Postcards From Myself

First of all I am back, so now the updates should be on a bit more regular basis. I had planned on blogging most every day while on vacation, but it just didn’t turn out that way. I got caught up in relaxing and enjoying the family. And driving and shopping and freezing and eating and taking pictures and generally doing everything else except for blogging. Oh well.

Second, I just upgraded the back-end of this site to Wordpress 2.5 this evening. I ran a through a bunch of scenarios on a test site and found no glitches with the way I am operating or my plug-ins. After that I upgraded here on the live site and it all seems to have gone very smoothly. I am having a few hangs with the auto-updating of plug-ins, but other than that I see no errors. That being said, usually it is you folks out there who catch my errors and problems not me. So if you see anything funky, please let me know.

And finally, let me apologize to all of those people on the road that I wanted to kill. I am sorry that you can’t drive without talking on your cell phone. I am also sorry that when you took Driver’s Ed that they didn’t teach you what the gas pedal or turn signals are for. Finally, I am sorry that you cannot buy a real exhaust for your car so that you don’t sound like a poorly tuned lawn mower going down the street. I am sure there are lots more, but that is about all I can come up with for the moment because my medication is kicking in . . .

This is a serious question for other bloggers and web people. I want to know your real experiences with EntreCard. For those of you who don’t know, you can see the EntreCard widget off on the left-hand side of my page. It is the square box with a picture in it and a yellowish gold bar across the bottom and an “E” in the corner. Think of it as a business card fishbowl for bloggers, much like the business card fishbowl at your local restaurant.

Now, my question for the EntreCard members out there is this - has it done you any good? Have you looked at your traffic or income since you started using it and done any analysis. For my part, I have made a couple of interesting acquaintances through it, seen far too many “Make Money Now” and “Help Me Make A Fortune” websites, seen a lot of widgets with half naked girls on them that have nothing to do with the content of the blog, and gotten a small but non-sustainable bump in traffic. That is about it unfortunately. I was really hoping it would turn into something more, and maybe it will over time, but right now it seems to be just so much spinning of the wheels.

When I go back and really analyze the traffic I am getting from EntreCard most of it is a quick hit for someone to drop their card and move on. They don’t go to multiple pages. They don’t comment. They don’t click on ads or subscribe to my RSS feed. The EntreCard traffic is empty calories. In other words, I get a nice rush that gets my traffic stats up a bit, but no lasting nutritional value.

So, when I compare both the value to my site and the value to myself of EntreCard versus searching out other people’s blogs and leaving serious comments, the result is obvious. Instead of clicking through EntreCard and going to hundreds of blogs per day that aren’t really of interest or in my subject area, I need to go through and only hit the ones in my group that I would have wanted to find without EntreCard. Steve Whitehead’s Inspiring Quotes is one of those. So are ProBlogger, Eavesdropping On Life, and a few others. But in general, the whole drop 300 cards per day just doesn’t seem to work for me.

As always, that is just my opinion and I could be wrong. And things may change over time too. So please, let me know what you think and what you advice is. Is EntreCard working for you?

I have heard the language of the apocolypse,

and now I shall embrace the silence.

- Neil Gaiman

This is totally random, but I just came across a site that is so odd and interesting that I have to share the madness. This is the kind of site that the Internet was created for and that I can literally lose myself in for hours. Take a look at Strange Maps. Seriously, look a it and then scroll down and look some more. When you are feeling that the world is a dull place and everything looks the same, consider these maps that can take the extremely ordinary and present it some amazingly different point of view. From New York under German occupation to Europe as a conglomeration of cartoon characters, the maps on this site convey more than places and directions; they offer up an alternative way of looking at all that surrounds us.

Enjoy!

There is a new service for bloggers on the scene that you may or may not have heard of. It is named RssHugger, and it is probably best to let them explain it in their own words…

RssHugger is a unique website that aims to bring bloggers and readers together. rssHugger aims to provide blog owners with a unique easy-to-use way to promote their blogs by sending them traffic, building backlinks for search engine optimization, as well as attracting new rss subscribers if the content is interesting to the reader. rssHugger aims to help visitors be able to easily find blogs that write about subjects they are interested in. These subjects include: internet marketing, making money online, charity, sports, gambling, and many more. If the visitors find a blog that they had not previously heard about, they can easily add it to their RSS readers or bookmark it.

This looks like it is going to be a very interesting service for many reasons, not the least of which is that it seems to be generating a lot of buzz in the online communities right now. Another thing that really intrigues me about RssHugger is that the verifications for membership are done by hand. Yes, by a real person. With any luck that may eliminate a lot of the “get rich quick” blogs that seem to be clogging things up recently. Sorry, but I really don’t care about how somebody wants to get rich and how to help. If I was interested in that I would watch the infomercials that come on TV at 3am.

Anyway, I am going to give the service a try and report back here in the future. In the meantime, if you have any opinions or experience with RssHugger, please leave a comment and let me know. Thanks!