After a busy Sunday (see the parade) and a Monday of work, here’s a simple post.
A snapdragon from my front yard.
I added a little WordPress plugin called Subscribe to Comment that allows you to check a little box on the comment form so you can get follow up comments in your email. A reader asked about it, so I decided to implement the plugin. Feel free to try it out (I always enjoy your comments, in general, all of you!).
I found a recommendation for the plugin on this WordPress blog called WebDesignerWall. If you like funky, beautifully designed web pages, it’s worth a peek.
There are a multitude of WordPress plugins, and some seem quite fun. Simple Recent Comments is one I must do soon. Maybe I’ll add it to the bottom, along with a list of archives of posts. I should try out some simple stats package, but those you won’t see. Unless I tell you. Oh, yes, I could tell you…another post idea!
And here’s an experiment with a blockquote that has a different border and background than the one I standardly use. More fun with WordPress.
As an additional experiment, I am going to set this post to be published at 3:15 am EST.
Two questions here:
1) What is a Google Ranking? (and should I even care)
2) What is MY Google Ranking? How do I find this out?
Let’s start with question 2. If you type “Google toolbar” in Google, you can get a link to the Google Toolbar. Download the toolbar and install it in your browser. I have mine turned off most of the time (because it takes up a little space at the top of the page), so now I’ll go turn it on so I can see the Google Ranking for every page I browse.
The Google Ranking for my own blog is 3 (out of 10). For my main website page, https://www.leoraw.com/, my Google Ranking is 4. Why is it higher for my main website page? I design websites, and I often link from the home page of the site I designed back to my main website page. So if the site I designed has a higher ranking than mine, it helps boost my ranking. I’ve been designing websites longer (10 years?) than I’ve been blogging (6 months?).
You can read more about Google ranking technology here. But the basic answer to question 1, what is this ranking stuff, if you want your page to show up higher on a Google search than a similar page, you need a higher ranking. The best way to get a higher ranking is to have related web pages with a higher ranking than yours link to your page. Note that I said related. If you are writing about dog food, and someone who is writing about poetry in China links to you, that is not as valuable as a dog food company linking to you.
Now comes the fun part. Let’s take some blogs and find out their Google ranking:
Maybe at some point I’ll discuss Technorati ratings.
I decided to set up a fake account called Random Commenter to see what it is like to be YOU, a reader of this blog. So here is what I have learned:
I am still trying to figure why Lion of Zion’s comments once went to the Akismet spam folder (I thought it was because of the links) or why Batya’s once went to Akismet, since she has posted many comments before this Akismet incident. So it could just be Akismet flakiness, something called “false positives”, when a comment that is fine for some reason goes to the spam folder.
So if your comment “disappears”, which should be a very infrequent occurrence, it may have gone to the spam folder, in which case you will have to wait for me to fish it out. You can let me know by using my contact form.
Notable Links from the Internet:
The Best Overall:
On Israel:
Art Links:
Famous Bloggers:
From this article:
Male bloggers tend to write about politics, technology and money; women are more likely to blog about their private lives and use an intimate style of writing.
At some point, I may do a post about women bloggers. Especially on how they deal with conflict. If anyone finds any relevant links, feel free to leave them in the comments. Or any of your own experiences with conflict and blogging. (Jack tried to help me find some a few weeks back, but the ones he sent me didn’t seem to fit my idea. Thanks for trying, Jack).
This is a “baby” blog. It was born in December 2007. One of the ways I hope to bring it from babyhood to toddlerdom is by honoring my commenters.
Taking a cue from the Rambam, the twelfth-century philosopher and expert in Jewish law who talks about 8 degrees of charity, I came up with 4 levels of commenting etiquette.
Level One: this is kind of a pre-level. It just learning how to leave a comment on someone else’s blog. You are not writing a whole post, but stating something in as clear a fashion as you can.
Level Two: Thank those who leave comments on your site. I still remember when I posted a comment on E-Kvetcher’s site on loshon hara (laws of gossip–a topic I would like to blog about, some time, some day). Look what a nice comment he left for me, after I left a few longish comments (I initiated the use of the term ‘blab’): “Leora, welcome and feel free to blab away.”
