Web Dev Notes

If you run a website or a blog you will soon realize that there will be good times and there will be bad times. The key to success is of course to survive the bad times and do your best to maximize the good times. Don’t let bad times drag you down even further by getting depressed as this will only cause you to slow down on your work pace. If you write a blog, you need to keep posting! Lack of readers could be a good reason to post more, definitely not less!

There are so many blogs and websites out there that chances are you will have competitors. No matter what, the internet is so very vast in size that people will find other content to view if you stop updating yours! If you let up for a second, you will fall behind. You blink, you lose! Keep plugging away at it and never give up. You can achieve anything you set your mind too if you put in enough effort!

Having trouble coming up with a new idea to write about? Are you sitting there looking at the blank text box, hoping for a miraculous inspiration to arrive suddenly in your mind? What if… it’s not coming! What do you do? Do you run for the hills and hide from all your angry visitors who are demanding a new update? Or do you write a not-so-good content filler that is of low quality and which will cause yet another revolt?

When I’m stuck and in desperate need of ideas, I take a coffee break!

Coffee might not be your magic cure, but taking a break to relax and clear your mind will definitely help. Browse the internet for a little bit and visit your favorite websites; maybe one will be discussing a topic that will light your flare and get those fingers typing.

I highly recommend visiting WebDevNotes.com as one of your favorite sites as well…! If my content cannot inspire you, at least the cats will!

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If you want to be successful you will need to work as hard as you can to reach your goals. Never give up, even if it feels like you are grabbing helplessly at thin air! Keep fighting for what you believe in and what you want to achieve!

Even if you feel like you might be running in circles, keep at it and be strategic! If something is standing in your way, find the source of the problem and address it. How long do you think it will be before you come home and the kitty has chewed up the laser pointer? The kitty always wins.

Running a website or a blog can be a lot of work, especially if you run more than one! Staying organized is extremely important because in order to become successful you will need to consistently add new content to your website! While that sounds easy enough, it’s harder than you think! Some days the ideas just won’t come or you will have other planned activities (like a job or schoolwork) that will take priority! If you don’t organize yourself, it won’t be long before your website turns into one giant mess!

The above picture is a metaphor for your life! If you don’t want your life to look like scrambled eggs, read these 27 Great Tips to Keep Your Life Organized. Be sure to apply the same advice to your blog or website!

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The best thing you can do for your blog is listen to your readers! Always reply to comments and emails from readers and consider discussing issues they bring up in future posts to show them you are paying attention!

If you don’t pay attention to your readers, they’ll be sad or indifferent. Sad or indifferent readers should not even be called readers, because they won’t be reading much of your website again! Do not underestimate how happy you can make your readers simply by noticing them and taking seriously any comments or opinions they share with you.

Happy readers are return visitors. Feed your visitors a happy meal.

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I’ve received questions from several individuals with regards to how I am able to include HTML code in my Wordpress posts. For example, if you want to make a word bold, you type <strong>bold</strong>. So the question is, how then did I write <strong>bold</strong> without the word becoming bold? The other questions I’ve been asked is, “How the heck did you do that indentation?!”. Take a look at this post for example! Can you put blocks of code like this on your page? YES!

The magic behind formatting a post like this is actually very simple. Writing a post in Wordpress is a simplified way of inserting a few paragraphs of HTML formatted text into a web page. When you make a word bold or add a link, the text is surrounded by tags which will tell the browser how to format it’s appearance on the screen. HTML tags always begin with “<”, so as soon the browser encounters this symbol, it will check to see if it is a valid HTML tag, and if so, take the appropriate actions. If you actually just want to display the “<” symbol on screen and have the browser ignore the possibility that it could be HTML code, then you need to instead write the ASCII entity name.

I know many of you just grumbled and felt discouraged at the mention of ASCII entity names, but don’t worry I promise it really is very easy! Basically, all you need to know is that some characters have an ASCII entity name which you can type in your posts to display the character. For example, the ASCII character name for < is:

Try it out! Open up wordpress and type the above ASCII character. When you preview the page, you will see that the character < is displayed instead. The new mystery then is, how did I write the ASCII character above without it being turned into “<”? hmmm…!

• Go here for a full list of ASCII character names

The next question was related to indentation in posts. The first thing I did was put my code within a blockquote. If you are using Wordpress, you can simply highlight text, then click the “b-quote” button to do this. This indents a whole paragraph of text, commonly used for quoting references by bloggers. Next, I surrounded my blockquote with a tag called <pre></pre>. This tag is used to define preformatted text which means that the text enclosed between the tags will be displayed as it is typed. In a nutshell, if you are typing a post in Wordpress and hit the spacebar 20 times between each word, when you hit preview, it will still only show a single space between each word. However, if you use <pre>text to be preformatted here</pre> in your post, then all text between the tags will display your text as it was written, meaning multiple spaces can be displayed.

Try it out. Copy/Paste the below into Wordpress and preview it to see the effect:

<pre>

This is the first line, with no indent.
     This line has 5 spaces in front of it!
          This line has 10 spaces in front of it!

</pre>

Enjoy!

Update:I’d just like to say it’s really interesting how this post first came to be. The only reason I thought about writing on this subject is because readers contacted me asking about it. I am very eager to answer any and all such questions! Please keep the feedback coming so that I can focus on providing content that is of interest to YOU!

