Let me put the cart before the horse for a minute.  Before you sign up for your own RSS feed, make sure your RSS feed is available via e-mail.  I know it’s old school and a lot of people prefer feed readers, but you are ignoring a segment of you reading population if you don’t make your RSS feed available by e-mail.  Maybe it’s just me, but I prefer to have latest posts delivered to my inbox instead of having to leave the comfort of my cyber home to search for a feed reader to read the latest from my favorite blogs.  I’m just lazy that way.

Fix Posting Problems

Over the past few months I went on a blog creation frenzy. I spent quite a bit of time uploading and tweaking themes, activating plugins and creating content for the new blogs.  With new blogs, I schedule posts to release over a period of a few days/weeks.

Because I had created so many blogs at one time, I sort of lost track of which posts where scheduled when.  Imagine my surprise when I logged into one of my blogs to see a red error message next to my scheduled post saying “missed schedule” or some similar text.

Not wanting to spend too much time figuring out why it didn’t post, I downloaded a plugin called WP Missed Schedule.  It’s a plugin that fixed the missed post problem.  Then I got to thinking.  If I had subscribed to my own blog’s feed, I would have realized that my uploaded posts never published.

Delayed Error Check

Another good reason for signing up for your own RSS feed is that you get to perform the final edit on your post (granted the edit happens post publication, but better late than never).  Sometimes when you’re compiling a post for your blog, you’re so involved in creating the post that you read what you want to see; you don’t always read what you actually wrote.

Sometimes what you wrote is what you read and other times what you read is not what you wrote.  The time between uploading your post, getting a full nights sleep and receiving your RSS feed by e-mail in the morning is the right amount of time needed to clear your mind and your eyes to read exactly what you wrote and make the appropriate changes.

BTW, you can only read your full post via email if you enable “full text” in your RSS feed.

It’s All About the Sitemap

This whole thing started because I was working on improving one of my other websites (the one Google hates). I’m determined to force Google to like it again.

One of my website improvements involved sitemaps, both HTML and XML. The XML sitemap is the one that I submit it to Google to help them index my site better and the HTML sitemap is for my readers so they can navigate the site better.

While creating sitemaps for that site I realized that NJFM’s sitemap disappeared when I changed themes to Thesis. So, the natural solution would be to create another one. That was much easier said than done.

The Wonders of WordPress Plugins

Since Thesis doesn’t seem to have a built in sitemap function I looked to plugins to accomplish the task. I downloaded, installed and configured several plugins only to deactivate and uninstall them. I didn’t like the way they displayed the HTML page. With over 350 posts here, the sitemap was more confusing than helpful.

Each plugin had varying degrees of usefulness, but not enough for me to keep the plugins activated. Who wants to look at a page of a few hundred links without being able to sort them by categories? I know I didn’t.

A Light Bulb Moment

I remembered my old WordPress theme had a built-in site map function. I liked it because it not only linked to the posts, but it displayed the post date and number of comments. It also showed the categories, tags and pages in a fashion that was easy to navigate.

My first thought was to duplicate the old sitemap and apply it to Thesis, but that proved to be impossible (it might be possible for someone with programming knowledge, but it was impossible for me). So, since I really, really wanted the sitemap feature, I decided to resurrect the old theme.

Why I Originally Switched from WP-Magazine Theme to Thesis

I originally switched from this theme in favor of Thesis because I thought Thesis would help my blog to load a lot faster. I was getting quite a few of backend errors with this theme and I thought Thesis would alleviate that.

Switching themes didn’t alleviate the problem. I’m working with HostGator and a few other tools to see if I can speed up the page load. In the meanwhile, why should I suffer with a slow page load and no site map to boot?

Getting Back on Point

My goal was to work on my other site, but ended up spending a day behind the scenes on NJFM. Needless to say I got very little writing done and will have to catch up on that over the next couple of days. In the meanwhile, I’ve got to finish what I started.

By the way, my site that’s hated by Google…after adding the ability to ping and creating the sitemap, the number of indexed pages shot up from 128 pages on April 22nd to 239 pages on April 28th. I still have 202 pages to go, but things are heading in the right direction.

I don’t know much about RSS feeds and didn’t really want to know much about them. All I know is that I’ve got one and some folks come to No Job for Mom as a result of it.

