SidekickBlog

I’m pretty happy about this as I thought it would take longer.  I believe there was a page rank update back in March but I did not bother looking until today.  Previously this blog had no page rank (it’s not even 2 months old).  Considering that there are less than 30 posts, I guess some of my SEO work has paid off.

Oddly, Recipe Mobile only has a PR1 even though it has almost 75 posts and I have done a lot more work on it than on this website. Also, it receives a lot more visitors from Google Search than this blog does.

In my previous post, I mentioned that while switching Recipe Mobile to the Mimbo 3.0 theme, I will also implement a child theme right from the beginning.  This process has been going well and I have already realized many of the benefits of using child themes. (continue reading…)

The decision has been made!  The new Recipe Mobile blog will be powered by the Mimbo 3.0 theme.  These are the reasons: (continue reading…)

I have reached the limit of the Cutting Board WordPress theme that we launched Recipe Mobile with.  It was a good theme to start with as it was my first experience with WordPress and the theme came customized to use on food and recipe websites.  However, the theme seemed to have issues with Internet Explorer right from the start and these issues were only compounded as I continued to customize it and add plugins.  The final straw was when the category pages started going out of whack when viewed in IE or Chrome.  There also does not seem to be any forum, documentation or support to help solve problems with this particular theme. (continue reading…)

Last week, I moved Recipe Mobile from its free hosting at ByetHost to Hostgator.  After considerable research on the best hosting providers, I had narrowed down my list to Bluehost and Hostgator.  Both seem to have glowing reviews and have similarly competitive hosting plans with unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth and the ability to host unlimited add on domains.  Finally I decided to go with Hostgator (as opposed to Bluehost) for the following reasons: (continue reading…)

Lifehacker: Want to know how to unblock a sink?  Or make firefox faster?  One of the most popular websites on the web, this is a must to help you make life a little bit easier.

Seth’s Blog: Mr. Seth Godin.  Master of marketing.  Make sure you read his books.

Engadget: My most frequented website to keep track of product launches and reviews.

Duct Tape Marketing: The simple and easy to follow advice offered by these guys keep me hooked.

xkcd: The funniest (& smartest) comics on the web!

Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk on Twitter) just used Twitter in a way it has not been used before (in my knowledge).  He asked all his followers to send his wife Demi (@mrskutcher) a good morning tweet at the same time effective creating a ‘love bomb’ (or love tsumani, all names that have been thrown around for this phenomenon).  This resulted in her getting over 4000 tweets in a matter of 10 minutes (and still counting).  Ofcourse, the fact that he has over 500,000 followers made this possible.  Hats off to Ashton for a great idea. (continue reading…)

A few days ago, I wrote about a huge change in policy by Entrecard.

Today, new updates have been announced by Entrecard.  Looks like there was a lot of negative feedback by publishers over some of their policy changes.  The Entrecard team has listened and made some adjustments to their plans.

1) Entrecard earlier had announced that all publishers would have to move the Entrecard widget above the fold on their websites or be disqualified.  Now they have changed this rule to a 1 page down rule.  Although some publishers will still find this hard to do on their already packed sidebars, I think it is a fair policy

2) They have dropped the fee to reject paid ads.  Earlier this was one of my biggest issues with the new policy and I am glad this has been changed.  However, I am not sure what is going to stop publishers from rejecting each and every paid ad as they do not get anything out of it directly (as opposed to ads by the Entrecard community which result in credits being earned directly by the publisher.)

All in all, I am glad that Entrecard has chosen to listen to the community’s concerns.  These adjustments mean that I will continue to give Entrecard a chance and keep it active on Recipe Mobile.

No point in me saying anything further.  Watch this amazing video.

I received an email from Entrecard today mentioning changes that many members of the blogger community were expecting sooner or later.  Entrecard has always been criticized as it never had a robust revenue model and there was no official way to convert the credits earned from Entrecard to actual money.  This has led to many bloggers moving away from Entrecard to competing ad networks.  Entrecard has been struggling to come up with a solution that addresses publisher concerns while still maintaining their particular advertising exchange model. (continue reading…)