As of February 2008, Technorati was tracking over 112.8 million blogs worldwide. Blogs, a website where entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order, are influential, personal, or both, and they reflect as many topics and opinions as there are people writing them. Anyway, did you know how the editor or owner of your famous blogs look like? Look no further. Below are a list of influential bloggers you may not have seen before.

1. Aaron Wall of SEObook

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2. Adam Curry of PodShow

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3. Amanda Congdon of ABC News

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4. Ana Marie Cox of The Ana Log

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5. Andrew Krucoff of Young Manhattanite

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6. Andrew Sullivan of The Daily Dish

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7. Andy Baio of Waxy

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8. Anil Dash of Dashes

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9. Arianna Huffington of Huffington Post

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(more…)

I have been a full time blogger for like 9 months now. I started way back in Novermber 2006 and here’s the first post that I ever wrote on rangit.com. 9 months is actually a short time, and throughout these 9months, I learned tons of things. They were things I wish I knew when I first started blogging. Below are the 10 things that I think all blog newbies should know about before jumping in.

Make sure that the blog is already making income before quitting 9-5 day job.



This is the No.1 mistake I made. Seriously. I was living on my savings for the past 7 months. I always thought that having a website was like having a service that is accessible by anyone in the world. And if I had advertisements placed around it, I’ll be rich in no time. Guess what? I was wrong. It was a mistake.

My budget was so tight that I couldn’t afford to go out with my buddies during the weekend for a drink. It was bad. My blog was like a leaf in a garden that didn’t stand out. I had AdSense installed but I was like making $0.01 a week! How pathetic can that be? I have read other blogs and have seen others making it in 2 months and thought that I could do the same. My savings was only enough to sustain my lifestyle for 3 months at most. Who knew it took 7 freaking months! What an experience that was.

Domain name



When I first started, I wanted a blog that is interactive in a sense that it allows an user to rate the product mentioned. And so I searched for a domain name, keeping in mind that it has to be short and sweet. I ended up with the domain rangit.com (this blog) as an anagram to the word ‘rating’. At that time, i called my this site ‘because you value yourself’.

Later on, an idea came in and thought ‘Why not divide my blog into 3 different niches?’. I knew that it would be better that way so that it keeps the scope and audience focused. Then losu.org and odyb.net came. Both are anagrams of ’soul’ and ‘body’. if you check out the sites, they are named ‘because you value your soul’ and ‘because you value your body’. Too bad my domain name of rangit.com doesn’t really match ‘because you value your mind’. I would have used a different domain name if I knew it earlier. Oh well.

Register domain names separately from the host.



When I first started blogging, I had no idea how hosting went. I made a mistake by registering my domain name together with the host. The problem is, I have no control over the domain name. A simple step of redirecting nameservers took days. If I had control over it, I would have just changed it in a minute. Lesson learned.

Just use the best blogging software and forget the rest.



Wordpress. The best. Period.

I always wanted to be different and at that point of time, Joomla! was a new open source project and it received good reviews. What i didn’t know was that Joomla was still a baby and couldn’t perform a lot of the other features that Wordpress can. I installed it anyway and blogged on that platform for almost 4 months. Those were really frustrating months. If you’ve followed me since the birth of rangit.com, you’ll know.

Take it 1 step at a time.



I made a mistake by registering 4 blogs. I thought that more blogs meant climbing up the social ladder, faster. Wrong. It was proven when I couldn’t concentrate on all 4 at the same time. In the end, I had no choice but to prioritize. Look at losu.org and compare it to rangit.com. Rangit.com far supersedes in terms of traffic and posts. Oh well, I gotta learn to better manage my time.

Better URL structure.



All my blogs have the same URL structure.

• http:// sitename / category / post title

Though it’s not too bad in terms of search engine friendliness, I would have preferred

• http:// sitename / post title

Networking?



There’s a question mark for a reason. For the past 9 months, there were at least 5 different blogger gatherings around my area. I wanted to join in the fray, but I thought, ‘Hey, how can i go? I have nothing solid to offer? The bloggers who will be attending are already making 5 figure income, known all around the local blogosphere and have a legion of loyal readers.’

Most of my friends are not bloggers. I have no blogger buddies. My blogs are not as famous as theirs and I make much less money than them. I felt that the only way for me to avoid being neglected is to make it in the blog world first, before attending any gathering. Of course it’s no harm attending the event, but I think it’s better to attend it with confidence and knowledge that I have something to offer too. Tell me I’m wrong.

Ad positioning



Ah… I only found out about the BESTEST spot to display an advertisement ONLY 3 weeks back. What a waste to the months before. You can even see it in action. Tons and tons of other bloggers have already been doing it.

