a

Forums Software (Updated)

I know what you’re thinking, use phpBB. Never. I will never use it. I have had so many bad experiences with that software that I have vowed I will never have a forum run by it again. I spent 3 weeks trying to simply change the color scheme on a theme for it and was completely unable to change anything but the background color for it. I will never again use it. It is not intuitive and I should not have to spend that long trying to figure it out.

Attention forum software writers: SIMPLE, INTUITIVE, EASY TO CHANGE THEMES, EASY TO CREATE YOUR OWN THEMES. That is the proper way to create a forum. If nothing else, a proper roadmap/explanation of the items in the style sheets to make it so that those of us who did NOT participate in writing the forum software know what the hell we are doing when we make a theme for it. Thank you.

a

Forum Software

a

This Post Brought To You By

The system is so easy to use. You sign up at GCast.com and register the phone number from which you plan on making your podcasts. If you can’t use that phone for some reason, don’t worry, the system will ask you for your registered phone number and pin. Then the system will give you the toll free number you’ll use to call in to record your podcast. You’ll be given options at the end including playing it back, publishing immediately, publishing later through GCast.com, or deleting and re-recording.

If you choose to publish later through GCast.com, you just have to click the “publish from playlists” link after you log into GCast.com. Choose the appropriate podcast (they’re listed by date, but the most recent entry is going to be the one on the bottom), choose the channel (you can have multiple channels, all free), and give your podcast a title and description, then click the button to publish it. Easy peasy!

I haven’t tried getting music and adding it to my podcast yet, but I’m planning on playing around with that at some point soon. I highly recommend GCast.com for any budding podcaster out there. It’s an awesome way to get started!

a

Calling All Wanna Be Podcasters!

My favorite had to be that a blog of mine was deleted for breaking rule #10, which states all URL’s must be valid. This came THREE MONTHS after I requested Entrecard to remove that account because I had deleted the blog, and I had already told them this. How unorganized can they possibly be? I’d already told them the URL wasn’t valid anymore and told them I wanted the account deleted. But they didn’t do it - instead they went through and did an “audit” of the blogs on Entrecard and deleted it because it wasn’t valid.

Frankly, after having another blog deleted for being a duplicate blog (there were a couple of posts that linked to my other blogs, but the majority of the content was original - yet it was tagged as being a duplicate blog) I decided it wasn’t worth it. Besides, I don’t have time to go through and try to drop 300 cards a day, per blog, when 99% of the blogs are loading so slowly, even on a high speed connection, that it takes far too long to drop them. Read: it took me about 4 hours to drop 300 cards and I’m on a broadband internet connection.

My favorite one of their rules however, is that any blog that has audio that automatically starts when the blog is loaded will be deleted. That’s bull. That is infringing on the blogger’s right to have what they want on the blog. It is THE BLOGGER’S blog, NOT ENTRECARD’S blog.

Entrecard you don’t own the blogs, you have NO RIGHT to state what they have on them. Frankly, if people are advertising on these blogs, it means people like them and don’t care about the content. If someone doesn’t want music when they load a blog, by all means, they can stay away from the blogs that have it. I avoid sites that I know have music on them all the time, because I realize that it is the site owner’s right to have it on there, because it is their site.

Rethink your “quality” standards. What is “quality” to you, is not “quality” to someone else, and you could be deleting blogs for no reason at all…which you are.

Besides, if I am correct, Entrecard could be considered an artificial means of obtaining links to your site, which Google will punish with removal of PageRank - it never happened to me, but somehow, I wasn’t willing to take the chance.

a

Get it together Entrecard

It is not fair to allow someone to take an assignment, do the work, and then say “oh, sorry, your blog’s PR isn’t high enough.” Unacceptable. I’ll be removing Blogsvertise from my list of blogging companies to work for right along with Smorty.

a

Blogsvertise Needs Work

Personally, I don’t particularly care for it. The interface on Disqus is not intuitive. I have no idea what I’m doing with any of the settings at all. From what I can tell, none of the comments are actually held for moderation no matter what I do. I want to go back to my old WordPress comments system.

So I did. All of the comments I received while using Disqus were stored on WordPress, so I just went through and removed the ones that shouldn’t have been there and went about my merry little way. It may be good for some, but I, personally, was not a fan.

a

Disqus - A Comment System

So there you have the various ad related ways I monetize my blogs. Well, not all of them. I do also do affiliate ads through LinkShare and Google Affiliate Network. I’ll post more on those when I see how well they do for me.

a

Site Ads

The problem here is, it allows advertisers to bid $0.00 or $0.01. It allows their ads to run on YOUR precious ad space for NOTHING. NOT FAIR. Those people are there to BUY ads. They should be PAYING for that space. Those ads should NEVER run on ANY site without the site being compensated for it. I didn’t sign up to advertise sites for free. That is what Entrecard is for. Project Wonderful is to advertise sites for PAY. So why were all of my boxes saying that the advertisers bid $0.01 and paying me $0.00? Good question.

To me, that wasn’t so wonderful and frankly, I’m finished with them. There’s no point in having something that won’t pay me a dime.

a

Project Wonderful? HA!

I’ve even removed the shopping ads and adsense ads from Gothic Peach so as to try and take back the blog from the ads. Although I have an assigned paid post for that site to do, I’ve blogged twice without a sponsored link, and I will probably try to blog at least once more without a paid link in the post before doing that. But I am trying to take those blogs back.

At one time, I’d had a blog that was dedicated to the Blog365 project. Unfortunately, that went by the wayside and I finally deleted the blog because it was pointless. I’d actually been following a blog that was giving out “ideas” of what to blog about for each day, but I couldn’t follow along because I could never seem to blog about what the day’s subject was.

I have been thinking of doing something like that on this blog - giving out some ideas for people to use, or not, for blogging aids if they can’t think of anything. I’ll probably post two or three for the day, just so people who happen to come here and take the ideas will have more than one thing to try and blog about. Because sometimes, it just doesn’t work to blog about one thing.

a

Blogging Issues