Mishmash Musings

I’ve been thinking long and hard about what to do with this blog. I have too many other things going on right now and not enough time to give this blog the attention it needs. I’m probably going to shut it down in the near future because, to be honest, it’s kind of a chore trying to find things to write about here.

For now, I’m going to scale back the posting from every other day to twice a week. After that, we’ll see if a shutdown is still necessary or if I can manage the new schedule.

Okay, I did it. I picked out a new theme that is vastly different from my old one. Instead of the dreary black & white scheme of before, I decided to go with something much brighter. This particular theme is called Victorian or something, and it seems decent enough for now. The only thing that bothers me is that my monthly archives are gone, and now I just have all my archives grouped together by category. I’m going to have to figure out how to get the old way back, but that will have to wait for the weekend. Oh, and I dislike how the recent posts aren’t shown in the sidebar, but that’s easy enough to fix too.

I might find other things wrong/annoying about this theme as I go along, but I’m satisfied for now!

I’ve seriously been considering taking a short hiatus from blogging. As I’ve mentioned before, I have very little time or motivation to write posts and do the thousand other behind-the-scenes tasks (such as networking, commenting, etc.) required to make a blog successful. Even when I do have a few moments to use the Internet, I spend it reading sites like www.homeremediesacne.net in an effort to find a cheap cure for my skin problems.

All I know is that I’ve been blogging for 5 years on 5 different sites, and maybe it’s just getting to be too much. I’m not the kind of person that puts my whole life online for everyone to see, which leaves me with very little to say. Maybe taking a couple weeks (or a month) off will allow me to get motivated again. Or, maybe I need to find a narrower focus for this blog. I already have one other general catchall blog, so that’s another reason I never have anything to say over here. These are definitely things I need to think about!

I’ve mentioned Blog Explosion on here a few times. It’s a site where you can generate traffic to your blogs by viewing other blogs and accumulating credits. I found some terrific blogs that way, and really loved the service. But for the past year or so it’s been on the decline because of new, apathetic owners and a broken system. Sometimes you can surf, sometimes not. Sometimes the clickable number images appear, allowing you to get credit for your visits, sometimes not. And in any case, it doesn’t seem that there are too many sites left in the rotation. When the viewer does work, I usually get to maybe 10-12 sites before running out.

In other words, it seems that folks have pretty much given up on BE. What a shame, because like I said, I had found some good blogs that way and was able to get a nice amount of traffic from them. I just don’t understand why someone would buy a site like that and then completely neglect it as it dies a slow, painful death. What a waste!

I sometimes check Google Trends to see what the most popular searches are on any given day. Just now when I was examining the list, I saw that “meth recipe” was No. 75 on there. Are you kidding me? Are so many people interested in learning how to cook meth that it is on the Google Trends list? WTF is wrong here?

I’ve heard that sometimes spammers will unleash a bunch of automated searches so that their keywords or websites come up on Google Trends. This is especially obvious when you check the list at an odd time, like at 3am or something, because the spammers don’t have much competition from legitimate searches.

But this is early evening, so spammers shouldn’t be too much of an issue now, right? What a sad, sad state of affairs if meth recipe is a legitimate query….

When BlogExplosion was down for a few days earlier in the month, I looked around for a surfing alternative and came across a site called BlogClicker. It’s the same general idea as BlogExplosion, where you “earn” traffic to your own sites by surfing through others, but there are a few differences. After trying BlogClicker for a while, I’m ready to list the Pros and Cons of the site.

Pros:

• The surf timer is just 20 seconds as opposed to the 30 seconds required by BE. I think 20 seconds is enough time to skim the page and see if it’s something you want to read or not. I love that I can surf 33% faster with BC.
• Your sites are accepted automatically, without having to wait months and months for approval like on BE. Of course, this has a downside as well, which I’ll address in the next section.
• Instead of getting the “No More Active Sites” error that BE uses, you can recycle through the same sites with BC. Yes, it’s a bit boring to see the same pages several times in one surfing session, but at least I can earn the number of credits I want without having to wait for everything to reload.

Cons:

• Because site approval is automatic, there are tons of spammy “make money now” pages in the BC rotation. I would much rather see true blogs while I’m surfing than sit through an endless parade of splogs.
• Since BC is relatively new (I think), there’s not a lot of activity over there. It can take a few days for other people to reciprocate all the visits you’ve earned, which sucks. At least with BE, there are still some loyal surfers, so credits are always redeemed within 24 hours.
• There’s no forum and therefore no means of interacting with other community members to get site news or information. Yes, I know the BE forums aren’t exactly hopping, but at least they’re there, kwim?

Overall, I think BlogClicker has a lot of potential. There needs to be some quality control, however, to crack down on the number of splogs in the system, and the owners should do a lot more in the way of promoting the site in order to attract new users. If those two things happen, I’ll be happy. As it is, I’ll continue to visit BC, but only a couple times a week, as opposed to every day with BE.

Well, I’m happy to report that BlogExplosion is finally back after being down for several days. There were rumors that it was perhaps dead forever, but obviously those were inaccurate. I didn’t truly realize how much fun I have surfing other blogs via BE until it was gone, so now that it’s back I’m definitely going to appreciate it a lot more.

I do wish that the current ownership would take a more active role in maintaining the site. I’ve heard that it’s a long, slow process to get blogs approved, which sucks — especially since I often get the dreaded “No More Active Sites” error message. I mean, how hard can it be to approve blogs for surfing purposes? Sign me up, I’ll help out!

I’ve been a part of BlogExplosion for about a year, and found it helpful not only for driving a bit of extra traffic to my sites, but also in alerting me to some fun new blogs out there. I usually don’t have time to surf around the blogosphere on my own, so it was nice to surf via BE because I knew I’d get reciprocal traffic that way.

But for the past three days, I haven’t been able to access the site at all. I decided to check around to see what others are saying about BE, but haven’t come across a definitive answer yet. Some people are saying that it’s completely dead, while others are saying that the parent company is in the midst of a server swap that is affecting all of their sites.

I truly hope that BE will be back sometime soon. I know lots of people who have benefited from it in the past, since it’s an easy way to promote small business opportunities, webstores, and personal sites. I will keep checking on BlogExplosion, and let you know if/when it comes back up!