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Ideas of March is a great initiative from Chris Shiflett to resurrect the blog.

I agree with Chris when he attributes the demise of blogging to the rise of Twitter. Personally I know there are many things I tweet that would have been the basis of a blog post in the past. You’d be forgiven for thinking that by Twitter allowing us all to easily, and quickly gets things of our chest Twitter would work to separate the wheat from the chaff; leaving us with perhaps less frequent but higher quality blog posts. Instead Twitter just seems to have robbed many of us of impetus to publish.

In Elliott Jay Stock’s Ideas of March post he talks of not having posted for over three months, and here my blog has become little more than a repository for videos I like.

I’m hoping that Ideas of March combined with my new blog design (don’t ask) will give me the impetus to start writing proper blog posts again.

Chris proposes we write about what we like about blog posts – so what do I like?

Over the years I’ve been reading blogs it has changed as blogging, and blogs have changed. I’ve enjoyed learning from blog posts with subjects ranging from the Hipster PDA to the existence of Chap Hop. These days what I enjoy are blogs that are a closer to journals and show more of the writers personality, interests and opinions. I tend to stay away from the more ‘technical’ blog posts I once read.

Blogs and blogging happened at a key time for me. A time when my love of the web had been sorely tested by working for too many years in large Corporations that continued to not understand the web or only wanted to ‘monetize’ it – of how I hate that word but oh how I enjoy spelling the American way.

But I digress.

I’ve said before that the rise of the blog, and the first @Media conference in 2005 were the events that rekindled my love of the web. Blogging was to me a realisation of what the web had been envisioned as by it’s creators: a read/write environment. After years of read the ease of blogging, via services such as Blogger where I started my first blog, brought write to the majority of web users. Anybody with access to the web could share their thoughts and ideas with the whole world in a matter of moments. It is for this reason I love the blog, and it is for this reason that I hope that not only do we manage to stop the slow decline of the blog but perhaps spark a blogging renaissance.

Here’s to the Ideas of March.

I’ve decided to sign-up for Project52 next year;  which according to the Project52 website is:

A personal challenge geared toward getting fresh content on your website. The goal is to write at least 1 new article per week for 1 year. Because we all know what it‘s like to procrastinate on our content. A website is not just a fresh design that can be uploaded to the web and forgotten about!

Why have I decided to join Project52? For fun and for the challenge as much as anything, but also because I feel blogs and blogging have become slightly neglected in our new online world of micro-blogging.

So a new blog post, each week, every week for 2010 – should be fun.

As I no longer have a links page or blogroll I’d like to draw your attention, if I may, to Biting The Big Apple; a great blog written by my friend Stephanie.

Stephanie and I worked together for a few years in London, then in 2007 Stephanie made the huge step of moving to New York to live and work.

Biting The Big Apple records that adventure and Stephanie’s thoughts and experiences of living in New York City.

It’s been really interesting re-reading a number of the posts with a new perspective following my first trip to New York.

Take a bite from the Big Apple.

Recently I decided to take this blog a little more seriously, and part of that has been to see where my visitors were coming from and to try and increase my visitor numbers.

Google Analytics reports that 57% of the visitors to david hughes.org arrived from a search engine:

That’s a HUGE proportion from Google, but looking at the detail I found that the vast majority were from Google.com. I live in England so Google insists on sending me to Google .co.uk no matter if I enter .com or not so I found it interesting that I should get so much traffic from .com and so little from .co.uk.

I found that when searching for david hughes my blog ranked #10 on Google.com and #1 on Yahoo.com. However it was another story when you looked at the UK version of the search engines that UK users are pushed to. On Yahoo.co.uk I was a very pleasant 3, but on Google.co.uk I struggled to find my site; after wading through search results I finally found it at #212.

I found this disparity in rankings surprising; it’s the same site with the same content so I really couldn’t see why it would rank well on google.com and not on google.co.uk. It was this dramatic difference that made me take an more active interest in my site’s ranking.

The first thing I learnt was that nobody except Google really knows how their algorithm works despite what some might tell you. So really we’re all experimenting and seeing what works; which makes it a little frustrating but also kinda fun.

The first thing I wanted to explore was the difference in rankings between .com and .co.uk. Looking into this subject it seems that the physical location of your website and its domain make a difference to how Google rank you on the country specific sites.

I moved davidhughes.org to a UK based server and saw a small improvement, but moving to a UK domain name proved more difficult. The .org TLD is classified as being international and this seems to make Google rank it well on .com but rank it lower on .co.uk because it is not a UK domain.

I tried to buy davidhughes.co.uk and david-hughes.co.uk but both have been bought by cyber squatters who wanted £1500 and £2500 + VAT respectively. I wish them luck as I’m not aware of a famous David Hughes that would pay that – we’re not talking about britneyspears.co.uk here.

Unsurprisingly, I decided to stay with davidhughes.org and work at building up the Google ranking for this domain.

The next thing I looked at was keywords or the words that people will use to search for and find my site. The keywords I most want people to be able to find my site via are david hughes; obvious but also rather common. I realised that David Hughes only appeared once on this site, in the header, so my keyword density was about as low as it could be. To help this I added a written by byline to all of the articles and updated the copyright statement to include my name; this added ten more instances of david hughes to the homepage. At this time I also wrapped main David Hughes in <h1> tags as this is good both from a semantic standpoint, rather sloppy of me not to have done so, and apparently Google likes headings.

This is really the extent of the technical changes I have made to my site; they did help but not as much as the final elements: links and content.

From all I read it seems the biggest single influencer on your Google ranking is incoming links. There are two ways I can see to get links to your site: go out and comment on other blogs and site and link back to your own site and for other sites to link to your site and articles.

The biggest factor in getting that to happen is of course content; if you don’t have content of interest to people they aren’t really going to link to you are they? I will admit to not having seen a rise in people linking to my site but I have seen an increase in visitors from links that I have published.

Apparently Google also like frequently updated content so I have tried to be a little less sporadic in my posting but as this coincides with my desire to do more with this blog it’s no bad thing.

So where has this focus on my Google ranking ended up?

When I started davidhughes.org was ranked #212 as I said earlier; it peaked at #65 but has since slid back to #94. I have no idea why my ranking has fallen back – that’s another Google mystery to solve.

A move from #212 to #65 in just over a month isn’t bad really is it? It’s not the front page where I’d really like to be but it does show that it is possible to improve with a few basic changes.

Anyway, back to the Google grindstone.

A few days ago I upgraded davidhughes.org to the newly released, and latest version of WordPress: 2.7.

When I saw the first shots of the new dashboard and IA for WordPress 2.7 I was  concerned that the changes were too great and perhaps not being done for the right reasons: change for changes sake. But having had a few days to play with WordPress 2.7 I’m very pleased with the new approach.

The most significant change in the completely new interface is the move form horizontal navigation across the top of the page to vertical navigation on the left. I’ll admit that this change gave me a few muscle-memory moments, where I out of habit moved my mouse to the top; but it’s amazing how quickly you adapt.

This new navigation gives WordPress much more flexibility to add new features in the future as they are no longer constrained by the width of the average browser window. I’m pleased to report that this new layout also works very well, if not better, on the 10″ 1024×600 pixel screen of my Samsung NC10 netbook.

In addition to the great new user interface there are a number of other new features and enhancements in WordPress 2.7; a favourite of mine being  the ability to upgrade from within the WordPress dashboard.

WordPress has  a very good introduction to 2.7 on their site that also explains the thinking behind the developments.

In my opinion the best blogging platform just got better; I can’t wait to see what WordPress 2.8 brings…