Oct. 20, 2007

No you did not imagine it

You did not imagine it. Discover Columbus said:

This Blog is Temporarily Closed

This Blog is Temporarily Closed

The entry from October 5 is a normal entry (not a sticky entry on the top of each page of the blog... a RealTown Blog feature... ) and it is back on October 5 in this blog, holding it's place in the history of this blog.

RealTown has made some changes. Many are positive. There is traffic from Google now! Yippeee!

Before this all started! InIf you are reading Discover Columbus I was going to strip out all the extras in the sidebar at first, or actually just go with the plain vanilla RealTown Blog default template because that was what I thought they were telling me my choice was, "use our default template for traffic" or keep your chosen template with the changes you have made but you won't get traffic. It turned out after conversation (most bloggers were not willing to go plain vanilla after all their work customizing their blogs) that it was not a choice between a blog with widgets, photos, headers and a blog with traffic. The change in url was going to bring traffic to all RealTown Blogs default template or not.

And of course the change has brought traffic to the blog. I assume all RealTown Blogs are experiencing Google being able to find the URL and deliver traffic to the blog. My blog had lots of traffic even when it was shut down, no comments allowed, a lot of it was from Google. Before the change in urls there was barely any traffic from Google.

Of course changing the URL caused problems. The search on my blog was going to RealTown's tag page not to my blog. I believe I have corrected that.

RealTown made some changes in the dashboard that helped with comments.

I think my blog has the largest number of entries of all the RealTown Blogs. I have always thought the RealTown blogs are slow and cumbersome. There are still frustrations. The copyright line at the bottom of my blog that is supposed to be automatically generated is not. There have been question marks in front of the words in the side bar a couple of times. Support has corrected that twice. I am not sure if it is something I am doing when I change things in my template (sidebar... like correcting the Google search so it searches my blog not RealTown, fixing widgets that have gone awry.) I get red x's when I put pictures in entries...

You get what you pay for.

No you did not imagine it. Discover Columbus was closed for about a week... maybe 10 days because of problems and spam. There was a sticky entry at the top of each page saying the blog was temporarily closed, redirecting traffic to ColumbusBestBlog.com (above is what it looks like in my reader...) That entry is back on October 5, 2007 but it is not as written originally since I opened comments before I started putting any content on the blog so I could work on the comments and spam.

Nov. 19, 2007 - RE: No you did not imagine it

A. Find a place like ActiveRain.com  to learn to blog... There was no ActiveRain for real real estate when I started to blog so it is just a fluke as far as I am concerned that this blog was not abandoned like most other blogs are.   I don't know if there are places like ActiveRain outside ActiveRain which is for the real estate industry.  Use a very, very easy platform to start out.  I think the new RT platform would qualify, as long as you went with the default template as it is  plug and play.  I don't think a Blogger.com or WordPress.com blog is the same thing because there is not the same feedback from a network.

B. Blog consistantly even if there is no feedback.

C. Learn to juggle.  I think of blogging like juggling.  You start with content add in links, toss in images, add a widget or two as you are ready.  Pretty soon you have all the balls in the air and you just try not to drop any.