Reasons Why Many Blogs Fail

Blogs can be a great medium to express and share views to the big world.
They are also a fantastic platform for building and assisting online businesses.
However, due to several reasons many blogs fail to take off.
In this post, I will be highlighting some of the reasons and how to steer clear of them.

Bad content

First up is Bad content. This is usually information or service you are offering.
If the information inaccurate or poorly presented, this could be a big turn off.

You can improve your writing skills by researching, reading or even getting someone to proof read your stuff.
You may wish to read my post on this subject. (more…)

Rolling back WordPress 3.0 to 2.9.2

Couple of weeks ago, I decided to upgrade my blogging platform, the wordpress upgrade was from version 2.9.2 to 3.0.
The install was smooth as expected, but things started to go pear shaped as most of my wordpress plugins decided not to work.
It got so bad that must-have plugins were crashing my site.
At this stage it was quite obvious that my plugins weren’t compatible with the new version of WordPress.

After spending some time offloading some of the plugins and a bit of faffing around, I decided to rollback WordPress to version 2.9.2.

Here what I did

(1) Back up database using PHPAdmin and plugin
(2) Downloaded and extracted WordPress version 2.9.2
(3) Using an FTP client, I simply uploaded and replaced existing WordPress files with version 2.9.2, preserving wp-config.php
(4) Refreshed my admin
(5) That’s it

I was quite surprised that this method worked – took about 10 mins to do.
I’m sure there are better and more systematic ways to approach this. But in my case, I simply wanted to get the task done in record time.

I’m sure I’ll eventually upgrade to 3.0 in the future, but for now 2.9.2 does the job for me.
Have you had any issues with WordPress 3.0?

Review of Build a Superstar Blog eBook

I would like to share with you latest review of Build a Superstar Blog e-book.
This time the book has been reviewed by Mariam over at V.O.I.C.E a great blog that focuses on e-book reviews.
I am super impressed by her review style and approach. She was able to breakdown the book into following categories Cover design, Content, Format and Styling, Ease of read and overall rating.

Right, I’ve done enough talking for now, head over the to Mariam’s blog to read this review. http://voicemp.com/review-build-a-superstar-blog/

Blogger: Mariam
Blog: http://voicemp.com
Twitter:@mariamcisse

Get parameters from URL using Javascript

During one of my consulting projects, I had the task of extracting a tracking/campaign ID from a URL and displaying it on a page.
Something along the lines of
http://www.buildasuperstarblog.com/work.html?track_id=12345&page=work
This test URL contains tracking id “12345″ and a page titled “work”.
For campaign and data gathering purposes, you may wish to extract these parameters.
To achieve this, I have embedded a Javascript function within my html page. (more…)