Category Archives: Watch Us Develop

ILovePhotoblogs.com Photo Store: We’re open!

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I’m happy to announce that  ILovePhotoblogs.com Photo Supplies is now open for business!

When I founded ILovePhotoblogs.com I actually had a photoblog portal / online photographic store in mind. By doing this, we’re able to give all websites and photographers — large and small — valuable exposure to reach a wider audience, the tools you need to better serve your customers, as well as provide a resource for photographic supplies at a value. Thus, to improve the web experience for everyone.

Through our partnership with Amazon,  we are able to offer a wide variety of photographic supplies, provide a great value for new and used products, and also to utilize their tremendous customer feedback library.

I hope you will find our store both helpful and useful!

How to quickly improve your Alexa rank

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Improving my Alexa rank for ILovePhotoblogs.com has become a primary point of interest. What is Alexa? Alexa.com is a subsidiary of Amazon.com and is a website which provides information on traffic levels for websites. The Alexa rank is measured according to the amount of users who’ve visited a website with the Alexa toolbar installed. Having said that, let’s recap my initial goals with this project.

How to quickly improve your Alexa ranking? I have done several searches and one of the best I have found on this topic is 20 Quick Ways to Increase Your Alexa Rank. Here are just a few tips from the article I will be incorporating this week.

  • Install the Alexa toolbar or Firefox’s SearchStatus extension
  • Write or Blog about Alexa. Webmaster and bloggers love to hear about ways to increase their Alexa rank. (One of the purposes of this posting besides my need to keep viewers updated on my progress.
  • Optimize your popular posts. Got a popular post that consistently receives traffic from the search engines? Include a widget/graph at the bottom of the post, link to your Alexa post or use Alexa redirection on your internal URLs. (Look at bottom of this post)
  • Create an Alexa category on your blog and use it to include any articles or news about Alexa. This acts as an easily accessible resource for webmasters or casual search visitors while helping you rank in the search engines.(Just did it)
  • Put up an Alexa rank widget on your website. I did this a few days ago and receive a fair amount of clicks every day. According to some, each click counts as a visit even if the toolbar is not used by the visitor.

Perhaps it is ego, but I want a better Alexa ranking. A few weeks ago when I started my ranking was around 4.5 million. Not much to write home about, that’s for sure. As I write this post, my Alexa rank is 1,029,023. Statistically a great improvement, but nowhere near the rank I wish to achieve. I know that one way to increase traffic is through better organic rankings with advanced link building tactics. So what is my Alexa rank goal? Well, my short term goal is to be under 100k by May 31. Not sure if this is realistic, but you need to have goals, so this is mine.
I will keep you posted as to any progress I have experienced using these techniques.

**updated May 09, 2008 – Alexa Rank is 371,595**

We’re Gravatar-enabled!

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Notice to all ILovePhotoblogs.com viewers. The comments on this blog are now Gravatar-enabled.  It’s pretty fascinating going through old posts and comments and seeing who has a Gravatar already. Do you have an account yet? I am in the process of unloading my gravatar this afternoon. Seems pretty cool!

What are Gravatars? According to the Gravatar.com website, Gravatars are Globally Recognized Avatars, or an “avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites.” You register with the Gravatar server, and upload an image which you will use as your avatar. The gravatar image is keyed to your email address, so that it is unique to you.

How to quickly embed HTML tables in WordPress

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Regular visitors of ILovePhotoblog.com will notice my recent facelift. Well, not me personally, although it has been considered, but rather to the main page of listing the top photoblogs around the world. After struggling from the beginning with posting my handwritten/edited html table on a daily basis and the nuances of how WordPress handles html, I found a solution. Thanks to the programming skills of Alex Rabe and his WP-Tables plugin for WordPress, my work/rework has been greatly reduced. In addition to the ease of adding to the main photoblog list, this plugin has a sorting function as well. I am a Firefox user, and have tested the new table in IE and Safari, no problems. The only issue I encounter is on my machine running IE and Vista, some blocking is occurring that I have yet to figure out. Suggestions?

HELP!! HTML tables continue to get messed with WordPress

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Not to air my dirty laundry, BUT….working with HTML tables in WordPress is driving me crazy!!!…Here is my daily process for posting updates..

  • I use Notepad to save my HTML,
  • add new entries at top of page,
  • insert background yellow to the newest entries/cells,
  • remove yellow background from yesterday’s entries,
  • select Edit main page in WordPress,
  • remove HTML from edited page,
  • copy and paste newly edited HTML from Notepad into WordPress code editor,
  • remove <html>,<head> and <body> tags, and save…Sound pretty straightforward?

The problem lies in the presentation. Once I refresh the page, the several of the links get scrambled. Many of the multiple word links have <a href> tags autogenerated by WordPress. For instance, Huey’s Photoblog, would appear as Huey, and then on a separate line, Photoblog. I have read that some users import from MS Word or use the FCKeditor plugin..Just downloaded the plugin, and rebuilding table in MS Word…More to come<wake up!> on this topic.

If anyone has experienced this problem and has a solution for me, please advise.

More pictures, website previewer enhanced; SnapShots User Guide

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After a call to the kind folks at SnapShots, I was able to adjust the website preview option to show more pictures. Now when you mouseover the links from the list on the main page, you no longer just see text, but get the actual screen shot of the home page. This is how I intended the feature to work, but obviously had it set up incorrectly.

Introducing Snap Shots from Snap.com

I just installed a nice little tool on this site called Snap Shots that enhances links with visual previews of the destination site, interactive excerpts of Wikipedia articles, MySpace profiles, IMDb profiles and Amazon products, display inline videos, RSS, MP3s, photos, stock charts and more.

Snap Shots bring you the information you need, without your having to leave the site, while other times it lets you “look ahead,” before deciding if you want to follow a link or not.

Should you decide this is not for you, just click the Options icon in the upper right corner of the Snap Shot and opt-out.

Give me a shout out if you feel this works better for you!