Snoskred – Life in the Country

One of the very first kayaking blogs that I stumbled upon quite by accident back in the days that I did not know kayaking blogs existed was Yakabout.

I have learnt a lot from reading this blog, and many of the things I have learned have changed our experience of kayaking forever for us. For example the shark skins – had we not heard about them on Yakabout earlier this year, we would have put the kayak away during the winter months like we did the year before. Thanks to Yakabout writing about them we got the shark skins and kayaked ourselves silly during the winter months.

At some point during the last few months with us making the decision to get into fishing from the kayak, I wanted to learn more about the fishing aspect of things. So I looked around the web with Yakabout’s links page as a starting point, and I found a kayak forum called AKFF – the Australian Kayak Fishing Forum. I lurked for a bit, getting a feel for the water, and then I signed up and began posting.

I won’t lie and say that I felt comfortable right off the bat there – there was a lot of discussion between people who clearly knew each other personally. There was also a fair bit of “Aussie” humour, some of it funny, some of it not funny at all. That is usually the case with Aussie humour, I tend to find. You take the good with the bad, though.

Earlier this week a big argument broke out when one of the members posted a photo of their dog in a thread asking members to sign a petition. Their dog happens to be a Dingo. It is legal to keep them in NSW providing you follow very specific rules, which the person in question was doing. Frankly I wish every dog breed had rules and you needed a permit to keep them, having been bitten twice by dogs I hate it when people just let their dogs run loose in the streets. It happens a lot where I live.

It seems on this forum when people have an argument, nobody reports the posts, the mod team don’t bother to step in even when they can see that rules are being broken and personal attacks are being made, and then when asked why action was not taken, they state that nobody reported the posts.

Once the argument is over – or even while it is ongoing, members of the forum will jump into the thread posting completely off topic and somewhat stupid things to try and break the tension and calm things down (hello, that is what happens when the mod/admin team isn’t doing their job properly!)

So when I saw a totally offensive (to me at least) image of a dead cat on a road posted in that thread with a sign saying “Free Cat” pointing at the run over animal, I reported the post.

I can’t remember exactly what I said when I reported it, maybe just something like inappropriate image. If I was shocked by the image, I was completely flabbergasted by the response I got from a moderator on the site named Leftieant.

As I have now been banned from the site, I am unable to post a copy of it, however I remember him saying that the image had been sent by email a lot, and he believed it wasn’t inappropriate or offensive.

I responded saying I had never seen it before, I was offended by it, and that I knew there were quite a few members on the site who were under 18, and that I hated to think of kids stumbling onto that image as a surprise to them. I also quoted sections from the rules that the image specifically broke.

I did not receive a response to that private message, and no action was taken about the photo. It is still there as far as I know. It was about this time that I began feeling this site might not be a great place to hang out.. what happened next certainly proved those feelings to be correct.

On Sunday afternoon, I visited the AKFF forums only to find a couple of threads with ……… in the title, one of which was soon deleted. I then discovered that the signature of one of the forum members – Astro, who is a contributor at Yakabout – seemed to have been modified and now made no sense.

It now said – Kayak Fishing Correspondent http://……….com.au – and I knew that it should have said Yakabout where the dots were. Hmm.. I dropped over to Yakabout where people were already chatting about this bizarre phenomenon in the shoutbox.

That same day, Yakabout had launched a set of forums on their site. Jealous much, AKFF guys? There was no reason to be – there is plenty of room on the internet for everyone to have their own forums. However with Yakabout being as well known and as popular as it was, they clearly felt threatened by it.

I wasn’t about to keep my mouth shut about this. I felt that any community that would act so childishly towards someone as awesome as Josh from Yakabout was probably not a place I was going to spend a lot of time in the future, so I was happy to be quite outspoken about it and you can clearly see that I was in this thread which I am surprised still exists – read it while you can!.

However I did not break the rules – being an Administrator on other forums, I know better than to do that.

