Journal - Meta Tags

I’ve still been spending a pretty big majority of my time working on “Audio Book Heaven.” I wanted to post new book reviews every other day throughout the month of May, and it looks like that will be no problem. I had quite a few short audio books on hand, books that I can complete in a couple of days. Still, it’s been a bit of a scramble writing reviews and getting them posted.

I’ve also been doing a lot of work on my older reviews, revising them slightly and re-posting them. I’m trying to optimize the whole thing so that it will show up on search engines. That means adding relevant keywords like "audio book" and “book review", as well as using the book title and author name. To get good results, I need to use those important keywords several times in each review so that's why I'm revising them. While I’m revising the old reviews, I’m also adding my affiliate links for Audible and Amazon. I had about fifty book reviews posted before I started all this so the revision process has been kind of tedious. I’m making good progress though, and I guess I’m more than halfway done. I’m hoping to have all that done by the end of May.

In addition to all that, I’ve been looking at some different ways to increase traffic to my blog. The best way to do that is to make sure it shows up in search engines like Google. When someone goes to Google looking for audio book reviews, I want them to find me. The best way to get in the search engines, is to have good meta tags.

Meta tags are part of the actual html code of your website, and they are what search engines look at to tell them what your site is all about. The tags would include the title of your site, plus relevant keywords. The keywords for my blog would be things like “audio book” and the others I mentioned above. It works best if the keywords you choose actually show up frequently in your website’s content, so that’s why I needed to do all that revising; I am mainly adding more relevant keywords to my book reviews.

So anyway, I found some instructions on how to add the meta tags to the code of my blog and gave it a try. It turned out to be pretty easy to add the code, but I didn’t really know if I had done it correctly.

Luckily, the instructions I found, also provided a link to an online meta tag checker. That’s exactly what it does, it checks your meta tags to make sure they don’t have errors and to make sure they have good relevancy to your content. So I ran the checker and my tags were entered correctly, and it said the relevancy was good also. Very good in fact, so I was happy about that.

The stat counter I put on my blog a few weeks ago is working well. I’ve been getting a small handful of hits every day, usually around 3 or 4 which is about what I expected to start with. One day I got a whopping eighteen which surprised me. Of course, I hope those numbers will gradually grow as I complete more work on the blog.

So I’ve been busy, this has turned out to be quite a project. I’ve been staying up pretty late every night working on it andI’m starting to feel a bit exhausted. That’s probably why I was sick last week. I don’t mind though. For the last year and a half I’ve just been drifting and it feels good to actually be working on something again. And if I end up making a little money off the thing, then I guess that’s okay too. I’ll have to give a share of it to God though since He is the one who gave me the sharp mind I needed to figure all this out.

1 Peter 4:10 Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God's grace in its various forms.

Mark 12:17 Then Jesus said to them, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's.” And they were amazed at him.

Journal - Almost There

Sooo, what’s been going on over at “Audio Book Heaven?” I’m glad you asked!

Ro confirmed for me that the counter is working. That was pretty exciting because I didn’t think I'd ever get it. At StatCounter.com they provide you with some raw html code and you have to copy it and paste it into your website to create the counter. I was having a lot of trouble figuring out exactly where the code started and ended and that’s why I had so much trouble getting the counter to work. At Amazon's affiliate website, when they provide html code for you, there's a button right below it. When you click the button, it automatically highlights the code and copies it to the clipboard. That is so much easier! I sent a message to Stat Counter and told them they should consider adding a feature like that.

Speaking of Amazon, I’ve got their affiliate program figured out and I’ve started putting the links in my book reviews. They have a system where you can look up a specific product on Amazon and they will generate the code that will link directly to that item. So on each of my book reviews, there will be a link directly to that book at Amazon if anyone wants to click over and buy it. I originally envisioned a generic link so that I could just copy the same link on each book review. That would have been a lot easier, but those links only come in banner form. I’m not really sure if screen readers can manage banner ads or not so I decided against that. The individual product links come in plain text form that screen readers will have no problem with.

I’m still having a little trouble with Audible. I actually have a generic link set up, but I want to do product links just like with Amazon. For some reason it's not working, though. I've been emailing back and forth with their help desk to see if we can figure out why. I’m using the generic links for now, but I hope to get the product links working soon.

I looked around at the ABE Books affiliate page, but I had a really hard time navigating their pages so I decided to drop that one. They're just not set up very well for screen readers.

So that’s about it. Everything is up and running, I just have a few little details to iron out. I’ve set myself a goal of publishing a new book review on every odd-numbered day throughout the month of May. I'll have to scramble a little, but I think I can do it. Stay tuned!

Psalms 42:11 Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.

Journal - Blogger Woes

Well, I’m not having much luck with this. As I mentioned before, to put hyperlinks in a post, I use the keyboard shortcut, Ctrl-shift-a, but last Friday it stopped working. Since then I’ve discovered that other shortcuts are acting funny too. Ctrl-b for bold and ctrl-I for italics are not working right either. I've posted questions in the Blogger help forum three different times but no one has answered.

I can’t really figure out if this is a problem with Blogger or with Internet Explorer, but I’m kind of leaning toward the latter. I’ve tried some different settings in Blogger with no success. I've tried some settings in IE, also with no success. I tried upgrading IE to version 8 to see if that might help, but my computer wouldn’t take the upgrade. My computer is about 8 years old and doesn’t always work real well. Some people would call it an “oldie but a goodie.” Others might call it a “piece of crap.” I’m still undecided as to which group I am in.

Anyway, after that I tried rolling back to IE version 6. I was able to do that easily enough, but it didn’t solve the problem so I reverted back to version 7.