If you want to be successful, you need to offer your visitors something unique. If you clone other websites you will end up reading your blog all alone.

Now hold on one minute! The clones shown above are obviously not alone, there are two of them! That may be true… However, consider how their similarities will affect the amount of attention they receive? If you are walking around the block and see the above cute cat, you may bend down to pet him/her on the head if he/she is not foaming from the mouth. Great! Now you continue your walk and a few minutes later, you see the exact same cat…! Well… not really! This time you have met the clone! Either way, you tell the little bugger to get lost and to stop following you! You are no longer interested! If it had been a different cat, you would have been more likely to bend down and pet his/her head again!

Don’t clone others. Offer something new on your blog or website. If you are discussing the same topic as someone else, present the content in a different way. Stand out or perish like an old banana.

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Want to Increase your Websites Page Rank and Incoming Traffic? Submit your Articles to WriterDatabase.com. It’s Free!

Do you want your blog to be a success or a failure? In order to be successful you MUST have quality content. Forget about quantity of posts and focus on quality. Plant the seeds for success early.

In order for your blog to take-off, you need some very high quality posts you can use as your foundation. Take the time to write these posts and then link to them often in the future. Help use them to propel you forward.

Of course, while those old cornerstone posts will help get your blog rolling and will be excellent at grabbing the attention of first time visitors, you won’t be able to grow unless you also hang on to your returning visitors. Even if you plant the seeds for success, your plant won’t grow unless you water it and put it somewhere where it can get sun.

Speaking about getting sun, don’t expect your blog to magically grow on its own! Your plant doesn’t have legs… If you leave it in the shade, it won’t get up and walk over to the sun. Your blog won’t get up and show itself on peoples screens either. You’ll need to get out there and market your content in order to attract some attention. Post comments on blogs with similar topics and hope that other authors and bloggers start sending you some links! If you have great content, the links will come!

For more tips about marketing and advertising your blog, check out the Web Dev Notes Marketing Section.

Looking for Web Development Software or Books? Visit my Web Development Software and Books Store!

Want to Increase your Websites Page Rank and Incoming Traffic? Submit your Articles to WriterDatabase.com. It’s Free!

The more links you have to your website, the more visitors you get! That’s a pretty simple concept to understand. Every link to your site on the web is another chance that someone will find your website. Even more important is the fact that the number of links to your website also helps your site gain a higher ranking in search engine results. Since most people use search engines to find anything online, the better you rank, the more traffic you will get! Search engines are an excellent form of free advertising for your website so it is crucial that you do not upset them if you wish to give yourself a competitive advantage over websites similar to your own.

There are many ways to build links. If you’re blogging, the best way is simply to interact with other websites by posting comments on theirs.

Another excellent way to build links to your website is through article submission. If you have a good website, you will already have tons of articles sitting around in your archives. Every now and then, submit one of these articles to an article directory like Writer Database.The reason for doing this is because at the bottom of your article, you can place a resource box which will link to your website as the source of the article. Therefore, if your article is approved, you will suddenly have generated a new link to your site. You can read more about the Writer Database website here.

Don’t just submit to a single directory. If you have time, try submitting to multiple directories to further increase the amount of links to your web site. The more you have, the better!

What about the Google penalty for duplicate content? If you submit an article identical to the one on your website, will the penalty outweigh the benefits? I’ve seen many discussions on the matter and the fact remains that nobody really knows the algorithms Google uses to rank pages. Many people believe that the duplicate content penalty will only affect duplicate content on the same domain. I have in fact seen this happen on my BattleCity Classic website which uses the Joomla Content management system. Due to the way the system is set-up, several different links could allow me to reach the exact same page. For this reason, my main landing page had a low page-rank of 1 for a long-time, until I fixed this problem. A few months later, after the next page rank update, my landing page jumped to a page rank of 4. During this time, I’ve seen the page rank of most article directories remain stable or even increase and so it would seem that the duplicate content penalty is meant to protect against a single website spamming Google’s index.

If you are however worried about duplicate content penalties, then take the time to write new articles ONLY for article directories. Do not place this content on your website, but instead use it in as many article directories as you can in order to advertise your site via the quality of the writing and of course through the generation of incoming links!

Remember when I said, “If You Clone You Will End Up Alone“? I wasn’t kidding! All too often I see new bloggers trying to copy another successful blogger in order to fast-track themselves to success! This is the worst thing you could ever do of all the horrible things you could ever imagine yourself doing!!! Why on earth would anyone ever read your new website if it sounds exactly like an existing well established site? They won’t!

It would be nice if humans were little lemmings who would march around the blogosphere and just magically show up by the thousands every day! Unfortunately there are no lemmings coming! Ok, thats a lie, you are the lemming and you are about to walk your website right off a cliff if you copy someone else or even worse steal content!

If you want visitors to take your website seriously, you need to stand out from the rest of the crowd!

How do you do that? The best way you can make sure you stand out is by NOT TRYING TO DO SO! Stop trying so hard to make your website an instant success. Accept the fact that there are no shortcuts and quality content is the key to prosperity! What about the standing out part? Just be yourself! Don’t try to be someone you aren’t. Every single person on this planet is unique so as long as you are yourself, you are bound to stand out.

A great example is Brandon from GamingMMO.com. The first thing you will notice is that he is passionate about his subject as well as knowledgeable. Once you have those two ingredients, all you have to do is let the fingers do the typing!