Blog Tycoon

I did a quick poll last year to see what bloggers want to do in 2010. The answers were “Write more content”, “Socialize more”, “Promotion and marketing” and “Brand awareness”.

Just as I suspected, bloggers want to write more as opposed to socializing which does not bring any real benefit to a money-making wannabe blog.

The answers percentage was as follows:

Write more content - 55%, Socialize more – 18%, Promotion and marketing – 18%, Brand awareness – 9%.

While neglecting socialization and marketing, writing more content comes first which is a good thing. But this should be combined with more brand awareness, otherwise bloggers might get lost in the sea of MFA sites, spammy sites and article factories.

What poll should come next? Brainstorm some ideas.

I need to extract some data from a web page and place it on a fishing site. The source web page is updated frequently, and I don’t have the necessary time to update it. So, I’ll use the Javascript innerHTML function.

First of all, I should identify the element I’m trying to copy, let’s say a div with the ID info:

<div id="info">
This information updates daily.
</div>

The next step is to include the source web page as an IFRAME with width and height equal to 0:

<iframe name="thief" width="0" height="0" frameborder="0" src="source.html"></iframe>

The final code should read from the IFRAME and display the content on the destination page, in a specially created div:

<div id="destination">
This content will be replaced.
</div>

<script type="text/javascript">
// this script will copy the ontent of the 'info' div into the 'thief' div in the destination page
parent.document.all('thief').innerHTML = document.all('info').innerHTML;
</script>

NETTUTS: How to create a slick tabbed content area

One of the biggest challenge to web designers is finding ways to place a lot of information on a page without losing usability. Tabbed content is a great way to handle this issue and has been widely used on blogs recently. Today we’re going to build a simple little tabbed information box in HTML, then make it function using some simple Javascript, and then finally we’ll achieve the same thing using the jQuery library.

Maki from DoshDosh has a great, as usual, article about content development strategies.

The type of content you produce influences the popularity and profitability of your website. People will often subscribe to and read blogs that are well-written and informative or entertaining.

[...]

Content should be considered a part of your overall master-plan and not just an isolated necessity or discipline. You don’t structure your articles simply to please a group of transitory visitors. There are many other larger factors involved.

[...]

It is not as simple as simply producing information that is relevant to your site theme or creating resource pages to fulfill the keywords used by search engine visitors to find your site. Content is more more powerful and it can be used to develop entire breeds of new audiences/customers from the existing crowd.

How do you find your information? How do you write your articles? You visit your favourite blogs, forums and newsgroups, find an idea, maybe copy some text from here and there, and here is your fresh article. But how many times have you copied more than one paragraph? I’m sure that all of you did this once or twice. Have you thought about the implications? Google will find your article and match it with the source. Boom, you’re penalized for duplicate content, although you had good intentions.

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