Believe it or not, there are plenty of blog value calculators out there, offering to give you the crucial figure. So, just for fun, I plugged in my url to see what they have to say about the old hippo:

Hippo Web Solutions valuations

Hmm, some interesting numbers there, quite a wide variation, but at least they’re more or less all the same order of magnitude. I should probably disclose that I discounted one that valued it at just $103 though! Interestingly it valued several other sites I plugged in at exactly the same value, so I guess it isn’t working properly.

Now, obviously this isn’t anything to get too excited about; after all if you really are planning on selling your blog, any potential buyer is going to want a bit more to go on, I’m sure! Still, it’s a bit of fun.

Share your own numbers in the comments below…if you dare!

Courtesy of 3nhanced.com

So why two versions, and what are their different strengths and weaknesses? Essentially it’s a trade-off between flexibility and ease of use. For more detail, check out this WordPress support page that lists some of the main differences between the two.

The importance of your own domain

With a free WordPress.com account, your blog is assigned a wordpress.com sub-domain of your choosing (as long as you don’t choose one that’s already taken, that is). So, it’ll be something of the form

http://your-name.wordpress.com

The main problem with this, in my opinion, is that you have no right of ownership over your site’s url - it is, after all, a sub-domain of wordpress.com, which means that it cannot exist independently of the main domain. If the company should (perish the thought) go bust, your url will disappear with it!

Now, to be fair, WordPress.com gives you the option of registering and using your own domain instead of the default wordpress.com sub-domain. Unfortunately this isn’t free - it’s a paid upgrade - but one well worth doing if you want to be taken seriously. I think it’s fairly safe to say that virtually all the big, well-known blogs have their own domain. You can read more about the ins and outs of how to do this in the WordPress.com forum.

Apart from credibility, the other reason for using your own domain is that your promotional efforts are an investment in your own brand, rather than someone else’s. And if you should one day decide to move to a self-hosted website or WordPress.org installation, you will be able to carry all your backlinks right along with you, meaning you don’t have to start from scratch building your traffic all over again.

WordPress plugins

I’ve written quite a lot about plugins on this blog, and in my opinion this is one of the most powerful features of WordPress. Unfortunately you are not able to install or utilise any plugins in the WordPress.com world, which severely limits your options to monetise your content or otherwise customise your site. This is the downside of the tradeoff between ease-of-use and flexibility.

Having said that, the core WordPress functionality is impressive, and is continuously integrating some of the best plugin features, so this is probably less of a hindrance than it perhaps once was.

Termination

Another consequence of going with a WordPress.com hosted blog is that you have to play by their rules. Granted, they don’t appear particularly onerous, but I always shudder slightly when I read stuff like:

Automattic may terminate your access to all or any part of the Website at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice, effective immediately.

Basically you’re at their mercy, and if for some reason they stop wanting to be your friend, there’s very little you can do about it. Of course, if you’ve been paranoid sensible and kept your own backups you’ll be able to get back up on your feet fairly easily - but I wonder how many people actually do this - after all, one of the stated benefits of having a WordPress.com blog is precisely that you don’t have to bother about this level of technical detail.

I love WordPress.com!

By now you might have gotten the impression that I’m opposed to WordPress.com - but actually that’s not the case. I just think you should go into it with your eyes open, and plan ahead a little. In my opinion, new bloggers should definitely go and get themselves a WordPress.com blog to play around with before going to the trouble of setting up a self-hosted blog. This will allow you to become familiar with the platform and the process involved in blogging without getting bogged down in technical details.

Later on, once you’ve gotten to grips with the basics, you can make a more informed decision about what niche to target, what domain to use, where to find hosting, how to go about installing WordPress for yourself, the wonderful world of plugins, etc. WordPress.com can be a great launchpad into all this, when you’re ready.

Which one do you choose?

I think ultimately this comes down to your individual circumstances: your level of technical ability, the amount of time you’re prepared to put into the technical aspects of your blog, and what your goals are for your blog.

It’ll be interesting to see which version is being used most by readers of this blog - why not take part in our poll? Feel free to leave a comment as well!

• choosing a topic
• registering a domain
• setting up a self-hosted WordPress installation
• generating content
• building web traffic
• monetization

and more.

When is it?

It’s every Wednesday between 6pm and 8pm, starting 14th January 2009, and is aimed at beginners, so whether you’ve just started blogging, or have been wondering what all the fuss is about, this is for you. It’s going to be very hands-on, and numbers are limited, so register early to avoid disappointment!

