Digitalquill

My Life and Times by Matt Houldsworth

Flower

Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

A Return to blogging

Well it has been some time since I last posted, during that time allot of water has gone under the bridge. It was back at the end of February last year that I wrote my last blog post on this site. Shameful I know, but I have been battling against Google and others for the length of that time.

This and my other blog Earning From Affiliates was hacked and links to spyware added to the bottom of some of my sites, I assume this was some form of SQL injection attack on a vulnerability in Wordpress.

As soon as I found this problem (hours after it happened) the site was cleaned, repaired and wordpress upgraded to fix the vulnerability, however by that time Google has showing a warning about the sites. No problem, all I should need to do is use the Google Webmaster tools to contact Google and ask them to re-check the site and remove the warnings. No… not that easy at all, emails and messages to Google went without a response. Weeks turned into months and I got fed up with the mess and was about to simply bin the sites when I thoughts I would have one more try and what do you know the warnings were removed and all is now back to normal running.
It has meant that the sites have been without updates for so long that their readers have probably long gone, any ranking in Google or other search engines has been damaged if not set back to zero so I am effectively starting afresh, although I do have the advantage that both sites still have their content, which is all self written unique content.

I have been busy over the last year, I was married in August to the wonderful and beautify Cheryl, her and our Daughter Eva are my life.

I have also been working on other projects, mainly software projects relating to Affiliate marketing, which have been much more successful that I could ever have hoped.

I will post more details about those projects in the coming days, but for now I just wanted to add a note to say I was back and I will be trying to find the time to post regularly and put some effort into these sites.

First Video Blog or should that be Vlog?

One of the reasons I have been quite on this blog (and on Earning From Affiliates) is that I have started yet another blog.

On The Allotment blog is a blog about all the activity on my new allotment plot. I have taken the tack of using it to record everything that happens on the plot.

To do this I intend it to be very visual, rather than having lots of words in the blogs, so this weekend I produced my first ever video blogs. I really went to town and produced three in one weekend. Go over to On The Allotment and have a look to see what you think.

I used YouTube and created a channel specifically for the blog. It was very simple to do, I have  Sony HD camera, and was able to upload the files directly from the camera to YouTube in HD format.

Ideally what I need to do is find some software that will allow me to edit those files. I was able to do some simply trimming and joining of the clips using the camera but I really want to do a better job with things like audio balance and putting intro clips and copyright notices onto the clips.

You may also be interested to have a look at Earning From Affiliates where I have just posted a blog post about the marketing of this new blog and how the posting of the Video Blogs and the use of YouTube has had a positive impact on the numbers of hits to the blog.

Wordpress plugin Development

I am currently looking at developing a wordpress plug-in, really for nothing more than my own interest. I have an idea for a plugin that monitors keyword density, which would therefore be a useful tool in SEO. The formula for working this out is relatively simple, however having never attempted creating a plug-in I really have no idea where to start… google and some tutorials I guess!

Blogging in the bath

I am laid in nice deep bath, soaking my aching muscles after a hard morning clearing gardens and garages at a rental property. Hopefully Monday will see it going onto the market and we will again have a tenant in the property very soon.

I wonder where other people blog from. I usually blog in my office at home, sometimes sat in front of the TV, but I don’t see why with today’s technology why one needs to be limited. I do have an Orange Mobile broadband dongle which I use quite often when I am out and about.

I was recently searching for domain names,  someone suggested ontheblog.com a play on words… unfortunately it i taken, although there is no site there.

I wonder where the stranges place anyone has blogged from is. Post a comment if you have any strange blogging habbits!