Blogging Schedules: It May Never be “Good Enough”, but that’s Okay

The blogosphere is made up of countless blogs on an exuberant amount of different topics. There is literally about 500 different blogs that appeal to every one person. That is how big the blogosphere is. While there are so, so many different things people bring up, explore, dissect and discuss on their blogs, when you cut through all the clever wording used to describe what a particular blog is all about what type of content you would expect to find there, there are mainly two different types of blogs–those used to detail, rant and rave about one’s life and blogs built and written by and for corporations. As more and more people start opening up and divulging just about everything that goes through their heads to their prospective audiences and as more corporations seek to identify and connect with their consumers, the line between these two, seemingly separate blog types continues to blur where we, the blog readers, see our favorite blogs writing about and being sponsored by corporations. Before the most recent FTC guidelines have been put into place, most of the time, blog readers did not know when we, bloggers, were just sharing information or were being compensated in some way for what we wrote about products and businesses.

As this already very thin line continues to blur, people who began blogging to divulge, rant, rave and detail their lives on the internet are evolving their blogs into their businesses and in some, albeit rare cases, a person’s blog makes up their entire of the bulk of their household income. While most people put the emphasis of being compensated for blog posts, advertisements and the like on mommybloggers, this trend has and will continue amongst any and all blogs with a significant audience that is deemed a “target audience” by consumers.

Woman Tribune started out as a business-like blog. It was not created merely to divulge about my life, although I have done just that on several occasions and will undoubtedly continue to do so as long as Woman Tribune is up and running, but it was created more-so to provide information and to explore and discuss information that is important and significant in the lives of women everywhere. To put it bluntly, Woman Tribune was created as a business, rather than something fun to do in my down time and because of that, Woman Tribune has always operated with a business-like platform. One of the major things to keep in mind when creating a blog with the purpose of it being a business in mind is that it must always contain recent information. While I do my best to post about relevant, interesting and varied topics, if I let Woman Tribune sit for a few days with no content going up after a number of days, it is pretty much the equivalent of committing blogosphere suicide. It starts to become irrelevant, something easy to gloss over and it becomes forgettable. So obviously, knowing that not only is content king in the blogging world, but frequent content is also king and something that must be kept in mind to sustain your blogging/business, the thought of blogging schedules is guaranteed to come up in your mind at least, oh, about 150 times. A day.

Blogging schedules are tricky. Every “professional blogger” or “internet/blog marketer, “interblog marketer” if you will, repeatedly states in just about every five posts for about five years straight to post on your blog as many times as you’d like, but around the same time every day in order to set your readers on a schedule and give them something to look forward to. This is all well and good, in theory, but can become quite a mess in no time and without any effort.

Firstly, trying to get my readers on some sort of “schedule” of when to expect my new posts seems a little weird to me. A little like parenting and why would I start treating my readers like my children when most of them already have children of their own? To add to this, because most of my readers do have children of their own, that means that while they probably love, and even fantasize, about the thought of having some semblance of a schedule, in reality, that is really not given to most parents. Adding to that, for a blogger to be available at around the same, exact time every day in order to update their blog makes it sound like they are lacking a life, which then again may be why they make the money and can be considered interblog marketers in the first place. Just sayin’…

I have always been a night owl; there is just something about the dark and the quiet that really jump-starts my mojo and really puts me to work. I tip a significant hat to the night time as being a key factor in my web design/development talents and for putting my natural knack for the English language to work as a writer early. I have been on the internet, designing and developing websites, writing (mostly) bad poetry and blogging since I was 13 years old. That is an entire decade of this stuff and for the longest time, I honestly had no idea what I was doing, but it worked and I built a name for myself in the political and feminist blogging worlds early. I thought I had some sort of an idea of what I was doing, but as I founded Woman Tribune and found myself enthralled with this new “blogging business” everyone jumped on the bandwagon of over the course of the past few years, I realized that in order to treat this business like a legitimate business, I was going to have to adapt to some business hours. This is exactly where my blogging schedule goes a bit haywire. Because I am a night owl, I am very often up all night (it’s 5:11am here right now and I have not yet been to bed. You obviously get the picture.) and because of this, I am usually not awake during “business hours,” ie: 9am to 5pm. A lot other bloggers have come out quite frequently to say that they too are night owls or suffer from insomnia and in order to still operate under the disguise, for lack of a better word, of being awake during normal business hours, they simply schedule their blog posts that they have written in advance, to publish throughout the day. I could do this if my WordPress did not consistently refuse to publish scheduled posts, therefore making me believe that my installation of WordPress has developed some sort of technological personality and I am just not ready for my content management system to start taking over my life, and then of course, the world.

Just a few days ago I had stayed up all night and got so, completely tired, but wanted to force myself to stay up all day and “work,” also known as write blog posts which is very much work in my life, this website technically being my business regardless of how much I enjoy doing it, but something dawned on me–something that should have dawned on me quite a while ago. I created Woman Tribune in order to provide information to women and to explore and open discussion about the topics that interest me, and collectively other women around the world. If I stay up all night and sleep all day, yet still provide this same service, then I have essentially fulfilled my obligation. If Woman Tribune has become even the least bit important, or a daily stop on women’s blog hopping and internet stays throughout the day, then it technically should not matter when new posts hit the home page.

When small potatoes bloggers, and yes I do very much consider myself small potatoes, I do not have an ego in the least when it comes to my “online personality,” see the blogs of corporations or really, really big potatoes bloggers updating several times a day it is because most of them have a staff of writers. Most of them have pre-written posts to publish throughout the day to make themselves look more professional, again for lack of a better word, than they really are. Bloggers who have created their own websites and who are the sole bloggers on their websites cannot catch up to the amount of volume being presented on professional and corporate-backed blogs and it is about time that we stop trying to. We don’t have teams or staff, we just have ourselves and if people are still logging onto our websites, then it must be enough and it must be okay.

