iBlogalicious!

Flickr is my favorite photo sharing site. I have been using Flickr since late 2006, and I kick myself for scoffing at hosted-elsewhere photo services prior to then. Flickr makes it easy to upload photos, and thanks to technology I can upload from within my browser, from my desktop, from my iPod Touch, from my iPad, even from my smart phone! I can display photos in sets and collections, and I can create mosaics, collages and slideshows to display on my blog.

Also, from a blogging standpoint, there are plenty of Flickr plugins that I can use to bring Flickr to my blog, and my blog to Flickr!

Are you on Flickr? If so, add me – I’m kiss-my-kitty.

Up for grabs are my recommendations of 3 awesome plugins for WordPress:

Fluency Admin

Use Fluency Admin to create a collapsed-at-all-times sidebar that provides icons (on or off – your choice) for sub-navigation, as well as your choice of background color. I really like Fluency because it cleans up the look of the WordPress dashboard.

Progress Bar

If you want to set up a basic progress bar to show your weight loss, debt paid off, money saved up, etc., then you’ll want to use Progress Bar. It’s quick to install and configure, and requires only one short line of PHP code to get it displayed on your blog’s sidebar.

Twitter Tools

The ultimate Twitter <--> WordPress plugin, in my opinion, Twitter Tools makes it easy for you to send new post notifications to Twitter, and display your recent tweets in your blog’s sidebar. Choose from the hard-coded method or widgets.

Have you noticed that it’s snowing here on iBlogalicious? You can make it snow on your blog too, simply by using the Let It Snow plugin. Speaking of snow, can you believe we had our first snowfall a month ago? I live in Pennsylvania, FYI, so snow in October is not a very common occurrence. In fact, I’m pretty sure the last “significant” snowfall in October last occurred sometime in 1979. Typically we don’t get a decent snowfall until at least mid-November. But on Saturday, October 27th, this is what I woke up to:

Crazy, huh?

In any case, I am totally ready for cold weather. I purchased snow boots for my son and daughter in early October; a new winter coat, snow pants, and a set of waterproof gloves for my daughter three weeks ago; and a long winter coat for myself that night. My son has a very nice 4-in-1 winter coat from last year, and I purchased a pair of snow pants for him about a month back, so we’re all set. Usually I wait until last minute to purchase snow boots for the kids, and by then they’re almost always sold out.

So tell me… are you ready for winter weather?

I purchased my very first Android phone, a T-Mobile G1, in February of 2009. Within a matter of days I was sold. I used to hate Google, but ever since my first Android purchase I have been sold. In chronological order, here are the Android phones I’ve had since then:

• T-Mobile myTouch 3G
• T-Mobile myTouch 3G Slide
• T-Mobile G2
• T-Mobile myTouch 4G Slide (my current phone)

Since I use Gmail (I add my pop accounts to my Gmail account so I can check my non-Gmail account), it just makes sense to have an Android phone. Everything is perfectly integrated: email, calendar, tasks, RSS feed, etc. So if you use Gmail or Google, you’ll definitely want to get an Android phone! ♥

Pinterest is the next thing in social bookmarking. Rather than using standard text and text-based descriptions for bookmarks, and organizing them into folders or categories, Pinterest allows you to visually bookmark pages of interest – and select a corresponding image from that page (or one you specify via URL or upload) to represent that bookmark. Oh, and bookmarks aren’t called bookmarks — they’re called pins. And pins are categorized on boards, rather than in folders or categories.

I love Pinterest. Visually, the layout is gorgeous. The never-ending scroll on pages makes it easy to just browse and browse and browse. You can search pins, boards, do specific word searches, or just browse what other people are pinning. From a social networking standpoint, Pinterest is a lot of fun and easy to use, and makes it easy to keep up with your friends’ interests. And from an SEO standpoint, Pinterest is definitely a worthwhile marketing and optimization tool.

Right now Pinterest is invite-only, but go ahead and request an invite — I got mine within a matter of days!

Facebook

Facebook is the king of social networks, rivaling only with Twitter due to Twitter’s ability to easily mass-promote and connect with others.

