Author Interview with Ed
Ed from The Pisstakers has been chosen for a Blog about your Blog author interview. I have asked Ed’s Wife Ed a series of questions about some personal things, blogging and blog about your blog. I hope you enjoy the interview.
Are you married? Girlfriend? Boyfriend?
Last year a very brave woman agreed to accept me with all my faults and she married me with all her faults. It’s amazing being in a team where faults complement each other, and I highly recommend holding out for that perfect partner.
She must of been over your shoulder while we did this interview! lol
What do you do when you are not blogging?
I like to eat my wife’s cooking, but I am not allowed to say that the food tastes good. Apparently it irritates her because I would eat an old sock if she served it up, and still say it was nice. I also spend a few hours a week assisting her in a long term project to tame a stallion. Patience will prevail and I am resigned to being the smarter of the two studs in the family.
What is your favorite blog to read besides your own?
That’s a tricky one. There are more blogs than people, aren’t there? After great deliberation, Ask Pud. He doesn’t post too regularly, but he always seems to have something funny or outrageous to say.
Alright enough about your wife, let’s talk about your blog.
When was your blog created?
I can’t remember, but according to Awstats, end of August 2006.
Why did you choose your blog topic?
There are actually 3 blogs within The Pisstakers. Tech, news and quirky. I am a closet wannabe geek but I only know enough about tech and web stuff to be dangerous. I also wanted to broaden the scope of the blog (and my own mind) with topical current affairs, and quirky weird stories. To mask my worrying lack of in-depth knowledge and scanty research, I thought it best to write it all up with a twist of humor. Voilá!
Did you think you were going to be instantly successful?
Absolutely not. And I made doubly sure that instant success would not be mine, by putting together a 2 year plan to get the blog fully set up!
What do you enjoy most about blogging?
It may sound stupid, but I like lunch time! That means all the articles have been done, and it’s time to do something else until the evening run round my online buddies’ blogs.
Do you have any new upcoming projects or ideas you want to announce?
I am thinking about how to implement some sort of “you submit my best posts, I’ll submit yours” scheme – to get the maximum benefit from social bookmark sites.
I have also been writing material for Nick Pruett’s new baby, Top Funnies, which is building up into a good blog, if you are into stand-up comedy from around the world.
What is the best feature on your blog?
Ironically the page that takes the least work has the highest PR – Funny Quote of the Day. On the technical side, the archiving is very clever. Too boring to go into, but it’s a very neat solution.
You have an interesting blog design, how did you come up with it?
I didn’t want any old rectilinear cookie cutter theme, and it had to be colorful and fun. Having said that, the star attraction, the written content, still had to be legible, and findable. (Still trying to perfect the search capabilities, but overall, I’m happy with the rest.)
Are you the designer as well as author?
I guess I proposed the concept, but Oscar Furgoni came up with the layout and Giuseppe Caruso from Bonsai Studio coded it and polished it all up. All very international and good fun. My artistic contribution is to add the banner images for each post.
What do you rely most on to get traffic to your blog or website?
Luck most of the time. Reviewing other blogs is quite productive, so that is an avenue worth pursuing. Google traffic is building too. Keep on putting decent posts out there, and saying hi to other bloggers. I am slow about networking, a hangover from college where you spend the first 2 minutes making friends, and the following 2 semesters trying to lose most of them!
And the final series of questions, a little bit about Blog About Your Blog
How did you find us?
On MyBlogLog. Pre BAYB, I noticed you, or rather, you and Mike on other forums!
What do you like most about BAYB?
You and Lee are good leaders, and good writers are following your lead. It is cool, and I am sure this is one blog that won’t atrophy.
We are just getting started.
What new feature would you like to see?
An on-page option to change text size. Thus spake the blind man.
What do you like the least?
Very long interviews? Don’t beat me for this criticism, but the color of the text beneath the post title seems a little too light for instant reading. And related to that, I just tried to check for past author interviews and it took me a while to work out how you access posts by category.
Maybe we need the categories on the sidebar. Your interview is probably longest of all! hah!
Who have you chosen to be the next one interviewed?
First off, I would like to thank Stefanie for putting me forward. I hope I haven’t made her regret her decision. And passing on the baton, I would like to nominate Rhys. I believe it was St David’s Day earlier in the week, so he is sure to be on form.
