How to Find Good Blog Post Ideas from your OWN Website

Stumped for a blog post idea? Chances are, you're like Dorothy with her ruby red shoes - you have the answers the whole time. Instead of clicking your heels three times, just log into your your site stat program and check your Keywords.

What are site stats? They are the statistics of who is coming to your blog, how they got there, which websites sent them, which keywords or keyword phrases they used in a Google or Yahoo or any kind of search. Most hosting companies provide these for free, but there are better ones out there, also for free. Look into Google Analytics and StatCounter. Both stat programs are free and invisible.

The Keywords people are using to find your blog are actual words typed into search engines by people interested in what you have to say. You may be scoring on the term "best ceramic flat iron" or "moms who make a million dollars" (I just made these up), but what are your smaller searches for? When you look into your keywords for which terms you're getting, look for the terms that are bringing in 1 search, or 7 searches, or 20 searches.

Small potatoes, right? Yeah, well, it also shows that your blog is coming up deep in the search engine rankings for this term, but you need to do a better job of optimizing for it to bring in an easy 50, 400 or 900 new searches. And chances are, you didn't meant to optimize for it at all. A combination of words from different posts, or you side panel, made your post rank for this particular term. Now all you have to do is write a well optimized post for it.

Gold SEO Nugget Example:
One rainy day, I was sifting through keywords, curious as to how people were finding FashionMista.com. A keyword phrase caught my eye: "do I have to be a good drawer to be a fashion designer."

Excuse me? No, of course you don't. But you had to ask a search engine that question? Fine, I thought. I'll give you the answer. I titled my post that exact question because the Title is the Page Title for that web page, and the Page Title is a very hot ticket for optimizing for SEO. Next, I made sure to weave those phrases throughout my copy in a way that made sense, and I included a picture, filled in the alt tag for that picture, and linked the picture. All very important steps for SEO. Search engines do look for images, and if the image has an alt tag, and is linked, the engine considers those terms especially important, which give you more exposure via higher rankings.

The result? FashionMista is at the top of searches for related queries (yes, people continue to ask the question), and the image I posted is on page 1 in Google Images for "fashion drawing".

So, it pays to sift through your keywords for a quick and easy blog post idea. Happy hunting!

ps: if you do want to learn how to draw for fashion, get the fashion drawing book, 9 Heads, which is fabulous. There are lots of poses, pleats, and ruffles to chose from as you practice.

If Someone is Stealing Your Code, Can They Crash Your Site?

If someone is stealing your code and providing it to others to use directly from your website, aka hotlinking, then yes, they can crash your site. If the code they are using contains an image, for example, from your website, and that image is coming directly from your server, like img src="http://www.yourwebsite.com/images/yourimage.jpg, then it is your bandwidth that is allowing that code to work.

It's like using your electricity. If your neighbor somehow spliced into your electricity, and used his air conditioner and TV all the time, and one day you went to blow dry your hair, and you blew a fuse, this would be the equivalent to your site crashing. It would not come up anymore for your visitors. You, not knowing that your neighbor is stealing from you, you call the electric company to get more power. Ok, you don't do that for the electric company, but you would do that for your hosting company. And they would of course charge you for the additional use of bandwith, to prevent your site from crashing again.

How can you avoid this? Start by setting up a Google Alert for your website. Make it for www.yourwebsite.com. If code is being publicly posted somewhere for others to take and use, this will alert you to it. Next, put on some hotlink protection, which only allows specified domains to display images from your website. Learn what to consider if you do this.

Apple Won't Fix or Take Back Hacked Phones

Just found this article from ZD Net via DIGG about a guy's friend who expected Apple to service his hacked iPhone. Apple wouldn't do it, and blacklisted his phone from future fixes, and refused to fix it. Um, duh? That's like: "Hi Mr. Store, I took apart your product and sprinkled some of my own stuff into it. Cool, huh? Got around your contract thing. So anyway, it's doing some weird thing that I need you to fix. Okay?"

He put a 3rd party application into it that opened the phone up to be used on TMobile, an accomplishment that happened rather quickly after its release. A lot of people want the iPhone opened up, like Free the iPhone.

My opinion? I wouldn't fix it if I were Apple. It's their product. They make the rules. Deal with it or invent something else. And don't invent something else to manipulate the existing product.

Related articles:
"Hackers" to share secret for iPhone free of AT&T
iPhone SIM Free

Brooklyn Artists Bring Free Wireless Via Cell Tower

Capla Kesting Fine Art, a group of Williamsburg artists is trying to bring New York City into the 21st century by allowing free wireless to the masses. Being a New Yorker, this is a legitimate problem, being that it was easier for me to access free wireless while on Yale's campus in New Haven, CT, and in various strip malls in Columbus, OH.

