AdesBlog.com

Yaro’s Blog Mastermind course (that i blogged about here) is going to open for registration end of this month.

While waiting for the new semester, he has released a new video(s). First one is called conversion blogging, watch here. Over the next 7 days Yaro will have more free videos and podcast interviews.

The Blog Mastermind “blogging course” will cost $77 a month, and will teach you how to become a professional blogger (if you are not already one).

Human beings (accept for the prophets, i will tell you the story after the post) are affected by the results of our actions, I guess that’s our nature. If we relate it to blogosphere, it’s all about traffic, RSS subscribers, number of comments blog posts etc. Bloggers get happy when their blogs’ traffic increase, when their comments on the posts increase and their RSS subscribers increase… etc.

And opposite is true, when the traffic decreases, the number of comments decreases and RSS subscribers drop, bloggers get upset and demoralized. Eventually they may even abandon their blogging because of the declining stats.

My advice is “don’t bother about the numbers!”. (Yes, I know it’s easier said than done but…) Just do what you have to do (i.e blogging) and keep blogging, don’t bother about those stats. Because if you are good at what you do, you will eventually succeed.

I guess in order not to be bothered much about the stats, you need to overcome a certain barrier. In my view this barrier consists of thoughts like: I have too few readers. My traffic is too low for me to succeed in blogging. What will people say if i write in certain manner? I have to write/behave/attend conferences like “top bloggers” to be accepted by others…etc

Reason for the discouragement

Usually one of the main reasons for the discouragement is, it’s when you blog for the wrong reasons. People blog for various reasons, and if you blog for specific reason like “making money online” only. Then, there is a high probability that you will stop blogging when you hit the bottom. In other words, when your blog stops making money, you won’t see any reason to continue blogging.

Of course, it depends on the projects. Sometimes you launch a project just to make money. So, when the project doesn’t make money, it’s better to just discontinue the project.

High traffic doesn’t mean more comments

I just want to give an example that high traffic doesn’t always mean more comments on every post. For example, ReadWriteWeb is a huge blog that has more than 200 thousand RSS subscribers (see screenshot).

But look how many comments each blog-post gets on RWW (see screenshot below). Not many! So if you have few hundred or few thousand RSS subscribers, and do not get much comments - don’t sweat!

So, if RWW with its 200+ thousand RSS subscribers, on average getting less than 10 comments per post, then by right your posts shouldn’t get any comments at all! ;) Just kidding. But you got the point right!? Don’t be worried if your posts are not getting any comments.

The Story

So, back to the story that I promised in the beginning of this post. Prophets are not bothered by the results, nor by the number of their followers (no matter how numerous or how few the number of their followers are), neither by the effectiveness of their calling. They have just one task to do - and that is to convey the message. Nothing more. Because it’s in Allah’s (The God) hands who should be guided and who shouldn’t be.

For example, prophet Hud (Eber in Hebrew) peace be upon him, preached years and years to his people. However, the only response he got was the rejection from his people (most of the prophets including Isa (Jesus) peace be upon him was rejected by his own people).

After years has passed, the people of Hud even demanded saying:

They said, “Have you come in order to turn us away from our gods? Then bring upon us the calamity with which you threaten us, if you are telling the truth!” Quran 46.22

You see? prophet of Allah didn’t get discouraged by the response of his people. Instead he was patient and continued his calling to the Truth. But it was his people who grew inpatient and demanded that the punishment be brought upon them. So God punished them as they wished.

Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) had also said that, there will be a prophet on the Judgment Day with 10 followers, and there will be a prophet with five followers, and 3, and 2, and 1. And there would be a prophet with no follower whatsoever!

Can you imagine a prophet who has been calling people to the Truth all of his life and didn’t get any result? We get discouraged if our blog’s traffic drops, or get negative comments or if few people unsubscribe from our RSS… and most of us even give up if particular thing that we are doing doesn’t bear any results within a short period of time.

In worldly terms, these prophets with few or no followers would be defined as the losers. But Allah has called them in the Quran that they were the real victorious ones. And the real losers were the community who rejected these prophets. Because ultimately it’s the prophets who will be in the highest level of Paradise, and the people who rejected them will be in the depths of Hellfire.

In Conclusion

So, the moral of the story (and this post) is: So what if you lost few RSS subscribers, of if your traffic declined?! Don’t bother about these little things. As long as you love what you are doing, just continue doing. Don’t bother what people will think of you or what will they say..etc. You are better than that!

