Using the Prologue theme with WordPress and you’ll get a Twitter lookalike. WordPress/Prologue combination is really a very powerful microblogging platform.

It is like having a Twitter blog with totally full control, customization plus the advantage of your favorite plugins.

In fact, I have it installed on a WordPress MU site – wassup.myblog.sg.

It has been 4 days since I started playing with microblogging. And I have hacked the WordPress MU and tweaked the Proloque template extensively to get it work the way I want it.

The good thing is I have been making several posts a day at my new Twitter-like microblog. Because the post is generally short, just a few sentences, I tend to write about anything and everything. I think you hear about my ranting more often at my new micro-blog.

Keeping tracking of my learning experience with WordPress MU and customizing WordPress templates is definitely Twitter-worthy. That’s why I have made record number of posts since I started blogging 4 years ago.

If you are interested in WordPress and microblogging, visit wassup.myblog.sg and give me some comments.

Wow, I thought this is a brilliant idea – “Display Advertising Without Annoying Your Regular Readers” by Dan of TheWrongAdvices.com. It is a simple script.

<?php
$referer = $_SERVER[’HTTP_REFERER’];
$url = strtolower(urldecode($referer));
if ( eregi(”www\.google((\.[a-z]{2,3}){1,2})[/\]search”,$url) )
{ ?>
INSERT YOUR AD CODE HERE
<?php } ?>

Basically, it checks from where is the visitor coming from. If it’s from Google search, then the ad is displayed. For your blog’s regular readers who come to your page via bookmark, direct keyboard entry or any other web pages, no ad will be displayed.

Darn! Why didn’t I thought of it earlier. This will definitely please some of my readers. I am going to test this out now.

P.S. You page has to be a .php in order to use this script otherwise you’ll have to tweak your .htaccess to enable html to behave like .php.

I am amazed with the quality of these free Adsense themes and templates which I stumbled upon this morning while looking for WordPress for business type of templates/themes. Here’s two of my favorite:

I will be using them for a new content website on a niche that I’m interested to dabble in. And, one of the best way to monetize the traffic for such an informational website is to use Adsense.

You’ll see that the Google Ads are strategically positioned for high click-through. The WP Colors template even use the image ad to spruce up the overall aesthetics of the web page. With good content and a touch of SEO copywriting, I am sure such web pages will make you a good Adsense income.

Using of These Free Templates to Make Money

If you are going to build a new site, there is no need to put up the Google ad. Instead, you may want to replace the Leaderboard and the Rectangle ads with some interest pictures to attract more traffic while you build up your content.Typically, I will build at least 10,000 words of good solid content – these words serve as fodder for search engine spiders. And is critical to getting my pages getting listed in the SERP. The next step would be link building.

Visit forums, blogs and social networks to get people who are interested in your niche to visit your website and give you a backlinks. Once you’ve have a steady stream of visitors, you can then put up the Google Ads to monetize your targeted traffic.

Remember: Good content for niche is the key to your online success.

Warning: Adsense Templates Sold by Internet Marketers

Not too long ago, Adsense templates was the hype and a very popular Adsense expert turned Internet marketer was selling such templates for hundreds of dollars. And many “Internet entrepreneurs” use these templates to build MFA(Made for Adsense) sites by web scraping article directory, blogs and news portals.

Do not waste your money and time to create more web trash. You are just making it more difficult for yourself to make money online.

I was having trouble with canonical URLs issue with this blog. When you entered http://shihengcheong.com/blog it would be redirected to

http://www.shihengcheong.com.com/blog/

You see, I’ve been used mod_rewrite to redirect all URL with www- prefix to the non-www URL i.e.

http://shihengcheong.com/

The mod-rewrite in the .htaccess at the root directory works fine.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^shihengcheong.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://shihengcheong.com/$1 [L,R=301]
</IfModule>

Last month, I installed WordPress to the folder, /blog/, and I got stuck with the canonical URLs problem.

Here’s the problem. I guess people do not type the trailing slash when they enter the URL.

