As a quasi-reclusive introvert with paranoiac-critical tendencies, one of my least favorite aspects of blogging involves creating those dreadful “About” pages that reveal unknown things about you. About pages are important to many people, providing a way to learn about and connect with the person or people “behind the blog.” After all, websites are relatively impersonal, as viewers are required to extract meaning and personality from behind a large, square piece of machinery.

Regardless of the type of site or blog you happen to be creating, the About page is your primary key to connecting with your readers. In fact, when readers click to read your About page, they expect to find you there, sharing personal information about yourself, your ideas, your purpose and story. Fortunately, About pages are as diverse as the millions of bloggers who create them. This is one of the reasons that the humble About page has become one of the most important pages in the blogosphere — they represent the essence of the blogger, revealing their personality, originality, and uniqueness.

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By now, everyone is familiar with the whole concept of the “blogosphere.” According to common definition, the blogosphere represents the virtual realm in which all blogs exist in an interconnected community of online social networking activity. Such blogospheric activity includes writing, posting and commenting, and involves many different types of blogs and bloggers. As with the atmosphere, the blogosphere consists of several, well-defined layers. Let’s investigate this hypothetical representational phenomenon..

Whereas the atmosphere may be divided into layers based on temperature and location, the blogosphere may be divided into layers based on popularity and purpose. Here is a summary of the various layers of the atmosphere:

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For those of you still hiding your bookmarks within the dark confines of your browser’s “favorites” menu, may I suggest stepping into the “here and now” with a fresh new approach: social bookmarking. Hopefully, most of my readers are already familiar with the many wonders of managing and sharing your bookmarks online, but for those who may still be questioning the whole idea, allow me to expound briefly on several of the immediate benefits:

Universal access to your bookmarked sites

Forget about time-wasting browser extensions that fumble to synchronize your business; manage your collection online at a great site such as del.icio.us and enjoy quick access to a definitive set of bookmarks from virtually anywhere in the world.

Better organization of your bookmarks

Drop the resource-hogging browser extensions that supposedly enhance the organizational efficiency of your collection; many social bookmarking sites employ user-defined tagging architecture to provide unlimited flexibility for organizing your bookmarks.

Don’t be tight with your bookmarks

Sharing information is the wave of the future! Help others locate the information they need by sharing your favorite sites with others. Social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us provide a simple way to keep select sites private, so get over yourself and get sharing!

One-click backups of your entire collection

Last but not least is the drop-dead simple method that most social-bookmarking sites provide for backing up or exporting your entire bookmark collection. For example, with a single click, del.icio.us exports your entire collection via a nice little html file. Fresh. Delivered.

Ahh.. so much better. If you still don’t believe me, then just stop reading here and go home. However, if you are totally feeling the whole social bookmarking movement, then read on, my friend — I have a few sweet little tips that I would like to share with you..

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Recently, I found myself drowning in an ocean of RSS feeds. Even after switching to Google Reader, which definitely speeds up the process of plowing through posts, I was wasting too much time consuming subscribed content. Thus, in an effort to find balance between saving time and staying current, I executed the following five-step feed portfolio makeover:

1. Drop lame feeds. Previously, I had subscribed to a number of feeds simply because they were recommended or mentioned in an article somewhere. Unfortunately, sound referrals and interesting commentary do not necessarily equate with strong syndicated content. I often found myself reading post after post about stuff that was not useful or even interesting. After some careful deliberation, I dropped around 25 of these lame feeds and moved on with my life.
2. Consolidate similar feeds. After following my previous collection of feeds for awhile, I began to notice ridiculous amounts of redundancy. There is just no need to subscribe to multiple blogs covering the same material unless they blog from truly unique perspectives. After choosing one or two authority bloggers for each of my focus areas, I unsubscribed to the “echo” feeds and thus reduced my feed collection by at least 20.
3. Eliminate overly aggressive feeds. I love to see fresh content from bloggers who post quality posts, especially when they only post once in awhile. It’s like getting a scooby snack or something and I just love it. Conversely, I hate to see overly ambitious bloggers bomb my reader with a jillion junk posts about the same old garbage — nothing new to say and no new ways of saying it. Needless to say, I kicked about 10 of these feed hogs straight to the curb.
4. Subscribe to summary feeds. When it comes to staying current with world news, tech news, and other frequently reported topics, it is easy to flood your reader with unnecessary content. Fortunately, many of the most prolific news-related sites provide an alternate summary feed that consolidates and highlights the day’s or week’s worth of material into a single post. By trading full feeds for summary feeds, I greatly reduced the quantity of incoming feed content without sacrificing the quality of its information.
5. Drop John Chow like a bad habit. Just kidding. Chow is great, but really, how many blogs about blogging and getting stinking rich do you really need? The point here is to craft yourself a diverse collection of enlightening, educational, and enriching feeds. Trade mindlessness and redundancy for thoughtfulness and original content. Drop the mind-numbing “list” sites and find sincere bloggers with experience and wisdom. I am continually fine-tuning my feed diet towards a diverse, eclectic, and original collection of insightful, high-quality content written by authoritative bloggers who aren’t pitching at me around every corner.

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Hello, my name is Jeff and I am nofollow addict.

