Content Writing & Copywriting Blog

Death Threats To A Blogger

Mar 28, 2007 3 Comments »

Just read this shocking post about Kathy getting death threats from seemingly known or unknown people. Although I’ve received mean comments at Writing Cave (which of course, I deleted) and even racist comments at this blog (more than a year ago), it was never this bad, as in Kathy’s case. Once I had said something “unacceptable” about a south Indian actor and someone said that death squads would be let lose upon me if I ever wrote like that. I removed the post not because of the threat but because I thought apart from upsetting people the post didn’t solve any purpose.

In Kathy’s case, I think it’s a no-holds-barred conspiracy to disturb her mental equilibrium and they have succeeded by making her cancel her engagements. She’s now at home, scared, locked, and the police is investigating into the matter. It can be taken as business rivalry but then such things should never be taken lightly. Psychopaths are known to first send the threatening signals and then strike — this is how they attain pleasure. I hope the police doesn’t just consider it a cyber crime, it could be much more than that. It’s best that she stays safe.

The comments she has received are in no way simply mischievous actions. They fully tantamount to crime and the culprits should be apprehended as soon as possible. My well wishes are with Kathy and her family.

Technorati Tags: Kathy Sierra

You Can Ditch The .BlogSpot Extension Now

Mar 27, 2007 1 Comment »

I came across this a long time back but forgot to mention it. If you’ve been publishing a blog using Blogger and now want to shift to your own domain name you can easily do it. In January Blogger introduced a service to easily shift your Blogger blog to your own domain name without you having to abandon your previous posts.

Actually you could always post, using Blogger, to another domain. The problem was, how to redirect the hundreds of posts that have already been written at Blogger? I know many people who face this problem. You now just have to register a new domain and submit the link at Blogger under the Publishing tab (a sub-tab of the Settings tab). Once you have submitted the link, all your current blog links, for instance http://maniacalmusings.blogspot.com/2007/03/nothing-to-say.html will be redirected to http://www.maniacalmusings.com/2007/03/nothing-to-say.html without you having to do any redirect tweaking. The following needs to be done first:

• Your domain, for instance http://www.maniacalmusings.com should be fully active.
• You should have a Google account because you need to use the new version of Blogger.

Personally, I’d advise you to get all your posts actually published under your own domain so that you can take regular backups. It’s a bit difficult, but you can transfer all your posts in such a manner that the posts are recreated on your own server, without playing havoc with your current links.

Technorati Tags: blogger, blog publisging

Akismet Not Working

Mar 26, 2007 1 Comment »

Of late I’ve been getting lots of spam. I guess my Akismet plugin is not working. When I noticed an increase in the spam rate I updated Akismet with a latest copy but I’m still getting lots of spam. Is there some better option available?

Is Your Blog Enough for Doing Business?

Mar 23, 2007 4 Comments »

Or should it be just a side-kick of your main business website? It depends on how you focus your blog. There are some people doing decent business through their blogs, for instance, blogs that publish content solely to earn ad-revenue. Bloggers like Darren Rowse and Steve Pavlina are known to be making great money off their blogs and blogging is their full-time occupation. But I’m not talking about such blogs. I’m talking about a blog like mine.

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Is It The End For Content Business?

Mar 22, 2007 6 Comments »

I was just now reading this interesting post titled Is Content Still A Business where the author refers to the dropping CD sales to claim that the business of content production is increasingly becoming less profitable. I think it depends on what you call content and how you market/sell it.

Content is not what you write, or what you publish and produce. Content is what people absorb, what they assimilate, what sort of pleasure or philosophy they derive. That’s content. And as long as you have this content and the will to legitimately sell it, content is always going to remain good business. How you sell content is very crucial, and the above-mentioned post has a valid point:

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