X111.com

A few… ehm… pointers.

• Be as bland as possible, remember, we’re aiming for the biggest possible demographic. So no words like shit, fuck, arse, or cunt. No criticism of anything that goes on in the real world either, every reader counts.
• Refer to your blogs/posts as articles, it sounds more like it’s actually worth reading.
• Tutorials rock! But hang on, you don’t actually know enough about anything to write a tutorial. No problem, just make a 3 page editorial about changing the header image of your blog. Lame? Yes. But it’s quality content! Ofcourse you need to plug it yourself on sites like Digg. With the demographic being the way it is there’s a big chance at least a few hundred will randomly Digg it all the way to the frontpage when they see the word tutorial. Suckers… profit!
• The blogosphere. This is a mythical place, a fairyland, where all A-list bloggers go to pat each other on the back. You HAVE to know what goes on in the blogosphere, and become a part of the inner circle.
  There are several conditions for this.
1. write like crazy. No ofcourse it doesn’t have to be original, just make it lots of words and throw in a few pretty piccies/screenshots. At least 1 per day, but 2 or more is better. Maybe 1 ‘article’, 1 ‘tutorial’ and 1 just with random links you copied from Digg or PopUrls?
2. smooch like crazy. Visit all the A-list blogs, every day, all day. And on every fart of the blogger comment how wonderful it smells. It’s the best way to get noticed which will even hopefully lead you to;
3. join a network. Networks are all the rage, you have to be part of one. Why? Eh, because it’s apparently the thing to do when you’re in the big league. You do get linkage though, and linkage is profit. Not to mention a cool little icon of the network you can wiggle into your layout to show you’re part of the popular crowd.
• Design. The Holy Grail. The be all and end all. This is the single most important aspect of the Quest for the A-list, especially if you’re aiming for the Web 2.0 crowd. You have to be original, by doing what everyone else is doing (at the moment it’s rounded corners and lettering with those reflection thingies underneath) but with your own ‘unique’ twist. It HAS to be tableless CSS. Because eeeeveryone will be so inspired with your uniformity that they simply have to check out your code (don’t worry about the lack of graphics or that you can’t code a line of php/perl/ruby if your life depended on it, css is called code in this crowd). Yes ofcourse you could have made it with tables in 1/10th of the time, but then you couldn’t impress anyone with your ‘code’.

[/sarcasm]
Needless to say there are plenty of blogs out there who just happen to end up among the top because they write good and frequently, or who release kickass layouts that everybody is automagically linking to because it’s in the theme. You can pretty easily filter them out from the noise because they tend to stay out of all the ‘blogosphere’ catfights.
My view on my own blog regarding all this? I don’t take it seriously, at all. This here blog thingie is up because I was bored with the old frontpage I had which was a sort of custom portal with all the new bits from around the site gathered in one convenient spot. I eventually ditched it because I thought nobody used it anyway and replaced it with this.
I still don’t have any clues whatsoever what the main thing will be (or even if there should be a main thing) so for the moment it’ll just stay the way it is; a spot where I can dump some links people may like, post the occassional ditty about what goes on in my life and with the site and somewhere I can annoy you with my rants such as this one.