When I first began Perishable Press two years ago, in August of 2005, WordPress quickly became my blogging platform of choice. Everything about WordPress was great, so I had no trouble overlooking a few seemingly insignificant quirks, such as the nofollow attributes that are automatically applied to all comment links. In fact, at first, I really had no idea what they were or how they affected my site.

Eventually, as I began delving deeper into the Blogosphere, I realized that those harmless-looking nofollow tags were considered by many to be detrimental to the livelihood of the blogging community and its way of life. The arguments against nofollow and the reasoning behind the “no nofollow” movement resonated well with my sense of social equity on the Internet.

The more I looked into the nofollow issue, the more opposed I became to the idea of default WordPress installations generating nofollow links by default. In fact, after arming myself with as much information as possible, I made haste to jump on the anti-nofollow bandwagon and publicly regurgitated the arguments against the implementation of nofollow links.

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In the Beginning..

Over a year ago, I posted an article recommending over fifty “essential Firefox extensions.” Excited to have discovered the miraculous joys of extending Firefox with such amazing functionality, I loaded my primary copy of Firefox with just about every potentially useful extension that I could find. Several weeks were spent playing with new features, customizing preferences, and configuring options to gel together in an orchestrated chorus of blissful browser harmony. After experiencing the functional firepower of my newly equipped technological terror, I was completely convinced that I had assembled the ultimate collection of Firefox extensions. And, as the power went straight to my head, I was determined to enlighten the masses by publishing a complete, unedited list of 51 “essential” Firefox extensions.

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Virtually every article written here at Perishable Press requires at least one or two “special” characters. Some of these characters — such as quotation marks, hyphens, and dashes — are very common, while others — such as the copyright symbol, bullet, and arrow — happen less frequently. As a blogger, I find myself repeatedly using a select handful of very common special characters. Very rarely do I ever find myself blogging a latin “Ä” (i.e., capital letter “A” with a diaeresis). To save time and effort, I need a quick reference that targets only the characters I find useful as a blogger. With that in mind, I assembled the following table of essential Unicode (UTF-8 encoded) characters ¹ for bloggers:

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Shouts out: First of all, to everyone who reads my content on a regular basis, thank you! Things are finally rolling along quite smoothly, and I just wanted to take a moment to let you know that I truly appreciate your kind participation with Perishable Press. We have some great things planned in the near future, and look forward to sharing them with you.

Business

Currently, I have several new projects in the works. I am redesigning my business site, Monzilla Media, developing several new blogs, and reporting here as much as possible throughout the process. These projects should provide a wealth of fresh material covering everything from CSS design and PHP scripting to SEO tactics and blog monetization.

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Here at Perishable Press, we like to stay current by running the latest version of WordPress. The site launched in 2005 with WordPress 1.5 (Strayhorn), eventually made the jump to version 2.0 (Duke), recently stepped up to 2.0.1 (Still Duke), and currently enjoys 2.0.5 (Ronan). Although each of these upgrades have required various file edits, plugin tweaks, and theme modifications, the process is always educational and remains an important aspect of this site. Much of our content revolves around using and customizing WordPress, and so staying current with new versions is critical if we are to continue operating as a relevant, contemporary resource.

Needless to say, with the release of WordPress 2.1 (Ella) in January of 2007, we were excited about upgrading. In fact, we were so enthusiastic about diving into ‘Ella’ that we went ahead and upgraded only hours after its release (mistake #1). I recall thinking something to the effect of “..every other WordPress upgrade has gone so well..” and, after skimming over the list of changes, “Wow, look at all that WordPress goodness — surely this will be a fantastic upgrade!” (mistake #2). As if that weren’t enough, by not waiting a few days before jumping aboard, it was impossible to follow the sage advice of “Google first, upgrade second” (mistake #3).

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Compared to some of the big players out there on the internet, we here at Perishable Press run a relatively small website. We began this project in September of 2005 with nothing but a domain name and a pocketful of inspiration. During the first several months of development, our traffic statistics looked something like: one unique visitor and 10,000 hits (i.e., nobody but us).

Well, that went on for the first few months of 2006, and then something miraculous happened — we were linked to by another site and subsequently indexed by Google, and then Yahoo, and soon thereafter MSN. Within several weeks after being picked up by the search engines, our page rank was like 1 or 2 and our traffic was something like: 30 unique visitors and 1,000 hits (i.e., we were finishing up site development as more people began visiting).

Well, the next several months into 2006 — like, say, from around April to July — Perishable Press continued to produce content, articles, themes, scripts, and all sorts of links everywhere. We were making more noise and several more sites linked to us. Traffic began to increase into the 100’s, 200’s, and eventually leveled off around 300 unique visitors per day (with like 3000 hits due to continued site development, etc.). Things were officially up and running..

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Enjoy these crucial blogging tips from the 0racle:

1. Embrace reality: Popularity contest make very one sickening — save it.
2. Not imitationary: Focusing on unique ideas and are so inspiring.
3. Eat me, sellout: Advertise for business, creating for pleasure.
4. Be true yourself: Write yourself, because you want to like it.
5. Mind the business: You can just eat me, smiling. I laugh you.