P.S Remember, majority is not always correct! And you do not have to fit in to majority’s demands, lifestyle, thinking…etc in order to be successful.

Note: Don’t get it wrong. It doesn’t mean that you do not bother about marketing, SEO, frequency of your posts, consistency of your posts…etc. Instead, you must use all the available options and ways to make your blog successful. It just means that, when you see negative results, you shouldn’t be bothered by them. Just keep doing what you are doing! And you will be fine.

This is like a freelancer’s dream come true. You pay one time and access all the premium wordpress themes designed by professionals.

WooThemes is a project launched by four respected WordPress theme designers - Adii, Magnus Jepson, Mark Forrester and Elliot Jay Stocks.

Pricing starts from $225 for 3 months subscription, and $375 for 6 months. This is a developer license, suitable for freelancers.

However, if you - as a blogger would like to subscribe and change your own blog’s theme often, then the license for 3 months costs $150, and for 6 months $250. It’s called single user license.

I think the single user license is a bit overpriced, don’t you think? Because who will change their blog design every 3 months? or even every 6 months? I think yearly plan would be a good idea for this.

http://www.woothemes.com

You probably wouldn’t understand what the title of this post meant, if you didn’t see the screenshot below right!? (picture says a thousands words!)

As you can see Google has been playing around with its search results. Now you can search “some” sites directly in the Google results. I liked it! Because when you go to the site, you will end up searching the site anyway :) So, why not directly search it from the Google results, right? So the Google team think, and I agree. I think it saves us at least one step.

P.S It only appears for some keywords and sites, searching for adesblog didn’t return such a result for my blog :( How about you, any of your sites has a search field on Google results?

I am sure you have seen similar screens (to the left) from twitter all the time, right? People even do not pay attention to these error messages anymore, because it became a common occurrence.

So, how not to be a twitter? In other words, how not to repeat the failures of twitter when you launch your new web project?

Besides having robust and scalable infrastructure, one way to make sure your web application (code) is reliable and won’t go down when there is too many people accessing it, is to - test, test, test! (E.g. load testing, stress testing…etc)

But how do you test when it’s not even live yet? How do you simulate thousands of people accessing your website? So that you can test if your application can handle the load? (I think the twitter developers supposed to ask these questions before they launched twitter :)

Solution is WAPT

WAPT 5.0 is a load and stress testing tool that provides you with an easy-to-use, consistent and cost-effective way of testing web sites, web servers, and intranet applications with web interfaces. You may test and analyze the performance characteristics under various load conditions to find bottlenecks of your web applications. WAPT has a set of features to test web sites with dynamic content and secure HTTPS pages. It provides informative test results through descriptive graphs and reports.

You can simulate the number of users accessing your site, you can either set a fixed number of users, or define it in a way that it will increase the number of users to your website at specified time intervals (see below).

WAPT can simulate up to several thousands real users to check the performance of your site and find any bottlenecks.

Full Features:

• Accurate simulation of real user activity
• Different types of users in one test
• Testing of dynamic web applications
• Flexible load level definition
• Testing of HTTPS/SSL content
• Descriptive test reports and graphs

WAPT is designed for Microsoft Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/XP.

It’s priced at $350 for 1-2 licences. You can try the 30-day free trial version here or order full-version here.

Website: http://www.loadtestingtool.com

This was a sponsored post* more info

Hack In The Box Conference (HITBSECCONF2008 - MALAYSIA) is back. It’s scheduled from 27th Oct - 30th Oct 2008 at The Westin Kuala Lumpur Hotel.

What is it?

The main aim of the conference is to enable the dissemination/discussion and sharing of deep knowledge network security information. Presented by respected members of both the mainstream network security arena as well as the underground or black hat community, the events routinely highlight new and ground(breaking attack and defense methods that have not been seen or discussed in public before.

Hack Macbook Air and take it home

This year’s Open Hack event will involve a fully patched Macbook Air with a default install of Leopard with all patches applied and the firewall set to default settings. Whoever hacks the Macbook Air, will take home a brand new Macbook Air + possibly USD5000.

Registration

Early bird registration closes on 14th July, you can register at http://conference.hackinthebox.org/hitbsecconf2008kl/register/. Fees will probably be too expensive for individuals, but for companies it should be ok.

You can get more information on the conference, the speakers and other info at http://conference.hitb.org/hitbsecconf2008kl/.