Archive for the ‘Mistakes’ Category

What is your Comment Policy?

Comments are one of the most important part of any blog. For a growing blog, comments are like water that helps a sapling to grow into a majestic tree. Comments are also a unique feature of the blogs, and the real time interaction, between the blogger and the visitor, that comments facilitate, I think, is one of the major reasons for the popularity of the blogs.

How a blogger manages the comments can either encourage, or discourage, a visitor to leave a comment or not. 

The first question, then, is : Is it a good idea to moderate comments?

I don’t think it is, because when I comment on a blog it satisfies me immensely to see my comment get posted immediately. But, then, as experience has taught me, there are a few people out there who can leave comments that you would rather not have on your blog. So, choosing to moderate comments is like choosing the lesser of the two evils.

The next question: How do you respond to a comment?

The easiest and the best way, they tell me,  is to respond to it in your comment section and to go back to the commenter’s blog and leave a comment there. But, for some reason, I feel that commenting in my own comment section may seem to some as an attempt to artificially inflate the comment count. It is dificult to please all, isn’t it?

But, from now, I have decided to change that, and I am going to be responding to the comments in the comment section itself. And, I am going to try and comment on most blogs that comment here.

That last part raises a question in my mind that I hope some of you can answer for me. When you leave a comment on someone’s blog, do you check back to see if the blogger has responded to it?

Also, do you have a comment policy? If yes, what is it?

Apologies!

The site is backIf you visited the site in the last 24 hours, you might have seen some unexpected things on here.

There was some site maintenance being carried out by  the hosting service providers, and it went on for longer than expected.

But, when I woke up this morning and the site was still not working I mailed the hosting provider to ask them about it. It turned out that they were thinking that everything was working all right.

So, after getting my mail they quickly fixed the problem, and consequently the site is up and working now.

I would like to offer my apologies for any inconvenience caused to any of you who visited the site during the  time the site was offline.

Social Networking and Blogging!

Did Blogging come first, or did Social Networking?

If you think about it, social networking, in one form or another has existed since time immemorial. So, the better question would be : did YOU start blogging first, or were YOU social networking even before you were blogging?

And, how is social networking affecting your blogging?

It is often said that social networking can be a powerful tool for bloggers; that it is a good way to get the word about your blog out there, and to get people to visit your blog!

But I don’t agree with that. Social Networking CAN be a powerful tool for bloggers but, before it can be  that, a blogger has to make sure that he is doing the other things right. One can not have a good, or even a popular blog, solely on  the basis of social networking. A good blog has to have  good content, a good layout and regular posts (it goes without saying t hat the quality of the posts has to be good). And if you have a good blog, you stand a better chance of having a popular blog!

Social Networking is good for making friends, but if you want  to be a better blogger (the definition of a better blogger is again subjective), just work harder on your blog!

Big time mess up!

OOOF!

As I said in a previous post, I recently moved hosts and I was very happy with the smooth way in which the transition happened but, then, I relaised that something was amiss.

When I was posting, I could not get the visual editor to work (which still doesnt work). So, confident after my initial success, I thought I could solve this problem too.

Big Mistake.

Everything that could go wrong, did! And I am thankful that I had been careful enough to take good back ups when I was moving because I had to re-install wordpress and lost all the posts. but my previous back-up came in handy, and I lost only two posts, which is not all that bad, considering I could have lost all of them.

Anyways, for now the blog is up and working, and I have learnt my lesson of not messing around with WordPress. I am going to take a break now and hope you don’t mind if something is not working right. If you notice something that is not as it should be, please leave a comment and let me know.

It’s up again!

If you have visited this blog in the recent past you must have been annoyed at not finding anything here. Before I begin to explain what happened, let me apologise for the inconvenience you might have experienced.

All users of WordPress must know that they bring out newer versions of their software faster than you can get used to the one you have just installed. Though, I had been ignoring the newer versions and was sticking to my old WordPress, the attraction of 2.2 was too much even for someone like me and I decided to upgrade.

Big Mistake!

Suffice it to say that everything got mixed up and the blog went up in flames. I had taken the backup of my files, but then I was successfully able to do something to them that they would not work either or maybe it was that I could not get them to work. Frustrated and tired, I decided to scrap it all and install WP from scratch again- a five minute process, they said.

But some things are not meant to be. It was now that my hosting service provider decided to play the truant and I had issues right and left. At one point the live support told me that they simply did not support WordPress. And At that point of time I thought this site was as good as dead.

Just like all good things come to an end, so do bad things and finally, with the help of a friend, WordPress was installed and the blog is now on its feet again.

When this blog crashed I was serialising the novella I wrote for NanoWriMo last year and I think I am going to continue with that, but this time I am going to mix the novella with general posts.

Also, I am going to try and post something on here everday, so if by any chance you like to visit my blog, it would be a good idea to blog mark it. Tomorrow, I start the serialising of the novella again. If you have missed it the last time, dont miss it this time. If you read it before, please bear with me. I will get to the sixth chapter real soon.