No, this is not another blog post about me going to the gym, experimenting with a new 4 Hour Body recipe or anything else you are probably guessing. This is about how I’m trying to make the experience on my site better for both of us.
I spent the better part of my last two evenings optimizing this site. Seems like I spend a ton of time helping clients and friends do this sort of stuff, meanwhile I have been neglecting my own site. This is what happens when you start to do what you love as a means of income; when you’re not getting paid to do it, it’s the last thing you want to do!
While this post is about what I did to my site, many of my choices are relevant to anyone that wants to take blogging seriously. I touch on how I’m speeding up my blog, to making money off of my original content and encouraging others to engage with my posts.
I hope this proves to be helpful for the both those who have just started blogging as well as those veterans who may simply have forgotten, or never knew, these tips to get the most out of your blog. So without further adieu, here’s a totally inside baseball look at what I’ve been up to. Continue reading →
LiveFyre, promising to turn a blogs comments into a live stream of organic, reader created content from all walks of the Internet life. I have been a huge supporter of the people at JS-Kit and their product Echo, in fact I’ve had it running the back end of my comments for quite a while. But when I got word about LiveFyre’s new system, I had to give it a try.
For the last few months I’ve had a beta invitation waiting for me, sent from LiveFyre CEO Jordan Kretchmer. Unfortunately, work at Pure has kept me so busy that even updating my blog has become difficult. I’m going to do what I can to make these updates happen more regularly…
I finally got a few free minutes to install LiveFyre and ran into some major problems. First, it was incredibly slow, not the plugin itself but the entire site. It took a few seconds for every page to load on the back end. The front end of the blog, what you guys see, was just fine. Second, popup ads! Every time I tried to load the plugin I got a popup advertisement. Not cool. Third, it didn’t work. Simply wouldn’t import my existing comments or install into my theme which is the standard WP 3 2010 theme.
I tweeted my problems and faster than anyone could ever hope, LiveFyre was there with help. I turned control of my blog to the tech guru’s at LiveFyre, after clearing out all the orphan tables and remnants of previous plugins/themes/installs. They feared a bit of malware was hiding on my system. Nevertheless, even after wiping my database of all extraneous entries and my WordPress folder of any extra content, I still had these horrible popup ads.
True to their word, LiveFyre went in, did the install and import for me and wham, everything is perfect. They even did a sweep of my blog to check for any major issues including malware. Luckily, they found none.
I still don’t know what happened that caused all of these problems but I’m happy to say they are all resolved and I’m ready to try out LiveFyre. I’m going to use this post as a test so comment away! Link back to it from your blog, Twitter or wherever else. Let’s test out LiveFyre, put it through its paces.
I still have my Echo Live subscription but… if LiveFyre proves to be the powerful comment engine it promises to be (and it is affordable after their beta period) I’m sold. If not on the advanced features, the absolutely amazing customer service.
