Julie Powell (Amy Adams) is a young woman, working at a government institution, and gradually getting bored with her life. She’s meeting her much successful (career wise) friends and realising that there’s nothing interesting or exciting happening in her life. She likes cooking and adores Julia Child (Meryl Streep), a cooking legend. So Julie decides to go through Julia’s cooking book and try all recipes, over 500. And just to make sure, she’s set a tight deadline – 1 year. Part of the challenge is to blog this experience.

The movie has a second line, which tells Julia’s story as well. Julia is in Paris, just after the war, where her husband was on an assignment. She’s bored, trying to find something to do. And she discovered french cuisine classes. She fully devotes herself to mastering the art of cooking. She meets new friends and agrees to work on a cook book – French cuisine for Americans.

Now back to what I wanted to talk about. Blogging. Well, I guess it’s one of the first movies that mention blogging, and kind of have it at the first plane. What’s also interesting, the whole blogging business is seen as a cheap alternative to book writing. You can’t get it wrong, nor there are editors to reject your writing. Just start writing and they will come. Well, sort of. First comment on the blog was from Julie’s mom, advising to stop doing this, at least according to the movie…

What’s really reassuring is Julie’s attitude towards blogging at the beginning. Guess it’s quite similar to what everyone else who starts blogging – “Is there anybody out there?”, “Will somebody contact me?”, “Does that benefit anyone at all?” or “Am I doing all this just for myself?”. Even the tagline was “Nobody here but us servantless American cooks…”. Nobody…

There are lots of SEO gurus out there who would argue that one can gain an army of followers/readers just by purchasing their super system book that’ll make wonders in just 7 days for a mere $19.99 making the website google friendly and placing keywords into the right places. Rubbish, I tell you. It ain’t gonna happen. So what this movie really tells us (or at least told me) – forget about the readers, in the beginning it’s all going to be about talking into the void. Couple of months really, if not longer, before one will get a concise stream of (everyday) readers/fans. Just do what you like and keep on blogging. Be very specific and do not wander away from the track. It’s not a book, so there’s some freedom. Julie even talks about her upset tummy in one post (is that real? I couldn’t find it on the original blog, but the navigation there is horrible, so no wonder).

So are the general purpose blogs doomed? You know, ones that talk pretty much about everything? I don’t know. I suppose, Twitter became so popular* simple because it allows people to just spit everything that they have on their minds out. Blogs require more attention and dedication. If I want to know who’s doing what at this very moment I’d follow them on Twitter, and wouldn’t read their blog. On the other hand Twittering is more about  ”I farted”, “the banana I ate this morning was awful”, etc. And the blogs allow to elaborate more about the things. But then again, who’d be interested in my personal activities apart from my relatives?

Therefore blogs that talk (from a personal point of view) about specific things (such as cooking, traveling, computers, programming, cars, etc) are popular. So is that the way to go? May be if you want more hit’s on the “donate” button. But definitely it’s a “no” for me, as I have more that one specific interest. I’m not going to talk about my personal things, but I will definitely not concentrating on one area either. We shall see where this is going to get me to, but I’ll give it a go.

Bit unstructured post about nothing in particular, don’t you think?… That was done on purpose…

UPDATE Another “speciality” blog that became really popular, but hasn’t been created on purpose, it was just as a “byproduct” of the main activity.

*) Personally I think it’s not that popular as it may seem. Since the message “you can make money on Twitter” got out, it’s more of a social network for various robots (Hey, Tweeter directors, you still think API was a good idea?)

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Yes, it did add the link, but not where I wanted it to add. I want ‘About’ link to be at the end of the list. Always. However it seems that there’s no way of changing the order in the link category, and the links appear based on the link IDs. So the only way to resolve this, is to change link_id of the ‘About’ link to something big, let’s say 10’000. I’m never going to have that many links , so 10’000 sounds like a sound choice.

Go to your database and select all links:

+---------+---------------------------------------------------+
| link_id | link_url                                          |
+---------+---------------------------------------------------+
...
|       8 | http://www.grenadepod.com/category/news/          |
|       9 | http://www.grenadepod.com/about/                  |
|      10 | http://www.grenadepod.com/category/it-technology/ |
+---------+---------------------------------------------------+
10 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Now change the link_id:

mysql> update wp_links set link_id=10000 where link_id=9;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
Rows matched: 1  Changed: 1  Warnings: 0
 
mysql> select link_id, link_url from wp_links;
+---------+---------------------------------------------------+
| link_id | link_url                                          |
+---------+---------------------------------------------------+
...
|       8 | http://www.grenadepod.com/category/news/          |
|      10 | http://www.grenadepod.com/category/it-technology/ |
|   10000 | http://www.grenadepod.com/about/                  |
+---------+---------------------------------------------------+
 
10 rows in set (0.00 sec)

All done, all fixed and here’s how the menu looks now:

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1. Akismet. If you plan using comments (who doesn’t?) you most definitely need this one. This plugin will check any new comment against it’s spam database and if it thinks it is spam – it will not allow it to show up on your site. So no more penis enlargement pill comments… Apparently 83% of comments are spam. It comes in a default installation and also requires WordPress API key. Plugin website.
2. All in One SEO Pack. Makes your website more search engine friendly. Not really sure how critical is that, but I tent to just install these plugins, just in case. Plugin website.
3. Amazon Affiliate Link Localizer. This one is quite handy if you’re advertising Amazon products on your site. Problem with Amazon is that you will not earn a penny if you advertise Amazon.com product and german user clicks and buys it off Amazon.de. This plugin detects the location of the user and display appropriate Amazon website link. Plugin website.
4. Contact Form 7. Simple contact form. Yet quite extensible, allows you to add custom fields, email forwarding, etc. Plugin website.
5. Easy AdSense. Another must have for those who want to place their GoogleAds on the blog. Although it’s primarily meant for placing GoogleAd code, you can use it for other affiliate networks as well. Plugin website.
6. FollowMe. Everyone’s on Twitter these days right? This plugin displays a Twitter “FollowMe” link on your blog. Plugin website.
7. Google Analytics for WordPress. Another plugin to make your website and Google friends. Adds Google Analytics code to all your pages. Plugin website.
8. Google XML Sitemaps. Yup, they want sitemaps as well. So Let’s provide them with some. Very simple and easy to configure. Plugin website.
9. Inline Posts. This one allows you to include posts in your pages. I mean any page. Let’s say if for whatever reason in your about page you decide to add posts – now you can with this plugin. Plugin website.
10. Sociable. Puts links to all gazillion social networking websites that are out there, so people who enjoy reading your posts can spread the joy and love. And yes, you can only select those that you like. Plugin website.
11. WordPress.com Stats. Kind of redundant if you use Google analytics, but I like the ability to quickly check how the blog is doing in terms of visitors, etc. Also requires WordPress account. Plugin website.

As I said, this is just the beginning. These are bare necessity to get you online in a good shape. Add more to your taste afterwards…

Update 1

Just when I started writing my first post about coding, I realised that simple <pre> tag is way too boring and I want something juicier. So there it is, a plugin that adds syntax highlight to the code syntax snippets in your posts. It extends simple <pre> so that you can say <pre lang=”python”> and it’ll render nicely highlighted syntax:

• WP-syntax. Plugin website.

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