Justin Germino Ramblings

The requests to review stuff are piling up and my queue has me working on reviewing an eBook on building long tail keywords and maybe a make money online program in the next week on my spare time.  I also owe a few WordPress plugin reviews and still never did get me a copy of SEOPressor V5 to review hands on for my own site, they ignored my emails which disappointed me.

Read a really great article by Shimon Gurman about the demise of anchor text links over on iBlogZone. It made me think of altering my approach slightly for SEO in my own articles as well as when building back linking strategies to my own site online, though I don’t do very many guest posts if you are into SEO and run a blog then this article can really help you improve your SEO strategy.

Speaking of blogging, Zac Johnson over at Blogging Tips did a slideshow article about the top 50 blogs that talk about blogging and if you are hungry to learn more about how to blog articles, tips, recommendations or just ideas you can certainly benefit by reading some of the sites he highlights.

Of course Dragon Blogger wasn’t on the slide show list, many of the peer blog sites on the list were always in the same roundup as DragonBlogger but somewhere along the lines the blogging community forgot we still cover blogging/SEO/Social Media just as much as tech, gadgets, gaming and such.

I normally go shopping at Walmart about 80% of the time for all my grocery shopping so it isn’t a stretch for me when I was asked to hold a Steak Grill-Off and have a few people over to try and give some opinions on the Choice New York Strip steaks that I purchased. Now the thing about a good steak is that you shouldn’t have to do too much seasoning or slather it with sauces that hide the flavor of the meat, you should enjoy the natural flavor of the grilled steak. For our Steakover we invited the neighbors who just moved in about a month ago, their daughter and our sons quickly became friends and hang out almost every day after school together.  They also enjoy jumping on the trampoline so was a great welcome to the neighborhood grilling event. For my family nothing pairs up better with grilled steak than grilling some zucchini with it.  Just slice a bunch of zucchini in half long ways and spread some butter or olive oil over them and you can cook them just about as long as you do the steaks depending on how hard or soft you like them grilled. For the NY Strip seasoning just a little bit of the McCormick Grill Mates Steak House Onion Burger seasoning goes a long way.  Cook thoroughly on each side, most of the steak eaters at this get together liked their steak medium rare which is my preference. After just about 4-5 minutes per side (depending on the BTU of the grass grill or coals) and you get yourself some fine cooked Walmart Choice NY Strip Steaks. Everyone thought the steak was delicious, the zucchini was phenomenal and the adults drank iced tea while the kids had some white grape juice.  It made for a fine meal and we even finished it off with some cupcakes. We also celebrated the 1st birthday of Gluten our Boston Terrier, which was the reason for the Steakover party in the first place.  Porky managed to keep a birthday hat on for a few minutes. Bottom line is Walmart had some decent quality USDA Choice steaks and if you live in a city where they are having the Steak-Over Challenge Cookoffs you can hang out with some local firefighters participating in a steak cook off and try some samples for yourself before heading over to Walmart to buy a few steaks of your own.

Are you ready to experience Walmart’s Steak-Over for yourself? Find out why you should choose your steaks at Walmart here. We shared our winning grilling tip – now tell us yours!

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Walmart. The opinions and text are all mine.

Had a fun weekend with the boys where Sunday we had a daddy-son day as my wife went shopping all day leaving the boys home with me.  Of course that included hours of Minecraft,  seeing G.I. Joe Retaliation and diving back into Star Craft 2 The Heart of the Swarm. Overall was a fun Sunday, and finished off some DVR’d shows at night when the kids went to bed.

Meanwhile, my Google Nexus 7 giveaway launched to a huge reception garnering over 6,600+ entries in the first 24 hours which is nearly 2x as many as any previous giveaway.  Three awesome sponsors including Blog Engage the network for bloggers, Hardcore Droid, and Enstine’s Make Money blogging blog joined the giveaway and their funding will be directed toward advertising as well as help front some of the prize cost. 

I didn’t get enough to sponsor the whole prize, but I got enough to sponsor just about half of it with some advertising promotion, this was still excellent as several previous giveaways were all out of pocket. 

Finally the new theme and Synthesis web hosting on DragonBlogger so far is rock solid, the pageload times are better than ever and my site hasn’t buckled a single time during the peaks and visits that come from various writers logging in simultaneously.  I would seriously recommend websynthesis.com if you need a solid and stable WordPress VPS hosting and you have outgrown your shared hosting or are getting frequent downtime, 500 errors and other issues.

I noticed that Synthesis appears to have an affiliate marketing as Chris Brogan and others link to ShareASale with websynthesis but I searched on ShareASale and don’t see them listed in the marketplace, wonder if they are invite only network.  I would be totally comfortable endorsing them enough to affiliate sell their hosting plans.

Got to admit that LeVar Burton was very clever with his tweet which won him an early copy of Google Glass.