This is probably what most people will type:

shihengcheong.com/blog

So, for the past month, you’ve probably noticed that the displayed URL at your browser address bar was

http://www.shihengcheong.com/blog/

and not the shorter version without the www.

I was not very happy with this www URL. I want the search engine robots to index my page as http://shihengcheong.com/blog/ and hide away all other variations of URLs that will display the identical page.

I am no mod_rewrite and .htaccess expert. In fact, I simply copy what’s working and modify it according. The intricacies of mod_rewrite and web server programming is not my cup of tea.

Modifications to WordPress URL Rewrite .htaccess

Finally, I stumbled upon a snippet of sample .htaccess codes for some WordPress plugins yesterday. And I got an idea to solve my canonical URLs problem. Here’s how I resolved the trailing slash problem.

I added the following codes to the .htaccess created by WordPress:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^shihengcheong.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://shihengcheong.com/blog/$1 [L,R=301]
</IfModule>

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]
</IfModule>>
# END WordPress

If you are new to canonical URLs problem , you may want to read Matt Cutts SEO Advice on URL Canonicalization. And yes, Google might have fixed the problem but there are many more search engines out there which are not as smart.

I mentioned in my earlier post, Top Ranking for Blog, about a blog marketing course. The trainer of the workshop, Tan Kian Ann was featured in yesterday The New Paper. And here’s the report…

Maybe you ask, “Why need to learn to blog?” or “Isn’t blog marketing just like marketing a website?”

Blogging is not new. People started to write online journal since the end of last century. Ok, it not really a hundred years old but it definitely has been around for some years. Youngsters are the ones who started weblog(the older name for blog) at that time and it was about keeping an online diary and sharing it with your best friends.

You don’t have to learn how to keep an online diary. Anyway, keeping an online diary may not be what you want to do if you are thinking of marketing online.

You want to learn how to blog so that you can become popular for what you’ve written. Popular means you’ll have a big readership and each of your blog post is listed in the major search engines, news updates, Digg and has hundreds of other blogs linked to you verified by Technorati.

Basically, you want recognition for your blog.

So you’ll need to know what’s professional blogging and how to market your blog so that you can influence how your readers going to spend their time and money!

Will You Make Lots of Money After Learning How to Blog?

Let’s put it this way, there are some professional bloggers that make a 5-figure monthly income from their blogs. And there are hundred of millions other bloggers who don’t make a single dime even if they have Google Ads plastered all over their splogs!

So, since you’re already blogging, you might as well make it properly and professional – get proper blog marketing training. And gain recognition for your blog.

I believe many people will love to see their blogs or blog posts being ranked top in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Live(MSN) Search.

And I thought I would prepare a 90-minute seminar to introduce working executives to SEO and Blogging with a catchy title…

Getting Top Search Ranking for Your Blog
Let Your Customers Find & Tell You What They Think About Your Service and Product

However, I know that there are already many articles written on the topic of Search Engine Optimization for Blog and Top Search Engine Ranking for Blog.

1. How to Optimize Your Blog for Search Engines
2. 25 Tips To Optimize Your Blog For Readers & Search Engines
3. How to Optimize Your Blog
4. 7 Ways to Optimize Your Blog
5. How To: Optimize Your Web Site
6. How to Optimize your Blog’s Search Engine Ranking
7. WordPress and SEO

There are of course more than 7 articles available on the Internet, but these are the better ones that I’ve found. And I will learn from these great Blog SEO Specialists to hammer out my very own 90-minute seminar on How To Get Top Search Ranking For Your Blog.

[UPDATE Jan 31, 2007] I just discovered that there is a 1-day workshop on Blog Marketing. So I may as well not re-invent the wheel and direct working executives interested in corporate blogging to go check out:

• http://www.PracticalBlogMarketing.com

I found blogging so much more fun after I started using MyBlogLog. Now, whenever I’m online, I’ll login to find out who’d been to my blogs!

Initially, the motivating factor for me to trade my name and email address is the free tracking service offered by MyBlogLog. And I have no idea how powerful MyBlogLog can help me to grow my readership and traffic with its social networking model.