FriendFeed

FriendFeed is a simplistic social network that lets you bring feeds from a variety of sources, including Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and your RSS feed, into one central location. Additionally, FriendFeed can post updates to other social networks, including Facebook and Twitter.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a social network site designed more as a resume-style site, but there’s definitely the basic social networking aspect involved. You can use LinkedIn both as a way to network with professionals, and to participate in typical social networking.

MySpace

An oldie but a goody, MySpace is one of the original social networks, and while it’s now very music and independent artist oriented, it’s still worth participating in.

Ping.fm

Ping.fm is not so much a social network as it is a type of forwarding service that will take updates you send to it and forward them to a variety of social networks and even IM clients and sites, such as Yahoo. I personally use Ping.fm, and I love it.

Twitter

Twitter is worth using, period. Need I say more?

Link Juice is an informally-coined term used to describe what goes along with the balance of inbound and outbound links for your website. Google PageRank is almost a community affair, because the links to your website as well as links from your website do help to calculate your overall Google PageRank. While it’s certainly true that quality, unique content and a highly optimized website go hand in hand in helping to calculate your site’s Google PageRank, it’s also true that links in and links out also play a valuable role.

Every time you link to a website from yours, a little bit of your Link Juice goes to that site. Likewise, a site that links to you will give a bit of its Link Juice to you. The higher the PR of the site you link to, the more of your Link Juice you can expect to go to them. And vice versa: the higher PR your site has, the more Link Juice a site gives when it links to you.

For this reason it’s essential to maintain a decent balance of inbound and outbound links.

Here’a a decent article that further explains Link Juice: The Keyword Academy: Link Juice Explained.

How can I increase my Google PageRank?

This is a question that many search engine optimizers as well as everyday bloggers ask themselves and each other. While there is no definitive, foolproof, here’s-exactly-what-you-need-to-do way of increasing your Google PageRank, or at the very least maintain it, there are things you can do to help significantly improve your chances of keeping or improving your GooglePR with subsequent updates. Here’s a random, in-no-particular-order list:

• Blog frequently. Google favors blogs whose content is updated regularly. Keep things fresh!
• Be unique. Under no circumstances should you post duplicate content. This is bad, bad, bad.
• Get quality inbound links. For example, two inbound links from PR5 sites have a lot more weight than five links from PR2 sites.
• Give quality and even not-so-quality outbound links. But try to maintain a balance between your inbound and outbound links.
• Keep your site’s layout up to date and as compliant with HTML and XHTML as possible.
• Keywords, keywords, keywords. Use ‘em everywhere!
• Hook up your site with article submission sites, web directories, and social networks.

Make sure you refer to this list and use it on a regular basis to help maintain quality for your website.

So what happens when you want to blog, but you don’t know what to blog about? Well, first and foremost, I turn to other blogs. I’ll check my Google Feed Reader to see what my friends are up to. I’ll hop around on Stumble Upon to see what’s interesting in the blogosphere. Sometimes I’ll just watch TV. Random things like a commercial for a Orange County jewelry store will be enough to inspire me to blog.

And on days like today, a gorgeous fall Sunday, I’ll simply say “screw it” and find something else to do. There’s always time for blogging, you know?

PageRank, Google’s “ranking” system for websites, is something that updates frequently or not so frequently, dependent entirely upon Google’s very own whims. This year there have been several updates of PageRank, including February 2011, later in the spring, then August 2011 and again in November 2011. Many bloggers are obsessed with Google PageRank, and with good reason: many advertisers and marketers use a blog’s Google PageRank to determine that blog’s “worth” and thus decide whether or not that blog is worth working with.

Believe it or not, Google PageRank is something that is updated continuously. Each day, all around the clock, Google’s servers and magical powers are combing the web and individual blogs, doing various calculations and checks to see what a website’s ranking should be. It’s only every couple of months that the “results” of those calculations and checks are officially released, in the form of a Google PageRank update.

Want to check your blog’s Google PageRank? Use CheckPageRank.net or PRChecker.info.