I thought it was the most clever one of the Twitter entries from celebrities and Star Trek fans probably did as well.  I grew up watching Star Trek The Next Generation and Geordi La Forge with his visor.

I have had users ask me before if I knew whether the Alexa Pro Plan would offer any benefits over the free claim to a site and I really didn’t have the answer.  Other than with the pro plan you can have some links established, set a profile pick and get actual certified visits/analytics which may help improve your Alexa score if Alexa was under reporting your visits and pageviews, I was curious myself what other benefits an Alexa pro plan would have on my blog.

So I decided to take the plunge and sign up for at least the 30 day free trial of the Alexa  pro plan and configured DragonBlogger.com behind it.  I will probably give it at least 60-90 days as 30 days isn’t enough to really get a good measure of changes to rank, rating, SERP, traffic as there are various blips, spikes that would need to be ruled out as well.

I specifically am using the 2 links to some of my static pages which get very little traffic and I want to see if any boost comes to those pages based on listing them in my Alexa site listing.

I continue to encourage my readers and fans to share reviews where they can, as there used to be some correlation between positive reviews and Alexa rating, but I was never able to prove it definitively.

I have heard some tell me advertisers will consider a site based on it’s Alexa and the metric is still an important factor, my Alexa has gone down (up) quite a bit over the last year where I once was under 20k Alexa rating and now hover in the high 40k range.  My traffic even while growing never saw my Alexa coming down, so there are other factors at work that I don’t completely understand as well.

I will let my readers know if I see any improvement or benefit with Alexa over the next few months based on using their pro plan which costs $9.99 per month and this is an experiment.

After talking with @BlazingMinds and @Ileane on Twitter yesterday about how to handle very old blog posts that get no traffic, I realized it had been ages since I pruned my own blogs from what I call "void posts" these are blackhole posts that may as well not exist, they get 0 traffic, don’t even show up on Google Analytics and have no purpose existing anymore, especially if they don’t have relevant information.

Do old posts hurt your blog?

I don’t really know the answer, as many online magazines have posts years and years old that are still indexed and visible on Google.  Some say that having old posts with 0 traffic may hurt your blog rankings, because Google detects posts in the sitemap and there are no visits/hits to those posts so may devalue rank overall but I am not so certain.  I just think posts without traffic may not be regarded well for rank.

Either way there should be a spring cleaning of old blog posts if you will, clean out the useless posts that have no business existing 2-3 years later.  So this little guide will help you figure out which posts to prune from your blog.  Note, this is completely optional, if you want to keep them there forever, it is up to you I don’t have any evidence that it harms your site.

What blog posts to trim?

• Old Holiday Posts

Having Merry Christmas 2009 post in 2013 isn’t going to really do much good, unless you are a diary blog where you are sharing an event that happened in your life that people can read about your history, chances are these posts may not get any traffic and be useless.  This is one reason I do very few holiday specific posts on my non-personal blog over the past few years was the fact that my 2008, 2009 holiday posts pretty much became void posts in a few months.

• Outdate News Stories

Posts about current events, trends that happened and were short lived are likely to die off the map fast.  How many people are still going to search for the Susan Boyle who came out of nowhere, or the Season 1 Finale of Lost.  These posts tend to age poorly and in some rare cases they may be relevant for archival info, but in most cases the age and become void posts.

• Outdated Technical Info

Posting about WordPress 2.2 doesn’t really do much when 3 years later we are on version 3.5 and nearly no features of 2.2 are the same way when it comes to accessing them.  These posts can either be deleted or updated and refreshed with new content and versioning to rejuvenate them and keep the same URI.  Except if you have comments for the old data, may need to purge them.

• Giveaways and Contests

These can sometimes draw traffic, but once they run their course past a year or so they may not provide any value anymore except as an archive.  In fact I had people try to join a closed giveaway months after it closed one time, but since it still brought in traffic I kept it up.  I also keep old giveaway posts to show that giveaways were actually held so this is one where it is subjective whether you want to clean them up after a year or two or just leave them.   If you choose to rejuvenate a giveaway post you have to flush all comments anyway.

In Summary

Some posts may be worth clearing out to make space or update to revitalize and perhaps bring in new life, but in general you can leave them too.  Always check the post against Google Analytics to make sure it hadn’t gotten any traffic in the past 60 or 90 days before clearing it, because if it had some traffic a month or  two ago it may make a comeback and just refresh it a bit.

I had the option to enable reply to reply’s on my DragonBloggerTech fanpage yesterday and have to say I really like the ability to finally reply to individual replies on a comment. 

Though they only thread 1 level deep being able to specifically reply to individuals replies and have separate conversations within the same conversation is pretty cool.

Facebook also now puts your most active replies for a base conversation at the top of the conversation so you don’t have to scroll to the bottom of a conversation to find the latest replies to answer.

