Which is more important? Should you have a keyword related domain name, or a personal domain name that reflects your name? This is a choice you have to make and one that depends on what your intentions are with your site.

One of the toughest questions that I faced when I started this site was what should I name it? When I first started this site, my intentions were to use it for a web design business. I enjoyed sharing what I was learning about accessible web design, and showcasing my work. Over time, however, I began realizing that there were numerous opportunities to learn a lot more about the internet and web sites, making money online and other things with personal web sites that just solidified my choice.

I decided to pick this name, ejcross.com as a personal site. This gives me a huge benefit, but also a huge drawback when it comes to domain names. Let me explain.

If you are looking to learn to blog, one of the choices you will have to make is will you sell your blog down the road? If you pick a hot topic and bring in a huge audience from your favorite topic, will you eventually sell your site? If it is in your name, probably not. If you do, you won’t make as much as you would if your site was in a generic name. Why?

Well, if I was shopping for a site that talked about my favorite items of “blue widgets” and your site was named “bobsbluewidgets.com” instead of “bestbluewidgets.com”, which one would make more sense? As for an investor or a person that was wanting to make money online with websites, I would pick the generic site name as a purchase.

When you create a site in your personal name, there comes an aspect with it that is related to you. It is hard to distinguish between you (the original owner) and someone else that might own the site. Would you want someone else owning your identity online? I sure wouldn’t.

One of the great sites that I read often when it comes to creating websites is Court’s Internet Marketing Site. You can see a great video about how to chose a domain name for beginners that should help you pick a domain name for yourself.

The ultimate choice comes down to the fact of if you want to just have a site that is related to your personal name, one that reflects your own feelings, opinions and thoughts, or if you want a site that is branded to eventually be able to sell for a profit if you decide to?

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The long anticipated Wordpress 2.5 is now available for download. As with any new version of Wordpress that comes out, there are bound to be problems with themes failing, plugins crapping out and the usual plaque of problems that comes from upgrading.

One issue that I have encountered before using wordpress is when I “upgrade”, I have found it to be most beneficial to follow these simple steps.

1. Begin with a backup of your database and your files for your site. Don’t skip this step, take the extra time to do this…trust me!
2. Download the latest version and either unzip it on your computer and then upload, or upload and unpackage it on your server.
3. Overwrite your existing files. Don’t do anything else, but just overwrite them if prompted. This will help to prevent problems with your upgrade. I have even deleted all of my wordpress install files, except for the wp-config.php and my theme and plugins folder.
4. Run the upgrade process.
5. Test your site. This is critical. Test it right away. Leave a comment, check all of your pages, etc. to make sure that they are working. There is nothing worse than thinking you are done than to find out that your comment form hasn’t been working, or your layout is all messed up.

This by no means is a full and inclusive list, so I am providing the links to some great information for you, directly from Wordpress.org.

• Main Wordpress Codex page
• Version 2.5 Plugin Compatibility List
• Version 2.5 Theme Compatibility List
• Upgrading Guide

Hope this helps some, and if you run into problems, always check in the Wordpress Forums, or check with the individual Theme or Plugin Developer sites.

© ejcross.com - visit ejcross.com for more great content.

If you are worried or haven’t thought about what would happen if you lost your database, let me tell you it’s no fun to go into panic mode when something happens to your site. My iPod site was getting a lot of hits over the last few days, so I was really happy with that fact.

One of the things I learned early on with blogging, no matter what your blog is about is to be prepared. I guess I learned something in the Scouts too! I have been using the WP-Cache plugin to handle the heavy user loads on my sites, and it has worked like a charm. But, how can I manage all of the databases on my sites easily?

I found and have been using the WP-Database plugin for several months on most of my sites. I can tell you that it is a lifesaver!

When I was going through cleaning up my databases, I deleted what I thought was an old db to an old site. What I didn’t realize was the old db was already gone, and in it’s place was the new one for my iPod site! YIKES!

So, much to my surprise, when I went back a few hours later to check on my stats and see how my new keywords were doing, I got the infamous “couldn’t connect to your db” message. Crap!

Enter WP-Database plugin

Since I have been using the WP-database plugin, I had forgotten about having it running. You see, it can repair, optimize and backup your wordpress database. Automatically. All you have to do is “set it and forget it”.

When I realized that my db was gone, all I had to do was recreate it in my phpAdmin, and then reinstall the most recent backup that WP-database plugin had created. Sure, I lost a couple of my more recent posts as it had completed it’s backup before I posted today, but it was a lot better than loosing it all!

Some of the other neat features of the WP-Database plugin are that you can manage your backups, empty or drop tables, optimize your database (if it is slow), repair it (if it is wacked out) and set a lot of options for it to run on its own.

The plugin is created by lester chan and he also has some other great plugins worth checking out on his site. A couple that I am going to be looking into are an IP blocker for wordpress and a download manager.

