Make Your First Post on Blog Action Day

You’ve started your first website, installed Wordpress or Joomla, uploaded and tweaked your theme, researched your keywords and now a few weeks have passed and you still haven’t posted your first article. Why?

Do you have writer’s block? Lost for words? Consider writing a post for Blog Action Day on October 15th, 2009.

From the Blog Action Day website:

Blog Action Day is an annual event that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day. Our aim is to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion.

Our Goal

First and last, the purpose of Blog Action Day is to create a discussion. We ask bloggers to take a single day out of their schedule and focus it on an important issue.

By doing so on the same day, the blogging community effectively changes the conversation on the web and focuses audiences around the globe on that issue.

Out of this discussion naturally flow ideas, advice, plans, and action. In 2007 on the theme of the Environment, we saw bloggers running environmental experiments, detailing innovative ideas on creating sustainable practices, and focusing their audience’s attention on organizations and companies promoting green agendas. In 2008 we covered the theme of Poverty, and similarly focused the blogging community’s energies around discussing the wide breadth of the issue from many perspectives and identifying innovative and unexpected solutions. This year we aim to do the same for Climate Change, an issue that threatens us all.

This years topic for Blog Action Day is Climate Change:

Why Climate Change?

Climate change affects us all and it threatens more than the environment. It threatens to cause famine, flooding, war, and millions of refugees.

Given the urgency of the issue of climate change and the upcoming international climate negotiations in Copenhagen this December, we think the blogosphere has the unique opportunity to mobilize millions of people around expressing support for finding a sustainable solution to the climate crisis.

Suggested Posts

We encourage you to write about climate change in the context of how it relates to the topic of your blog. To help you start thinking, here are a few ideas about how you might connect climate change to things that you might already write about:

• A Technology or Business blog might write about emerging clean tech and how innovative companies might be able to help address the problem of climate change.
• A Health or Lifestyle blog might write about how climate change will affect our children’s health and daily living.
• A Nonprofit or Political blog might write about how climate change is deeply connected to many other issues – such as poverty and conflict.
• A Design blog might write about new trends in eco-friendly or sustainable design.
• A Travel blog might write about the places you want to see now before climate change makes them difficult to access or, well, under the sea.

So what do you have to lose? Get started with your blog today. Besides, in exchange for your entry you receive a free anchored link to your site, from a PR7 blog. If you have no idea what I’m talking about then you need to take some time and read my Intro to Link Building page. However if you know exactly what I’m referring to, go ahead and sign up here.

Free High Quality Photos from PicApp

While visiting one of my favorite sites Lost Ball in High Weeds, I learned about a new site that has high quality photos to spruce up your website, called PicApp. I’m always interested in giving my readers access to valuable freebies for website building, so I immediately took a look and was pleasantly surprised. They have some of the best quality photos online, by far and they are all for FREE!

No more “borrowing” images from your favorite blogs. Now you have access to the same great photos they do without the risk of copyright infringement.

From the PicApp website:

Add the best news and stock photos to your blog.

Picapp is all about more opportunities and choices:

Where You– the publisher get access to millions of premium, legal images, updated by the minute and can use them in your posts- for free!

Where You– content owner enjoys this innovative yet monitored distribution channel to reach new users and increase revenue

Where You– advertiser reaches targeted, well segmented audience and access to premium ad inventory

A true Win-Win.

We have over 20 million premium images, editorial and creative, covering any imaginable category—from news, sports, to celebrity, travel fashion and more.

Our content partners include Getty Images, Corbis, Splash News, Pacific Coast News, Newscom, Image Source and more. We support the largest blog platforms: WordPress, Blogger, TypePad and more.

What’s also great about PicApp is that they already have a super cool Wordpress plugin, which allows website owners to easily add photos to their websites or blogs directly from the PicApp database.

Here are a few video videos to get you started with using their service.

How to Use the PicApp Wordpress Plugin

How to Search for Images on the PicApp Website

In addition to the Wordpress Plugin, they also have a PicApp Toolbar which enables you to search for free images from your Firefox browser.

