This Fall, I celebrate five years of blogging. I have written tons of web development stuff at Perishable Press, lots of helpful WordPress stuff at Digging into WordPress, some philosophical stuff at mindfeed.org, creative/artistic stuff at Dead Letter Art, jQuery stuff at jQuery Mix, and some business-related web-design stuff at Monzilla Media. Plus a bunch of interviews, guest posts, and other blogging projects. So yeah, lots of blogging and writing during the past five years. And they just flew by.

Despite what the haters may say, there are some tangible benefits to blogging. As I write, I continue to learn a great deal – not just about the fine art of writing, but also about the nature of the audience, social media, and the Web in general. There’s a lot to it, more than you may realize. Looking back during my recent hiatus, I enjoyed the opportunity to reflect on the past and contemplate lessons learned, future goals, and what it all means. Here are some of my thoughts, strategies, and lessons learned after five years of blogging..

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Stolen content is the bane of every blogger who provides a publicly available RSS feed. By delivering your content via feed, you make it easy for scrapers to assimilate and re-purpose your material on their crap Adsense sites. It’s bad enough that someone would re-post your entire feed without credit, but to use it for cheap money-making schemes is about as pathetic as it gets. If you’re lucky, the bastards may leave all the links intact, so at least you will get a few back-links (if you have been linking internally) and get notified of the stolen content as well (via pingback or Google Alert). Lately, however, many of the scraper sites that I have seen are completely removing all links within the stolen content. Incidentally, there are some tell-tale signs that the site you are visiting is a scraper site:

• No RSS feed available
• Many quality posts that contain no links
• Many quality posts but very low subscriber count
• Great content but with zero comments on any posts
• Lots of good content but with lots of Adsense or other ads
• No “About” page or business information
• And the number one brain-dead giveaway: no contact form or email address

If you pay attention as you surf around, you may want to keep an eye out for some of these dead giveaways. If it looks like the site is profiting from stolen content, it is advisable to leave immediately and locate an original source of information (you could even be cool and report the scraper site to the original author). I.e., help strengthen the legit blogging community and don’t support scrapers in any way. But avoiding scraper sites is merely an afterthought. The real challenge is to have a solid strategy in place that will help you identify, eliminate and prevent stolen content. Unfortunately, there is no “magic cure” that will stop the scrapers from stealing your hard work — apart from running a private site or not providing a feed — but there are many great tools that have proven quite effective in fighting the war against stolen content. While not completely exhaustive, here are some powerful tips and tricks that have served me well over the years:

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I checked my Feedburner subscriber count on April 2nd and was surprised to see that the number of RSS subscribers had dropped from around 1800 to around 1100. The next day, my subscriber count decreased again, this time to around 700. Today, my Feedburner statistics increased slightly to around 1000 subscribers. So, in the course of three days I lost around 40% of my loyal readers, according to Google Feedburner. Will I get these subscribers back? Will my Google subscriber count return to normal? Why did my Feedburner count drop in the first place? Let’s explore the issue and try to answer these critical questions.

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WordPress for Business Bloggers by Packt Publishing was a pleasure to read because it approaches many of the important aspects of WordPress from a slightly different perspective: that of the “business blogger”. The book is aimed at the aspiring business blogger who wants to use WordPress to run a successful business blog. The book claims to skip the basics and jump right into the meat of transforming WordPress into a lean, mean business blogging machine. While this may be true for the book’s target audience, the technical aspects of WordPress covered in the book are familiar ground to the seasoned WordPress user.

Digging into the book, readers will find the expected WordPress topics explored from a business-blogging point of view. The books moves along at a quick pace, and quickly makes the case for using WordPress to achieve their business blogging goals. The book then presents a case-study that serves as a working example throughout the remainder of the book. After a quick romp through some basic design and coding principles, the book covers the essentials on integrating image and video content into your blog. The following chapter emphasizes the importance of content in general, and provides some timeless advice on using WordPress to deliver superior content.