I guess the best thing I can say is always be prepared for the unexpected, especially yourself! Try this plugin and I hope it saves you one day too (well, not really, I wouldn’t want you to go through this!).

© ejcross.com - visit ejcross.com for more great content.

COLOURlovers.com

The COLOURlovers.com site is a really neat site that allows for registered users (free registration) to submit color palettes that they have designed. The great part of this is that your color palettes are already selected, and you can view them on one page, side by side, or as individual color tiles.

The color palettes that are given also give the RGD and Hex codes for the color, which make it easier to incorporate them into your site design. There is also a “trendiest colors of the month” section where you can see what color combos are “hot” for the month. You can also grade and submit comments on each color palette that is submitted by other users.

Colorsontheweb.com Wizard

One of my favorite color sites is the Color Wizard from colorsontheweb.com. This is a great tool that allows you to input a hex code for the color you are interested in and it will then show you a lot of information about hue, saturation, tint and color variations.

If you don’t like the colors, just slide the RGB bars around a little, and it automatically adjusts the variations of the colors you have.

The colorsontheweb.com site also includes a color wheel and contrast analyzer. The contrast analyzer will ensure that you have enough contrast between your color selections in order for you site to be more accessible and usable for people with color difficulties, or for the average joe so that you won’t put a light gray on a white background.

colorscheme generator 2

The Well Styled Color Scheme Generator 2 is a quick and easy color generator that is a great tool to check your accessibility and usability with.

This generator gives you a lot of flexibility with the color schemes you can select. However, one big bonus is that if you are testing for visual usability, there is a drop down menu that will change the colors in order for you to see what people with vision problems will see.

The drop down menu gives you eight (8) selections from protranopy to full color blindness as options. This can really make a difference with your site as it can show you what others will see and help you to avoid color selections that might cause parts of your site to disappear.

colorcombos.com

The color combos site is similar to the colourlovers.com site as it already has color palettes put together for you to review. One big difference is it’s combo tester that shows a larger selection of the colors that you want in order to make it easier to see them side by side.

There is also a color library, color tags that let you select a base color, and a unique feature that lets you grab the colors from another website. If you like the colors used on a particular site, you can enter the URL, and it will present the colors used to you.

Color Picker 3.1

The last good color selection tool is called Color Picker 3.1 from pagetutor.com.

This tool is designed to give you a live look at how your colors fit together by allowing you to modify the background and text colors. It will also let you set your hover, active and link colors too.

In conclusion

Picking the right color for your site is more than making it look good to you or your visitors. There are usability and accessibility considerations that should be given some thought as well. I hope that you find these tools a good resource to help you understand color better, and that they provide some benefit to you and your site users.

© ejcross.com - visit ejcross.com for more great content.

SeoDigger.com allows you to input a site URL and it will then show you the keywords that site has that will rank it among the top 20 in Google. It returns quite a few good answers and allows you to see the Wordtracker and Overture results as well.

One of the neat features of this site is that you can sort by the position, wordtracker ranking, overture ranking and also the most recent keyword request.

SeoDigger uses the Google English, Google Russian and MSN English databases and you can select which one you are wanting to use.

SeoDigger.com is also the home of the SEOQuake Toolbar. If you don’t have this toolbar installed for Firefox or IE, check it out also as it gives you a lot of information on each site when you visit it.

© ejcross.com - visit ejcross.com for more great content.

While I didn’t get many responses, I wanted to share those that I did with you. I have also searched the internet and have brought you a couple of other great articles on why to blog.

Enjoy writing and helping others

So here it is! The first response was from Frank at optempo.com who wrote and said:

I blog because I enjoy writing but I don’t enjoy writing books (I’ve tried). If I can help other people while I’m doing it, it makes me even happier.

Franks response points out two key areas to having a successful blog. One, you need to enjoy writing. It doesn’t matter really about what, just as long as you enjoy writing to an audience. If you enjoy writing, and the content is good, then others will begin to show up and check out your blog.

Secondly, helping other people is what blogs are about. You are knowledgeable in a certain area, or several areas, and the information that you write about can be found useful or inspirational for other people. Whether you write about ways to make money online, or how to fix the kitchen sink, each of us have knowledge that we can share. And by doing so, we all benefit.

Great minds think alike

The second response was from pablopabla at blogsreview.net who wrote:

Gasp! What a coincidence as I wrote more or less and exact post as yours (with the same title) and got it posted yesterday! This is freaky!

Yep, that’s right folks. We both wrote articles on the same thing within two days of each other. While the FBI and CIA are investigating this strange coincidence, Pablo and I can assure you that we are not working together on this. Go and see pablopabla’s article on why he blogs or the additional article about how blogging can be freaky.

