Beef Jerky Blogs

Wednesday, June 11, 2008 Steve Johnson

I just wanted to make another comment today, check out my two beef jerky blogs...

I have to credit my Junk Food Blog for this idea. What I learned on JFB is that junk food manufacturers are willing to send me free samples of their food just to get some extra publicity. The power of blogging is well known to many of them.

But the problem I've noticed with JFB is that companies send me a lot of chocolate, potato chips, and candies, which I don't eat much of. I'd much rather get beef jerky, my snack food of choice. So I launched Best Beef Jerky as an attempt to get free beef jerky, and each package of beef jerky I get gives me material to blog about. Moreover, beef jerky has become pretty popular over the past few years with the low-carb diet craze.

And in fact, the low-carb diet craze is what inspired the second blog, Beef Jerky Diet. I'm trying to see if I can nudge my way into the weight-loss publishing and marketing world with this, and at the same time, use it to cross-promote my beef jerky review blog.

As far as my weight loss quest is concerned, I'm doing pretty well. I've lost about 20 pounds since starting it earlier this year.  

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Blogger FTP is Down Again

Wednesday, June 11, 2008 Steve Johnson

Blogger's FTP service seems to go down frequently. As often as it goes down, I don't know why they can't do something to shore it up.

Here's a rather long thread of disgruntled users, just from the recent downage that started yesterday...

http://groups.google.com/..../browse_frm/thread/9c93b0bfd9e66ad0

It's not until you get to the 91st response that you see someone from Blogger actually chiming in to that they're working on it.

This is what lead me to move several of my blogs over to Blogger's Custom Domains, at least that way I can still use Blogger and not have to deal with FTP problems. But Custom Domains is not without its challenges.

For one, it won't hold the template images. I have to store those files on another server, and have the template (or CSS) link to them. Second, all Blogger-hosted blogs have their content images hosted on Picasa, and Picasa limits me to 1024Mb of file storage. Normally that would be plenty for one blog, but I have lots of blogs, and I need more space. I guess I'll have to pay for the extra storage.

Another disadvantage to Custom Domains is that I can't add non-blog pages to the blog. I like to supplement a blog with several hard-coded HTML pages (non-blog pages), that are linked up from the blog template. I just feel that this adds some unique SEO value. It simply cannot be done, unless those pages are hosted on a subdomain, or an entirely different domain. But then again, that submarines the unique SEO value.

And the biggest problem with moving a blog over to Custom Domains is that it doesn't move the content images from the old server to the new. You either have to move them manually, and change all the image links, or create a map that tells Blogger where the old images are. Either way, it's a pain.

But then again, you don't have fuss with FTP problems.  

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