There are a few different ways to sign up:

• by telephone - 0191 515 2800 (office hours)
• in person or by post (I know, I know) at:
  

  Centre for Lifelong Learning
  2nd Floor, Bedson Building
  Kings Road
  Newcastle University Campus
  Newcastle upon Tyne
  NE1 7RU

• or you can pre-register online

How much is it?

The full course fee is £72.00; fees are discounted to £57.00 if you’re retired, and £33.00 if you’re a student or on Income Support. There’s also an extra £5 charge for domain registration.

Where is it?

Here’s the location:

View Larger Map

I hope to see you there!

No, it’s a particularly insidious piece of malware which purports to be looking out for your best interests, in order to con you into installing it. I’m referring to a trojan called “Antivirus 2009″ (also known as AV 2009) which appears to propagate by infecting legitimate websites. Here’s what Google Safe Browsing has to say about it.

Antivirus 2009 is malware

This is the window you’re presented with if you have the misfortune to surf by an infected website. Most people who are shown this will be concerned, and rightly so, what with all the nefarious stuff floating around cyberspace these days. The implication is that your computer is infected with something dreadful, and you’d better take steps to rectify the situation, or face the consequences.

It seems their strategy, once you’ve installed the software, is to repeatedly warn you that your system is infected with something, and the only remedy is to purchase the full version of their software to clean up the mess.

In case I haven’t already made it clear, let me stress that this is not genuine anti-virus software. It’s a scam which preys on people’s fears and sincere desire to protect themselves online.

What should you do?

Firstly, don’t install the software! Now I know that it’s not necessarily always obvious where messages like this originate - you may well be shown something similar by a legitimate antivirus program that you have on your system. My best advice is to read the message carefully, including the window title, which will often give you a clue as to the application responsible. In this case it’s fairly clear that it’s coming from a website, which should raise your suspicions. The poor spelling and grammar are also a telltale sign that everything is not OK!

How to remove AV 2009

If you’ve fallen into the trap, all is not lost. Fortunately AV 2009 doesn’t appear to be particularly malicious or destructive, and is fairly easy to remove. In my case, AVG detected and removed it without any manual intervention (although it took a few reboots to root it out completely). If that doesn’t work, try a Google search - there’s plenty of advice from those who’ve done it.

This again highlights the need to be vigilant online, and to keep your defences up: firewall, virus protection and browser security settings.

Be safe.

There are also third-party WordPress plugins available which provide some of this functionality - I wrote about one such statistics plugin a few months back. But a couple of days ago I stumbled across another plugin - that provides the bona fide WordPress.com stats within a WordPress.org blog! Now, this is not a new plugin - it’s been around for a couple of years already by the looks of it - but it’s the first I’d heard of it.

Plugin overview

As you can see, these are not statistics from my site. Because I only installed it a few days ago, it has not yet collected enough data to be of much use, so I lifted the screenshot from the plugin’s download page (I figured that was OK, since I’m promoting the plugin ).

The following information is displayed on the overview page:

• Recent traffic
• Referrers
• Most popular content
• Search engine phrases that have brought visitors
• Links on your site that visitors clicked
• Incoming links to your site

And each result allows you to drill down further to pull up more detailed stats on a particular post, referrer or search term.

Plugin installation and configuration

Installation of this plugin is very simple - copy it to your wp-content/plugins folder and activate it via the admin console as usual. The only slight complication is that you need a WordPress.com API key to use it - but this shouldn’t be a problem if you use Aksimet because you can use the same one. If you’re not an Akismet user, simply sign up for a free WordPress.com account to get one. It’s as simple as that.

As I mentioned earlier, it only starts collecting your stats once you’ve set it up, so the information you can get from it will be a bit limited for the first few days.

Conclusion

Because I haven’t had the chance to use it much yet, I’ll still have to see how the information weighs up against what I already get from Google Analytics. My feeling is that I’ll use the plugin stats mainly for day-to-day monitoring, but will use Analytics for more in-depth analysis.

If you’ve used the WordPress.com stats, either on a free or self-hosted blog, please feel free to leave a comment and share your experience, or add anything I’ve missed.

