Good Evening everyone,

In my last post I was wondering what on earth Technorati is, how it works and how to increase your “authority”.

Technorati seemed to be a bit of a dark art form, with information hidden away and I didn’t really understand how it did what it did.

Well, I have found the answer.  And actually it is rather an anti-climax.  Technorati’s authority is worked out by looking at how many blogs link to you.

That’s it.

As you can tell I am a bit bemused and expected this to be a lengthy article on the inner workings of a secret internet traffic boosting bit of kit, but nope its just a link looker at-er.

One thing to note though is that it does not count comments.  So you can’t actually do anything about it unless people are linking to you in their posts.

So here’s an idea, I’m going to build a list.  Once that is done all you have to do is copy it into your own site and then add links to your favourite sites, tag them and then ask them to do the same.  This will result in more blogs linking to us through posts etc and will work well for the good of the blogging community, hurrah and all that and for my next trick I shall end all wars lol.

Ok – here’s the audience participation bit – Add a comment with your blog’s URL below and I will duly add you to the list in the hope that you will do the same… And don’t say I don’t give you nothing!

Happy Travelling!

I have been attempting to grow the traffic on this site since I first started blogging.

I have concentrated a lot on the magical world of search engine optimisation and found this to be a bit of a “dark art” that is incomprehensible to most, although having an SEO plugin for wordpress seems to be helping, expect a post on that soon (when I actully know more about it).

Technorati - what is it?

As for other sites for social media; Digg is widely regarded as the grand-daddy of all of them and then there is StumbleUpon, which pretty much does exactly what it says on the tin.

But I was quite interested in Technorati, it is completely blog focused and seemed to have more “things” than I have seen on the other sites.

So off I went to find out more. Technorati states that:

Technorati was founded to help bloggers succeed by collecting, highlighting, and distributing the global online conversation. Founded as the first blog search engine, Technorati has expanded to a full service media company providing services to the blogs and social media sites and connecting them with advertisers who want to join the conversation, and whose online properties introduce blog content to millions of consumers.

So I am now signed up, have entered all my information and you can now find my profile here

The steps for your own profile are reasonably simple: creating your own profile, creating your blog profile, adding a description (250 characters max) and adding keywords.  Nice and easy so far.

Back to my profile page after the set up and I have an authority of 0 (zero).  hmmm.  Next up – how on earth to increase this rating.

Well that my dear readers wil come in another post.  As I am still actually finding this out.  See, I told you that this blog was indeed “live”.

I have an idea of how to work Technorati but I really need to investigate.

Have you got any information on how Technorati works?

Hello all, how are you?

Well I have been doing some planning for my travels recently.  Which makes a change to messing around with the look and feel of this site. (Which I hope most of you find ok).

So, what have I been up to?

Well I have come up with a “first draft” of the route, this is by no means finalised and there are going to be a few changes to it, but here it is draft numero uno.  Official Travel Route of Overland Wannabe.

Any suggestions of places along this route are very welcome!

A guest post from the brilliant Kevin Littleton at kevinlittleton.blogspot.com

Keeping Memories

Don’t delete photos too quickly. I don’t delete anything when I’m taking pictures somewhere because looking at them on that tiny lcd screen doesn’t give you a clear view of what it really looks like. When you get home and upload those pictures to your computer you get the real look. You can’t really tell what a picture looks like from your camera. Some of my best shots were later “discovered” after going through them on my computer. Then there is Photoshop where you can take those “awful” shots and touch them up to make them look “better”. Remember though, when in doubt make them black and white and then they instantly become art!

To take this practice further I don’t delete a single photo. Ever.

The reason behind not deleting any pictures is because each picture is a memory and each memory is something beautiful that needs to be remembered. So what if the picture isn’t artistically sound, it’s your picture and it’s your memory.

Not all my pictures are in focus or of anything particularly exciting but I do keep them all. I don’t want to throw away memories. It’s the same thing as writing in a journal. Let’s say you had a bad day and you write about it in your journal or diary. Just because it was a bad day would you crumple up that piece of paper out of your journal or delete that entry from the computer? I hope you don’t because you can use that bad day later to grow and learn from. Each memory in our head is equally important. We need them.

Kevin Littleton

Please leave a comment for Kevin below.

Ok, well on my previous post I discussed the kind of things you should think about when transferring from Blogger to WordPress.

