No Job For Mom

WordPress Plugin: Broken Link Checker

2012-02-09T15:45:12Z

While I’m contemplating my direction for the next 5 years of my online journey, I decided to play around behind the scenes on a few of my blogs. In doing so I happened upon the plug-in called Broken Link Checker. If you have a WordPress blog and are not already using this plugin, I strongly suggest that you install it

This neat plugin is especially helpful if you have old blogs with lots of posts. Finding all broken links on old blogs is just about impossible. Broken Link Checker continually checks for broken links and sends notification emails when broken links are found.

After testing the plugin on one of my smaller blogs, I installed it here on NJFM. The plugin found over 200 broken links on this site. When you consider that I’ve only got a little over 500 posts, 200 is a rather high percentage of broken links.

Waning Interest

As I was fixing the links I realized most of the links came from NJFM’s comment section. It made me realize that I’m not the only one who loses interest after building blogs.

The majority of the broken links were from folks who created a new blog, came here to No Job for Mom and got very involved in the community. Over time they lost interest and allowed their blog’s domain name to expire thus resulting in broken links (this is not a complaint, just an observation).

The People Factor

I think cleaning up broken links improves the reader’s experience. I know I’ve read quality and compelling comments on other blogs only to be later disappointed when I clicked on the commenter’s website link to find that it was a dead end.

SEO Factor

I am not an SEO expert but I would think search engines appreciate blogs with current links as opposed to blogs with a ton of broken links. Whether or not fixing broken links improve search engine results remains to be seen, but it can’t hurt.

Broken Link Checker has earned its way onto my favorite WordPress plugins list.

Shout out to Crystal Clear Edits

2012-02-01T13:55:57Z

I wanted to give a shout out to Crystal and her new website Crystal Clear Edits.

Crystal is a valuable member of the NJFM community. She poses great questions, offers encouragement and provides information that has helped many of NJFM’s readers.

She recently unveiled her new website Crystal Clear Edits. You see, Crystal has this uncanny ability to spot typos and errors in manuscripts that have been reviewed by several pairs of eyes. Not only does she have the ability to find these mistakes, she is very compassionate when bringing these errors to your attention.

Her love of reading, respect for language and her eagle eyes makes Crystal Clear Edits the perfect business for someone with such qualities (not to mention that a name like Crystal is the icing on the cake).

If you’re writing a book, have written a book or have documents that require a fresh set of eyes, get in touch with Crystal. Crystal charges a fair price and provides a top-notch service. You won’t regret having Crystal review your manuscripts.

Crystal, I’m excited for you and I wish you all the best. You’ve been a tremendous help to me and I know you will be a tremendous help to others.

Almost 5 Years of Online Writing

2012-01-24T14:34:36Z

February 7th will mark my 5th year anniversary of quitting my part-time job in an attempt to earn money as an online writer.

In those 5 years I’ve earned and learned quite a bit. The largest contributing factor to my online writing success was the decision to transition from up front to residual earnings.

The Changing Seasons

If you’ve been writing online for longer than one year, you know how much things have changed in that short period of time. I’ve witnessed even bigger changes over the past 5 years.

The one underlying constant is quality content works and people like to be told what to do. So much of the Internet is either providing information to help people make a decision or telling people how to make the decision. We are a thirsty bunch for being told what to do and how to do it.

Switching Gears

Regular NJFM followers may have noticed the decline in posting frequency. As I look at the evolution of the Internet, the evolution of my interests and changes in my off line life, I’m finding that NJFM holds a different position in my list of priorities.

While I still enjoy blogging here, I’m finding my enthusiasm is waning. There’s nothing worse than placing uninspired content on a blog just to keep things going.

What am I Saying?

I’m not quite sure. It’s like this. I like to blog, but I like to be inspired when I blog. There are times when the inspiration is hot and on fire and there are other times when it’s not. It seems that I’ve temporarily lost my enthusiasm for writing about writing. I haven’t lost my enthusiasm for writing, it just writing about writing has lost its luster for the time being.

This is not a “RIP” post for the demise of NJFM. It’s an “I have to follow my gut” post because the one thing freelance writing has taught me is to follow my gut.

I’ll continue to post here from time to time, but not as frequently as in the past. Call me crazy, but I think you would much prefer to read inspired content instead of prattling drivel about writing online.

What’s Up with the Amazon Traffic?

2012-01-10T12:14:47Z

The other night I noticed a temporary surge in traffic on several of my sites. Around the same time I noticed a surge in my Suite 101 traffic too.

On my own sites I could tell the referrer was Amazon. Most of the traffic was coming from Seattle, Washington and Fresno, California. There were one or two hits originating from other cities, but the majority came from Seattle. On Suite 101, the traffic referrer was listed as [direct] but I suspect it was Amazon too.

A Suite 101 side note: I find it comical that we, the Suite 101 writers, must wait a year before we can post our Suite articles elsewhere, but plagiarists get to use our articles right away.

Unfortunately, the traffic surge was the equivalent of being Stumbled, a lot of traffic but no clicks.

I did a quick search online to see if I could find any info to shed light on the situation, but couldn’t find anything.

Out of curiosity, did anyone else notice such a traffic surge and if so, do you have any idea what caused it?

Knee Deep in Redirects

2012-01-07T13:39:33Z

Oh boy, I’m busier than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs! My desire to upgrade my Tidbits site has taught me another valuable lesson. Here’s the lesson:

When converting a site from Joomla to WordPress (or changing platforms), do not change the category structure or the file naming convention. In other words, don’t do what I did.

Old School

When the site was hand coded, there was only one way to access any page on the site. All a reader had to do was type in the static URL and boom…there was the page! With content management systems such as Joomla and WordPress (yes, I call WordPress a content management system), it’s different.

It wasn’t until after I received over 600 “File not found” errors (started at 90 a day and has now trickled to only 10 or 15 a day) that I had a V-8 moment.

My old school thought process of accessing each page via one URL was outdated. With content management systems, pages can be accessed in a variety of ways. I won’t get into the whole relational database structure reasoning for why that is, but take my word for it.

Changing with the Times

In the past when I changed platforms all I had to do was insert a “change of address” line from the old webpage to the new. Now, with at least 10 ways to access any one page from my old Joomla site, the redirects seem endless. You see, something as simple as including or excluding the forward slash (/) at the end of a URL can generate a “File not found” error if things aren’t redirected correctly.

So, this Redirect Queen has been putting out redirect fires as they happen. I was pleased yesterday when I only received 11 crawl errors.

How do I Find the Errors?

There are two ways to track errors. The easy and not so thorough way is by checking my Statcounter stats. When I see “Page not found” in the log, I know I need to address the problem.

The other more complete way is by signing into my Google Webmaster account. There they list all of the errors Google encounters when the bots crawl my site. Some of the errors are because of redirects but some of the errors are a result of incorrect link backs. I see some of the sites linking to Tidbits were incorrectly coded.

Additionally, I’ve found that Joomla created a few pages that made absolutely no sense to me, but I’ve redirected them anyway.

When will it End?

The way I calculate it, I fully expect to be resolving redirects for a couple of months. Fortunately, each day there are fewer and fewer redirects and I’ve got it down to a science. I can now complete my daily redirect duty before I finish my first cup of coffee.

BTW, if you find yourself with the same problem (hopefully you won’t), there’s a plugin that helps to make the redirection process a little easier. The plugin is appropriately called Redirection .

Ya gotta love this stuff or else you wouldn’t do it.