The Lousypoet

Did you know that aside from 12 days I have posted something new every single day since July? I think that’s more than I have ever done on any incarnation of The Lousy Poet.

With this post, I will have 467 posts, 39 pages, 37 approved comments, 2533 spam comments, 31 Categories and 161 Tags. And most of that is within the past year because this incarnation started at 0 in November of 2007 (and I only posted things on 1 day in November and 1 in December of that year!).

Just thought I’d share

So I found this website, Book Blogs. It’s a social website where you can join and discuss all things book related.

Unlike a number of other sites that I joined just for the sake of getting my link posted, I actually like this site, and the discussion threads actually engaged me enough that I posted in a number of them.

So go check it out!

Blog house, that is. I decided to do a few projects that have been nagging at me but I keep putting off for no particular reason. One of the big ones was to incorporate my individual poems into the actual Wordpress installation instead of the old individual HTML files that were from the original site launch. Back in those days, Wordpress didn’t allow for multiple pages, let alone having them several levels deep. With these latest builds, I’ve been able to put the whole site together using just Wordpress. This really helps with the continuity of the site, and just means that if I change the layout, that the indivudal poems will update with the new look instead of me having to manually change every single one of them! I should’ve titled the site the “Lazy Poet.” LOL!

I also took a look at the Webring code I’ve had for some time. I’ve been a member of Webring for a long time, in fact, I think every site I’ve ever done linked into a webring… Anyway, I decided I should enrol in a few more rings, so I went to the Webring home site to do just that, and lo and behold, the code I’ve had on my site for more than a year is dead, obsolete, and has apparently been doing me no good traffic wise! So, I’ve gone ahead and fixed that and signed up for the maximum pending sites that I could. When those ones approve me, I’ll add some more. I’m really sticking to the book, writing, and poetry based rings. I’ve decided that since my pagerank is going to hell because of my paid posts, I can at least not further anger the Google gods and have appropriate links to the site!

I’ve also taken a few ads out of the right sidebar and the footer. Aside from the fact that these have been up for months and no one has even clicked on the banners, let alone signed up, I just don’t think these programs are ever going to make me any money, so forget it. I figure I can put up better things to take up that prime real estate on my website.

So that’s where the projects stand tonight. I still have to get the rest of the Word of the Days added to the Archives. That is a long, boring and arduous task that I’ve just been putting off. Oh well, it’s my own fault for not doing it from the get go. I really do suffer from “jump before looking”-itis.

Well, hope all are well. I’m off for the next few days, so I hope to get a few more posts up. I’ll apologize ahead of time, some are going to be mundane paid posts, but hey, daddy’s gotta pay for Christmas somehow TTFN…

So yesterday I wrote about my plunging Google pagerank and wondered what I should do about it. Varsha Vijay wrote a comment on that entry that is naturally very simple, but did get me thinking about this site and what I should be doing with it. He wrote;

Advice ? Write good and people will come to you. BTW your blog name (lousypoet) created the curiosity to come to your site but could not find anything relevant to poem`s.

Now there’s the thing. There is nothing about anything on The Lousy Poet. Currently, this site is a mish mash of my ideas, things I see and do that interest me, and a series of blog posts that only exist to make me a few bucks. While I don’t see anything particularly wrong with doing the odd paid post, there is not enough original material to balance it out. This site is more than just the eclectic place that I promote it as, it is, simply, a mess. There is no balance and no sense of direction. And yes, Varsha, you are right, there is very little here that has to do with poetry even though the name would suggest some connection to the poetry world.

So I spent today thinking about this site. Where it is, where I want it to go, what kind of niche do I want to be a part of. This brought me back to the very reason I started this site to begin with.

About four years ago, I wanted so very badly to be a writer. I had a number of old poems and short stories laying around and so I thought that I wanted to put them in one archive online, that would then serve as the growing archive of my own written work. I thought this place would inspire me and that by now my first book would be written.

Well, here we are today, and I haven’t written that book. I haven’t even written much of anything. The old stories and poems are still here in the writing archive, but they’re just a reminder of what I had wanted to do, and demonstrate how today I am still so far from that goal. So where does that leave The Lousy Poet? Well, like I said, this site has degraded to a general sloppy mess. I haven’t done anything with it to provide it with some purpose because, frankly, I have no purpose. I try to be a good father and husband and employee, but when I sit down on this computer, I really only have a goal to earn some extra cash to keep my websites online and maybe put twenty or so dollars away each month.

So after reading Varsha’s comment, I decided I am going to do the following things. These may not be the only things, but it’s my starting point;

1) I will continue the Word of the Day
2) I will be adding a Literary Quote of the Day
3) I will be adding a weekly feature called The (Not so Lousy) Poet of the Week
4) I will be focusing more on articles that aspiring writers and poets can use, such as getting published, writing cover letters, self publishing versus getting published and more.

