.
- It’s OK to link to stories by other folks, but don’t steal. One of the biggest bummers I’ve had to personally deal with as an aspiring web-based author is people ripping off my content. It’s not okay to republish my entire article, just because you kept my name on it. You’re taking traffic away from my site, which I can track, and sending it to your site, which I can’t track. Quoting a few sentences and linking to my article is acceptable. And I welcome it! Send traffic my way and I’ll try to return the favor. But duplicate my content elsewhere and you’re going to confuse Google into thinking we’re trying to search engine spam, or people are going to visit your site and think it’s my site. Not cool.
- Link to other sites (create a blog roll). Google ranking (where your site shows up in search engine results) is based on a complex variable equation, but one important component is how many sites link to you. Link to good sites on topics similar to yours, and encourage those sites (and others) to link back to you. Show readers what sites you read, to give them options of other things to read that they may find interesting. It’s friendly to your readers, and it helps your ranking in search engines.
Which Is Better: Blogger or Google Pages?
Here’s a quick, bullet-point rundown of my likes and dislikes for each, followed by a bit of in-depth discussion of what you can and can’t do, with some tips and tricks for each.
Google Pages -- Pros:
- Create and host up to five websites with one Google account.
- Comes with 30+ neat looking templates to choose from.
- Just write-and-go, don’t need to know HTML.
- Can host regular HTML files if you’ve got an already created site.
Google Pages -- Cons:
- Websites created have to be hosted under googlepages.com. This means your website has to be mypage.googlepages.com instead of www.mypage.com.
- As you add more pages, you have to link to them manually. No overall index is created automatically.
- If you use a redirecting trick to make your webpage show up as www.mypage.com, your organic search engine placement seems to suffer.
Blogger -- Pros:
- The latest version of Blogger can host custom domains directly. No redirect trickery needed.
- Easy, word-processor style interface for writing new entries.
- Built-in RSS feed support.
- Blogger’s layout modification editor is slick, allowing drag and drop modification of page elements.
Blogger -- Cons:
- What order each page is displayed in is determined by the time/date it was posted.
- Blogger only offers a few templates. The default ones are kind of boring.
- Manual template editing is tricky and NOT for the faint of heart.
- All sites have the Blogger Navbar at the top, by default.
Templates and “Look and Feel” Modification
The latest version of Blogger only comes with a few templates, while they’re okay, there’s not a ton of them. If you use a default template, your blog is going to look like a thousand others. (Probably far more than a thousand others.)
The template format is open and people can create their own, however, it’s not for novices. I modified spamresource.com’s template to add in a logo and additional graphics, and change the overall look and feel slightly. It took me a long time to do, and I couldn’t figure out everything I wanted to. And I’m not afraid of code. If you’re a superhero with CSS, you’ll feel right at home. However, nobody’s mom is ever going to be able to edit a template or create a new one.
Editing the elements within your template, however, is smooth as silk. Click on add a page element, select what you want (list, title, picture, etc.), then drag it around on the page to where you want it to display. This makes it easy to create things like additional sidebar navigation links on the fly. Even if you’re not a power user, it’s still easy to add things like a SiteMeter and AdSense advertising.
There doesn’t seem to be any way to modify the overall look-and-feel of a page created with Google Pages. You can upload your own HTML files to Google Pages and link directly to them, however.
Content Creation
Creating new content is very easy with both sites. Just click on new post (Blogger) or create new page (Google Pages), type in what you want, and away you go. Blogger is very “post” oriented – it’s all about taking your written content and flowing it into a pre-existing site-wide template. With Google Pages, it’s more of a page-based environment, where different pages can have a different template, different navigation links, etc.
Blogger automatically creates archive links for you, so people digging around on your site can link to older pages with little trouble. It’s different with Google Pages; no page is explicitly linked to, unless you choose to link to it. So if you have a lot of pages, and you want everyone to be able to find all the pages, you have to manually create an index that links to all of those pages. (It’s not an unwise idea to do that with Blogger, either, but it’s definitely not necessary.)
Adding Advertising to Your Site
Speaking of AdSense, Blogger has built-in integration with Google AdSense. If you don’t know what AdSense is, it’s a neat program from Google that allows you to opt-in to their advertising program. You donate some amount of space on your website to showing ads. Google determines which ads are appropriate, and automatically takes care of serving and tracking them. Google tries hard to target ads appropriately for your site, and it seems like it’s usually pretty spot on. You get paid based on ad clicks.
Blogger’s AdSense integration is a bit limited. It’s a great way to get started, but if you’re even the slightest power user, you’ll probably want to download AdSense code yourself and manually add it to your Blogger-hosted site. I’ve done that on www.spamersource.com, so that I could manually configure it so two ads show up in a specific place in the left navigation. (The default Blogger options for putting ads along side templates can result in a big blob of empty space, or only one ad showing up.)
