BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

In continuation of Blogging Editor saga – here’s some crazy ideas that I think worth mentioned. Not sure what would be the best course of action – write the whole thing up and pass it to someone who can create a piece of software or jump on this project myself. The problem with creating the software myself is that I do programming for Windows only. And a lot of bloggers use Mac. And I don’t even have Mac, and never had.

• Have different flavors of the software – Windows, Linux, Mac
• Have two types of software – free and paid
• Probably outsource free version, while paid would have more elaborate features, targeted to Pro bloggers
• Have the software to back up posts and tags into some sort of database that can be accessed without the software itself (like OpenOffice database or similar)
• Ability to work with all major blogging platforms, including WordPress, WordPress.com, LiveJournal, Xanga, Vox, Blogger and so on.

Sometimes something weird happens – I demand something that isn’t available. With software it’s easy (that’s how I got into computers), you dig in the code and you tweak and hack around until it does what you want.

When I just started this blog on Blogger quite a while ago, there was this feature that allowed to set up a link for your title – in case if you don’t want the title of the post to link to external resource. Why would you do it – whole another story, but it was just possible. With WordPress, even matured to version 2.3, it is still not.

I have decided to dig in and figure out how to do it with as least effort as possible. I have no idea how to build a WordPress plugin yet and I didn’t really have time to figure that out. So I decided to go hacking. Through various resources on the web I figured what needed to be hacked and how. Initial idea was to leave core files untouched and hack the theme only, so any time you upgrade your WordPress installation the feature remained untouched.

The only two places you will need to touch are functions.php and main index file of your template. This is such an easy process that almost any can do it in under 15 minutes.
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As any blogger I can’t help but look at the stats now and then. At certain moment I realized that I don’t see Alexa in list of visiting search engines. I also realized it’s wrong. So I ventured in depths of my memory and just before hopelessly sinking there I remembered someone posting about Alexa redirect and how that helps your Alexa score.

What I did was I gave out just one redirect link (http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.dontdateguy.com) to our friends’ blog DontDateGuy.com on a not very crowded forum and watched stats afterwards. In just several hours I saw a tremendous boost in Alexa’s “curiosity”. Alexa was going over the site like there is no tomorrow, superseded by Google only (but who can beat that guy, eh?). For last 8 days (since the blog became active) Google hit it 143 times, Alexa 93, Yahoo 65 and Ask.com – 27. Comparing to this blog where Alexa also wasn’t showing up – pretty impressive to me.

So I have set up some more redirect links to two aforementioned blogs and will keep watching what will happen by the end of the month.

UPDATE: Alexa’s redirect doesn’t work now. Guess it got abused too much.