But as I pondered the question I realised that the reason I’m pretty relaxed about this stuff now is that over the years I’ve learned how to avoid most of the common pitfalls and recognise and deal with potentially threatening situations when they arise. Here are my top tips for staying safe online:

• Install anti-virus and firewall software

  Because we are now spending more time online than ever before, the risk of contracting a computer virus nowadays is a lot higher than in the past. Add to that the fact that so-called malware is becoming ever-more sophisticated and hopefully it’s fairly obvious that it’s in your best interest to use protection! There are many commercial and free options available, so there’s really no excuse not to.

• Keep software up-to-date

  Software companies regularly release patches and upgrades to their applications as new vulnerabilities are discovered and addressed, and it’s essential that you keep your installations updated, including but not limited to your operating system (eg Windows), internet browser (eg Internet Explorer), and email program (eg Outlook). And make sure your anti-virus software is kept current too - new viruses are produced all the time, and your anti-virus software needs to be informed of them.

• Enable appropriate security settings

  Browsers and other internet-enabled applications generally allow you to specify how you’d like to handle cookies, file downloads, and various types of dynamic content. It’s normally advisable to use the default values unless you understand the implications of changing them. Disable these settings at your peril!

• Consider changing browser

  Most people use Windows computers with Internet Explorer, and because of this, most malware is concentrated on finding vulnerabilities in these applications. Moving away from Windows is probably a step too far for most people, but it’s quite easy to switch to a different browser - I personally prefer Firefox.

• Don’t open email attachments

  Don’t open file attachments unless you’re sure they’re trustworthy. And just because a message appears to come from someone you know doesn’t necessarily mean it’s kosher - many viruses propagate by sending infected file attachments to everyone in the address book of an infected computer.

• Be cautious about downloading files

  Only download stuff from reputable sites.

• Beware social engineering scams and phishing expeditions

  Often the weakest part of a system is the human element - this is the basis of phishing scams. Online banking applications are technically very secure for obvious reasons, so scammers concentrate on duping unsuspecting bank customers into divulging their login information.

• Log in via a secure connection

  When logging into online accounts, ensure you’re connecting via a secure connection. Look out for the https in your address bar, and the padlock symbol at the bottom of the screen. Also make sure you type in the website url correctly, as it’s not uncommon for scammers to create dummy sites based on mis-spellings of popular website addresses. And above all, never click on a link in an unsolicited email inviting you to “confirm your personal information”.

• Choose passwords wisely

  A good password should contain a mixture of upper and lower-case letters, digits and symbols, and should not be a dictionary word.

• Don’t give out personal information online

  This includes your address, phone numbers, email address, mother’s maiden name, date of birth, etc. This type of information can be used to commit identity theft, which can wreak havoc on your credit rating and cause untold stress to its victims. Bear this in mind when updating your profile in social networking environments like Facebook.

The net must seem a scary place to someone who’s just getting online for the first time. But as long as you’re careful, it’s really not all that bad - the balance of good far outweighs the negative stuff, in my opinion. The best piece of advice I can give is simply to use your common sense! If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. And if you do run into something that seems strange, get a more experienced friend to check it out for you, or do a Google search and see if anyone else shares your suspicions.

If you’d like to add anything that I’ve missed, please feel free to leave your comment below.

Stay safe!

Sure enough, a quick search turned up several candidates. The Global Translator plugin looked the best, so I went right ahead and installed it - it’s those bunch of flags near the top of my sidebar.

From what I’ve seen so far, this plugin has the following benefits over using the plain Google widget:

• Translation occurs at the site level

  What I mean by that is that once you select a language, any other pages from the site will be shown to you in the same language (as opposed to the widget approach where you have to translate each page individually). This makes for a much more seamless user experience.

• Choice of translation service

  The plugin currently supports four translation services: Google Translation Engine, Babel Fish, Promt and FreeTranslations.com. Which one you use is completely up to you, and invisible to your site visitors. So if one isn’t giving you the results you need, you can switch to a different one in the background without a problem.

• Translated pages are cached

  Translated versions of your pages and posts are stored locally within your site, from where they can be served directly to visitors without having to be re-translated with each request. For medium- to high-traffic sites this drastically reduces the load on the translation service, which is to your benefit because if you make too many requests to these services you risk being banned - this is certainly the case with the Google service; I’m not sure about the others.

• The cache is non-intrusive

  Cached pages are created in ordinary files, not in your database. To be honest, I can’t see that it would be a problem if they were in the database - most other plugins don’t have any such qualms - but there you go. And before you start worrying about how much space this is going to consume, relax - there is an option to compress the cache, which seems to work just fine.