Patty Mooney commented on that post and asked:

I am curious why you decided to transfer to WordPress from Blogger? Looking back, would you do it again?

Well that will make a good post, thought I,  and so here it is.

First of all, Why set up a blog on Blogger?

I am a bit of a Google convert to be honest.  I love GMAIL, Adwords, Google Analytics, Google Connect, Google Docs etc, etc (and it really is a long list!) So it was only natural for me to set up a blog on Google’s blogging service, Blogger.

I didn’t really research into WordPress too much, at the time I set up my original blog WordPress 2.7 was just a sparkle on the motherboards at WordPress.  The older version did have loads of people recommending them, at the end of almost every post about how good WordPress there was the word “BUT”.  And then a whole load of things that WordPress was bad, slow or just confusing at doing.

So with my blogger blog set up and running, and with a boost from Blogger by being nominated at “Blogs of Note” (which resulted in over 20,000 visits) why on earth would I change?

What are the limitations of Blogger?

Now I’m not going to discuss all of them, but only the ones that were relevant to me.

First point was the ability to add pages, I wanted to have organised content so that people could easily search through, find the information they wanted more easily.  Secondly I also wanted the ability to add contact forms, places for a store (secret project coming soon!) and other ways to make more money online.

I am also a bit of a geek, well actually quite a large geek.  Having my own domain and the ability to add Plugins, Widgets and complete access to my own domain, add to that my own email domains an hey presto, that’s the geek in me fulfilled.

Also I wanted to have a professional looking site that would allow me some funky ways to access and upload to it.  having FTP access allows me to upload things much more quickly than having to wait for Blogger’s image uploader.  All of thee are things that I had to think about for travelling – time on Internet = money, even more so than when online at home.

Of course the final push came from trying out a free wordpress blog first of all.

The immense plugins library and availability of themes really tipped it for me.

I have a plugin for a contact form, a plugin for search engine optimisation, a plugin that automatically creates a sitemap, a plugin that automatically cuts posts to previews, a plugin that enhances the site search (try it, it’s load of fun) and there is also a secret plugin, if you leave a comment you will find out what it is!

And – These plugins are so easy to use!

There is no painful set up  – most of them do not require any coding skills or to even touch the website’s code!  All I need to do is download, unzip and upload the plugin into my library and WHAM, I can see it in my Plugins page on the admin area – go into it’s own settings page and that is it.

And I think that is the real beauty of WordPress.  Think of it as being the iron structure within a skyscraper, you can clad the outside however you want and also furnish the inside of the structure to make it work the way you want it and look the way you want.

Having the ability to grow and expand this site was a major factor in changing to WordPress.

Looking back, Would I do it again?

Yes – I can definitely state that I would still have moved from Blogger to WordPress.  I would of course do it differently, but then again, would I know what I know now?

I’d say to everyone to think carefully about changing your blog. I know for a fact that I got it wrong, I moved too quickly and had a far too complex template to start off with.

Have you changed your address or service or are you looking to? Or do you have any further questions, please add them to the comments below and I’ll reply to you.

How to survive the upheaval of changing from Blogger (Blogspot) to WordPress.

Be prepared for a hell of a lot of hard work, things not working correctly and basically everything going wrong.  Also make sure you have everything in place and tested before you tell your readers about the new site.  I told my readers far too early, which led to all kinds of catastrophes and it may take quite a while to build up my reader network again.

For now though, here is what I have learnt:

Lesson Number One

Don’t run with the first theme you find, try some out, add posts to them for a while and see how it works

The first WordPress theme I used was a free theme from WOO Themes.  I thought that the exciting front end would work well for the site, allowing me to categorise posts left, right and centre.  I then discovered the plugins library for WordPress, which is full of easily installable widgets.  This is where my problems really came in.

Lesson Number Two

Use a theme that gives you a bit of room to customize, in my old theme I was unable to edit much on the sidebar, which is a great place for bloggers to add tools for readers.

Ultimately though the theme was too business like, it didn’t really feel like a blog and it detracted from the storyline way of viewing the site.  I still needed a theme that would allow people to be able to look through the categories as lovley drop down menu’s (which you can do above).

I found brilliant theme that ticked all the boxes, downloaded it, unpacked it (you will need Winzip or similar) and off I went.  Here I encountered my first error, the stylesheet appeared to be missing!

