يوميات معاذ - حيث تجد #حديث_الأربعاء وقصصًا أخرى

Category: Site update (Page 19 of 24)

80,000 views! Site update inside

2016-05-07 / / 0 Comments
80,000 views on my blog, what a day!

I have reached 80,000 views on my blog, it’s a milestone to be celebrated indeed! The result of hard work and dedication, and I can’t forget my loyal readers!These last few weeks since I last wrote an update were a true blessing, while I blogged less, I embarked on a soul finding journey beyond the interface of blogger, I am still undecided about posting that kind of posts yet on this blog, I’ve thought of it, I might pitch a pilot post like that soon, but without feedback, none of that is happening..



Times call for a change

  • I moved from a 3rd party domain to the Blogspot hosted domain (actually I didn’t renew the subscription fee), if you feel like reading the full post, then you are welcomed to check it out from here.
  •  I’ve lost a great deal of traffic due to this sudden change, but I’m sure I’ll be able to win my readers back, after all most of them are from Libya searching franticly for a way to get a passport (pray for Libya please) and I’m sure they will comeback as soon as the reservation site gets back on-line, it’s that bad!
  • As a side effect Linkwithin is acting off, giving me two links instead of one, one for the third party domain that expired recently and the other is for the Blogspot domain.
    Since Linkwithin has a really responsive support team (just kidding), I’ve dropped the idea of using Linkwithin all together, but if you are still into it, check out this post covering a popular fix for the post issue (shameless self promotion at it’s best!!).

Blog improvements

  • During this time I decided to take a “real” look on my blog, and I found some really bad posts, I mean REALLY bad (I’m my own worst critic), so I went happy with the delete button.The total post number went down from 410 to 288, that’s in case you noticed, and in case you didn’t, there you go!
  • Deleting that huge number of posts left “dead links” all over the blog! Since I tend to link my posts together to create a better context, deleting a huge number of posts will create gaps! And there is no way to tell blogger the posts were deleted, I had to take care of those manually, one by one! With the help of a little tool of course! This tool helped me search for dead links and locate them exactly inside the blog, some of it was from the old domain but mostly it was deleted posts (and a very few links that expired ad needed to be removed).
  • I’ve figured out why some of my posts have awkward spaces in them while I didn’t do that, I might post about that, it depends on readers mainly.. 
  • Sometimes, doing nothing fixes stuff, if you wait long enough, some issues will resolve themselves (I’m talking about blogging, if you have problems work on them!). 
  • Blogger has changed the sitemap limit, only allowing 150 posts to be submitted, even with the massive downsizing I did, I was still way above the limit, luckily I found a way to add more sitemaps to fetch all my posts, which happens to be very easy to use, checkout the sitemap tool from here.
    And YES! I believe that adding a sitemap is important for blog growth, despite the claims that Google sitemaps sites automatically, I find that very hard to believe.

Brand growth

  • It’s no secret that I use Twitter for promoting my content, and I am pleased with the results, if anyone is interested I’ll make a post (or a series of posts) on how to develop a strategy to promote your blog content and twitter account side by side.
  • It’s worth mentioning that my twitter followers exceeded 16,000 followers!
  • I focus on Twitter a lot because I’m an anti-Facebook activist, so I can’t use Facebook for promotion (and everybody is on Facebook)..
  • The blog grew a great deal in comparison with the same time last year, that’s great! If I could seduce the readers to comment? That would be super too! (Come to the comments section, we have cookies).

Blog look and feel

I finally settled with a look for my blog, I like this template, and I hope you do too, because it’s going to stick around for a while!
It’s clean and responsive, so far this is the closest template to my vision of a personal blog, unless if you have a better thing to offer, I’m always down for an awesome template (in almost 4 years of blogging no one has suggested me such a thing).
I think it’s time to settle down with one look for the blog, don’t you agree?

Final words..

Change is never easy, and for some it could be harder than ever. This last month was a wild roller coaster ride of changes and challenges, and I’m glad to say I’ve concurred them all, it’s really down to how you adapt to the changes and challenges in your life and make the best of them!
Till the next major milestone.
Have a nice day, and do tell me what do you think of this post?

Reasons why I’m not renewing my domain

2016-04-14 / / 0 Comments

I had a domain for over a year now which I got from Libya’s biggest (and only) ISP,Libya Telecom and Technology, it wasn’t as good as I thought!

I had some expectations about getting a domain of my own, sadly none of them came true, even when I did my best promoting and getting my name out there!

