John L. Dilbeck: RSS

Why Advertising, Marketing and PR Pros Should Blog by Bob Cargill

Wed, 19 Jan 2005 16:03:12 GMT

In a three part series of postings in his blog, A Fine Kettle of Fish, Bob Cargill lists 10 reasons why blogging is becoming more important for people in our industry. See Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. I think the reasons he outlines are just as applicable to people in a wide variety of other fields. Why wouldn't a real estate agent, for instance, maintain a blog of listings and sales? This would provide great information about the local business and it would be a great place to add more information about the area and the reasons to relocate there. Over time, this could be a repository of knowledge that would never make it to a website because it is so much easier to blog than it is to update a website. The usefulness of a blog for a travel agent is likewise rather obvious, in my opinion. What better way to tell us of new specials or trips the agent has recently taken. A blog would offer a convenient way to inform clients and potential clients of the good, bad, and ugly in the travel business. I won't continue to list examples. Either you "get it" or you don't.

Blog readership jumped 58% in 2004

Wed, 05 Jan 2005 07:38:11 GMT

It looks like I picked the right year to focus on adding more blogs and more RSS (also known as XML) feeds to my sites! From the Pew Internet & American Life Project site:

By the end of 2004 blogs had established themselves as a key part of online culture. Two surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in November established new contours for the blogosphere: 8 million American adults say they have created blogs; blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users; 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online; and 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs. Still, 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is.

If you're one of the 62% who don't know what a blog is or what RSS is all about, let me recommend the following sites to start learning about them. RSS was co-developed by Dave Winer and you should read about Radio Userland, the product I use to manage this blog and nearly 5,000 pages on several websites. Also, be sure to read All about RSS. Another good resource, and one that keeps getting better, is written by Ken Evoy. One of Ken's claims to fame is presiding over the company that developed Site Build It!, which I think is the best web design, hosting, and promotion service on the planet. I am one very happy customer. The product just keeps getting better. Visit the Site Build It! link first so you can see where he's coming from. Then, go read the information he wrote about RSS: Really Simple Syndication for his Site Build It! customers. I spent several months in late 2004 developing my blogging infrastructure and staking my claim on several blogs at blogger.com. Now that the development work is mostly done, I can pass along newsworthy information to a wider audience faster and more efficiently than ever before. Also, from the other side of the story, I use Radio Userland to read others' RSS feeds using the news aggregator that is built in. I subscribe to a little over 50 feeds and read them on a more-or-less daily basis. It's a lot easier to read the RSS feed and then click on a link that interests me than it is to remember to go to all 50 of those sites and try to find the new information. I'm to the point now that I'd rather get newsletters and site updates in an RSS feed than in an email message or newsletter. I have commented on quite a few blogs and I always meet an interesting person on the other end when he or she responds to my comments. One of the most interesting recent developments -- for me at least -- has been the addition of RSS feeds to the Site Build It! customer forums. Now, instead of having to go to the forum every day, I added the RSS feed and I can easily read down the list of posts to see which ones I want to read and perhaps respond to. This is a very busy forum, and the addition of the RSS feed has shaved a couple of hours off my forum reading time every day. I think we'll be seeing much more about blogs (also known as weblogs or journals), RSS, XML, and similar topics this year. If you have a business with information that changes on a regular basis, you should look into blogs and RSS syndication.