Josh from Yakabout also posted about the goings on, which you can read here – Days Of Our Lives.

Imagine my surprise when I returned home from a kayaking trip on Monday only to find that my forum account on AKFF no longer existed. I am in excellent company though, because Yakass (Josh) no longer exists either. No explanation from the people on AKFF, no discussion, no mention of a warning, nothing. They just threw away two members of the community.

I am assuming (perhaps someone from the site reading this could comment and let me know for sure) that they made the decision to ban Josh, and they felt I would not keep quiet about that either, so they banned me at the same time.

Now me, I can understand. I am nobody in the kayak fishing world. But Josh? Who is probably one of the most well known (not to mention popular) kayak fishermen in Australia these days? That’s a bad choice, guys. That one will come back to bite you once your members work out what is going on. Oh wait.. you’re not ballsy enough to explain it to them, and they’re gonna have to figure it out all on their own?

Let me give you an example of how you are supposed to administrate a forum. When you ban someone and create a new rule as a result of that, you need to let people in on the secret.

Recently a member on The Mudflats borrowed money from other members promising to pay it back – and then did not pay it back. When we Admins found out about this, we chose to ban the member and we also created some new rules as a result. Here you can see the post where we explained the banning, and here you can see the new rules.

That’s how you do it, AKFF people. So why don’t you explain the banning of Yakass and Snoskred to your members? Oh wait.. you don’t have a good reason for doing it? Ohhh.. right.

There were some people on AKFF who I looked forward to meeting – I guess that won’t be possible now. That is the one thing I do regret about all of this.

Not one to let things like this upset me, I have built the bridge and got over it – and joined a new kayak forum which Josh assures me is awesome, and a quick look around over there shows me it probably is the better place for me anyway, they have a local fishing group. And I see some of the people I had hoped to meet are members of this new forum also too.

And even cooler, there is a blog devoted to generators.

I made my Swedish Furniture name – I dare you to do the same thing!

Ladies and Gentlemen. Please listen carefully. What I am about to say is so important I feel that I want to type it in caps. Rather than inflict caps lock on you, I’m going to trust that you are paying attention.

Internet Explorer version 6 and below does not render CSS properly.

Therefore instead of the navigation bar on my blog looking the way it is supposed to look – which is like this -

It looks like this -

I don’t have to tell you that clearly something is very wrong with Internet Explorer 6 and below because the picture clearly tells the story. I could fix it so that it looks ok in Internet Explorer 6, but you know something? Why should we web designers have to do a lot of work to fix something that isn’t our fault, but is the fault of a defective browser?

My website looks exactly how it is supposed to look in every other browser except for Internet Explorer 6 and below. I know this because I have tested it.  You can test yours at Browsershots.

And you know what else? People using Internet Explorer 6 or below?

You should upgrade. NOW.

Drop what you’re doing and click on this link to upgrade your defective web browser!

Alternatively, you should switch to Mozilla Firefox which actually works properly – and always has done. You won’t believe how different the internet looks when you see it the way web designers intended. Firefox even does automatic upgrades these days, so you will never ever have to worry about downloading another upgrade yourself again – it will tell you it needs to upgrade, and you just click yes. It does not get any easier.

This topic annoys me so much it makes me want to swear. You see how I restrained myself from saying lots of rude words? I’m not sure how much longer I can keep doing that, so upgrade today.

Kirsten from All About Me – And Then Some asked many interesting questions yesterday in her post Am I A Good Blogger? and it’s such an important topic that I felt a comment would not do justice to it. So today I am going to take on two of the important questions we bloggers should ask ourselves. Do I buy my own domain? What about social networking?

Do I Buy My Own Domain?