It’s the (336 x 280 Google Ad) directly after the title. Trust me. It works.

Choice of niche affects revenue



I didn’t realize but the choice of niche affects your revenue. I didn’t know that keywords like ‘hair’ and ‘computer’ had a difference. I always thought that all keywords are more or less the same. Too bad I only learned about it after a few months of writing. Oh well, at least now I know what to focus on more.

=)

And so it was my first time getting into the frontpage of digg, experiencing the sudden spike of traffic exceeding 60,000 users in 2 days. What a phenomenon. So much that I got a notice on my website looking like this :

I had mix reactions actually. Good in the sense of exposure, bad in the sense of forking out additional cash to buy extra bandwidth. I wasn’t really prepared for the wrath, but nevertheless it’s an eye opening experience.

Over the hours, I scoured the web for all the information I can find about preparing myself for the next digg effect. Some of the methods suggested seemed complicated but anyhow, all are useful. Anyways, here are 8 simple things that everyone should know about preparing for the next digg / slashdot effect.

What’s The Host’s Reaction?



I for one, am a client of a shared hosting account. If you are like me, you don’t have much control of the situation when a spike occurs. When it happened to me, I thought that i could bring forward some of next month’s transfer limit. However, the only choice presented to me by my host was buying additional bandwidth which will only last until the end of the month. I bought it today 28th May, and will last only till 31st May.

I found out that some other hosts may even think that the spike is an attack of some sort. So it’s pretty important to find out the actions of your host. Cause once the server is down, none of the steps below will help.

External Media Hosting



This includes images, videos and audios. All the media for all my websites are hosted externally. It helped me tremendously. I had over 60,000 visitors before I exceeded my bandwidth transfer quota of 10GB. It meant that the size of a page is about 166KB. If I had included the 8 screenshots, the total size of the page would’ve been over 500 KB, capable of serving 20,000 visitors, 3 times less, before exceeding bandwidth.

I host ALL my images in imageshack, videos in YouTube and audio files in imeem. All 3 are highly reliable media hosting sites in their respective categories. Thanks to them, I have lifted a huge burden on my server’s side by keeping page sizes as small as possible.

WP-Cache 2



Super efficient caching plugin by Ricardo Galli. It improves pages of self hosted Wordpress blogs by caching and storing them in static files, improving efficiency by skipping the process of compiling the entire PHP code and building the page from the database. Serve hundreds more for each passing second and improve performance from near a minute to millisecond. WP-Cache 2 is a huge improvement over its predecessor, WP-Cache.

PHP Accelerators



The name says it all. As long as the application is written in PHP, you get to enjoy the performance boost. What it mainly does is
cache the compiled bytecode form of PHP scripts to avoid overheads on ALL page request of parsing and compiling source code that may never even get executed.

Depending on execution time and the percentage of source code executed, the PHP code will experience speed boosts of an average of 6X on a given request. Check out the list of PHP accelerators. The current general preferred accelerator is eAccelerator. However, you will need to ask your host about installing this. Your webhost may have already installed a PHP accelerator.

Mirrors



duggmirror and Mirrordot are the most famous mirrors for Digg and Slashdot. Both sites will mirror articles that hit the front page of both social bookmarks, keeping a copy in their servers in the event that the ‘dugg’ site goes down. For example, here’s my site’s ‘dugg’ article mirrored in duggmirror. Put the mirror link in the comments of Digg or MirrorDot, to redirect traffic in the event the site fails.

Switch Off Plugins



Know that plugins are also files that are called by your themes to generate queries to the database to yield the information on your blog. The more plugins, the more queries to the database. Digg and slashdot effects will last mostly around 2-3 days. Choose a few from among the list of plugins that you can live without for a few days. Once you realize an incoming surge of traffic, quickly turn a few off temporarily.

Optimizing Apache Server



This article lists 5 steps that you can take to configure Apache for maximum performance.

Upgrade Hosting



If frustrations still appear after executing the above steps successfully, then it’s time to move up. Take everything a step at a time. If you’re on :

• Shared hosting, try upgrading to Virtual Dedicated Hosting.
• Virtual Dedicated Hosting, try upgrading to Dedicated Hosting.
• Dedicated Hosting, try upgrading to a higher-powered dedicated server.
• High-Powered Dedicated Hosting, go for multiple Load Balanced Servers.

If it is a bandwidth transfer problem, try negotiating for an increase. If not, move over to a different provider that can feed your traffic bandwidth requirements.

The Digg Effect
How to handle digg effects