Google Alerts: Know all the Gossips!

Google alerts have become very important nowadays, since you can keep a track of how often people talk about you or about your interest. I read a blog where the publisher said that it’s as good as a PR who actually charges for providing the same service.

I had set my google alerts recently and didn’t know they come in a bulk! Next morning I opened my email and it was flooded with alerts of Donald Trump, Game of thrones, Behati Prinsloo, Narendra Modi and many more.

To start with, the best and probably the most funniest was an alert by Peter Suderman, the managing editor at Reason.com, called The incredible Cluelessness of Donald Trump’. It consists of the hilarious extended interviews and speeches of Donald Trump and never stopping support of GOP to his recklessness. Few of headlines he mentioned were, Five different positions of Trump on abortion, Impossible Debt reduction promises like clearing $10 trillion in 8 years, Nonsense Policy and Dangerous self-certainty. The writer critically analysed Trump’s negligence towards the citizens and his never ending worthless and useless interviews to the media.

The next alert I am going to talk about is the ever famous and most awaited Game of Thrones series. The Independent, a morning national newspaper of UK, published a report on After Show of Game of Thrones on HBO. It will be a talk show about the series and they will discuss on how the story is proceeding and its characters. HBO has previously arranges after shows of the serials Breaking Bad as ‘Talking Bad’ and The Walking Dead as ‘Talking Dead’. I think it’s a great way to connect with the audience and provide deep discussion on the episodes. The news report also quotes George RR Martin- “The hosts will likely have a fair amount to talk about as the show looks set to surpass the books” He also added, “For years, my readers have been ahead of the viewers. This year, for some things, the reverse will be true.” This sounds very interesting and I am definitely up for it.

I would like to recommend Google alerts to all my viewers and ask them to let me know in the comments of what all they read and learned from it.  

 

Spams- NO MORE!

Its a beautiful sunny morning. You are sitting in your garden with a cup of tea and your macbook. You open your last night’s blog to see comments like- “well written”, “Brava!!” etc, and all you see is, “huh!! i followed you scum, follow me back”, “crap, need more audience?? sign up here…. http….”. The morning is ruined and so is your blog post.

Such nasty spam comments can be a big disaster for the goodwill of your blog. It not just adds a negative value to your blogpost but also hampers the true audience and their valuable comments. And why just the spam comments? Porn site advertisements are also a big part of spams which add on to the disgust.

There are many ways you can get out of this and solve your problem. According to my research, 3 best ways to stop or monitor spam on your blog are-

1. If you are a WordPress user, you can customise WordPress to minimise comment spam. By this you can hold the comment until you approve them. Sounds good? Here are the directions to use this facility of WordPress- Go to your Dashboard settings> Discussions. Tick the boxes next to “Anyone posts a comment” and “A comment is held for moderation” on “E-mail me whenever….”.Then tick “Comment must be manually approved” in the section “Before a comment appears.” Now you can moderate comments before they appear on your blog. This might lower down the traffic on your comments, but its worth it!
2. If you are tired of spams, you can direct the comments to a social media website. For example, you can attach a LinkedIn group and start a discussion about it. The audience can freely go to the group and start discussion about the blogpost.
3. Another way to preserve your blog from spams is using a third party comment-hosting platform. To leave a comment on your blog, the reader will have to sign in in one of those you choose, and then can comment on your blog. Some of the top commenting systems are- Disqus, IntenseDebate and LiveFyre.

Now don’t worry about the spams at all. Go SPAM FREE! 🙂

Slough of Despond 4, Widgets

This one proved to be a fun exercise as it boosts and develops my blog even more. The moto was to add at least 4 widgets to my blog. The ones which I chose are-

1. Twitter: Follow me on twitter widget will help viewers access my twitter profile, and they will be able to follow me.
2. Facebook Page: Initially, I thought this widget will make viewers direct towards my Facebook profile, so I attached my profile’s URL (and of course that didn’t help). Later i realised its for a Facebook page, so I have attached my Dance academy’s Facebook page to my blog.
3. Instagram: Attaching the Instagram widget was the hardest as you need to take out a ID from your Instagram profile such that it could link to my blog. But anyway, its done now.. So all my viewers can direct view my Insta profile and as update my profile, the widget will keep updating as well. Yaayy!!
4. Flickr: So after the above three, I ended up having nothing left but Flickr. I have never used it before, but I made an account there and added a widget here. Honestly, FLICKR LOOKS FUN. I might use it quite often now.