GeorgiaDragRacing.com Tops 1,000,000 page views in 2004

Fri, 31 Dec 2004 11:56:20 GMT

After working hard this year on building a variety of websites and blogs, it's gratifying to see the work start paying off. My brother, David Dilbeck, owns GeorgiaDragRacing.com and I manage most of the site. For the first time, we had over a million page views, but that's a bit misleading because we moved many of the new photos to Webshots.com and the news is now hosted on his weblog at gdrn.blogspot.com, so the actual number of page views is probably substantially higher. There were over 174,000 unique visitors at JohnDilbeck.com who looked at over 885,000 pages. I'm always surprised by this because this is a site where I experiment to see what works and what doesn't and it has no discernible theme, other than things that tickle this big brain of mine. I was researching search engine placements for some keywords on all the major search engines and I'm happy to see that we continue to get more and more top 10 positions on hundreds of key words and phrases -- so we're obviously doing something right. I've been working the last three months or so to target the keywords "Cherokee County, NC Business" and "Murphy, NC Business" and I'm happy to see these new sites rising in the search engines. It is my goal to help people in my home county promote their organizations and activities more effectively on the Internet by providing either free or inexpensive advertising and promotion venues. Working together, we achieve better results than working alone. I'll prove that in 2005. Because I'm interested in so many things, I'm going to take the parts of JohnDilbeck.com that are theme-related and move, or duplicate, them on smaller themed sites. We'll see if that results in higher traffic and better conversions or whether I'll just waste some time experimenting. Also, to further segment my interests, I've created quite a few new blogs and they will be associated with new websites. I think it will be better in the long run, but it's more work now. Also, while I'm in development mode, I don't get as much real writing and promotion done, but that should improve by March, 2005, giving me all the rest of 2005 to put my promotional plans to work. I'll be putting a full list of all my blogs at http://JohnDilbeck.com/blogs/ and all my websites at http://JohnDilbeck.com/websites/ so I can keep track of all of them! As of yesterday, all of my blogs have been upgraded to make it easy for you to subscribe to the RSS feeds, and I'll be moving more and more towards RSS in the coming months. I appreciate your visiting my site(s) and I hope we're providing information you find interesting and useful. You ain't seen nothin' yet. Happy New Years, y'all.

Search It! Adds Five New Searches for RSS and Blogs, and Four for Specialty Hubs and Directories

Sat, 04 Dec 2004 21:47:02 GMT

Ken Evoy's free Internet search utility has just gotten better, if you have any interest in RSS, XML, and blogs, or specialty hubs and directories. Search It!, which does NOT involve downloading anything to your computer, is a utility that makes it easier to find information relating to business and ecommerce on the Internet. By using a multi-step process (usually three steps, but sometimes four), it will build the searches for you and go to the appropriate search engine, directory, or content site to find the information in which you are interested. One item you'll see in the Step 1 dropdown box is "Reference Library for Content." By selecting that, Search It! will automatically populate the Step 2 box with appropriate choices. There is a link to get help for using the tool once you have selected your choices for Step 1 and Step 2. The new searches listed in the Reference Library for Content choice in Step 1 are: Yahoo! RSS Domain Search
Feedster Blog/RSS Search
Syndic8.com RSS Search
Google RSS Content Search
Yahoo! RSS Content Search
It's taken me years to learn how to search for some of these things and where to go to find them, and Ken has just given you that power for free. Not only that, but he just added four more searches related to hubs and directories. Select "Specialty Hubs and Directories" in Step 1, and you'll see the following new searches in Step 2: Google Wide
Google Tight
Yahoo! Wide
Yahoo! Tight
The help link below Step 1 and Step 2 gives information on how to use these new searches. I use Search It! just about every day. It's easy to use. Leave the small window open in the top-left corner of your screen so it will be available when you want to find something of interest. The more I use it, the better I like it. I was surprised to see that I have several sites listed in the top 10 for both the Yahoo! Wide and Tight searches for the following keywords: Step 3 = "Murphy NC" and Step 4 = "travel". It looks like the work I've been doing for the last several months is starting to pay off.

I've been a busy boy...

