It seems YouTube has been compromised. A script that is inserted into YouTube comments redirects the user (any user that views either the video or comments pages) to another website where a disgusting video plays. The exact nature of the website is unknown however it has been suggested that it can steal session cookies. Obviously there is also a potential risk for account theft, and infection by viruses and malware. I would strongly advise you avoid the website completely until this issue has been rectified.

Clearly things can go wrong online, so it pays to be aware and prepared. Recently Cindy had to undertake a ‘spontaneous blog vacation’ (as she put it) after her WordPress installation was compromised. The problem here seems to be that WordPress wasn’t updated when new versions were made available. This is a problem I’ve experienced with one of my websites in the past. Fortunately starting a new WordPress installation is fairly straight forward however if you haven’t backed up your blog you will lose all your content. You wouldn’t leave your only copy of your manuscript outside on a windy day so why risk your blogging content?

How To Export Your Blog

While logged into the WordPress dashboard, locate the Tools: Export option.

You will be then presented with the export screen. Here you have the option to restrict your export to specific blog authors (assuming your blog has multiple authors). This might be desirable if you had a communal blog but now want to set up separate sites for each author. For the most part however you’ll just want to leave it as ‘All Authors.’

Click on ‘Download Export File.’ A dialogue like this one will show up, however note that the look of this window will vary slightly from browser to browser. Make sure you select the option to ‘Save File.’ Give the XML file a meaningful username – especially if you have multiple blogs – but leave the date stamp intact. This will help you determine which backup is most recent at a glance if you have multiple backup files for the same blog.

Remember to back up often. If you couldn’t tolerate the thought of losing all the work you’ve done between now and your last back up take this as an instruction to back up right now.

Make multiple copies of your back up XML files. If your only backup is on your computer and something happens to your computer, then it’s all been for nothing. Consider keeping copies of your backup files. Put them on a CD or an External hard disk or a USB stick. Email copies of your XML files to your ‘cloud’ email account. Better yet why not save them to your Dropbox and have your essential files synced between all your computers? The 2GB option is free.

Realise your contribution to the Internet is important enough to take seriously and protect. Happy blogging and happy backing up!

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I sometimes assume if I know something then it must be self-evident to everyone, but this is obviously not necessarily the case. I thought I would include some tips for people who are new to the WordPress platform.

Separate Tags With Commas: If you look at the WordPress dashboard you’ll see a reminder of this advice but it is still sometimes ignored. Tags are a helpful way of searching for specific information within your blog. If you maintain a blog about rock and roll music people will be able to click on the tag ‘Elvis Presley’ for example and see all the blog posts relating to Elvis Presley. However if you don’t include commas between your tags as you enter them all the tags are treated as one entry. ‘Elvis Presley’ as a single tag is meaningful, ‘Elvis Presley Carl Perkins Blue Suede Shoes’ all together is garbled, confusing and not very helpful.

Think About Your Categories: Starting a blog can seem a little daunting at times, especially if you don’t know exactly what you want to write about. I actually think it’s quite natural for blogs to evolve over time – so don’t lose sleep if your blog takes on different dimensions as it develops. But thinking about what subjects you want to write about up front gives your blog a focus in the beginning. Listing blog entries under the ‘Uncategorized’ default category is lazy and doesn’t help your reader understand the entry subject matter. It’s a missed opportunity from a search engine optimization perspective too. [You can't delete the uncategorized category but you can change it. Consider what your most blogged subject will be and change the category name and category slug. This will save you time in the long run.]

Create Meaningful Permalinks: The URLs that WordPress produces for your individual blog entries can be either pretty or ugly, generic or meaningful. Search Engines find a URL with relevant keywords in it more meaningful than a number. By default, WordPress produces permalinks that look like this:

http://www.domain.com/?p=2028

You can customize them however you like, personally I like to use a /%category%/%postname%/ format.

http://www.johnlacey.com/blogging/basic-wordpress-blogging-tips/

Use absolute – not relative – links when linking to external resources: If you link to Google for example from your blog entry and type in ‘www.google.com’ browsers will assume it’s a relative link. It will produce something that looks something like this:

http://www.johnlacey.com/blogging/www.google.com

http://www.google.com

Remember you’ll learn by doing… so get started. WordPress is a great platform and whether you’re using WordPress.com or self-hosted WordPress it’s a powerful tool that will help bring your ideas to the world. Happy blogging!

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This is part two of my series on a talk given by James Maskalyk, Christian Lander and Antony Loewenstein at the Sydney Writers’ Festival recently. You can read part one here.

