Amit’s Tech Blog
April 22nd, 2009 by Sarah KingIt’s always interesting for one tech blogger to check out another… in this case Amit’s Tech Blog. There’s the whole definition of tech to consider: how strictly does the blog stick to the subject matter? Just what type of tech articles are covered.
One of Amit’s most recent posts relates to the Indian elections – off topic but a very big deal at the moment. Staggered elections because the country is so big! Who would have thought! Any Indian blogger worth his salt will be blogging on this and Amit’s post is well written and interesting.
Overall Amit is a prolific blogger and the posts are diverse, and of interest to the general tech population. From the oh-so-hyped Twitter (Make Money with Twitter) and the ever useful Limewire (LimeWire Review & Info Guide).
The posts are littered with mouseover ads which I don’t like and the adsense blogs are placed above the fold which is also problematic. Balancing the need to get a return on investment from a blog (especially one so well maintained) and to keep readers is incredibly tricky and it’s unfair to object to all advertising. Getting that balance right though is essential and I’d like to see the island ad at the top of the posts replaced with a skyscraper running down the side or a banner sitting in the middle.
At the bottom of the page there are links to Amit’s other blogs – all kept separate depending on their content. He appears to write all his own posts which is smart and makes the content genuine and more targetted to his audience. You can easily lose a couple of hours on your first visit – this blog has alot to offer.
Dish the Dirt on Backstabbers!
June 22nd, 2006 by Sarah KingI’ve just started a new blog, open to any contributor, to collect personal stories of backstabbing incidents.
If you have a story to tell, rock on over and type it up 
Who said chicks don’t blog!
May 16th, 2006 by Sarah KingI stumbled across Jack of All Blogs today, in particular Move over boys, we are pimping out the blogosphere. Girls, it’s worth a read! Are we quietly just getting on and doing our thing – or are we being walked over.
Now, I can’t imagine the other SarahK, Summer or Andrea being walked over… nor Cathy Odgers (come back, we miss you!)
Cathy is quoted over at Kea Blog as saying: Read the rest of this entry »
BlogParty’s latest Incarnation
February 24th, 2006 by Sarah KingMike Dammann from BlogParty is one of those people with infectious optimism and energy. His blogs are spawned all over the web and I lose track of what, where and why.
BlogParty now seems to be just a blog, with the forum moving back to it’s blogparty.com domain. Lets hope the hosting is more reliable than some of the others used!
So, to try and drum up some attention, he’s offering $250 in a prize draw for bloggers mentioning BlogParty. The only problem is that by blogging about it you’re likely to increase the number of contestants and reduce your chances of being picked. Damn Dammann!
WordPress Archive Lists
January 24th, 2006 by Sarah KingOne thing I haven’t become involved with is writing plugins for WordPress but I have been looking at ways to make my blog more efficient.
I tried out a tag system back in October but found that it generated too many tags and often irrelevant tags so finally scrapped it in favour of the plugins from Ultimate Tag Warrior produced by fellow kiwi Christine Davis (who I don’t actually know 
). Her system allowed me to produce a “Tag Cloud” which is pretty cool.
I haven’t totally got my head around the custom tags page with url rewriting but for now I’m happy with urls like /index.php?tag=kiwi and I’ve learnt a little about templates.
So when I posted some info about the UTW plugin at DigitalPoint one of the members asked about Category Archives and gave a new plugin to use. I took a look and couldn’t quite work out how to use it, so took the lessons from UTW and applied them! Read the rest of this entry »
Making Adsense Ads relevant on a blog
December 7th, 2005 by Sarah KingI received this email today from a blogspot user
Sarah, I’m hoping you have advice for me about my Blog. On my “homepage” Business & Technology Reinvention the adsense ads have low relevance to the content on the page. But when I open an individual post the adsense relevance is excellent (for example Winning Against Big R&D Spenders)
Given that most of my traffic comes to my home page I’m concerned that the low relevance ads dilute the focus of my Blog. Do you have any advice or suggestions to improve?
David
Google, via it’s MediaPartners bot and Googlebot, are very effective at reading a page, nutting out the essence of it and returning the correct ads.
They seem to have a blindspot, though, when it comes to blogs which use Blogger or Blogspot blogs – as these seem to attract more than their fair share of ads for other blogging systems. Read the rest of this entry »