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Aaron Wall on SEO, the future of the Web, Google dominance, and life as a professional taste tester

As someone who keeps a close eye on the mystical world of Search Engine Optimization, one of my favorite sources of information is SEO-guru Aaron Wall. Aaron is the author of the immensely popular SEOBook.com, where he shares his knowledge, ideas, and opinions on a wide range of SEO-related topics. I have always admired the direct, informative way in which Aaron presents his content, which itself is always insightful and intriguing. Having read much of Aaron’s thoughts on SEO and marketing, I wanted to “zoom out” and ask Aaron a few questions about the possible future of SEO and life on the Web in general. Recently, Aaron was generous enough to respond to some of these rather eclectic questions, including some interesting “behind-the-scenes” questions revealing how Aaron works on the Web..

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Picture it. You have just prepared some recent snapshots of your buddies from a gathering over the weekend. Special care was taken to choose the images, and resize the images appropriately. As you sign in to your favorite social networking site to upload these images, you realize your credentials are invalid. You type in permutations of your user-name and password, check the “Caps” Key, but find that you are still not allowed access to your account. Your account could be have been hacked, removed, or just made unavailable. The site that you swore would hold and keep your memories, thoughts, feelings, and treasured moments are inaccessible or worse, gone forever. How could this happen? Just as we get attached to material things in life, we become attached to our email, blogs, podcasts, bookmarks, and images. In other words, this is our new digital existence. Some would call it our digital baggage.

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After much deliberation, I have decided to take a short vacation away from the computer. I have been working like a dog recently, and feel that a change of pace would help recharge the ‘ol brain cells. I haven’t decided exactly when it will be, but I am thinking that some time off in August (my favorite month) would be swell. Maybe go to the coast, do some traveling, take a long nap, or whatever. Technically, I haven’t taken a break from blogging here at Perishable Press in almost three years! So it’s definitely time..

Generally, I like to post three or four times a week, depending on my schedule. As most of you know, I like to post quality articles on just about anything related to Web development, graphic design, blogging, social media, SEO, site security, and just about anything related to technology, creativity, and design. Given a two-week hiatus, I am asking for help with around seven or eight guest posts, preferably from a few different authors.

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Among my friends, family, coworkers, and other social acquaintances, there are not many “bloggers.” In fact, there aren’t any. Two or three of my old friends have websites that are updated once or twice per year, but none are actively blogging and sharing their ideas with the online community. Many of my “non-blogging” peeps simply don’t “get it.” To them, the whole idea of consistently updating a website with new material seems like a big waste of time. In fact, on several occasions, I have been confronted with some serious questions and criticisms about the whole “blogging thing.” In this article, I take the time to respond to a few of these complaints and questions, which ultimately expose some of the pros and cons of blogging.

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I am going out on a limb here, but my guess is that most bloggers are not taking advantage of Gravatars. Most of the sites that I visit do, however, take full advantage of the opportunity to sport a favicon. Understandably, favicons have been around for much longer than Gravatars and therefore are much more prevalent.

Still, I can’t help but wonder why more people aren’t taking advantage of the free personalized avatar service provided by gravatar.com. For every Gravatar-enabled site there are many opportunities to build brand recognition. And there are many Gravatar-enabled sites from which to choose.

Just as favicons are excellent tools for transforming a user’s browser into a fully branded web portal for your site, so are gravatars, favatars, and other avatars incredibly useful marketing tools for your blog. If you need to further develop a strong sense of name-recognition and brand-awareness, take a few moments to implement and customize these three “must-have” branding tools:

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Sure, I’ll admit it, I am addicted to the Internet. I am connected at work, at play, and at home. When access is unavailable, I go through withdrawals — headaches, nervousness, hallucinations — the whole bit. Over the years, I have learned how to take advantage of periods of Web inaccessibility, however, in general, my schedule pretty much revolves around the Internet. Thus, in the name of “everyone else is doing it,” here is an inside look at my hectic weekly schedule:

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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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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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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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Several months since it began, the Perishable Press is finally being fleshed out with posts, feeds, and images. Now that the site is (95%) built, we are experiencing the joys of blogging, tweaking, and fine-tuning details. So if the site looks good but seems a little short on content, just give us time — there is much planned for the future. I am grateful for this website, and look forward to using it to its fullest potential.

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.