Blogging Tips
James had some great tips for blogging and writing in general. I particularly adored this:

First rule of writing: put your ass in a chair.

He also notes that because there is so much content on the web readers can be fickle. He recommends being clear and thinking about how accessible your writing style is. He also spoke of the importance of offering a story – a rich narrative thread – to your readers. He recommends updating regularly.

But I’m famous on the Internet…
Christian describes ‘Internet fame’ as being the lowest form of fame you can ever hope to achieve. He suggests that serial killers have more fame than Internet people. He tells bloggers to not try to become famous, insisting that readers can easily tell when someone is doing something for the joy of it and when they are just trying to make a quick buck.

Does Being Published Give You Validation?
The answer is clearly a resounding yes. I think it’s important to appreciate that these bloggers were at the Sydney Writers’ Festival not because they were bloggers, but because they were published authors and had books to promote and sell. (I mean there were no unpublished bloggers on the panel.)

Christian explained that by generating publicity through his blog he was in a much better position when approached by a publisher. You can be a ‘nobody’ he insists and still get the power of an established author before being published through blogging.

Christian also points to collaborative community efforts online that have become books such as Post Secret, something he touts as a great way of getting a book deal without ‘doing any work.’

Related Posts:

• The Blogosphere: Part I
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• Notes on Brisbane Writers’ Festival

As part of the Sydney Writers’ Festival I recently attended a talk about ‘The Blogosphere’ featuring James Maskalyk, Christian Lander and Antony Loewenstein.

Christian is the genius behind Stuff White People Like the ‘micro-humour magazine’ that chronicles… well, actually the title is fairly self-explanatory. James used blogging as a way of communicating with the outside world while working with Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) in Sudan. Antony blogs extensively about the the Israel/Palestine conflict, and is also the author of The Blogging Revolution in which he discusses individuals living in repressive regimes who are using blogging as a tool for sharing information and political change.

What is Blogging?
Christian Lander:

Blogging is not an artform. It’s writing as it always was. Maybe it was a little shorter and you publish quicker.

James described blogging as a ‘new kind of journalism’ and one that offered greater immediacy than other forms of print media and one which could incorporate multimedia elements.

Why Blog?
Antony suggests that in many countries there is no alternative to blogging for independent thought and that even in less repressive nations most newspapers are ‘crap.’ He identifies the aim of independent political blogs as being heard. Having worked as an Australian journalist he admits that editorial stances put considerable constraints on journalists and that having an independent blog gives the writer much greater autonomy.

For James, having little contact with the outside world, blogging gave him an outlet to communicate with others and process his own experiences in Sudan. He started it as a way of keeping in touch with family and friends, and was surprised that it attracted a much broader audience over time.

Christian started his blog just to amuse some of his friends.

Community and Feedback
Christian admits that he no longer reads comments because they are really vicious and that apparently there is some sort of ‘race war’ going on within the comments on his blog. Negative comments don’t encourage writing. He also notes a difference between the kind of feedback he gets from email as opposed to via blog comments, explaining that the ratio of positive email to negative is 100:1. He doesn’t believe in comment moderation, laughing as he explains that, “You can delete the comment but you can’t delete the person.”

Similarly Antony explains that comments do not form a large part of his writing. He does however have a novel approach for dealing with particularly oddball or offensive comments. He takes them and publishes them on a special page within his blog including their email addresses.

For James blog feedback was his only connection to the larger world and in his experience the comments were mostly positive. He suggests that blogging offers an opportunity to connect not just with information, but with people – and people you wouldn’t ordinarily have the opportunity to connect with. When he was struggling to heal a three year old boy he made information about the patient’s symptoms available online (including photographs, obscuring the boy’s face for privacy and security reasons). With the assistance of the collective wisdom of his readership, he was able to reach a diagnosis.

You can read part two here.

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• The Blogosphere: Part II
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I adore WordPress.

It is such a far cry from the hand coded pages I created ten years ago. Back then, in an attempt to streamline my workflow, I would make page templates – essentially HTML files that included a header and a footer and some information about the way the page would be formatted. It saved some time though I still had to manually upload each page. It made adding new content an awkward time-consuming process. Even after I had added a new page I would have to go back to the front page of the website and add the link there, perhaps with a thumbnail, perhaps with a brief description.

WordPress is celebrated also for its ability to present information in Search Engine-friendly ways.

