Personal Blog of Carl Pei

MyBlogLog is a nifty little service, but recently it has been getting on my nerves. I have three main reasons.

1. Concept. What is the actual concept of MyBlogLog? Whatever it is, I’m sure the thought was NOT to have people adding as many contacts and joining as many communities as possible in order to gain traffic. It’s starting to more and more seem like a bad idea.
2. It’s slow. This is very annoying. One of the main reasons I use MyBlogLog is to see the nice “Recent Readers” sidebar, it adds a nice, personal touch to the blog. Recently, it has been so slow that sometimes it might take up to 30 seconds to load. As internet connectivity and speed develops, people grow less and less tolerant to slow web sites. MyBlogLog is making my websites slow. If they don’t get faster servers anytime soon, I’ll stop using it.
3. It’s spyware. In its essence, MyBlogLog is spyware. Not much different from spyware that infect your computers, MyBlogLog tracks all click activity on pages where its code is inserted. They collect and save a large amount of data that they could do what they want with, perhaps sell to companies. If you want to use my info, provide a better service.

The only reason I’m still keeping it on my blog is because, as stated earlier, the Recent Readers widget. But don’t forget, there are other competing services offering a Recent Readers widget as well. I’ll give MyBlogLog one week.

The Wordpress timestamp is an awesome tool. As you read this, I’m probably somewhere on the beach in Barcelona, Spain.

Can you travel and maintain a regularly updated Wordpress blog? Sure, why not?! Wordpress’ inbuilt tool, the Timestamp is invaluable if you want to maintain a steady post rate. It allows you to write blog posts beforehand and specify exactly when the new post should show up on your front page.

To use the Post Timestamp tool, login to your admin panel and enter the Write tab (wp-admin/post-new.php). There, you will see a widget called “Post Timestamp”, which should be at the bottom right corner of the page if you haven’t changed the default order. Finally, just specify when the post should show up after you write it, and you’re done.

Titles are a big part of SEO. And by default, Wordpress outputs page titles in the following way: Blog Name >> Blog Archive >> Post Title. As you could see, this does not look very good. Additionally, it is not as search engine friendly as it could be. What you want is the most important to be shown first, in this case the actual Post Title.

Example
Wordpress Default: Who the hell is Carl Pei? >> Blog Archive >> March Earnings Report

There is a plug-in for Wordpress that gives you the optimal title, and guess what it’s called? - Optimal Title. Optimal Title will improve your Wordpress page titles in terms of usability and SEO. With it installed, your titles will instead look something like this: March Earnings Report | Who the hell is Carl Pei?

Now compare it with the example above, which one would you rather use? Installation is free, fast and painless so if you haven’t already, do it now!

I usually hate using my real name on the internet, so why now, why register a domain with it? Below are some simple reasons.

1. If I don’t, someone else will.
   Like most things in life, if you don’t do it, someone else will. Seriously, I’d rather buy it now than wait until some third world domain collector gets it and wants a leg for it. Especially if I keep my current pace my name alone will probably be worth millions in the future.
2. Coolness.
   How cool is having your name as a domain? The future is online. Already today we are seeing the benefits of communication, commerce and entertainment online! Like it or not, but one day everything will revolve around the internet. How inconvenient will it then be to not even own one’s own name as a domain? Above all if you’re going to become someone.
3. Branding.
   Branding and brand recognition is very important. Everything from where you shop to what toilet paper you use is all branded. One’s own name is one of, if not the most important brand one will ever know. As much as I hate using my real name online, I knew that I one day had to in order to start building a durable brand. Using nicknames does not work as well. As soon as you start achieving anything under the nickname, people will start using the same name, and every time you change, you will have to start from scratch.

So who the hell is Carl Pei? Legitimate question, especially since most of you reading probably know jack squat about me.

A probable question that follows is why I am writing this random …shit. I used to write an even crappier blog before, crappy until I realized that my English skills dramatically increased. Today I’m kind of ashamed of what I have written there, so I won’t share the link. But if you’re a stalker and like to search people’s email addresses in Google you could probably find it. Yeah, so after several months of writing randomness I scored full points in the National English exams, highest in school that year.

What did that have to do with anything? Think… if writing a crappy blog could increase English skills, what would happen if one maintained a half-crappy blog? Just imagine the possibilities.

Actually, there are many reasons to why i bought carlpei.com. For one, I am going to take the Cambridge Proficiency Exams in English and have already made an investment in paying the test fee. Well, not really, our school is paying half the fee, but the remainder is still quite a lot. Hopefully maintaining a blog will have the same effect as before. We all win. You get to read my randomness, I get my grade.

Deal?