Absofreakinglutely! Kirsten is on Blogger, which makes it easy to use your own domain yet continue to enjoy all the benefits of using Blogger. There are many reasons why you need your own domain and here are some of the important ones -

- Wherever you go, there you are. People will always know exactly where to find you.
- You build links back to your blogspot domain – you could be building them to your domain name.
- You have absolutely no control over what the people at Blogger do.- If Blogger went haywire – would any of the people who read you regularly know how to find you again? If you have your own domain they can easily find you.
- If someone hacked into your blog, you would be able to redirect your domain to the new blog (this happens a lot more than people realise, don’t think it’s impossible) and people could still find you.
- You may decide later to change your blogging platform to WordPress, or create a portal instead of a blog (tinyportal is my favourite and one I have looked at using in the past) or do one of a million things, and by having links to your domain rather than a blogspot URL, you get a jumpstart on page rank, on links to you, etc..
- It gives you flexibility – you can decide to move, or not
- either way you’re *able* to make these decisions yourself.
- If you decide to take your blog down for whatever reasons you can leave a simple page with instructions on how to contact you.
- You cannot get your own Alexa ranking on a blogspot domain. You automatically get Blogger’s ranking. For the bloggers who do want to earn some money from blogging, an Alexa rank is a bit important. It is one of the things advertisers look at. (Update – check the comments, you can have an alexa ranking on blogspot but you have to have a large-ish amount of traffic to get it, Thanks Meg!)

The only time you should not use your own domain is if you have been blogging for a very long time on the one you have now and have high rankings on that blog. Even then I would STILL consider it.

Now a few quick myths we need to get out of the way re owning your own domain name.

It’s Expensive.

No, it’s not. You can buy a .com domain for as little as $8.95USD a year – and some domains are even cheaper. I do recommend that you also purchase the privacy protection for $6.99USD per year – that means nobody knows your real name, address, phone number, just by looking up your whois information – worth a little extra money! For less than $16 you’re all set. We use Go Daddy for all our domains – all five of them. Meg from Dipping Into The Blogpond also wrote a great post about getting your own domain name and debunking the myths of .au domain names.

You Need Hosting.

No, you don’t. With Blogger all you need is the domain name. Blogger is going to do all the hosting for you. Later down the track, if you wanted to go to WordPress you may need to consider hosting – but Go Daddy provides hosting for as little as $2.99 a month and there are many excellent hosting packages out there on the internet.

It’s Not Worth Doing Now.

Any blogger who has moved from a blogspot domain to their own domain will tell you – the sooner you do it, the better. Even if you’re just blogging as a hobby you may change your mind about that later – and then have to go to all the effort of re-establishing page rank (which you may well have built to 6 or even higher) and Alexa rankings and backlinks and blogrolls etc.

When I changed from the blogspot domain, Sephy had just done it weeks before me, and he already had a list of the sites I needed to change my URL on. The list was long but it was a fast job and only took me an hour or so. However all the backlinks I lost.. whoa. I had the old domain on a 101 rating with Technorati. My new site was a 0. I had a google page rank of 4. My new site was (and still is) a 0. It was painful. I made the change on the 17th of July and my new domain name is up to a 78 on Technorati – without me having the time to devote to letting people know I’d moved by visiting their blogs personally. It’s still on my to do list. The longer you leave it, the more painful it will be.

Blogging Is Just A Hobby.

Can you name one other hobby of yours that you can do completely for free? All my hobbies cost something. I can’t think of one hobby I do that I haven’t had to put some cash towards.

I’m Not Blogging For Money.

I’m not painting for money. I’m not reading for money. I’m not playing computer games for money. I’m not gardening for money. I’m not watching DVD’s for money. I’ve easily spent 3 times what I’ve spent on buying my own domain on all of the above – sometimes 30 times.

What About Social Networking?

Kirsten said – I don’t have time to dedicate to heavy social networking… If I did I’m sure I’d have more readers than I do now.

The only social networking tool that draws large amounts of traffic is probably StumbleUpon – Digg is not quite the same thing, that’s more a news and article network. The others are nice, and often leave pretty pictures in your sidebar but realistically don’t bring large amounts of traffic in the way StumbleUpon can. So in my opinion, StumbleUpon is an absolute MUST – I’ll talk more about StumbleUpon in a minute. I do still recommend you sign up to a couple of the networks, as follows.