I confess I had never really considered WordPress in terms of its accessibility. I just discovered a wonderful video from Glenda Watson Hyatt on how WordPress as a platform and blogging more generally as a channel of communication have changed her life.

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Google works in mysterious ways.

Some years ago I used a local ISP as my web host and domain registrar. While the people there were nice and mostly helpful, everything had to happen manually (setting up a new MySQL database might take several days depending on their technical guy’s workload) and with a handful of different domains their fees were becoming remarkably expensive.

Eventually I made the switch to online (US-based) “do it yourself” registration and hosting services. There was a learning curve associated with this, but even figuring out how to set up a new MySQL database (for example) took a lot less time even as I fumbled around working out where things were located. However at the time I really didn’t understand the domain transfer process. I was nervous. My primary domain at that time was johnlacey.com, though I registered johnlacey.net with the new service primarily so if there was any downtime I would at least have a workable email address. I transfered all my web services over to that new email address. (It helped me a lot too since the previous email address with johnlacey.com was now obscenely overwhelmed by spam.)

I basically moved my haphazard blog to a subdomain on the new domain, blog.johnlacey.net. I decided to really pour a lot of energy and time into it. Some weeks I was posting a new entry every day of the week. I decided this would be a personal blog and that I would use johnlacey.com for commercial purposes (once I figured out what the hell it was I wanted to do with my life).

I commented in a lot of places, always including a link back to that blog.johnlacey.net location.

In all this time, johnlacey.com laid barren. Not a piece of content there at all. I recently resurrected it. I started writing about content creation and social media since they are things that appeal to me and things that I work on myself.

I don’t want to dwell upon it for too long but I should probably just tell you… There are thousands of people in the world who have the name “John Lacey” or some variant thereof. There’s an Australian artist (no relation) with that name. There’s an American Revolutionary War hero of that name. There’s even a television show from the late eighties/early nineties called “Dear John” whose main character has the name John Lacey. When it comes to my name as a search term, there is a lot of competition.

The thing that interests me the most is that both sites – the one that was basically abandoned for years and the one I pumped a lot of energy and time into – are doing well in Google. (The Australian version of Google has johnlacey.com in 4th place though blog.johnlacey.net doesn’t appear on the front page. The International/US version of Google has blog.johnlacey.net in sixth place, and johnlacey.com in seventh place.)

I took inspiration from the website of Alister Cameron (after we discussed it in a webinar session) and changed the permalink url to my ‘about’ page from ‘about’ to ‘john-lacey’ and linked to a lot of different web services I use with my name linked.

I guess the things I’ve taken away from this process are two-fold.

• Make sure your name (or business name or keyword/s) are used when people are linking to your website: I went to great lengths to politely ask my friends that when they do link to me that they do it by name. As long as you do this politely and explain your motivation (search engine optimization) people are usually happy to oblige. Of course when you comment on blogs this thing is automatically very easy because they are set up to link to the site you specify with the name you use.
• Your name (or business name) are keywords; think about your keyword density: When I blog I scarcely refer to myself in third person. I will say “Today I set up a new blog at this domain.com.” I don’t turn around and say “John Lacey set up a new blog at this domain.com.” That would give the illusion that somebody else is writing my blog posts for me and that goes against everything the ‘personal web’ represents and of course it’s not true! But you still need to use your name in enough places for Google to associate your site with that term.

This is where the repetition of “John Lacey at Twitter” and “John Lacey at Stickam” and “John Lacey at BlogTV” (etc.) on the about page becomes so valuable. But what else can you do?

If your blog theme allows you to include the blog author name (and if it doesn’t easily, there are always hacks around this) on each entry, do this. If you include any photographs of yourself make sure you include your name in the ALT and TITLE tags. You can include a short bio on the bottom of each entry (if appropriate) that includes a link to your site within your name. For example:

There is probably an opportunity here too if people are talking about you (and saying things that you’d like to share with your readers) to quote them on your site. They will use your name and in the context of that quotation using your name in a blog entry will be normal since you are not referring to yourself. Great for testimonials.

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I was recently asked how to change the sidebar in the atahualpa3 WordPress theme.

The easy answer is through the use of widgets. However I have also made a PDF explaining this process in greater detail with lots of pictures to help along the way.

You can download it below.
Adding Widgets To Sidebars In WordPress [PDF]

You will need Adobe Acrobat (or similar) to read this document. Don’t forget you can right-click and select “Save File As…” to save this file to your computer.

Hope this helps!

Any wordpress questions? Leave a comment or talk to me on Twitter.

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