Entries from December 2007 ↓

Unfortunately, for some reason, all the images on New Writing disappeared. I immediately thought I would need to:

• Reinstall Wordpress
• Check MySQL database
• Pay a ‘Technical Guy to Fix it’
• Search on Wordpress Forums

Then I thought I would contact my host host-i-can. They said it was almost certainly a htaccess issue.

I googled htaccess, and happened to see an article mentioning prevent hotlinking.

Then I remembered I had turned on an option in Host i Can preventing Hotlinking.

Disabling this option bought all the images back to Net Writing.

Moral of the Story: always try the easiest and cheapest methods first.

Happy Christmas to all.

I am currently on holiday in the Carribean – an idyllic resort in the Dominican Republic. I hoped that a holiday would provide lots of free time to enable more writing. However, I’ve found that despite having more free time, I actually feel less inclined to write.

Here are some Tips for Writing on Holiday.

It is better to have a complete break and mentally switch off. Rather than being under pressure to write, but not having any inclination to do so.

A break can be good for recharging the batteries.

Maybe you have a commercial / work oriented blog. When your on holiday these topics may seem even less inspiring. Take the opportunity to write on other topics that do motivate you.

Fortunately, on one self improvement blog I had pre written 4 blog entries that I could publish over the course of two weeks. This gives you a break and also enables you to keep your blog ticking over. Another option is to invite guest bloggers to write for you.

Like anywhere else, writing is easier under certain circumstances. If you can find a bit of peace and quite writing will be much easier than taking your laptop to the beach (plus, sand and computers don’t mix very well.)

This holiday has shown me the importance of maximising your productivity in a busy day. When you are so busy you think – if only I had more free time to write. – But, now I have more free time, I am doing less writing.

I used to use the default wordpress search function. However, I found that the search results were rarely meaningful. Wordpress doesn’t seem to be able to distinguish which is the most relevant post. If, for example, you search for ‘Google and SEO’. It will return every post with those 2 keywords in it. However, when I search I am looking for the post with that in its title.

Rather than searching through wordpress, I found it easier to do a google search ‘Google and SEO netwriting’ would bring up the post I was looking for quicker than an internal search.

Since I stopped using wordpress my search, I assumed it would be better for reader to replace it with a custom Google search button.

• If you are a Google adsense publisher, you can easily create a google search button. As an added bonus you can get revenue if people click on the sponsored search results.
• Note: I use Google search button on several websites. I find it provides about 10% of Google adsense earnings. – Not a huge amount, but, it does add up over several months.
• If you are not a Google adsense publisher, Google allow you to create a custom Search Engine
  

Any Disdvantages of Google Search?

Sometimes new pages are not indexed. Occassionaly, not even, old pages are not indexed by Google. If you have many pages which are not indexed, you want to try and get them indexed through removing duplicate pages, and getting more links. However, sometimes I feel it is just a glitch of Google that they cannot index all pages.

Does anyone prefer Wordpress Search to Google Search?