These changes will take place over the next several weeks. I’d love to say that they will start tomorrow, but I want to get a few things in order and done ahead of time, so if my schedule gets heavy I can keep things going up on time.

I’m hoping to make this an interesting place to visit. I know that I might not be able to compete with some of the really great literary and poetry sites, but I hope that with these added features and a few other things I have in the works, the Lousy Poet will prove to be a fun, informative and interesting site to visit.

Here’s to better days!

So when I saw the title of this blog, The Language of Love, and that it had to do with flower, gifts, language of love, it had me seeing a rather sappy mess in my head. But I’m always up for checking out a new blog, and since so much poetry in the world has been written about love, who am I to fight it? But I found myself rather surprised. The blogger has a multitude of different posts. It being near Halloween, she has a number of great picks of decorated pumpkins! There’s also recipes on making natural plant based products. All in all, I found some interesting articles that were far from what I had initially expected. I suppose since this blog has rarely had anything to do with poetry (though I’m looking to change that soon!) I should hardly be surprised, but hey, I am! So forget the sappy sounding title, go check out so decent content!

Thanks to Google and search engines in general, the web has become a wild place with people fighting for even the slightest improvement in their pagerank or seach engine placement.

Pagerank is something Google has put in place that assigns a numeric value to your site based on inbound links, content, and a whole slew of variables that I’m certain are well over my head. My site, which has been online since about 2004, has over 200 posts as well as a number of other sections had a pagerank of 1, and when I checked it this morning it had sunk to the lowest of the lows, 0. Now, my wife’s website, firewithinstudio.com, where she has a gallery and hasn’t posted a single blog entry, is a pagerank of 2! WTF??! I mean, I’m no expert, but shouldn’t the age of the site, the volume of content count for something? I don’t think my wife’s site has anymore links to it than the Poet, so what’s the deal? Maybe I’m being punished because I’m doing some paid blog entries, but I think it’s a pretty dirty shot at those of us who are scraping the bucket to survive to punish our websites for making us just enough money to pay for our hosting. It would be one thing if there was nothing here but affiliate links that were generated by a computer, but crap, I’m typing all this stuff myself!

And thanks to a low pagerank the opportunities for making some income from this blog have just been seriously reduced. I guess I understand a desire to filter those blogs that have been created solely for posting paid for posts, but really, shouldn’t there be some way to calculate the number of articles that are original content with no affiliate links and work off a percentage or something?

If anyone has some good advice, let me know. I’ve been trying to increases the traffic to this site, and in the process have swapped links with sites that might not match the content of this one, but so what? I’m a little miffed by this.

So I was directed to a blog by Raghul. I really connected with the sentiment of his blog’s byline. It says;

In this changing world…. I am reading, observing and thinking a lot. All my views are written here, I am just trying to write something interesting…..

I totally get where this guy is coming from. Oh, to just be able to write something interesting. But on his blog Cacography, Raghul does manage to do just that. He has some interesting posts about technology, curses on local royal families and even what a great view he has from his office window! Go give his site a look!

When you have kids with special needs, it’s hard for both parents to have carreers that take them out of the home. That’s why it’s been so important for us to find Ways of making money at home.

There are quite a few blogs out there that can provide some really great advice and guidance. I found Lisa’s blog and she’s got lots of different means of creating income streams and traffic for websites. What I also liked about her blog was that it’s also her personal blogging space, which helped make it feel a little more personal. All too often, blogs with advice on making money at home can seem cold or too much like a gimmick filled sales pitch. Finding a blog where there are some good pieces of advice but you can also read about how Lisa’s cats gave birth to kittens just makes it all so much more real. Check this one out!

So I was a little pissed yesterday. I checked my email and there was one from a blogging service I do paid blogs for telling me that my blog entry was missing and could I rectify the problem. So I wonder, “How did that happen?” as I clearly don’t delete posts or links, so I hop over to the site and there’s this “Under Construction” page where the poet should be!!! I freaked! So, I email my hosting service and ask, ummm, “Where’s my site!!!” A few minutes later, they emailed back to check it, and the site was live once more. But then, I kept getting Internal Server Errors anytime I tried to get into the admin side to write a post! It took them all day to fix that, and so my streak of posting something at least once a day has been broken. BALLS!

Oh well, back online now and all seems to be well. Hopefully that was an isolated incident that won’t occur again.

So another site I want to pass along. I’ve been looking for simplified advice on things like getting more exposure for this blog. One site I came across is Not Guru, which offers practical tips for mom & pop businesses. It gives really down to earth explanations about net techniques that might otherwise be quite complex.

Reading the site actually made me aware of a new scam known as click-jacking that makes users think they are clicking on benign links when in reality they are surrendering control of components of their computer such as their web cam. Thanks to Not Guru’s simple explanation, which included a handy video, I was able to get a good idea of what this involve, how to protect myself, and what kind of impact the market’s response to this might be.

Check this site out. I found it really useful!