Interesting post on what makes a blog interesting/popular; who should blog, and who should think twice.
“When A Business Should NOT Blog” from The Intuitive Life Business Blog
Blogging should be a more personal experience, while a website may be more ‘marketing speak’. It’s a daily/weekly one to many and largely live, personal conversation. Comments and trackbacks allow for a minor level of public feedback, but it’s still more passive on the readers part.
Blogging allows emotion and daily life into the mix that is not normal in traditional website writing. If you are true to the craft, once its said it should stand, unedited. A bad day or close to the heart topic can lead to a post that isn’t well thought out. Tomorrow apologies can be made.
Popularity: unranked
Hotlinking can be a major pain on highly loaded servers. Hotlinking is where another site links directly to your images/movies/downloads on their site effectively making you pay (in bandwidth and server usage) for people to view your content on their site.
One client, I saw a 40G pipe that always became saturated in the middle of the day drop to below ~32G at peak after hotlink protection was enabled.
To stop hotlinking add a .htaccess file in your root directory with something like the following:
RewriteEngine On
# replace domain.com with your domain name
# also allows for http://domain.com and http://www.domain.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?domain\.com/ [NC]
# skips if http_referer is not passed by client
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
# send a nasty image instead (make it a small one)
RewriteRule \.(jpe?g|gif|png)$ /images/goaway.jpg [L]
# or save bandwidth all together by just sending an error back
#RewriteRule \.(jpe?g|gif|png)$ – [F]
Popularity: 1%