Try them out and let me know what you think! This is a definite add to my recommendations page.

New Changes. New Theme. New Goals.

With under just a few months of starting my blog, I decided to update the theme a bit. I liked the design I created and the person I contracted to code it for Wordpress did an awesome job. However in hindsight I realized that I needed just a little bit more flexibility.

The old design used the blog as the main focus, which was a good idea at first, but after reviewing the stats and using my own intuition, I decided to make a few changes. The meat of the content on this site is listed in the right column, so I wanted that to continue to be the main focus. Since it’s the most popular area on the site anyway.

The newsletter signup  looked cool but wasted too much valuable homepage real estate (plus, I’m not even sure if I want to have a newsletter anyway.)

I wanted to place more emphasis on the upcoming tutorials section, so with my new Studiopress Metro Theme, I was able to add a video section directly to the homepage. The point of this site has always been to give my visitors useful info on how to create a website, so in that sense, the blog needed to be alot less important. What are your thoughts?

Yeah, I know some of my content is still missing … (and I’m trying to train myself to hit spellcheck before I post lol)

So what are my new goals? Well other than using spellcheck, I plan on finishing up this first round of web tutorials, review a few other website builders to keep up with all the great new technology and hopefully finish up the Step 4: Avoid Some Common Mistakes section.

Screenshot of Old Theme

Coming Soon

How to Install Joomla Manually

You can follow these instructions if you want to perform a manual installation of Joomla for your web site. Read more

How to Install Wordpress Manually

To be sure, much of the difficulty of installing WordPress has been eliminated by the Fantastico installer – a utility that is available on most hosting accounts. With Fantastico, all you need to do is answer a few prompts such as what directory to install WordPress in, and boom! – you’re done. Although I heartily recommend using it, and you may want to get on with your web marketing, I think a user should go through the manual install process at least once, to get familiar with how WordPress operates behind the scenes. Let us look at the process of installing WordPress manually:

1. Open www.wordpress.org in a browser. From there, click on the blue bar that says “download Wordpress x.xx” – it will show the latest version. Right now, it is 2.8.4. (You may have to click on a second link to get it). Save this to your desktop or somewhere else convenient, and extract all files from the zip archive into a folder called “wp”.

2. Using an FTP client, connect to your domain – the hosting company will have given you the correct username and password when you signed up. Once connected, look for the “www” folder (also named “public_html”. Open this folder on the server (in the “remote” window in your FTP client) and in the “local” window, open the “wp” folder that you extracted the Wordpress files into. Copy everything from “wp” into “www” and close your FTP client.

3. Log in to your domain’s Cpanel by entering www.yourdomainname.com/cpanel. Enter your username and password and scroll down until you see “MySQL databases”. Click on this and it will prompt for the name of your database. Use something short like “wp”, because it appends your username to it. Click “create database”, go back and scroll down to “Add new user”. Choose a username for your database – you can use your cpanel username and password if you wish, or a completely different one. After creating the user account, click “go back” and scroll down to “Add user to database”. Select the username and the database as above – not that your cpanel username is now stuck on the front of it. Click “add” and “all privileges” on the next screen. Then close the window – you’re done with setting up the database.

4. In your FTP client, right-click on the “wp-config-sample.php” file in the “www” folder. You need to change 3 things here – the “MySQL database name”, the “MySQL database username” and the “MySQL database password”. Just replace what’s inside the single quotes with your own details, close the file and save it as “wp-config.php”.

5. In your browser, open the address www.yourdomainname.com/wp-admin/install.php. If you get an error message here, it usually indicates that one of thenames in wp-config.php is wrong. If all is well, you will then be prompted for the blog name, and your email. Pick a name that contains all or part of your keyword, enter your email address and click on “Install Wordpress”. Take note of the admin username and password on the next screen, and log in with those details.

6. You are now in the “back office” of your blog or website. This is where you add content, set up new pages and change the appearance. To see what your site looks like, click “visit site” on the top left corner. You have done it – you have installed Wordpress!