Level Three: If someone comments on your site, and you have never visited their site, go back and visit their site. And leave a comment. On something. Here was Jack’s first comment on my site, on my anti-pantyhose post: “Men are far more practical. No pantyhose, no pumps, no girdles.” So I went back to his site to find a post on which I could leave a comment. No comment on the particular post I found; it was one of Jack’s strange ones. I’ll give a link to Jack’s Comments on Commenting instead.
Level Four: Finally, the highest level is to link to a blogger or a blogger’s post in one of your posts. Search engines don’t follow the links in comments. But they do follow the links in posts. So here are links to blog posts by people who commented in the past week:
Finally, thank you to Jill, and here’s a link to her Flower for Kiersten painting.
Hakarat hatov = Recognizing the good (Hebrew expression)
I’ve participated in two blog carnivals, and here are the links:
Haveil Haveilim 161: Pidgeon Break
I looked up “pidgeon” and found this:
rats with wings, a person, usually a martin, with a barrel chest and pronounced curve in their rig that makes their ass trail behind their shoulders by an inch or so.
And the delicious kosher cooking carnival, #29, pre-Passover edition.
In a fit of insanity, I seemed to have volunteered to do the August Kosher Cooking Carnival. More on that much, much later.
It is a lot of fun to participate in these carnivals. Humor and waffle jokes fly about (though many of the posts are serious and seriously informative, especially in Haveil Haveilim). Kudos to all the hosts and bloggers.
I had great fun this past week creating a new header for a popular blog called:
A Mother in Israel
If you are interested in parenting, breastfeeding, interviews with other bloggers, life in Israel, burkas or potato kugel, mom in Israel has a lot going on.
Mom emailed me a variety of pictures; the final header has abundant, colorful fruit in a market, a child’s tricycle, challah, a laundry basket and squeegee, and a boy in a cap at the beach. I asked my children to review the header before forwarding the final version; my daughter remarked the bike looked like it was in the market and the laundry looked like it was on the beach! Bravo, daughter. Great to have assistants like you.
A few of my favorites:
Finally, here are links to two very touching posts:
My Aliyah Part I
and My Aliyah Part II. In these posts she talks about the sudden death of her mother, loneliness and grief, and making friends in a new place.
She is funny, personable, and informative. I hope you’ll enjoy her blog as much as I do.
I have this livejournal account, mostly so I could answer Daniel Saunder‘s posts. Daniel writes about severe depression and Judaism, two topics about which I have experience, and Doctor Who, about which I know very little. (I don’t even own a tv, though I’m sure my older son could show me how to watch it on the internet if I were really interested). Daniel had a great post last week about Rav Soloveitchik’s Halachik Man. It takes a while to read his posts. He recently posted a best of the Blog, in which he starts out by saying:
I think part of my problem with blogging is that I can not decide what my blog is for. I sometimes think of it as a place where I can be myself, where I can explore all of my various, unconnected interests, in which case it does not matter who reads it. However, I also think of it as a way of delivering a message of some kind, of exploring certain ideas that I want relate to people in one or other of the sub-cultural groups that I am in, so it becomes necessary to reach that particular audience, whether of Doctor Who fans or Orthodox Jews or some other group.
Except perhaps for the Doctor Who part, this paragraph is one many bloggers can relate to. Who are we talking to and why?
Last week someone stopped me and said: “I found your blog!”
Uh, oh, I think. What did I say? Is someone REAL finding my blog? Someone I’m going to meet on the street (actually, it was in the back of my kids’ school)? Turns out, she has a great blog herself, and here it is: elinka.livejournal.com. Oh, by the way, it helps if you know Russian. Sometimes she writes “Shavua Tov” in Russian (Shavua Tov means Have a Good Week. In Hebrew). You can always enjoy the cute pictures.
I took a look around Live Journal tonight, and my account said I have no friends. Don’t you love it when you sign up for something new, and it tells you that you have no friends?
Finally, it asked this question:
What talent do you have that you wish more people would recognize?
I don’t know the answer. Do you have an answer?
My son, middle son, the one who once commented on my blog as me, who is up too late playing computer games next to me, said I should have said “fishing.”
One of the live journal bloggers answered:
I can fly.
Jack is a clever blogger. I have about ten ideas for posts in my head, but only time to write one quick one, as my children are now arising, and the real day is beginning.
So, here’s a link to Jack’s blog:
Second Annual Link to Jack Day.
We should all be as clever as Jack!