Do you keep to a blogging schedule? Do you think having a blogging schedule or posting at the same time every day is important?

While I and Woman Tribune, essentially is a “small potatoes” blog, I am very interested in its continued expansion and if any women out there are interested in contributing guest posts or weekly/daily columns to Woman Tribune, please feel free to contact me directly at holly[at]womantribune[dot]com to contribute your awesome blogging talents. I’m sure we could work something out and you would be in pretty good company because for the most part, I kick ass. Again, just sayin’…

Add Some Style to the Wordpress Admin Panel

As anyone who uses Wordpress knows, the admin panel is a little rough on the eyes. It’s the same blend of blues and greys, it never changes and if you get sick of looking at the ‘fresh’ design that was released with Wordpress 2.5 the only other option you have is the vintage Wordpress look, which is even worse than the fresh look.

If you’re like me, you know that change is good, especially when it comes to sites you look at every day. We all need to change it up a little bit every now and then, which is why sites like MySpace have so many free template sites and the same goes for Blogger and Wordpress design templates, why sites like Plurk and Twitter allow you to change the look of your profile, and so on. People do not want to be forced to look at the same thing over and over again. This also applies to the Wordpress Admin section. I know that I spend countless hours every week working on my websites; the amount of hours I put in on my websites are the equivalent of two full time jobs, not even factoring in the fact that I also work a full time job from home. With a “job” that you spend up to 80 hours a week on, looking at the Wordpress admin panel while you go about your website work can get a little sore on the eyes and very repetitive.

Pressing Pixels thought the same thing and decided to make a plugin to change the look of your Wordpress admin panel–Wordpress Custom Admin Branding.

The Wordpress Custom Admin Branding plugin is a great plugin and makes logging into your Wordpress panel again and again a little more refreshing than it would be normally. Here’s a look at what Woman Tribune’s Wordpress now looks like:

With this plugin, there are three separate parts of the Wordpress admin panel that may be changed with an image of your choice–The login screen, the header and the footer, as you can see to the left here. The plugin works with all Wordpress installations, I’m currently running Wordpress 2.6.1, which you can also see in the footer image, and the plugin works perfectly without any tweaking.

I definitely recommend this plugin for anyone who is sick of looking at the same old Wordpress admin panel. Download the plugin here.

Woman Tribune’s Magazine Makeover

Woman Tribune was recently made over into what this site’s first aspirations were–A magazine!

Every category is represented, the most recent post from every category is listed under ‘Other Recent Articles.’ You can also see our latest book review and recipe in the sidebar. In addition to our makeover and our ideas on an expansion of the site to let our readers be a bigger part of the site and be a little more hands on as we expand into a community, we have also added a poll for all of our readers to take part in; that being Would you be interested in participating in a monthly book club?

That’s right, one book a month with a private forum for all members to discuss the monthly book in. If you are interested, please vote yes in the poll and also leave a comment here with a valid email address and if we have enough people who want to take part in a book club, I will email you all personally with details on how to sign up and give you access to the forum.

Hope everyone likes the new magazine layout, leave your feedback in the comments!

Tackling Comment Spam–For Good

Blogs are everywhere today; just about everyone has one and because so many people of various backgrounds, cultures and personal interests are involved with the caring and keeping of personal or entertainment websites, they have easily become the leading form of web media when it comes to attracting spam.

Web publishers need to constantly be on top of their comments, checking for spam and getting rid of it promptly before viewers see them and suddenly think we condone the buying and selling of illegal pharmaceuticals or we are unnaturally concerned about their personal and intimate relationships. Spam comments are equally bad for everyone involved in a particular website. They are irritating for the webmaster, having to check sometimes daily or even multiple times a day for comments that are inappropriate for the website and are offensive to readers and it also shows readers that a website may not be as professional as it would like to be seen. If a website fails to look the part of a multi-faceted, entertaining and above all, polished and mastered website, it does not matter how well your website does stat-wise, your viewers will not be interested and potential-advertisers will not take you seriously.

Dealing with spam comments can quickly become a second job for a webmaster, especially since the bigger a website gets, the more spam it attracts. The secret is to finding an efficient and user-friendly spam comment program to help eliminate the worry of unprofessional and inappropriate spam. If you are running Wordpress, you are most likely still running the spam monitoring system Akismet that came with your original Wordpress install; however, there are other programs out there, for Wordpress in particular, that I have found to work much better than Akismet.

Defensio is a comment spam monitor and eliminator whose entire mission is based off of outsmarting evil spam, which it does miraculously. In my opinion, you cannot get any better than Defensio for taking the edge off when you’re thinking about how your website is doing and if any spam is leaking through.

With its innovative technology, Defensio actually adapts to the content you post and is proven not to work in the exact same manner for two different bloggers; instead, it adapts to the webmaster’s specific way of managing their comments and follow suite. Every comment that is posted on your website is given a level of “spamminess” and is determined whether or not the level it is given is low enough to be posted. On a personal level, I have seen comments with a spamminess level as low as 20% be held for moderation, just to make sure that it wasn’t someone trying to plug their site or a company looking for some shameless exposure.

With 99.77% accuracy, Defensio definitely gives you the security you need to be a successful, professional and efficient webmaster with absolutely no worry about back doors being left open for spam comments to get away with accessing your content. It tackles comment spam for several different user interfaces such as Wordpress, PixelPost, Mephisto, Text Pattern, Movable Type and Drupal. It is also supported by several different web developer platforms such as Ruby on Rails, Java, Perl, PHP (4 and 5) and Python; all of which can be downloaded here.