You see, pablopabla lives in Malaysia, and I live in Kentucky, just south of Cincinnati. While we both read each others blogs, we hadn’t planned this. Just one of those strange coincidences that shows how small (and big) the blogging world can be! While pablo doesn’t reveal his reason for blogging, he promises he will soon so check back on his article.

Four points that sum it up

Mike Cherim from Green-Beast.com posted an article last year about why he blogs, and I think the four points he brings up are really a good summary for many bloggers.

• Sharing technical items and giving insight
• Sharing news and information, even personal
• Creative outlet, stories, fun stuff for me
• Passive advertising, a guy’s gotta eat

Great quotes Mike, I think he really sums up the broad reasons as to why people blog.

Why do you blog site?

One other site I found out there is called whydoyoublog.com. It is an online survey and open discussion thread for finding out the reasons why people blog. There are some really neat answers in the discussion thread, so head over there and check it out.

Final Thoughts

In conclusion, I guess the best reason as to why people blog is really your own reason. It is up to you to search deep inside and find why you blog. Are you passionate about the environment and want to share your thoughts? Do you enjoy helping others out of debt? Are you looking for ways to make money online with blogs?

Each reason is as unique as each blogger. I hope you know your reason(s) as it will really help you to keep focused when you don’t feel like writing or blogging.

© ejcross.com - visit ejcross.com for more great content.

For those of you that noticed, when my article about bloggingzoom.com went live, you couldn’t comment. I apologize to you for that. I couldn’t log into the admin area of the site without getting a ton of errors.

So, after messing and debating on the easiest way to do it, I finally upgraded my Wordpress install.

I have to tell you, it wasn’t to bad, but it wasn’t all that smooth either!

The upgrade process

Ok, so I went to the Wordpress site as the original install of this wordpress base was from a fantastico install. I know, I took the easy way out. Shame on me…

I followed the directions exactly as they appeared on the Wordpress Extended Upgrade Instructions page, and it worked just fine for me!

It really was rather easy, I just had to read through the instructions a couple of times to make sure that I understood them in depth. I hate getting into something only to realize that I missed that one critical word and now all is messed up beyond repair.

The upgrade went smoothly, however the plugins did cause some problems. There were numerous new plugin updates that were available. If you didn’t know, the new Wordpress install will automatically check for updated plugins for you and provide the link to download them.

Once I retrieved all of the updated plugins, then it was time to redo some of them. You see, like a tinkerer, I had modified some of mine to “tweak” them to my liking. I probably shouldn’t have done that, but oh well.

Over all, it was a smooth process, just took a little refining and modification to get it done.

What’s new?!

You will notice a new look to the comments section as I have implemented the threaded comments to better direct my comments to the original author.

I have thinned out some of the advertisements on this site as I was experiencing slow viewing times, so I wouldn’t want you to either.

Let me know!

Let me know via my contact form if you find any problems or glitches with this site please.

And, I apologize again for anyone that found this site when it puked and wasn’t working! I just hope it didn’t get on your shoes!

© ejcross.com - visit ejcross.com for more great content.

This was a quick little project for me to put together for a friend who loves iPod’s. He has been wanting to get into blogging for sometime, but hasn’t had the time.

Well, the time is right now for him, so I welcome you to check out bestipodstuff.com.

The site uses a lot of SEO techniques, some of which I have discussed here, and some I haven’t (yet!). The theme is a modified theme that I won from Adii.

I hope you enjoy checking out the site, and I know he is excited about it also. I would say he is going to be busy for the next few days updating it also with neat stuff, so you might want to subscribe to his feed.

© ejcross.com - visit ejcross.com for more great content.

Comment spam can be annoying, but I can tell you I wouldn’t get rid of my Akismet for anything after this episode.

I have noticed an increase in my comment spam over the last two months, with the most dramatic increase coming in the last two weeks. It wasn’t much for me to get 4 or 5 comment spam trapped each day, so life was good. The last couple of weeks have really sucked for me, as I was getting 25 or 30 comment spam in a day.

That might not seem like a lot, but I also found a few comments in there that were false positives by the Akismet system. I was able to recover those easily, which is another good reason to check your Akismet logs.

What I found was I was receiving a ton of the comment spam from one post. I’m not sure how the spammers work, but I can only guess that somehow they found the page and it made it into their spam box and it was shared with tons of other spammers out there. I was getting all sorts of stuff, from blank comments to lists a mile long promising me that there were numerous women anxiously awaiting to service my every need. Huh, I guess they are gonna cut my grass and wax the car! Sweet…

Since the post was an older one that hadn’t received much traffic, all I needed to do, and did was go and turn off the comments and pings under the “Discussion” tab for that particular article. I used the integrated feature in the Akismet Spam section of the comments tab in the Wordpress administration panel. Just hover or click on the “view post” link and you will see which one is causing you a lot of problems.

