Web Talk

The whole story started about five days ago when, all of a sudden, Web Talk started experiencing a great drop in its visits. Basically, from almost one thousand visitors a day, at the present time Web Talk just manages to gather a little more than two hundreds people. I have lost around 80% of visitors, and considering that all of Web Talk’s readers come from Google search, well, this has obviously to do with Google itself. This tendency is still on because, while I am writing, my visits are still dropping dramatically by the hour. If it continues, I fear there will be just a dozen of people here at Web Talk. I have to tell you that this thing worries me a lot. That’s why, a few days ago I started Googling to find out if I could get a solution or a reply to this big issue. To my big surprise I learnt that this is not a lone case but a spread tendency, courtesy of Google and its Sandbox. But what is Google’s Sandbox? First of all let me tell you that Google denies any Sandbox algorithm in its policy and, as a consequence, there are lots of theories about it, all of them getting to the conclusion that, despite what Google says, there is a kind of Sandbox behaviour on Google’s side. But let’s start from the beginning. Let’s start from what means being in a sandbox and why it was created. Google’s Sandbox was put in place in March 2004 to prevent fake and spam sites from being placed and ranked highly in the Google Search. Basically, if a website manages to get a lot of visitors, or a high rank or perform well in the Google Search in a short laps of time, Google gets “funny” about the website and, because of this reason, tends to think that something weird, bogus and not-legal was made in order to trick its algorithms. That’s why it puts the website in a sandbox to play…just with itself. As a result the website will stop performing well in Google Search, and while the whole website is still indexed, its keywords will perform badly and its pages will be shown very low in the search result. Solutions? No solution are available at the present time. The only thing to do is waiting. Usually Google puts a website in the Sandbox for a period of time which varies from one month to one year at most. I don’t want to discuss about Google’s policy because a lot has already being said in the Internet. That’s Web Talk situation right now. I can not do anything but continuing writing my posts as usual. For the few of you guys who were able to find this blog, stay tuned because more news and guides are coming up. If you wish to know more about Google’s Sandbox here is a list of the most interesting articles I manged to find while surfing. Continue reading »

The beginning of this story started some weeks ago when I decided to hire a web designer in order to have my Wordpress theme restyled. Oh boy! It has never been so difficult for me to spend some of my money. As a matter of fact every time I asked for a quotation or I looked interesting in a web designer, I just got uninterested replies from the other side. Maybe, the turn off side was my limited budget which made my offert very unappealing. I am just a guy running a personal blog. I am not part of a big company which has bunch of money to spend without a second thought, so I can not afford to spend thousands of dollars. In the end it was just a matter of money, nothing more nothing less. Anyway, every time I got a quotation I was very crestfallen. If you think to have your Wordpress theme re-made, it is right for you to know that designers may ask you a lot of money, in the order of thousands of dollars. Usually prices start from 1.200 - 1.500 USD. You won’t get anything less. This is not a general rule. In fact I also got cheap quotations, but the web companies involved had a very low profile meaning that, if you looked at their portfolio, they didn’t perform very impressive artworks. At a certain point I was really in despair. I contacted more than 20 Wordpress designers, but the results were really frustrating. They asked too much money, they were not very good at what they did or they were not interested in my small budget. Luckily for me, just when I thought that I could not have any chance to have my theme reinvigorate, I got into communication with Rachel, web designer and owner of Cre8d-design.com. First of all, I have to say that before knowing her I got impressed by its company portfolio. If you want to know what I am talking about visit this page to have an idea. Rachel was very patience, calm and listening and understood my needs and what I was looking for, tailoring an offer just made for my blog and my limited budget. In the end I hired her. The first thing she did was to put me into communication with her excellent coworker Stephen Merriman who promptly fixed some incompatibility issues with my theme and the new Wordpress 2.5.1. After that, she started pouring some good ideas in my head and, after mixing everything up, she made me understood what kind of design I was looking for. The process was rather simple. Every time she modified my theme she sent me a snapshot of it. At that point I indicated what changes I wanted, she made them throughly and a new snapshot was sent. The whole process was performed in a special environment called Basecamp, an account where I could log in whenever I wanted to see the progress of the work and communicate with the team. It took just a couple of days to have my brand new Wordpress theme re-designed! The coding part instead was reserved to Stephen Merriman who, I have to say, did a very good job! A special thank to Rachel Cunliffe and Stephen Merriman who help me make this blog more gorgeous than ever! If you want to hire them, click here!

