Blazing Minds

This is a guest post from Duncan who is an online marketing specialist and keen blogger representing an online vases retailer

There is a very common SEO technique for building links called “blog comment spamming”. This is very different from “blog commenting” and it is important that a distinction be made before we go any further. Blog commenting is taking a genuine interest in the blog post and leaving constructive feedback or questions in the comment section that ‘adds’ something to the post. Blog comment spamming on the other hand involves not evening reading the post in most cases and leaving some truly generic or mindless comment for the sole purpose of gaining a link. Most importantly, blog comment spamming often ‘takes’ something away from the post and in my opinion is not good for SEO for the following reasons. Read the rest of this entry »

The other night I was thinking of a poem and the words Blazing Minds kept buzzing in my head so I started putting something together on my blackberry and out came a poem inspired by poker tournaments. Since the poem was titled Blazing Minds I saw it more than fitting to donate it to this website as it was the source of inspiration for the Title.

Blazing Minds

Blazing minds and burnt dreams
a past sundered with intention
rocking fortunes gathered
plans starting to unfold

Witty games take no prisoners
a liars cheat easily revealed
mind too slow for this ensemble
another player discarded in cards

Handful of masters, left standing
blazing minds with toasted nerves
a bet is placed to call them in
a bluff or truth about to unveil

A savage hand ends with a fold
queens kissing a wounded heart
a flush of royal seals them last
end as satisfying as the beginning

Poem by Dragon Blogger

If you enjoyed my poem you can read more than six hundred original poems on my Wanderer Thoughts Poetry blog where I play the Random Twitter Poetry every weekday where I take random words and craft a unique poem including all words played.

I can’t believe how the weeks seem to fly by, it’s true what they say “The older you get, the shorter the days!” But enough of all that nonsense, on to the important stuff the weekly round-up of what’s been going in the last week here on Blazing Minds, Google seems to be top of the search engines last week and in the top visited posts the number one post had over 400 hits in the week, wicked! Another surprise was the top referring website was Twitter. So anyway, let’s get on with the stats. 

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I’ve not done one of these Blogger Earnings posts for ages, so I thought it was about time that, I checked out how my blog has done over the last month, Blazing Minds is getting more popular lately and this seems to show on the earnings, though some sites such as SponsoredTweets, Magpie and Google Adsense haven’t pulled in as much as they usually do, but sometimes there is a slump in the earnings and I have noticed in the past the February always seem to be the month that slumps!

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I can quite honestly say that I’ve always been a big fan of FireFox, it’s quick, easy to use and it has a massive amount of add-ons that you can use to help you out with many a situation from simply browsing the internet to helping you out with your blogging, yes you read that right, there are several FireFox Add-Ons, that I personally use that you can use to help with your blogging.

So here in this post I bring you a list of the FireFox Add-Ons that I find useful, some at first you may not think they will help out you out with your blogging, but you will see that there is a method in my madness
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OK it’s been a while since I actually posted a photo a day, but I have been busy and I have been uploading them to flickr But today I had to pop into BMW in Llandudno to have part of my steering wheel replaced, it was the part where the Mini badge is, it has a faux leather texture on it, which had started peeling off, this was a fault in the part, so I got a new one fitted under my Mini warranty.

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This is a guest post from Duncan who is an online marketing specialist and keen blogger representing a producer of natural beauty products and skin care products.

Blogging has come on a long way since its infancy. All bloggers could do back in the day was write a post, give it a title and maybe include a few hyperlinks if they were lucky. Nowadays however there are all sorts of widgets, plugins and extensions to help make the blogging experience a richer one, both for blog owners and their readers. WordPress has undoubtedly had a big part to play in this development, allowing the masses to develop the open source code and customise blogs to suit their needs. The other blogging platforms aren’t too far behind however and their progress is driven by the very human desire to make things better and more engaging.

One such development that many blog owners are taking advantage of these days is music players that they can either embed into their posts or individual pages. A couple of examples of these are the ‘Audio Player’ plugin for WordPress , which can actually be imbedded in any blog if you know a bit of code. Or Groove Shark, which is a customisable widget that will play music on your blog from their own diverse and extensive collection.

Using music on your site can really enhance a visitor’s experience. If you are trying to create an ambiance or have a clear theme on your blog, music can reinforce this. You might also like to showcase your own music on your site so you can get feedback or maybe catch the ear of someone in the industry? What you need to be careful of however is crossing the line between enhancing a users experience and putting them off by forcing your audio choices on them.

It is worth remembering that everyone has different tastes and may not like the music on your blog. Also, these days many people have their own music players open whilst browsing the net and don’t want their songs interrupted by what you think they want to listen to. With this is mind it is rarely a good idea to have music start playing automatically when people arrive on the site, but instead give them the option to turn it on if they so wish.

For example, on this site the music player is closed when people arrive

But if you want to you can open the music player by clicking on the arrow and the song starts to play. In this case it is Michael Jackson’s – Man In The Mirror…classic!

The key is, by all means give your visitors something to listen to when they visit your site and read your posts, but don’t try to force anything down their throats or assume they want to listen to your choice of tunes.