The traffic to my blog exploded and I have many more readers. I call this phenomenon, viral blogging.

Exponential Growth in Traffic with Viral Blogging

I started my membership on 3rd January, 2007. The traffic to my blog has since grown exponentially – from Alexa ranking 5,000,000 to 228,228(as of Jan 26, 2007). My blog communities have 16 Contacts and 7 Admirers!

Social Networking with MyBlogLog

In less than a month, I am already addicted to MyBlogLog – not for it’s free tracking and statistics services but for it powerful social networking features. I’ve found many blogs in my area of interest: SEO and Search Marketing. I am connecting to people interested in SEO and search marketing, and many bloggers from Singapore.

I think Singapore is becoming the Blogging Nation. My unofficial statistics rank Singapore first in the world for the number of active bloggers per capita.

Visit The MyBlogLog Blog and get to know the great people behind this fantastic service and find out loads of new MyBlogLog features.

[UPDATE Feb 2, 2007] Just discovered that Lee Oden of TopRankBlog.com got an interview with MyBlogLog CEO Scott Rafer.

This blog is now ranked PR4! That is, Google has pagerank’ed this blog from PR 0 to PR 4.

Thank you, thank you… to all those who link to me. I appreciate your reading and citing of what I’m ranting writing here.

I’ve noticed Google dancing over the past 10 days. A couple of my websites suffered a drop in pagerank – from PR4 to PR3. I think it’s because I’ve neglected them(for a long time, maybe more than 9 months) and have not been adding new content and implemented new link building campaign with them. So it’s sort of expected.

The good news is, for those websites that I actively SEO and build links, the pagerank have improved. I have a couple of web pages gained from PR4 to PR5. One point to note is that, these websites are focusing on Singapore-based traffic – in my own jargon, it’s Singapore SEO‘ed!

However, gaining higher pagerank is one thing and actually gaining higher position in the search engine result is more important. Isn’t it?

Before I could get the time to upgrade my WordPress 2.0.6 to 2.0.7, WordPress 2.1 (Ella) is here!

So I want to know what’s in it for me to upgrade to the new version. When I read the features list, I am glad to know that…

You can set any “page” to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.

I will definite install Ella 2.1 and try out the CMS features.

The other important features to me are:

The Autosave. I tend to lose my writing and have to resort to using a text editor to compose my post before copying it to WordPress and format it.

New version of Askimet. I believe the new version will catch more SPAM and honest readers will not be mistaken for making comment at this blog.

New, more efficient database code which translates to faster page loading when I add a post, update a post or displaying my blog on your browser!

However, I don’t quite understand this…

New search engine privacy option allows you take you to indicate your blog shouldn’t ping or be indexed by search engines like Google.

Maybe you would like to comment on this and enlighten me what’s this “privacy option”.

Yesterday, less than 14 hours ago, I installed WordPress 2.0.6 to my domain Shi.SG and now they have WordPress 2.0.7. I guess I’ll have to upgrade to WordPress 2.0.7. It is uncommon to have a upgrade so soon unless there’s a really urgent need to do so. Right?

I am going to work on WordPress as my preferred blogging platform. There are just too many benefits with WordPress for me to adopt this fantastic blog engine despite the hassle of installing and constant upgrading my website so very often.

And here’s just 2 of The Most Important Benefits…

Search Engine Friendly

WordPress is definitely more flexible for me to to SEO optimization. One of the biggest advantages is that you can use search engine friendly URLs e.g.
http://shihengcheong.com/blog/2007/01/predictions-for-2007/
which is preferred by the search engine rather than
http://shihengcheong.com/blog/?p=49

Trackback

One of the main reasons why this blog did so well, in terms of Alexa ranking, is because of the trackback feature. You see, when I quoted others’ blog posts, WordPress can automatically create a comment at the post I quoted. And I am getting a lot more visitors to my blog because of these comments.

This is one of the most powerful way to promote your blog. I guess this is also part of social media marketing.