 

 

  • I thought it would look good on a resume.
    People started to think (for some reason) that I’m really good with making sites, and all of a sudden I’m plagued with requests of making websites, I am not a web developer! 
  • I thought it would help get me a better job
    I thought that having a site (not just a free hosted blog) would catch the eyes of HR personal and enhance my chance of nailing a dream job (any decent job in my case) but it didn’t!
  • Times aren’t so easy
    With this economy I have to squeeze in every penny, and since the domain didn’t reel in any money or do anything real to enhance my career, then I’m better off making other investments and leave the domain for now.
  •  Not making the full potential out of the domain I bought a domain and a hosting space in order to redirect users from my blogspot site to the domain, I didn’t upload anything on the server so it’s a total waste! I found an easy way to change the blog’s name across all posts, and that was awesome! And the space that was given to me was so small! I mean Google provides 15 GB of drive space, and a free hosting services, let alone that using a custom domain takes away the ability of using HTTPS to secure my site!
  • Difficult to manage I’m using Google’s webmaster tools, and having a custom domains means I have four sites to manage (the blog, the blog with www, the domain, the domain with www) and dropping the custom domain would make the management easier, and since my domain is a country domain, it’s guided towards readers of that county, and my target is the world!!
  •  Promotion issues I thought having a custom domain would make twitter treat my URL differently, instead of taking 30 characters from the tweet it would take less (since I have a shorter domain), well that was not the case there! My url took the same amount of characters and I was in for a shocker! No HTTPS availability Since I linked my blogger domain to my purchased domain, my blogger domain is simply redirecting to my ly domain, in the process I lost HTTPS security because blogger doesn’t support that yet, meaning I’m less secure now than I was before getting the domain!

What happens next?

Life is all about experiences, I had a nice year with a custom LY domain, and now it’s time to go back to the old subdomain that blogspot provides, it’s not that bad, many professional bloggers, artists, and products use subdomains to blog, let alone me! Someone who is still finding his way in the world of blogging. Why should I pay for my site to be online and for people to read free of charge, while I can keep it hosted for free? It would take me some work to change all my bios and social media sites to the new site, but I’m sure it’s worth the effort! And I think that my stats will improve so much after dumping the LY domain which I think it limiting me from reaching my total potential (due to google’s geographic location settings). Do you have a custom domain? How much do you pay for it? What’s your current plan? And finally: What do you think of me going back to a free service hosted by Google? Waiting for your comments below!

    75,000 views!

    2016-03-29 / / 0 Comments
    Today I reached 75,000 views!

    Today is one of the days I feel my hard work is paying off!
    It’s an important step towards a goal I set for myself, the 100,000 views, three quarters of the way.

    reaching 75000 on my blog

    I’m also really close to reaching 15,000 followers on Twitter, which is a huge part of my promotion success!
    Since I don’t want to be overly talkative on the blog, I wanted to use this post as a total update, I’ve been experimenting with several templates lately, and until I can find something decent I’ll stick to the basic template, I’m afraid I’ll be sticking on it for a while!

    As for the domain issue some of my readers reached out to me saying that the domain is down, and that’s true! My LTT hosted domain went down and I’m yet to fix it, I’m still unsure how to add it to the blog, this makes me rethink the whole “third party domain thing”.

    An update

    I haven’t been able to restore the domain, so I just configured it to redirect to here until it expires, and I don’t think I’ll be renewing it.
    The contact page hasn’t been working for a few days (thanks for letting me know!) And I fixed it by not touching it at all!

    The simple template proved to be far too simple, I had to change it a little bit, I found a perfect template but had some issues I had to fix, and the developer wasn’t replying to anyone who contacted him, so I came up with the one you see now. I hope you like it.
    Last but not least, linkedwithin.
    For some reason, linked within is showing posts with the new domain and the old one together, and even tho I made a redirect, it doesn’t work with the posts, just the home page.
    I tried contacting them several times, but they didn’t respond to my initial e-mails that I sent over a year ago, and didn’t respond now..
    So Linkedwithin had to go to. 


    Thanks for being a part of this journey! See you at 80,000 views

    Tell me what you have in mind in the comments section below, if you can help with the domain issue or have a cool template for me.

    My 400th post, what a journey!

    2016-03-10 / / 0 Comments
    I realized that I have reached my 400th post, and it’s a significant milestone indeed!

    I always stopped to celebrate these milestones (even when I didn’t have a clear direction for my blog) and this happens to be a big one!
    I have written 400 posts since I started blogging back in 2012, not all of them are good, in fact some are pretty bad! And I’m not planning to change them one bit!

    They will remain as a reminder for me of my humble beginnings, and a measure of my improvement.

     

    400 Post

    I am glad I’m able to help people around the world with my blogging, it’s gives me a sense of achievement like nothing else to know that somewhere, I made someone’s day through my writing, the writing I have so much fun doing!

    I remember writing on my first post saying that I wanted to blog to share my knowledge with the world and provide solutions for problems I couldn’t find online, no surprise that the first two posts written in that concept were a hit! Over 3000 views for both on the very first day, how did it happen? I didn’t know or care much, I was busy doing my job and documenting what I encountered.

    I’m glad that at this time I know what I want to blog about, I’ve taken the direction of open source and just ran with it all the way! It’s my cause and what I want to spend my life working with..

    What does the future hold for my blogging?

    I’m looking forward at my 500th post, I will try to enjoy the path and not think of numbers like I did now, and god willing I’ll take the pause to reflect on the 100 posts I’ve wrote.

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