Fri, 05 Nov 2004 10:39:01 GMT

As I wrote back on July 20th, I was sick for some time and just wasn't able to get anything done. Boy, did that change! Between then and now, I've been adding to websits and blogs every day. New websites: A Year From Now -- Act on Your Dream!, Dilbeck Communications, and Cherokee County, North Carolina. AYearFromNow.com is hosted on what I think is the best web design, webhosting, and website promotion service available on the planet: Site Build It!. I haven't had the time to really flesh out this site yet, but that is planned for this winter. Are you interested in telling your success story? DilbeckCommunications.com is hosted by Hosting With Us and this is a great webhosting service that offers quality hosting, outstanding support, and good prices. To build this site, I had to learn PHP-Nuke and PHP programming, but now that I know how to do it, the site is coming along nicely. CherokeeCountyNC.com is a portal for residents of, and visitors to, Cherokee County, North Carolina, where I live. I've been thinking about building this site for about a year and after I learned PHP-Nuke it seemed to be just what I wanted to build the site. It, too, is hosted by Hosting With Us. I'll probably be putting most of my efforts into expanding and maintaining this site. With email getting so bogged down by spam and spam filters, I've decided to look into other ways to communicate and I've been looking at options for building blogs and syndicating the content. Now, I know that I've been blogging ever since I started my subdomain on EditThisPage.com and Dave Winer and Userland were on the bleeding edge of blogging, even before it had a name. I've been using Radio Userland for years to build my static sites and to maintain this blog. Over the years, many others have joined in and there are now many tools for blogging. I've been experimenting with Blogger.com and running my feeds through FeedBurner.com to parse the Atom files that Blogger uses, instead of the more-common RSS. I've managed to get syndication working for all my blogs and you can see this at work at JohnDilbeck.com/blogs/. I'm also experimenting with using Blogger to build static pages on CherokeeCountyNC.com, so, a couple of days ago, I changed the settings so that Blogger.com will FTP the Cherokee County, North Carolina Blog to blog.cherokeecountync.com. My thinking is that this will build new static pages on the site, in addition to the dynamic pages built by PHP-Nuke. I believe that the search engines will index the static pages better than the dynamic pages, but I don't know this for sure, and that's why I'm testing it. It's been a wild couple of months, but a lot of progress has been made. Feedburner.com was a great find and I heartily endorse their products. Blogger.com was also a great find and I endorse their product as well. After the hacker problems I had on GeorgiaDragRacing.com, I've been removing almost all the scripts from my static sites and moving towards other services that I can integrate into my sites using FTP and/or javascript. Some work better and some not as well. So far, I'm not sure which I think is the best. Still testing. At this point, I don't have any plans to build any more sites over the next three months, but I have some ideas for new sites this spring. Over the next few weeks, I'll be updating my sites and fleshing out the new ones. You're invited to visit!

I've completed setting up my weblogs.

Sun, 11 Jan 2004 21:08:48 GMT

About two weeks ago, while working on one of my websites hosted by Site Build It!, I wanted to create a weblog for maintaining current information about telecommunications. While it is possible to create a weblog, of sorts, using Site Build It, it wasn't what I'd become accustomed to using Radio Userland or News Pro. I decided it was time to investigate the state of the art concerning RSS and syndication, and that led me to the newest version of Radio Userland and the replacement for News Pro, Coranto. Both are heavily invested in RSS and XML and it was time to do some updating and building of new infrastructure before I could make progress on my original goal. Now, I've installed Coranto on JohnDilbeck.com and DilbeckConsulting.com. I created a new weblog at blogger.com. I've updated some of the settings at johndilbeck.editthispage.com. I downloaded, installed, tested, and purchased a license for Radio Userland version 8. Now, I'm ready. At this point, I create my weblogs (also called blogs) using Radio Userland, which automatically uploads to John L. Dilbeck's Radio Weblog and to John Dilbeck's Ramblings. Then, it's a fairly quick procedure to copy the entries from my original Ramblings site to it's new host at http://JohnDilbeck.com/news/ where it's powered by Coranto, and to my blogger.com blog at John Dilbeck's Ruminations. I'm running most of the entries concurrently on all of the weblogs, and I don't know if I'll continue doing that or if each will take a direction of its own in the future. Either way, the background work is completed. I have to add a few more pages to several sites where I'll use syndication via javascript to show portions of the blogs on pages that will be automatically updated with no extra effort on my part once they're in place. In a couple of months, I'll know how this is working and how well it suits my original desires. Now, it's time to turn my attention back to marketing and selling.

Weblog entries flowing through multiple sites

Thu, 01 Jan 2004 22:50:05 GMT

I've been working on configuring my various sites so that I can edit one weblog with multiple categories and have it update my site at http://radio.weblogs.com/0133364/ which will be reflected to http://johndilbeck.editthispage.com/ and this site will update the blog entries on the home page and publish an XML file for RSS syndication. The result of all of this can be seen on my test page at: http://dilbeckconsulting.com/news/jd-ramblings.html which uses a relatively simple syndication script at http://JohnDilbeck.com/ to read the XML file and create a javascript output file that can be included on any page on the Internet using a couple of lines of javascript. Still working on testing this at this time. Most of it is working as I hoped it would, but the categories I select on my local Radio Userland Weblog page are not propagating to the other site or to the RSS file. I'll continue to work on this. Eventually, I anticipate being able to edit one single weblog and have it publish to a variety of sites in different ways. Today was a successful test of the concept. Now it needs refining. I'll be talking more about this as it develops.