Day In The Life of Baz

I think this has been one of the longest Google Bitch Slaps that I’ve ever seen. Over at my other blog, mainly devoted to CakePHP and JQuery, I had gotten trounced by Google in the Page Rank department; it went all the way down to 0. I got offered some money for a few links on my site and, like an idiot, I forgot to apply nofollow to the links.

A few days ago, I noticed that the Page Rank went up to 3. So, after several months of no Page Rank, I’m quite happy with that. It actually gave me a lil’ bit of incentive to write more. But that’s going to be after the GRE, but that’s another story.

Popularity: 39%

I must say, I’m impressed. I truly am. I’d never imagine that Microsoft would have made such a stride to create such a generic blogging application. The power of this program surpasses everything that I’ve seen before in a desktop blogging client. Windows Live Writer is definitely a winner in my book, but…

Why I Like It

First of all, there’s nothing that can beat the speed of offline editing. There’s not waiting for www.myblog.com/wp-admin. There’s no clicking and waiting for the post page to load. It’s just pure editing, quick and easy. It’s great.

One of the best features I’ve seen is that it has the ability to pull over your blogs CSS style so that you can see exactly what the post looks like like. Hit F12 and there’s a live preview of what the post looks like, as if posted on your blog. That’s cool.

Images Are Awesome

Inserting images into a post is the most insane thing I’ve seen. Of course you can drag an image into your post from your desktop and there you go. There’s a built in drop shadow feature that I’ve come to love. It actually edits the image and sets the drop shadow on the image itself. It’s not an after-market style that’s applied; I guess there are pros and cons to this, but all I can see are pros.

Popularity: 43%

Now if you’re a reader of my feed, let me first of all thank you for your loyalty and continued reading.

Basically, I’m sorry. I’ve been doing a lot of posts to test various feed plugins. And by definition, these need to come through the feeds. There’s no way (that I know of) to stop it or pause it. So you guys have been seeing a bunch of crap posts.

I would just like you to know that things are now going well. All the tests are complete and everything should be back to normal (until the next cool feed plugin comes along).

Thank you again.

Popularity: 22%

We all know that linking to your prior posts is a great idea. Google loves it and your new readers will love you for it. But knowing you lazy guys out there, you don’t really do it as much as you should. Well I’m going to help you out there. There one way you should know about already: the Related Posts plugin. I kind of prefer the Similar Posts plugin, but you guys already know that. But I got a great new way to help you out with your links.

Enter aLinks

I’m guessing that the “a” is short for “auto”. It basically helps create links without actually going through the tedious process. I mean I guess it’s not that bad, but I’m lazy, sorry. Now as with everything that helps us lazy people, there’s a bit of footwork involved. The way that aLinks works is off a set of key words or key phrases. You go to the administrator section and stick in some key words and when you use them in your posts, links and magically created. That’s it. Out of the box it helps you in three basic ways.

I’ve been having a problem deciding which plugin I should be using: “Related Posts” vs “Similar Posts”. I’ve decided to test both of them at the same time. Now, I’ve made up my mind:

Similar Posts blows Related Posts out of the water. I don’t know how the matching algorithms are different, but the matches ended up being more relevant. Some times Related Posts would return no posts, which Similar Posts gave me what I was looking for.

Not to mention Similar Posts has a great plugin that works for the feeds. So the decision has been made. I thank you for bearing with me during this experiment.

I’m curious as to which one you guys think is better:

Popularity: 39%