Region Blog Review

Region Blog Review is moving to NWIBlogs.com.

Please visit version 2.0 of Region Blog Review at NWIBlogs.com.

The Post-Tribune’s Jerry Davich is firing up the Northwest Indiana blogosphere with his new blog — Observations From The Edge.  One of his first posts in January encouraged people to visit Dune Acres, a place that isn’t known for its tourism bureau and red carpet treatment of “outsiders.”

It’s a great start!  Let’s hope that Jerry Davich continues to “stir the pot” with his observations about life in the region posted on Observations From The Edge.

Our furnaces are our lifelines when temperatures fall below freezing, so it is always good to know a little about how your home’s heating and cooling systems operate.

On Home Comfort is a new Northwest Indiana blog that takes some of the mystery out of heating and cooling.

Here’s a sample:

If cold walls or ceilings, drafty doors and windows, ice dams and icicles come to mind when you think of your home in the winter, you’re paying to heat air that leaks right out of your house.

Blogger and builder Steve Dalton has created a ranking system for Northwest Indiana blogs over at his Northwest Indiana Squidoo Lens.

It’s a pretty smart idea and a great way to have a mini-blog ranking competition.

Click through to see the plexo

A view from a Google Analytics Map Overlay report

The key to recovery is to admit the problem — isn’t that what they always say in movies and television shows about celebrities and others facing major life issues?

I’m admitting that I have an addiction to blog statistics.

Sure, I can handle my stats. I just tell myself that so that I don’t feel so bad about having multiple redundant systems keeping track of hits and visits and all sorts of other information about my blogs.

My statistics packages include:

Google Analytics

Statcounter

Quantcast

WordPress.com Stats

Analog 6.0 and Report Magic

Is it a bad sign I can’t just stop at one?

I have to admit that I used to think that people who used WordPress for their blogging platform were reminiscent of cult-members on a mission for new recruits. It might have been the blogging crowd I ran with at the time that always brought on the full force of peer pressure to join the WP world.

After using WordPress for a couple of months, I can say that all of the evangelism for the free program is warranted. I host the program on my own server and my hosting company installed it at my direction. (They also handle upgrades, so there’s no need to manually delete and replace old files using FTP).

Before WP, I had used Blogger and the draft version of Blogger and hosting the files on my own servers. After suffering the curse of Blogger users who FTP — long wait times to get new posts to upload — I finally took the plunge and set up my blogs using the WP platform.

The best thing about WordPress its ability to automate many functions that I was manually doing when I was using Blogger. Sitemaps are automatically updated and pings sent to various services when I create a new post. Have a lot of comment spam? The Akismet plug-in takes care of most of it.

Before WP, I wasted time creating my own sitemaps using various programs that required me to upload the sitemaps to my server. I’ll never do that again, but I’ll get all of the benefits of having up-to-date sitemaps.

Using WordPress takes a lot of the tedium away from blogging.

I love writing, but dislike spending lots of time hassling with administrative issues required to ensure Google and other search engines come to visit. It’s great to be freed from the techy chores when they can be done in the background by the software!

WP makes it easier to concentrate on producing great blog content.

Matt Saliga at Hammond Ramblings predicts there won’t be a “Miracle on 165th St.” in Hammond  as a major retailer plans to pull up stakes.

You have got to be kidding me! Evidently the Mayor is going full steam ahead with the “Keep Carson Pirie Scott in Hammond” campaign. All schools in Hammond passed out flyer’s today rallying the people of Hammond to save Carson’s asking residents to be part of “The Miracle on 165th Street!”

Buzzcut discusses his wife’s BMV woes — she had to spend $600 to get her name changed to be able to get a driver’s license.

Okay, so I moved to Indiana from Illinois this year. My wife and I went to the BMV to get our Indiana licenses. I had no problem. But my wife was unable to get a license with the correct name on it.

When we got married 11 years ago, she took her maiden name as her middle name (you know, like Hillary RHODAM Clinton).

The evolution of spam continues.

As bloggers fight spam with Akismet, comment moderation and captchas, spammers exploit a new technique to grab eyeballs for their splogs — spamming Technorati by selecting top 100 blogs as their “favorites.”

Reports Mixed Market Arts:

Akismet does a great job at weeding out spam blog comments, and to keep up with the evolving antispam techniques, the spammers have started joining Technorati and adding top blogs as favorites. This allows them to show up on high traffic (Technorati) blog pages without having to be approved by the blogger.

I’ve found over the years that Problogger.net is a great source of ideas for all things blogging.

The site is oriented to monetizing your blogging creations. Author Darren Rowse is a blogger who makes a ton of money selling ads on his blogs, in addition to running a blog network and being a part of an emerging church in Austrialia.

But, the fact that Problogger is designed for those aspiring to make money doesn’t have to stop someone who isn’t interested in the monetary aspects of blogging.

The blogging tips can be applied to any blog written by someone who wants to propagate his or her ideas throughout the universe.

Some of the posts are inspirational, as well as informative. Some deal with getting traffic. Other with design. There’s always something to be learned.

Problogger is a great place to learn more about being a great blogger.