After I turned off the comments and pings on that older post, hopefully the spam servers are choking on the fact that they can’t send me any more seductive offers or risk free methods to increase my “manhood” size.

All I can say is I’m not sure why that one post was targeted, but it was, and I hope you can find it useful to try this method to cut down on your comment spam.

© ejcross.com - visit ejcross.com for more great content.

This is the third and last article on the series and I am going to show you how to create hidden skip links for your site. If you want to show your skip links, there are numerous methods to do so, and I won’t cover them here as each site design is unique. The basic code will still apply so you will need to style it to fit into your site accordingly.

I will use my site here as the example for creating and styling hidden skip links. The method used relies upon semantic xHTML code with CSS for the styling. All we are going to do is add a couple of id’s to an unordered list and move it off screen. We will also make it accessible so that it will appear if “active” to the user.

Create the list

When we are ready to incorporate skip links into the site, take a look at how your code is written. Do you have each section prepared for the skip link to function? Is your main content area clearly separated from your sidebar? What about your footer and your navigation?

This is where it is critical to use good semantic markup with clearly identifiable id’s for your site. Remember, however, that an id can only be used once on a single page.

Here is how my list looks for ejcross.com:

<ul class="access">
	<li><a href="#content">Jump to Content</a></li>
	<li><a href="#navbar">Jump to Navigation</a></li>
	<li><a href="#footer">Jump to Footer</a></li>
</ul>

Now, there isn’t much to it, just an unordered list of items. One note is that you want to make sure that this list is the first thing on your page, just below the opening <body> tag. This will allow for it to be the first item shown to screen readers and other mobile devices so that they don’t have to go through all of your content or navigation to be able to use the skip links.

Also, while we are talking about the opening <body> tag, let’s go ahead and put id="top" here. This will be for a skip link that you can place at the bottom of your site in the footer section, or at the bottom of your content area. This will allow for people to quickly navigate to the top of your page or site without having to scroll if your article is long. This should be a visible link.

What does it mean?

Let’s break the code down a little bit to explain what it is doing.

<ul class="access">
	<li><a href="#content">Jump to Content</a></li>
	<li><a href="#navbar">Jump to Navigation</a></li>
	<li><a href="#footer">Jump to Footer</a></li>
</ul>

The beginning <ul class="access"> that is assigned can be titled anything you like. I just called it “access” for my purposes of remember what it is describing.

The list items are the skip links. This is where you will tell the link to direct to a specific portion of your site. The first option I want to offer is a skip to content. The internal link specifies a location of #content and on my main content area, I have the <div id="content"> to “catch” this internal redirect.

When you place a “#” sign prior to an internal link, it is telling the browser to look into the rest of the code of the site and find the “id” that matches it. This is where the ease of semantic code will really help. If you already have an id in use for your main areas, then just match the newly created skip link list to redirect to them.

You can repeat this process of adding or deleting items to your main skip link area, and then matching them to specific areas of your site.

As for the visible skip link that goes on the bottom of your page, the <body id="top">, you can add a skip link to the section of your footer or bottom of your content area that says “top” or something else that signifies that it is a link that will take the person back up to the top of the site or page.

It would look like this:

<a href="#top"> top </a>

Pretty simple stuff so far? Let’s style the hidden links next!

To the CSS

As for the CSS that I use on my main skip link section, all we are doing is moving the “access” div off of the screen, and making it visible when it is “tabbed” upon. Let’s look at the CSS:

ul.access, .access {
	position: absolute;
	top: -9000px;
	left: -9000px;
	z-index: 9;
}

With this part of the CSS, we are giving the hidden skip link an absolute position off screen to the left of 9000 pixels. You can set this to what ever you desire, but this is a nice number to ensure it is out of sight. The z-index also ensures that it will remain visible above anything that might be over top of it.

Now for some CSS magic to make it reappear when it is active on the page:

ul.access a:focus, ul.access a:active {
	position: absolute;
	top: 9005px;
	left: 9005px;
	background: #690;
	color: #fff;
	padding: 5px;
	font-weight: bold;
	border: 2px solid #000;
	width: 10em;
	z-index: 9;
}

With this coding, all we are doing is telling it to reappear when the link receives focus, or is “active” for Internet Explorer. As you can see we are telling it to show up 9005 pixels from the left and 9005 pixels from the top. Remember, in the prior code to hide it we were telling it to hide by 9000 pixels, so in essence we are positioning this link area 5 pixels from the top and left.

The rest of the styling is for color, border and other styles that you can adjust or modify to integrate it more into your site.

In conclusion

I hope you have enjoyed this series on skip links and have found it useful and easy to integrate into your own site. If you have any questions, please let me know. This simple method will allow for better usability and accessibility for your site and only takes a few moments to put it into action.

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