I can use this to answer queries directly by readers, showcase information, and it actually should cut down on the @name usage quite a bit since you can reply to people in a nested conversation rather than having to call them by name later in the thread.  So far the feature was only enabled for my fanpage I haven’t seen it show up for my personal profile yet.

One reader reported that the reply to reply feature of Facebook is not available for Android yet and maybe not for iOS, it may be a browser only option at this point and not have made it into the apps yet, I don’t know if anyone can confirm if Facebook nested replies works in Android and iOS app versions of Facebook yet.

Have you enabled Reply to Replies in Facebook yet, what do you think of the reply Facebook reply feature?

-Justin Germino

The Kindle Fire that I got for my Mother in Law as a Christmas gift in December 2011 was having issues, my poor mother in law couldn’t charge it anymore as the connector inside the Kindle Fire became so weak and loose that if you plug in any A/C charger it would just hang and never make a valid connection to charge the device.

[easyazon-image align=”center” asin=”B0083PWAPW” locale=”us” height=”500″ src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51EN7cswSYL.jpg” width=”500″]

The Kindle Fire Warranty is a 1 year warranty but Amazon was kind enough to replace my mother in laws Kindle Fire with a brand new replacement even though it was 4 months past the warranty expire date.  I was happy to present her a replacement that didn’t cost me anything to fix and she was happy to receive it as she uses that Kindle Fire probably more than my kids even do.

Thanks Amazon for the excellent support and replacing the device outside of warranty period.  This makes me inclined to spend the money and upgrade my kids Kindle Fire devices to Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ versions at the end of the year as holiday gifts.

Last weekend I spent a good 12 hours putting in the new theme on DragonBlogger.com and tweaking last minute widget, logo and minor cosmetic changes until it was just so.

This week my goal was to have DragonBlogger.com migrated to WebSynthesis VPS Hosting.  I first learned about WebSythensis through a Yoast email that they were migrating to this platform and reasons why.  When I saw that Copyblogger owned this hosting solution and uses it, and also a tech blogger I follow Chris Pirillo also uses WebSynthesis then I had to learn more.

WebSynthesis runs on a very different infrastructure than your typical shared hosting, it runs using NGINX web server with PHP-FPM and they have optimized everything for Genesis specifically but many of their optimizations will help other WordPress themes as well.  I originally asked if they supported my Suffusion theme blog as I wouldn’t be using Genesis yet (unless I can find a child theme or pay to design one that looks like my current site).

They said they would host it and see what they can do, now with NGINX none of my redirect statements in .htaccess would work so had to build manual rewrite statements which they implemented for me after telling me how to format them.

The cool thing about WebSynthesis is they give you a web proxy to use so you can test and work on your website on the new hosting provider prior to cutting the DNS name over.  This allows you to import the WordPress database, upload all the content, themes, plugins you need and generally have it 100% operational until the last step is to just change the DNS name records to point to WebSynthesis.

I am still in the progress of testing and finalizing the cutover, but expect to see comparisons and performance test results against the old shared hosting and WebSynthesis to see if it makes that much of a difference.  At first I will use WebSynthesis directly with no cloudflare and no MaxCDN and add those services to see how much of a difference they make as I did with Bluehost Shared Hosting.

I will say the migration guide that WebSythensis provides is excellent, and they also will configure W3 Total Cache for you as per their optimization.  They have good snapshot utilities and they have security monitors in place to help protect your site right from the start.  You do not and cannot use Better WP Security with WebSynthesis as most of it is centered around Apache and NGINX does not have the same configurations/modifications with .htaccess file.

Kind of really frustrated with sites like LivingSocial and Groupon as of late after both my wife and I had bad experiences with vendors who had coupons/deals listed one from each service and in both cases the company was failing to deliver on the deals as promised or kept adding delays, cancellations and limited terms in order to make it so inconvenient to claim the deal you feel like it was a waste and don’t want to bother doing business with the service anymore.

In one of these cases with Groupon my wife found out within a few days the hassle it would be to collect on the coupon, the cancellations and lack of availability and got a refund processed fairly quickly.  In my case I purchased a LivingSocial deal 8 months prior and it had a full year to expiration, in this deal a cancellation combined with lack of flexible scheduling, no set specific blackout period which they clearly indicate after calling to schedule and book the appointment (none was stated in the original deal).

I have contacted LivingSocial but have yet to receive a response from a live person about a potential refund, as their policy is to not issue refunds after 7 days unless the company goes out of business, but this is ridiculous to the point where I am removing all my email subscriptions to both Groupon and LivingSocial as a result of these frustractions.

Bottom Line:

These Aren’t the Deals You Are Looking For

Most of the time, the deal will end up being a hassle and most companies can’t handle the influx of people trying to take advantage of the coupon which greatly reduces flexibility when they first publish.  Maybe this isn’t the case as much for restaurant deals, but it is a problem for at least 2 separate companies.