The problem with my RSS feed is that it does not display dates (or didn’t display dates). That minor little omission was working my last nerve. Unfortunately, the only way for me to figure out how to get the blog post dates to display was to play around with the feed.

Problem Solved – Or So I Thought

I learned a little more about feeds than I wanted to. Apparently WordPress blogs have several feed locations. There’s the atom feed, the RSS feed, RSS 2 and RDF. I don’t know what they all mean and I don’t really care. Bottom line, I was using the atom feed. Apparently atom didn’t want to display the dates, so it didn’t.

[smartads]

On top of having several feeds, I have my feeds re-directed through FeedBurner. I did that because FeedBurner offers more flexibility than the plain old ordinary feed. Unfortunately, I have yet to spend the time configuring the feed to take advantage of FeedBurner’s flexibility.

Anyway, getting back to the RSS problem, atom’s refusal to display dates forced me to switch to a different type of feed format. I ended up switching from atom to RSS2. This worked just fine because the RSS2 feed displayed post dates. There, my problem was solved and I was happy.

Checked My Email

Imagine my surprise when I looked in my inbox this morning and found my latest NJFM feed. It listed the full text of my last 10 posts. That’s not what I wanted. All I wanted was to display the dates and a summary of the post (GRRR).

I’m a writer, not a techno geek. I’ve got other blogs with RSS feeds that display the date and a summary of my blog posts. For some reason, I can’t get the feed to do what I want here at NJFM.

If anyone has a solution, I’m all ears. In the meanwhile, please bear with me while I try to figure it out (GRRR).

The ones that I don’t appreciate very much are the bogus blog commenters. They’re not spammers, just a very close cousin to spam. Sometimes it’s a bit difficult for me to determine whether or not the comments are bogus or spam. Luckily, since my blog is on the WordPress platform, I’ve installed Akismet, which is a spam catcher. However, there are some comments that even Akismet doesn’t catch.

Over the past few months in writing blog posts, I’ve come to find a few common characteristics in bogus comments. Here are the ones that I see most frequently:

1. Keyword Names: The commenter does not use a first, middle or last name. Heck, they don’t even use a witty username. What they use are keywords to steer search engines to their site through backlinks. That’s a No Job for Mom no-no in my book (I know a few got past me, but I’m looking out for them now).
2. Flattery: The old saying “Flattery will get you everywhere,” doesn’t work here. I’ve been around the block a time or 30, I know the difference between a compliment and empty flattery. Some folks will say anything just for a backlink.
3. Promises to subscribe to my RSS feed: This is a sister to Flattery. If you are going to subscribe to my RSS feed, please do. However, there is no need to post a comment that says “I like your blog I guess I will subscribe to your feed so I won’t miss posts.” Oh, I forgot, such statements are usually signed by “keywords.”
4. Several comments applied to different posts on the same day saying the same thing: I think that crosses the bogus line into the spam category.
5. Thanking me in advance for approving a comment: Bloggers want to approve quality comments. No need to thank in advance unless you know that your post is really bogus and the false “thank you” is the flattery to get the post approved. Most people who submit quality comments assume that the post will be approved.

This is by no means a complete list of bogus blog comments. It’s just the ones that I’ve come across repeatedly. If you have a few “bogus comment gems” that I didn’t mention above, please share them. I could use the chuckle.

I started to compose a post in which I was going to give the same advice that has no doubt been addressed several times over on the internet. I was about to offer the advice that you should blog about what you enjoy, what you’re passionate about, yadda, yadda yadda.

I was going to share my rather limited blogging experience when I checked my ProBlogger RSS feed. The title of the article that caught my attention was “Million Dollar Blogger Interviewed.” As fate would have it, that post saved me the time and effort of having to share my experience. Why listen to me when there’s a perfectly informative interview with someone who obviously knows what he’s doing.

Alborz Fallah, The Million Dollar Blogger, started three blogs a couple of years ago. After building the blogs he soon realized that he was passionate about cars and poured his efforts into his CarAdvice.com.au blog. He spent his time and effort building it and now he’s making more than $20,000 to $30,000 each month.

I strongly suggest that anyone who is wrestling with the question of “What should I blog about?” to check out the Alborz Fallah interview. After listening to the interview, download the transcripts and study them. He offers more in the 49 minute interview than I can offer here in this post.

Learn from the experts. After studying the information, decide what you want to blog about and get to it!