Thank you for the interview, I think we know more about your wife than we do you though!(kidding) Remember if there was a question I missed that you want asked in the next interview please submit it by commenting on this post or emailing me at ff_n_stuff@yahoo.com
Do Someone A Favour
Do someone a favour!
I like to read about succes stories of all kinds, whether about blogging or business in general. One I looked at again this week was the Marks & Spencer story. M&S run large, very successful stores in the UK and other countries. They have been around for years and years.
The thing that interested me was how they actually started.
First there was Michael Marks. His mother died of childbirth and he suffered because he was a Jew in his native, what was then, Russian Poland. To escape he came to England to settle in Leeds where there was a large Jewish community.
He was without money and had no trade. He heard, however, that there was a business in Leeds that might be able to help him. He set off to find this ‘golden’ opportunity.
A warehouse owner called Isaac Dewhirst found Michael standing outside his establishment. He couldn’t understand the young man, asÂMichael only spoke Yiddish, but somehow, with the help of an interpreter, he got to hear his story.
Isaac Dewhirst offered to lend Michael £5. From this the beginnings of the Marks & Spencer empire was created.
The year was 1884 and with the money goods were bought from Mr.Dewhirst’s warehouse. These he started to peddle around local villages. It is interesting that 100+ years later Dewhirsts still supply Marks and Spencer.
It’s a long story but briefly: after selling door to door, a market stall was started out of the profits and later he met Tom Spencer – and the rest is history.
I suppose what I’m saying is: I wonder how many of us would have bothered to help a penniless person as did Isaac Dewhirst?
Sometimes a small favour or kindness can change lives.
Good blogging,
Mike
Mike’s Money Making Mission
Blog Crossover Event of the Year
Over at Quit Your Day Job and No Smoking In The Skull Cave we are currently holding what we’ve declared the Blog Crossover Event of the Year!
The way it works is Becca and I went away separately with the task to come up with the most groan worthy movie titles possible – titles like Aliens Vs Predator (mmmmm) or Jason Vs Freddy (hang on). We then swapped the list and for the next five days we will celebrate the awful ideas for film that we’ve come up with.
To get an idea the very first movie that Becca came up for me to write about is:
You can check out the interview with the director of The Texas Ewok Massacre at Quit Your Day Job and keep visiting both QYDJ and No Smoking in the Skull Cave for the next five days and enjoy the campy pop culture fun!
Blog Competition, First Entry
I woke up this morning, pleased to find we received our first review in the blog competition from Esplanade. The review is nice, and sets a good tone for the competition.
After about 10 or so reviews, the competition will be closed and the voting will begin. The winners will receive 10$ for first and 5$ each for 2nd and 3rd. For more information you can check out the original post about the competition.
Our judges are Ed, Stefanie, Mike, Chris, Lee, and myself. So spread the competition about our little contest, I’ll link to you if you do! Thanks
Choose the Right Host!
So you want to join the millions of other tech savvy people and start your own website or blog. You take a look around and soon find that there are literally thousands of companies out there offering hosting. So which one do you choose? Here are some important pointers you should look out for, next time you choose a host.
Reliability
What good is having a website if its down on a regular basis. Many times, you will only discover a host is unreliable after you have registered. Therefore, do a simple Google search looking for customer complaints – don’t trust the testimonials found on the hosts website. A number of hosts will also offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee. This is useless unless they offer you a free month of hosting if your site goes down. I know HostingZOOM offered me 1 months free hosting when my site went down for just over 30mins and that has only ever happened once. A few other companies will offer similar deals.
Space and Bandwidth
Will you ever need 250gb of space and 2tb of Bandwidth? Well, for the average user the answer is no. However I can see one of blogs exceeding its bandwidth allowance in the next few months. Two companies that offer you ridiculous amounts of space and traffic are Dreamhost and AN Hosting. Dreamhost will actually keep on increasing the amount of space and traffic and AN hosting gives you more then enough to begin with. You will probably never use all of the resources these two hosts offer, but woudln’t it be nice if you could host all your downloads, podcasts, videos etc on your own account instead of using a third party service.
Digg Proof
This wouldn’t have been a requirement a few years ago, however if you have ever been touched by the hand of Digg you will know how frustrating it can be when your site crashes. The Digg effect will sends thousands of visitors to your site in a short space of time. Look for a host that offers something along the lines of clustered failover. This means that if one server goes down your site will still be accessible on another server. MediaTemple became famous for claiming they were Digg proof and I haven’t heard any complaints on that statement.