But, in which way this team of gorgeous geeks can help you? Here is a comprehensive list of what they can do. Continue reading »

Just a quick note. Web Talk has changed its skin. I hope you like the new theme. I wanted something simple, elegant and with soft colors. This Wordpress theme should let you concentrate on the posts a little more and should make the browsing of the blog easier. So, Welcome to the new Web Talk. In a couple of days I will give you more infos as far as the company who modified the theme is concerned. As usual, stay tuned!

If you are a blogger you know only too well how important to put advertising on your bog is in order to pay your monthly and yearly fees to manage your internet activity. In fact, you have to pay the web hosting provider, ask for help to programmers just in case something gets screwed, pay a designer to get a better theme, pay Adword to let other people know about you and what you are doing etc. If you start blogging seriously and you are not into programming, at a certain point you have to pay to get help. Blogging is a continue work in progress. Usually readers don’t see a lot about this feverish activity, apart when a new article comes out, but I assure that behind the scenes there is a lot of work and posting articles is just the tip of the iceberg. Blogging is an extreme dynamic activity made of hundreds of big and small daily adjustments. OK, I apologize for this little off-topic… There are a lot of ways to get money from your blog, but the most used one is, without any doubt, Google Adsense. There are dozens of plugins letting you put its code among your pages or promising you to fine tune it, but what if you don’t manage to find the right plugin reproducing the behaviour you are looking for? A solution is to know a little bit about php programming, make a custom piece of code and put it into your blog’s theme. Let’s make an example. In the past weeks I have have been looking for a plugin which lets me put Adsense in the main page of my blog ( by the way, I use Wordpress) at specific intervals, let’s say one advertising every 3 posts. Well, believe it or not but I didn’t manage to find it at all. Lucky for me and you all, there are a lot of good guys out there willing to help you for the sake of it. This is the trick I managed to get from a good willed guy:

• Get access to your blog thorugh your FTP software.
• Go to /public_html/wp-content/themes/yourTheme.
• Open Index.php (which corresponds to your blog’s homepage loop).
• Add this piece of code after <?php if (have_posts()) : ?>: <?php $counter = 2; ?>
• Add this other piece of code containing your Adsense after <?php the_content(’Continue reading »’); ?>: <?php if(++$counter % 3 == 0) { Echo ‘Your Google Adsense code here‘; } ?>

The behaviour you should expect from this code is that it will put a Google ads at the bottom of the first post of your blog’s homepage. It will also put a Google ads every three posts, following thus this frequency: 3,6,9,12 etc. If you want your Google ads to follow a different frequency, just change the figures in the code.

It has been a long time since I last spoke about Web Talk and how it is doing. A lot of things have changed since then, and I have to confess to you that a lot of good news have happened. First of all, last night Google updated my Pagerank which has passed from 1 to 3! Just in case you don’t know what I am talking about, Pagerank is shown by Google Toolbar and it tells you how much a web site is important for the World Wide Web and relevant to the topics it is talking about. Google describes it in this way: “PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages important “. Basically the more other websites speak about your web site, the more its Pagerank takes-off. But Pagerank is more than this. As a matter of fact, its special algorithm also calculates how many pages your web site has got, and how deep they are interlinked among themselves. For Google’s algorithm, a web site having a lot of internal links (and above all inbound links, of course) means that it is well made, rich of contents and structured in an optimal way. So, as you can understand if my Pagerank has passed from 1 to 3, it means that Google has promoted my blog successfully! But having a high Pagerank also means that, if you are using Adsense or other forms of advertising, your earnings will be higher. Furthermore, people having some kind of business could be more interested in my blog in order to promote what they are selling among its pages. There are a lot, really a lot of benefits about having a good Pagerank, but the most important one is the gratification to understand that I am doing a good job. This fact is also confirmed by the increasing number of people visiting my blog. Here are some statistics for the month of April:

• Visitors: 5284
• Pageviews: 17129
• Spiders: 19247
• Feeds: 1488

If these figures don’t tell you a lot, compare them with the month of Febraury:

• Visitors: 2348
• Pageviews: 11762
• Spiders: 8944
• Feeds: 2011

For the past couple of months I have not added anything new as far as my blog is concerned. I mean, I have not added any new plugin nor new section. But the amount of posts Web Talk has got, has increased dramatically. In fact the blog has managed to collect around 400 posts, covering a lot of topics: from blogs to laptops, from tricks to hacks, from software to web utilities etc. Just give a look at the Tag section to get a better idea. Ok, time to go back to work, folks! Two last words. The first to say “thank you” for supporting my blog with emails, messages and nice comments. By the way, I am always open to suggestions and if you want me to speak about a particular topic, don’t esitate to write me. If my blog has managed to reach 320 visitors a day, well, I owe this excellent result to you all and the support you are giving me. The second is this: In the next couple of days Web Talk will witness a major change. In fact, it is going to get a new feel and look! Web Talk will change its skin to look sexier and more appealing than before. It was not an easy decision, but in the end I decided to give you all a little prize to let you know how I feel about the encouraging words you are writing to me. Continue reading Web Talk the way you have done till now. More exciting things are coming up…As usual, Stay tuned!

One of Web Talk’s reader has written to me asking to explain how the tab section, located at the top of the blog (containing the following tabs: Home, About, Contact, Submit, Donate, Subscribe, Videos) works. Here is what he wrote to me:

Hi, just saw ur post from the itheme site and glad u r using it too
just wondering i have downloaded the theme but how do i change it ?
what i mean here is the above tab home about contact submit donate subs

coz my about link is being set to http://www.abc.com/?page_id=2 and when u have created the “contact” tab, how to link it to http://www.webtlk.com/contact/
Is it “save as” the whole sites (offline) and copy all the code back to contact.php? Or do i need to change some settings from “Customize Permalink Structure”?

hope u get what i mean
and thanks for the explanation
thanks

Here is my reply… Continue reading »

Web Talk is proud to introduce you its brand new Web Talk video section. This new section contains the most interesting videos Web Talk managed to find on YouTube about How-to, reviews, tutorials, funny stuff etc. You can even join up to upload your own videos and let other people know about the things which stir your heart! Web Talk Video Section is reachable by clicking on the link above or just by going to the end of each post! What are you waiting for? See the most interesting videos available in the Internet now!

Since I am always looking for something original and nice to add to my website, namely widgets and small services to give my readers something new to play with, today I want to speak of some widgets I found on the nice, but rather simple website called whos.among.us. These widgets are not really widgets to tell you the truth. In fact they are just pieces of codes to copy and past wherever you want on your blog (no installation is required). Anyway the results and the effects they give you are the ones belonging to widgets for real! You have to know that I have been looking for a widget giving me the exact location of my online readers and the exact number of them for a long time. I have to confess you that I am really piky when it comes to choose something to add to my blog, since I don’t want to burden it with too many features which sometimes can slow it down. A few days ago I stumbled upon whos.among.us and I was really amazed at what it offered me. Let’s see together these widgets in detail:

• Whos: This little widget gives you and your readers the chance to know how many people are online in your blog. You can choose among different kinds of stickers. You can choose the colors and the shape of the widget itself to adapt it to your blog’s feel and look.
• Maps: With it, you can add your blog a map showing where you readers comes from. The map itself is highly customisable. In fact you can choose its colors and dimensions. I decided to choose a small map for my blog because I wanted to put it in the frontpage for everybody to see. If you want to you can click on it to see the map bigger and see where the readers come from in a more effective way.
• Graphs: This is not a real widgets. It is rather an extra service coming from the other two widgets. It is a graphic showing you statistics of the people visiting your blog. You can choose the lapse of time to see: 24 hours, 31 days, 12 months, 5 years. The graph also shows you the minimum, the maximum and the average of your readers in a due period.

I like these widgets. They are simple, effective and no special knowledge is required. All widgets should be like that. Just copy the code provided and you are done! I recommend it to everyone!