I went back through the files and found the stylesheet, tried reuploading it and then went thourgh the whole process about three times, until I realised what I had done -

Lesson Number Three

Always make sure that any theme, plugins, widgets or whatever else is designed to work with your version of WordPress, if it isn’t then you could waste hours of valuable blogging time!

I finally found a theme (the current one I am using), made  a number of changes to it and am now back to blogging.  If I look back I now realise that I should have been a lot more patient, actually waiting until I had the site completely set up before changing all my links across.

Speakling of links, I had expected to be able to do a simple 301 redirect from my old blogspot address.  I assumed this was possible, well, I assumed wrongly!  I have now tried a number of redirects from my old blogspot address, none of them really work, and those that do get Blogger breathing down your neck and calling you a spammer!

P.S. If any one knows of a good one that works then please let me know!

Lesson Number Four

Don’t assume things will work, Google them and try them out first.  This will save a lot of disappointment and re-thinks at the later stages.

So after all that do I still think that the change was worth it?

Well yes, mainly because I was able to do a good deal with ITSimple.co.uk for hosting etc. But even without that I do really enjoy the awesome and powerful features of WordPress and it’s plugins.  I shall be here for a very long time ladies and gentlemen so no need to update your bookmarks anytime soon. (Famous last words)

So what about you – where and what is your blog based on, what features do you think would really benefit a blogger? And what could we all do without? And should Blogger allow a simple re-direct feature?

VersatilityLiteScreenshot

A great big hello to everybody out there.  And also an apology for taking so long to get everything sorted.

We have had more issues than you could believe and more themes than you could create parks for.  But now we’re back.

We’ve got a theme that works and blogging is once again top of the agenda – please remember to change all of your bookmarks, favourites (or whatever you want to call them) are changed and also please sign up to the new email updates.

I hope everybody likes the new look site, the categories will make it easier to update our travels and for you to look through each country and also all the other random advice we will put up about travelling.

I’ll get loads of the widgets back up as well very soon, if you see anything wrong please let me know, also any comments regarding anything on or about this site are very welcome.

Bring on the trumpets, roll out the red carpet and marvel at the wonder.

Yes the front page is just one of the massive changes we’ve made around here.

You may also notice the menu bars at the top, where all the pages reside and the wonderful categorised posts to allow you all to find your way to the information you want an awful lot easier.

I would love to hear from you all, both old readers from my blogger blog and new readers who have found this site.  Posts will be more focused now on the conversion side of things, as the new van is coming soon.  After that we will have a little spree of planning posts then off to the travel posts!

We’re also planning for a little video action here as well, all in time though folks.  Unfortunately I am a man, meaning I am unable to multi-task.  A woman could have probably created this site in half the time, but then again a woman….. No, had better not.  I’d be shot, or at least loose some readers.

Well enough of the chitter chatter.  Please Bookmark this page, subscribe to the feeds or subscribe to the email feed, all of these can be done using the links at the top right hand side of this page.

Are you thinking about doing your own thing like this site?  contact ITSimple.co.uk

Well, I’m breaking out the champagne, who’s joining me?

And I mean Good – For this morning I do not have any work to go to. The sun is out and I am off to view some more LDV vans for converting.

That’s all for now folks, will update more later on.

Ok so on Friday I finally finished work, packed up my office and buggered offski!

(comments jump)

I took Saturday as a complete day of nothing, did some chores round the house, got my car cleaned ready for it to be sold and then had a day off from thinking about the future, because it got real pretty quick.

Today I am back – It’s not a good thing to think that I am not actually working anymore, in fact it’s quite the opposite. I am working harder than ever before in an attempt to actually become a travel writer. There you go guys and girls – my secret is out!

I have always loved writing, and even went to do Journalism at University (that’s another story for another time)

So it’s something I am keen to get back into. Next week I shall be sending of letters and emails and a whole snow storm of other applications to writing places etc to see what I can get. I will also be tracking down some of the leisure magazines, campervan mags, tenting mags and of course you guys will get the first peak as usual.

Also – and I say this with a small amount of trepidation, I will be moving this blog!!

It will be moving to a lovely new page where I have a nice layout, my own domain and the best thing of all – lovely galleries and some other funky stuff. I will let you know when this is all going on but I want to give a huge shout out to ITsimple.co.uk who have done me some remarkable favours for this to go ahead.

I hope you will all join me when the new one is created.

As usual comments are very welcome.