How to Create Great Content

It's not always easy to produce content that is worth someone else's time, something that is worth posting. Sometimes you get it right, some other times you don't. The key here is to be steady and make sure everything is in place to allow yourself to create great content every time. 

When browsing the Internet, people need to get their hands on the information they're looking for as fast as possible. What does that mean? It means they are laser focused, impatient and have a very short attention span. What are the most basic things you can do to maximize your chances to satisfy these people and present them the awesome, compelling content they're looking for?

Blog Activity Graph for FlatPress

A new plugin for FlatPress was recently released by Igor Kromin. It's a great addition that allows you to see your monthly blog activity.

Click the link bellow to check it out:
Blog activity graph for FlatPress

FreeOrion Is Now On GitHub

I didn't look at the FreeOrion project for quite a while. I just found out they migrated to GitHub a short time ago. That's great news, as GitHub is the place for open source collaborative development right now.

It will hopefully boost the motivation of contributors and bring in new ones too. I'm definitely going to look into the code once more when time permits and see if I can submit a few simple mods that would move things forward a little.

FreeOrion on GitHub, contribute now!  GitHub | FreeOrion

Official FreeOrion website: FreeOrion

New Official FlatPress Style: Leggero v2

I'm pleased to announce that NoWhereMan, the maintainer of FlatPress, approved my new take on the classic FlatPress theme. Leggero v2 is part of the FlatPress source code, as an available style for the Leggero theme.

I present you, Leggero v2!

Some quick details about it:

• It's 100% responsive
• It works properly with Internet Explorer, as well as with any modern web browsers
• It uses web fonts with shadows, has a transparent sidebar and a fixed background image
• It looks modern and actual, while still having the "FlatPress / Leggero" feel it should have

5 Easy Ways to Make Your Forum Thive With Activity

Every forum admin has been there one day or another. Things are going pretty good on your forum, but after a little while, you notice your board has somehow stopped gaining speed. How to make your forum more active?

Like for many things, many small details can make a huge difference. The following suggestions are pretty easy to put together and achieve great results in less than a month.

So, what are the easiest actions you can take to bring your forum up to the next level? Let's see!

Chitika Review - Pay Per Click Ads

I tested Chitika, a pay per click (PPC) ads service to help publishers monetize their traffic. I displayed their ads a forum message board and 2 blogs for approximately a week, with very disappointing results. Here's my quick review of Chitika.

$0.07 for 5 clicks? Are you kidding!?

You read it well. What they give you per click is ridiculous. The highest paid click I managed to get was $0.03. I've read similar feedback on quite a few blogs and forums analyzing various ads networks. It would seem that their PPC is very, very low, especially if you're used to Adsense's $0.50 to $3.00 per click. Even with a very high click-through rate, which I had not, it would take you a huge number of clicks to earn anything of interest. 

AdSense Account Disabled for Invalid Activity

Thank you Google for closing my Adsense account for reasons that are out of my control. I've been working with Adsense for more than 5 years now, publishing ads on 4 different websites. Nothing weird ever happened until last month.

On a certain day last month, I got about 150 clicks in less than an hour that were obviously invalid. Someone out there clicking repeatedly on my ads? Probably... I reported that weird activity right away, to make sure they don't close my account. What else was I supposed to do?

Well, a month later, here I am. They disabled my account and rejected my appeal request. Nice.

At least they sent me my last payout the day before they closed my account...

From FlatPress to Blogger

A few days ago, as I was customizing my blog again, I realized that something was wrong. All that time I've been using FlatPress, I kept modifying, fine-tuning and working again and again on my blog's design and features without being able to make it feel right. I was investing more time and efforts in the container than in the content. That's not right. It was time to let go and move on.

I happened to test Google's Blogger, a product I didn't use in years. I was surprised to see how it improved over the last 5 years. I found what I was looking for. Then, I went through all my posts one by one and copied them to Blogger. Didn't feel like messing around with a potential way to batch import my entries. Not for only 17 blog posts. 15 minutes later, all my content was migrated.

A part of me is sad to move away from a product I care about. FlatPress, although not powerful and widely used as WordPress or Blogger, is a great product. It's developer, NoWhereMan is a great guy. I decided to go with it several years ago because it's easy to customize and I wanted to learn a few things along the way, which I did. Did I overgrow it? I don't think so. I'm just tired of my blog being in constant development. I still want to develop themes for FlatPress though, it's an amazing platform to learn and experiment, while bringing forward the product's development. But I'm not going to use it for my personal blog. For now.

For the first time in years, I'm satisfied with how my blog looks, feels and works. Hope it'll last!

MTU Size for PPTPD VPN Sessions

Users are getting a black screen when connecting to their Windows workstation using RDP through a PPTP VPN? After looking at all possible causes, I found out the issue had to do with the VPN PPP sessions’ MTU size. Here’s how to fix the MTU size of Ubuntu’s PPTPD sessions so that everyone can get their work done.

Edit /etc/ppp/ip-up and add the following line at the end:

/sbin/ifconfig $PPP_IFACE mtu 1500

You’ll see that new PPP connections now have a MTU of 1500 when using ifconfig.

It would appear that an MTU size of 1396 for PPP sessions will sometimes cause issues when using Windows 7’s RDP through the VPN, no matter what the display options are. Fixing the MTU to 1500 as explained above fixed the black screen glitch right away. The problem was on the server after all.

Content is King

When I take an overall look at my personal Internet browsing habits, I notice that like most people, I visit a certain number of websites every now and then. Why are these websites in my bookmarks? How did I become at some point a regular visitor? The answer is simple: Content.

Nowadays, it’s not that hard to give yourself some visibility on the Internet and have people visit your website. But will these new visitors remember you and return? If you don’t serve them quality content on a regular basis, you can be sure they won’t. Forums, blogs, most websites are subject to this golden rule of the Internet.