Features and Add-ons
When I was shopping for a host I made sure I looked for a company that offered a quality control panel, email, script installers and unlimited subdomains and databases. If your host doesn’t offer all this then look elsewhere because all of the hosts I have mentioned so far offer these features at a price you are probably already paying. AN Hosting will also give you a free domain. I find the most useful feature is a script installer that will install blogs, shopping carts, cms, forums etc with just a few clicks. This makes getting a blog or similar site up and running a simple and hassle free process.
Customer Support
Look for a host that offers free technical support available both through email and phone.
Check out my Blog at go2tap.com
Leave a Comment
It’s Friday again so soon!
If you are new around here, every friday we run a post like this where we give users the chance to leave us a comment about whatever they want to. Tell us about your blog, our blog, or anything else on your mind.
The idea is to get a mini discussion going. The best commentor will be selected and given a link on our site, and we now also have a top commentor section.
Don’t miss out!
[Update]
Comment Friday post had 11 comments and we would like to recognize RC for his weird posts! He will be added to our list under Comment Friday at the top of the right column. I’d also like to thank Ryan for stopping by and commenting, he was a previous comment friday winner. Stop by next friday so you can get your blog linked up!
The Spring Training Story I’m Following
If you read my baseball blog at all, you know I have been following the Josh Hamilton story for quite a while now. I am not sure what it is that intrigues me so much, other than the fact that I always root for underdogs and love stories like his. When all is said and done, no matter the outcome, I would love to be the one to collaborate to help him share his story with world.
By now, I am sure most of you are saying, “What the heck is he blogging about? Who is Josh Hamilton and what is the story?” Take a moment to see for yourself.
Blogocular directory
The best way to judge a book isn’t by its cover, but to open it up and get stuck in. So I tried to sign up for Blogoculars, a site that the owner claimed fitted into the category of sophisticated directory alongside chainki, swicki and bla.st. Is it?
Browser compliance.
Apple’s Safari is a standards compliant browser. Unfortunately, I couldn’t peel back the address bar on the browser window to see the sign-up info in the header of the blogocular page. Never mind. Mac users are determined too – as a minority, you have to be – so I fired up Firefox, and voila, a full webpage appeared.
Blogocular’s directory layout
First impressions for first-time visitors who land on the site are good. Clear, simple, sharp. The directory’s navigation is divided into a manageable 18 sections. Comedy was the closest to The Pisstakers genre. This category was actually quite an improvement on other directories where humor doesn’t even figure sometimes.
Signing up to Blogocular
The signing-up process was simple, apart from unnecessarily having to hunt for a link to the Terms. (I had to agree to them before joining, so I felt obliged to check them out.) Nothing to hide, so how about a link right there on the form?
In theory all was hunkydory easy and I should have been listed very easily. Unfortunately Mac Mail junk filters are a wee bit too smart and I haven’t managed to receive the authorization email yet. Perhaps the site owner could post the salient part of the email address on the form so we can go ahead of time to our email preferences and divert their impending mail away from the junk folder?
How users use the directory
What do visitors see when they land on the site? Clarity! Click on a category in the heading and the relevant blogs appear. Click on a blog and go through to a list of recent posts. Each post entry in the directory is based on an Atom or RSS feed, which means you get a title and the first lines of the original text.
Features
There is tracking and voting and all the usual good stuff, including stars. And the ads aren’t too intrusive. But the killer feature for me is the scrolling iFrame, which means you can scroll through massive lists without losing track of where you are on the main page. Most cool in my opinion, and I wonder why they didn’t use the same system throughout the site structure.
Blogocular, winner or loser?
It is a lot better presented than most directories, because there is no sense of structural massiveness, thanks to lots of good old whitespace and that scrolling iFrame. On the other hand, Blogocular is text only, so whilst it loads quick, web 2 freaks could argue that it is a bit utilitarian. Maybe site thumbnails wouldn’t be a bad compromise? And if the categories could be expanded perhaps with dropdown sub-categories off the basic list, and let users add their own categories, maybe it can stay organized and will never grow into a morass of blogs.
Although I don’t hold out much hope that the Blogocular directory will generate mega amounts of traffic for The Pisstakers tech or blogger review blogs, it is probably a good time to get your blog listed before the directory behind the elegant front becomes a sprawling list. Enjoy watching the PR benefits accumulate over time, and of course, discover lots of fab blogs.
And hey, the 143 Safari users out there could sure do with a glimpse of the header!