A 10 ft hight tower named "CIA Cell Tower" is being constructed out of wood and antennas at 121 Roebling to amplify local wireless signals. It will be unveiled at the Confulx Festival, an event organized to promote awareness of the city. This may mean that the artists are amplifying local, unprotected wireless signals, meaning, the owner did not password protect his/her wireless signal when setting it up in his/her livingroom.

Part of their mission, as stated in Metro, is to also "raise awareness of government-funded wire-tapping, the erosion of civil liberties and the need to secure home connections from eavesdropping."

And from the Capla Kesting Fine Art press release:
Congress' recently approved changes to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows the NSA to monitor domestic conversations and e-mails and provides the legal standing for the cell tower's construction.

"The tower allows groups like the NSA to collect data intercepted through e-mails and internet traffic on unsecured Wi-Fi connections without having to approach internet service providers such as AT&T Inc. This will eliminate the U.S. government's alleged complicity in current class-action lawsuits filed by consumers who feel their privacy has been violated," explained John Leo.

If you do have a protected wireless system near the tower, you can access it in areas not just your home or in the downstairs coffee shop. For me, it would be the downstairs grocery store, and my wireless doesn't actually reach that far.

Related Articles:
The Press Release
The Gowanus Lounch: "CIA Cell Tower" Art Project in Williamsburg
NY Metro

Hotlinking and Your Bandwidth

I discovered a most disturbing thing: a scetchy free blogging software company was providing my free desktop wallpaper to its members. But not only that, it was offering it from my website, meaning, if someone were to plug in the code the way they suggested, then every time that blogger's website showed up, it would be pulling the image from my website using my bandwidth. You can see a picture of it on my Spammy Scammers blog, where I've exposed them. Now, as you all may know, I do offer pretty, feminine free desktop wallpaper. So, as with any file, purchased or not (like an e-book), it is subject to being thrown online somewhere without the owner knowing.

Posting an image directly from another person's website is called "hotlinking" or leeching. It's when you steal an image and the bandwidth from one website and to display it on your website. Bandwidth is basically the invisible stuff you pay for that shoots from your server at your hosting company through fiber optic cables and into people's computers to allow them to view your site. That's not the exact definition, but basically what it does. You know how when Daily Candy features a website, and sometimes you can't get to it? Well, it's because it crashed because it exceeded its bandwidth. There were too many people trying to access it at once, trying to pull images and text from it just by viewing them.

You can prevent a bandwidth crash by contacting your hosting company to ask them to increase your bandwidth (and your monthly charge). Or, if you know you're going to be on Daily Candy, increase your bandwidth for that month. But if you're doing well, then you'll have to keep that bandwidth increased for good...hopefully! A hosting company that has a technical system in place to provide more bandwidth on demand (like an overdraft safety account with your bank) is MediaTemple.

So. How can you prevent Bandwidth Theft, as I call it? You can get hotlink protection, and block every domain from displaying images from your site, except domains you specify. This does not prevent people from "grabbing" images off your site, uploading them onto their servers, and displaying them. Which isn't always a bad thing for PR reasons. Social bookmarking sites like StyleHive displays and shows off your images if someone socially bookmarks one of your product pages. BUT, if you have hotlink protection and did not allow for StyleHive to be an accepted domain, then your images won't show up there for people to drool over. Get it? So just make StyleHive an accepted domain in your code for your hotlink protection.

I went the route of hotlink protection because I was getting monthly alerts from my server that I was exceeding bandwidth, but my traffic was remaining the same. Mysterious, right? I attributed it to the fact that I used to store and serve all of my images for my blog, FashionMista, on my Katie-James.com server. As FashionMista started to pick up, particularly one image in Google Images that was doing particularly well, I was basically stealing from myself. So I got real hosting for FashionMista and started putting images over there. But, I was still getting the alerts. And now I think I know why. Hotlinking.

Cute! Geek Girl T-Shirts and Pins!

Just found these Geek Girl t-shirts and pins from Rotem Gear. How perfect!

Click here to see more t-shirts and pins...

Apple to Issue $100 Credit to Early iPhone Customers

In the comments for my post on my iPhone flaws and pet peeves, fellow blogger MelissaHead informed us that her pet peeve was the lowered price of the iPhone of $200 so soon after the release - which is to the annoying dismay of us early customers. Then she found a letter from Steve Jobs stating that he received tons of emails from people like us (I didn't write in), and has agreed to issue a $100 Apple Store credit. Here's his letter:

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/openiphoneletter/

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