• Automatic locale-specific URLs

  The plugin automatically inserts specific language codes into the URLs of your translated pages. So, for example the German version of a post becomes http://some-domain.com/de/the-url, the Dutch becomes http://some-domain.com/nl/the-url, etc. An interesting question is how these are handled by the search engine bots, and whether these translated pages will start to show up in other-locale versions of Google etc? I’m speculating a little bit here, but because the URL is unique for each language-version of the page, I think they will be viewed (and thus indexed) as seperate pages. And because they’re in different languages, they will not be regarded as duplicate content. If this is the case, it seems to me like a great way of attracting more search traffic - you can bet I’ll be watching my stats over the next couple of weeks to see if this is indeed the case!

• Aesthetics

  This is pure personal taste, but I prefer the look of the flags to the Google widget, and you also have more control over how they’re displayed.

Banned for excessive numbers of requests

I’ve seen various references around and about to the translation services banning different sites because of making too many (or too frequent) requests. I believe this issue has been resolved in the Global Translator plugin by building in a configurable throttle setting to prevent this from happening (this is also where the cache comes into its own). Because of this though, don’t expect your entire site to be indexed immediately. With a 5-minute delay between requests (the default), it’s going to take a few days for most average-size sites to be translated into all 30-odd languages that are available.

Conclusion

All-in-all this looks like a nifty bit of code, so hats off to the guys at Nothing2Hide for all the hard work. I for one am looking forward to seeing how it performs over the next few weeks.

Image courtesy of Hamed Saber

Now, I’m not necessarily suggesting we all go out and start producing Chinese-content sites (although if you have the capacity to do so, it might not be a bad idea!). But I do think we should start to change our Anglo-centric worldview and recognise that the internet is truly global in reach. In much the same way that there is a lot of emphasis these days on producing sites that are accessible to those with disabilities, we should try to come up with initiatives that make it easier for visitors of other languages to our sites.

Google translation

The other day I came across a cool translation gadget from Google. With just a fragment of HTML you can include their widget which looks like this:

and allows your visitors to translate your site into the language of their choice. I’ve decided to include this somewhere on the pages of this site - initially in the sidebar, but I’m toying with moving it to the header or somewhere else very prominent.

Lost in translation?

One thing about automated translation services is that they can tend to produce rather garbled output. So I decided to put this one to the test; for my experiment, I translated the first paragraph of this post into Chinese, then back to English. If it survived this double translation, it couldn’t be too bad.

Here’s the result of the Chinese translation:

多年来，美国一直是powerbase互联网，控制在生产和消费的网站。但是，在北美地区仍是该地区最高的互联网普及率（某种程度的互联网使用人均），对原材料数量的互联网用户，您现在必须寻找不超过亚洲，尤其是中国。不仅如此，因为它已经很高的普及率，北美没有多大的成长空间，而亚洲，目前只有约 15 ％的普及率，具有巨大的增长潜力（统计礼貌的互联网世界统计） 。

and the subsequent translation back to English:

Over the years, the United States has been the powerbase of the Internet, in the control of production and consumption of the site. However, in North America remains the region’s highest Internet penetration (some degree of Internet use per capita), the number of Internet users of raw materials, you must now look for no more than Asia, especially China. Not only that, as it has a high penetration rate in North America there is not much room for growth, and Asia, only about 15% of the rate, with huge growth potential (Statistics courtesy of the Internet World Statistics).

OK, so it’s not perfect, but enough to give a pretty good sense of the overall message. Also, bear in mind that any translation errors are compounded here by being through the mincer twice. And last but not least, English and Chinese are very different. So it should be more than adequate for “ordinary” use. As a further check I translated a page or two into Dutch (of which I have a passable knowledge) and it made perfect sense.

Was it good for you?

I’d be interested to hear your feedback too - if you know any of the languages on the list, how about translating this page and letting us know how accurate it is?

I’d also be interested to hear any other tips you may have on making websites more accessible to other languages and cultures.

Thanks for reading!

So how did I do it? Extensive link building? Premium content? Long hours? Well, yes actually (I’ll leave you to be the judge of the content) - but that’s not what I attribute this rise to, at least not directly. In actual fact, it took all of about 10 minutes two and a half months ago to sow the seed that is now beginning to bear fruit - I’ll give you a little hint:

That’s right, I simply installed an Alexa traffic widget.

What is Alexa Rank?