After that I tried using system restore to revert my settings back to a previous time when everything was working. I knew the problem had begun last Friday approximately, so I was going to roll everything back to last Wednesday or so. Well, when I got into the system restore utility, the oldest restore point available was last Thursday at 8:52 pm. That restore point was labeled as the time when Windows sent through an automatic update for Internet Explorer and every restore point before that had been removed. Coincidence?

So, I’m left with a few options. Like Ro said, I could type out the html code by hand everytime I want a hyperlink. I’m semi-familiar with html tags from my eBay days and I could do that, but honestly, it’s a really big hassle and I’m not sure I want to go to that much trouble. I’m planning on having a lot of links in my book reviews and typing out all that code would take forever.

My second option is to switch from IE to Mozilla Firefox, which is what Joni uses. I tested that, and the hyperlinks work okay, but it makes the code visible in the compose screen and I don't like that either. I could probably live with it though. I tried a couple of other browsers, the new Google Chrome and Opera, but neither of those work with a screen reader apparently.

A third option is to switch to a new blog host. I’ve been checking out WordPress and I kind of like what they have to offer. One of the first things I found at WordPress, is the built-in stat counter. It automatically keeps track of the hits on each page of your blog, tells you which search engines are sending you the most traffic and lots of other stuff. There’s a whole page of statistics. Why Blogger doesn't do that is a mystery to me. In Blogger you have to use a third party counter. I tried that with no success.

Next, I looked at the Wordpress widgets. They have some that sound very useful. Some of them are powered by the built-in stat counter. You can display your most popular blog post titles and things like that. There’s one large problem, however. The only way to put the widgets on your blog, is to click and drag them into place on the sidebar. There's no "add this widget" link like Blogger has. My heart sank when I discovered that. I sent them an email to let them know why that was a problem, and asked them what kinds of accessibility options they have for blind and low-vision users. That was late last night, so I haven’t heard back from them yet. I hope they answer.

Well, there’s a couple of other things I’ve been working on this week, but this post is long enough. I’ll tell you about Audible’s affiliate program, and Statcounter.com next time, okay?

See you later!

Luke 18:1-8 Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. He said: "In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared about men. And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, 'Grant me justice against my adversary., "For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, 'Even though I don't fear God or care about men, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won't eventually wear me out with her coming!' “ And the Lord said, "Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?"

Journal - Critical Mass

Well, I haven’t written anything for a while, as you can see. I’m starting to get a little bored with the whole blogging thing. That's how I am, I find something new that interests me and I put a lot of time and effort into it for a while, but I always end up getting bored with it eventually. That’s one reason why I always found it so difficult to settle down with one job for very long.

This time it has been kind of weird. I’m bored with the blogs, but I don’t want to be bored with them. I want to keep doing it because it was really fun for a while. Bonus points to anyone who can explain that. So anyway, instead of just giving up on the blogs altogether, I decided to try and shake things up a little bit.

What I decided to do is come up with a new name for my audio book review blog, “Reviews From The Deep.” But that was too easy, so instead of just renaming it, I decided to create a whole new blog with the new name so it would have a new URL and everything. And that’s just what I did. My new audio book blog is called “Critical Mass Media, Audio Book Meltdown.” Since it was an all new blog, I wanted to put some different gadgets on it and do a few different things with it. So far, it has proven to be very challenging, which is a good thing because that will keep me interested for a while.

The first step was creating the blog. A simple enough task, unless you happen to be blind. To create a new blog, you have to complete a verification. It’s a little box with some letters and numbers in it and you have to type out what you see there. It’s called a CAPCHA I think, although I don’t know where that name comes from. Maybe Ro will tell us. They do that so you can prove that you are a human being and ot some auto-spammer. They have a little thing you can click on if you’re blind so you can hear the numbers instead of seeing them, but they never work. Until now, that is. When I got to the CAPCHA, I clicked the listen link and I could actually hear the numbers and type them out as it played. It really worked! I was very pleased about that and was off to a good start on my new blog.

The next step was to export all of the book reviews from my old blog, and then import them to the new one. That step was pretty easy, there are links to click on to export and import. Basically it’s just saving a file to my computer’s hard drive, and then opening it back up from the new blog. No problem there, all of my book reviews showed up with the comments still attached and everything.

Now I wanted to put some fancy gadgets on my new blog, namely a counter, and a drop-down list box for the labels. These are not standard gadgets that are available through blogger, but can be added by adding some raw html code. I ran into some trouble there. I spent about five hours working on those two things and got absolutely nowhere. That’s pretty frustrating because things like that used to be pretty easy for me. Not to worry, I’ll keep working on it.

Also, I ran into another problem. About the time I created my new blog, something that I use a lot quit working. To create links in a blog post, I use the keyboard shortcut "ctrl-shift-a." Suddenly that stopped working and I get some funny warning message when I try it. I think that some security setting in Internet Explorer has changed, but I haven't found out which one yet. I put a message in the help forum about it but haven’t gotten a reply yet. I'm going to do some research on that as soon as I'm done posting this. Anyway, that's why I couldn't provide a link to “Critical Mass Media” here. No big deal, the blog isn’t ready to be looked at yet anyway.

So those are the things I need to figure out. After that, the next step will be monetizing the new blog. Monetizing is a fancy name for using your blog to make money. Since I’m writing audio book reviews, I want to link them to websites that actually sell the books and get a percentage of the sale in return. That's called an affiliate partnership and both Audible.com and Amazon.com have affiliate programs. I'll have to figure out how that whole thing works, that's kind of new to me.

So that’s what I’ve been doing for the last several days. So far so good, my interest in blogs has been rekindled. For now, at least. I’ll keep you posted on my progress.

Ecclesiastes 1:3-9 What does man gain from all his labor at which he toils under the sun? Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises. The wind blows to the south and turns to the north; round and round it goes, ever returning on its course. All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again. All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.