Bumpzee –

Bumpzee is basically a series of blog communities. Each community has an RSS feed. That means whenever you post, your blog post goes out to a lot of people. If you can make your title and first 250 words eyecatching enough, you will get some traffic from it. However even better you will find that some absolutely legendary people within these communities – and you will build excellent relationships.

It does not require a lot of time to join Bumpzee, and once you have joined you can throw the community feeds into your reader. They do generate a fair bit of posting traffic but as time goes by you will figure out which blogs you can live without, and add your favourites into your reader on their own.

MyBlogLog –

One thing I love about MyBlogLog is the fact that it autoadds you to a bloggers community once you have visited their site 10 times. So just by cruising around the blogs you love, you are social networking too. I log in there once a week and add any new friends to my friends list, this takes maybe 5 minutes. They also have some great stats which come for free when you’re a member – outclicks is really useful for me.

BlogCatalog –

Very similar to MyBlogLog. I think if you have one you should have both, but maybe that’s just me. It doesn’t take much effort to sign up at these, and very little effort to maintain them unless you *want* to put more effort in. I wish BlogCatalog did the autoadding thing, too. (Jonathan, BlogCatalog’s new blogger liason team member, are you reading this?)

Make An Impression –

With all three of the above communities, you can put the little widgets in your sidebar and see when people have dropped by on sight. I personally love that. Make sure you get yourself a unique and eyecatching avatar – preferably an image you have taken yourself if possible because then it is less likely it will be copied. Use the same avatar on *all* social networking sites. People will click on your avatar to find out more about you, and they often end up at your blog. It’s not a huge amount of traffic but it is one way to find new readers.

StumbleUpon

The main thing you need to do for StumbleUpon is download a toolbar in order to use it. The toolbar is excellent. It contains everything you need in order to stumble. I’m not going to write a guide on how to stumble here, because Meg already did that much better than I can. Beginners Guide To StumbleUpon – You do not need to absorb all the information in the guide at once. Bookmark the article, and go back to it once a week, learn something new. I still keep going back to it.

I stumble sometimes 5-10 minutes a week. If I find myself at an internet loose end, I tend to stumble rather than do anything else. Sometimes that happens – you’ve read everything in your feed reader, you’ve checked the news sites, youve done everything you wanted to do, and now you’re like.. hmm.. the internet is BORING. Then you see the toolbar, and you remember – no it isn’t! and you hit the stumble button.

The even better thing about stumbling is, you can give a blogger a bit of a traffic burst when they blog something you really enjoy – and you can do this with just ONE click. They deserve that – and they will appreciate it and thank you for it.

You *should* make sure to tag anything you stumble – take a couple of moments to do this and make sure to put it in all appropriate categories. A post like this for example would belong in blogs, internet, blogger. There’s a drop down box, adding tags is simple. Meg had to send me an email to let me know that one. hehe thanks Meg!

So..

You don’t have to want to be an “A list” blogger to make the most of your blogging by having your own domain name. You just have to want to be the best blogger you can be. A lot of people don’t read blogs about blogging and when they *do* read blogs about blogging they feel a bit offended – I haven’t done that, I don’t need to do that, etc. You have to take the best bits of what the blogs about blogging are saying, the bits you can use, the bits that apply to you, the tips you want to try, and let the rest go. I’m not going to just follow one persons advice on something, I want to read a lot of opinions, that’s why those blogs are so popular.

Social networking can seem time consuming but tends to be a lot less time consuming than you’d think. Have I convinced you of the benefits of both, Kirsten? As long as you don’t use Facebook, which I am told is the temporal vortex of the Internet. I don’t know for sure, I haven’t signed up!

When I get time, I’m going to add a “best blogs about blogging” list of blogs to the sidebar. If you’re reading this and you have any suggestions on blogs that should be in that list, leave a comment with a link to the blog please.