Essentially, Alexa rank provides an indication of the traffic flowing through any site on the internet. Alexa gathers data on site visitors and page views on a per-site basis and then ranks sites according to their popularity; the lower the rank, the more popular the site. You can find more details in the Alexa help if you’re interested.

According to Alexa they gather data from many “diverse traffic sources”, but their primary source is from the surfing habits of those who have the Alexa toolbar installed. Now, since it’s mostly techies who have this installed, many have noted that Alexa favours tech sites, so tough luck if your site is all about the mating habits of the lesser spotted goldfish!

Why install the Alexa widget?

That’s where installing the widget comes in. By doing so, you’re effectively turning every visitor to your site into a virtual toolbar user for the duration of their visit, and thereby providing Alexa with a pretty accurate view of your site’s traffic. This means you gain an advantage over those who don’t have the widget installed, since Alexa has to extrapolate far more in their case. But it’s not an unfair advantage - after all, anyone can install the widget. Neither do I consider it “gaming the system” - there’s nothing artificial about the data Alexa is receiving. On the contrary, you’re ensuring they receive the most accurate view of your site possible.

Who cares what your rank is anyway?

Advertisers, that’s who! Rightly or wrongly, Alexa rank is one of the primary indicators used by potential advertisers to evaluate your site. So it stands to reason it’s in your best interest to present your site in the best possible light if you hope to make some spare cash from it. Enough said.

How to install the Alexa widget

It couldn’t be simpler. Simply head over to the Alexa Site Widgets page, select the style of widget you’d like, plug in your url, and paste the resulting code fragment into your site’s html or template.

Thanks where thanks is due - I first heard about this from Yaro Starak. At first I was really sceptical, but I guess you can tell I’ve gotten over that now! Thanks Yaro.

Let me know how you get on.

Apart from paid advertisements, there are several other ways in which ads can be displayed on your site, which is kind of nice as it gives you the option of promoting your own or affiliate products in empty slots, or even on other sites in the network. But the trade-off is increased complexity, which is compounded by the confusing manner in which the PerformancingAds site is laid out.

To start, I’ll run through the various ways adverts can be set up, with a brief explanation of each, and how they interact:

1. Paid-for ads.

   These are the ads you joined the network for - ones in which someone pays you for the privilege of displaying their advert on your site for a period of time. Ads can only be booked if you have free slots available, so setting your price correctly is the key to maximising your earnings; too high and you won’t get many bookings, too low and you’ll sell yourself short. A good strategy is to set a lowish price to start, then gradually adjust it to regulate demand.

2. Self-booked ads.

   PerformancingAds allows you to book your own ads into any available slots, and will serve them for you for free. The only thing to bear in mind is that paying customers will not be able to book the slot as long as your self-booked ad occupies it.

3. Alternate ads.

   These are similar to self-booked ads, except they only show up in free slots, and have the advantage of leaving the slots available to be booked by paying customers whenever they come along. This is a very good way of ensuring full utilization of your slots.

4. Exchange ads.

   Similar to alternate ads, these are displayed in free slots, but with the difference that they are shown on other sites in the network - a great way to get a bit of free exposure for your ads. It works on a points system, where you earn credits by displaying others’ exchange ads, and also for selling ads on your site. In the past I’ve had some fairly dodgy and untargeted stuff showing up, so use with care. But it’s still worthwhile setting up your own exchange ads to be displayed on other sites (assuming you are earning credits from selling ads).

The order in which I’ve placed the ad types is significant, as, to the best of my knowledge, this is the way the different ad types are prioritised for display. So paid-for and self-booked ads take precedence over alternates, which in turn take precedence over exchange ads.

Optimal configuration

This is the configuration I consider to be optimal from a Publisher point-of-view:

1. Set up the ads you wish to use as alternates, using the Advertisers tab.
2. Under the Publishers tab, select which of your alternates you wish to display in each of your regions.
3. I don’t tend to use the self-booking feature because, as I explained above, this prevents paying customers from being able to book slots.
4. As far as I can tell, the only way to utilize exchange ads is to set them up seperately in the Exchange Ads section, which is a bit of a pain since it means you have to configure the same ad twice if you want it to show up both as an alternate on your site and an exchange ad on someone else’s. It would be far better, in my opinion, to set up the ad once, then designate it as both an exchange and an alternate ad. If anyone knows a better way of doing this, please let me know.

And that’s it: my recipe for a setup that requires minimal manual intervention. Please feel free to share your own tips or suggestions.