Using Standard HTML
If you’ve already got a website you’ve created elsewhere, and you want to move it to Google Pages, it’s very easy to do. Just go to the “Uploaded Stuff” section on the right side of the Google Page Creator interface. Click on the “upload” button, specify the file you want to upload, and hit upload. Repeat this for every file you want to upload. It’s not as fast as FTP, but it’s only going to take a few minutes, even if you have a few dozen files to upload.
Most people creating a website this way use “index.html” as the name for the front page (default page) of their website. Google Pages is not smart enough to know to display index.html as the default page. To get around that, you create a “home page” (/home) in Google Pages. On that page, click on a content area, switch to “Edit HTML”, and paste in the javascript redirect below.
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
window.location = "http://aqphilhey.googlepages.com/index.html"
//-->
</script>
Of course, change “aqphilhey” to the name of your site, otherwise you’re going to redirect people to my friend’s site, instead of yours. After you save this, people who visit http://(yourname).googlepages.com will be automatically redirected to your index.html page.
It’s not possible to host already-created HTML files with Blogger. Blogger manages and creates pages for you; your only control over this process is turning it on or off.
Using a Custom Domain Name
This is an area in which Blogger excels over Google Pages. If you own a domain, you can make it point directly at your Blogger-hosted site by creating a CNAME record pointing to ghs.google.com. This sounds harder than it actually is. My domain registrar (joker.com), the company I purchase domain names from, offers an easy control panel where I just have to click in, select my domain, select “Create a CNAME entry” and then type in ghs.google.com. You don’t know even have to know what a CNAME is. (It’s an alias that makes one server name point at the same place as another.) Most domain registrars offer something functionality similar to what I have available to me as a user of joker.com.
It’s not possible (at the moment) to purchase a domain name and make it point directly at a site hosted at Google Pages. However, there are hacks you can use to work around that limitation. See www.philhey.com for an example of a site I host with Google Pages. In my domain registrar’s control panel, I created a web redirect so that www.philhey.com points to aqphilhey.googlepages.com (the “real” address of the site). This is necessary because sites created with Google Pages have to be hosted under googlepages.com. I use a “frame based redirect” to mask this fact as much as possible. That way, the site appears (to most users) as being hosted under philhey.com, instead of under googlepages.com.
Search Engine Placement
This is really important, and you’re about to find out why I just spent a lot of time and effort transitioning some of my sites away from Google Pages and over to Blogger.
Having my website show up only under my preferred website URL is important to me. I don’t want www.aliverson.com to actually be aliversonchicago.googlepages.com (which was the case for a while). There’s two reasons for this: branding and search engine placement.
By branding, I mean the look and feel of the site. When people visit my site, I want it to show up as “mine”, and not as a tiny little portion of Google Pages. If people look in the address bar when visiting my site, and see “aliversonchicago.googlepages.com,” they see the latter, not the former. With the redirect tricks I talk about above, it’s possible to mask this association to some degree. Using a frame-based redirect, most users never notice that a site is actually hosted under googlepages.com. However, doing it this way has a huge negative impact on your organic search engine ranking.
What’s organic search ranking? It’s how your site is ranked and rated by search engines. I’m focusing on Google, because that’s the one that’s most important to me.
When you use redirect tricks to make a website show up as a URL other than the one it’s actually at, Google can’t easily follow the link between the top level of my domain down to where the actual content is hosted. I don’t know why this is the case, but the net result is that when I hosted my sites with redirects in front of them, the majority of the text content of the sites did not show up in Google’s search results. (Note to the nerds in the audience – yes, I know it’s technically possible to still categorize and rank the content in spite of this link – it’s just that it clearly was not happening until I stopped using the frame-based redirecting.)
Google is how people find your website nowadays. If your content doesn’t show up in Google, you’re nothing; you’re going nowhere fast. I write lots of articles on technology-related concepts, pretty specific stuff on narrow topics like spam and blacklists. I expect (and hope) that people find my articles when they search on those topics in Google. If Google’s not adequately cataloging my content, those people never find me. Sure, some people know to go to my website address directly, but those people already know about me. This is more about growing my readership. People search for information on a specific topic, come to my site, and then hopefully like it enough to bookmark it and come back to it later to learn more.
That’s why I’ve moved even this site (which really isn’t something I consider a blog) over to Blogger. With Blogger’s ability to have a domain name point directly at my Blogger-hosted site, the connection between my domain name and my website is made in a way that Google’s much more easily able to catalog my content and return it in response to Google searches on topics I write about.
So, which tool am I recommending over the other? That’s a tough call; it really depends on your goals and skill set. If you’re an HTML neophyte and just want to write up articles and post them, Blogger’s the way to go. If you have an already-created site with HTML files and supporting images, Google Pages is a better fit. If you’re a super hard-core CSS nerd and want to create a bang-up template to use with Blogger’s easy text content management system, then that’s the way to go. If you want to play around with static pages and host specific content (images, MP3s, PDFs, etc.,) then Google Pages is likely where you’ll want to start. I use both, and which I prefer for a specific project depends on how much time I want to spend on a site’s look and feel, how much content I have created already, etc.
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