Improbulus Archives - Successful Blog

A Story: New Media and the Writer/Blogger Girl

May 26, 2007 by Liz

Improbulus, I Don’t Know

The question was set. What is your diet of new media? What do you consume? Make a list if you would. Put the most consumed at the top of the list. . . .

Shortly before SOBCon, my friend Improbulus asked that question. I wanted to answer, but truthfully, I didn’t know what to say. Sad to say, my mind might be clever and occasionally a risk taker, but my reality is flat out boring.

I’m a dreamer. Like Christopher Columbus, I’ll go sailing off to the edge of the planet in the most rickety ships. (Okay, so maybe his ships were state of the art, but mine wouldn’t be — unless Terry Starbucker and Chris Cree made sure things were in order.) I’m a pizza and beer kind of girl. I still like my music on CDs, preferrably timeless, musical, and with great lyrics.

I’m not sure I know what new media is.

New Media and the Writer/Blogger Girl

This is the story of new media and the writer girl who became blogger girl. . . . It begins with knowing that, as writer girl, all I need s is a great keyboard, a fabulous display, and my BOSE headset that sends back sounds bouncing off walls — so that I don’t have to, bounce off walls, that is.

A telephone is useful, but optional. Well, this writer girl talks a lot, so maybe it should be on the list.

Life was simple in Web 1.0.

The world changed when I started blogging. [Read more…]

Great Find: Adding Show-Hide and Categories

April 23, 2006 by Liz

Improbulus Offers Us 2 in 1

There’s a reason I wrote poetry to Improbulus the blogger at A Consuming Experience. She is one great researcher, analyst, problem solver, who does everyone a service in every post she writes. Her analysis and deep research are featured in Technorati’s family of support pages.

This post is a two-in-one special for you. What I give you today is WAY COOL.

Great Find: How to include categories for your blog (manual, expand-collapse) by Improbulus
Type of Article: How-to article on adding show/hide feature and categories to blogging platforms that don’t offer those features.
Permalink: http://consumingexperience.blogspot.com/2006/01/how-to-include-categories-for-
Target Audience: Anyone who needs to add a way to do categories or show/hide features to their blog platform

Content: If there’s an interesting problem to be figured out, Improbulus has been on it and found a way to deal with–if not, she’s found out who’s already done that. This particular entry in her archives demonstrates how to break a post and continue it on the next page in the lower function blog platforms. It also shows how to manually add posts to categories in a platform, such as Blogger–the platform that Improbulus uses. The great news is she offers the exact code and how to use it. Click the Consuming Experience to access the article.

Adding categories is great promotion for page views. It pulls readers deeper into your blog. I’m going to have to write her another poem, but first I need to add categories to my blogspot blog.

If you use this post, how about leaving Improbulus a comment or better yet, linking to it. It’s always a great idea to support folks who do us these kinds of big favors.

Brand you and me. Improbulus understands that BIG TIME.

–Me “Liz” Strauss

Title Tags and a Poem to Technorati

November 8, 2005 by Liz

I promised you a Tuesday post on tags and this is it. One thing this successful blogger knows is that you don’t tell your readers that you’re going to do something and then not follow through with it. I’m following through with it.

When I started getting my notes together, I knew something about tags. I had put keywords deftly in my template just as Darren Rowse describes in his article, The Importance of Title Tags in Search Engine Optimization. In fact, I had done things so much like he had, I’d done the same things wrong.

This post explains the importance of title tags in how search engines look at our blogs. Darren added a two-word term to his. Then he graphed what happened. In just three days, his position on that term at Google changed from 65th to 10th. On MSN, his listing went from 40th to 1st. The comments that follow the article also add some new information, including how to respond gracefully when you mess up your host’s template.

Now for something completely different–a poem to Technorati Tags.

Oh Technorati
you fickle one
you really had me going
thinking if I chased enough
I might find solid ground.
But your faint mystery
was finally unraveled
when I found Improbulus
who carefully explained how the
premise is structurally unsound.

In other words, I found a post by a writer named Improbulus, Technorati tags: an introduction that provides everything you’d ever want to know about tags with a capital T and probably more.

I’m a saturation learner, so I found it fascinating to see exactly how the Technorati system might be used. Improbulus provides subheads to guide us through this well-organized analysis of the possibilities. Be sure to read the end where Improbulus gives an opinion of the downside of the system.

–ME “Liz” Strauss