bla.st blog

WordJot has been launched

Tim Bromhead — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 21:48:26 +0000

Hi all, we've just launched our next project: WordJot Simple Online Newsletters, the easy way to set up an email newsletter that's also online for easy reading.
Check it out at wordjot.com

Bla.st is for sale

Tim Bromhead — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 23:12:09 +0000

Bla.st is for sale, you can see the auction at sitepoint.com. The site is ticking along nicely, but I just don't have time to develop or promote the site any more.

It really has been a blast working on the site, I've learned huge amounts about setting up sites and marketing. Our next project is WordJot.com, a simple online newsletters system, somewhat more of a traditional business.

If anyone is has any queries about bla.st, please get in touch.

Entrecard - "Looks a lot like bla.st"...

Tim Bromhead — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 08:40:12 +0000

...a quote from this discussion on Entrecard.

Well done to them, looks like their traffic is going the right direction!

bla.st downtime

Tim Bromhead — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 20:53:23 +0000

Thanks to the super efficient spam filter of Google Mail, the notifications that the domain bla.st was about to expire didn't reach us! Luckily the .st registrar allows 14 days after a domain expires to reregister it, so we're all up and running again.

The lesson learned is not to rely on email notifications for your domain name renewals. We've now set up an annual calendar alarm so this won't happen again.

Total downtime was about 12 hours, and we've added 2 days to the expiration time of all cards to cover this.

New card feature: Headings! Some simple SEO tips

Tim Bromhead — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 10:08:32 +0000

We've added a new field to the card editing screen, you can now add a heading to your card as well as a description. Now, anywhere a card description is displayed, so is the heading.

While not a very exciting change, this should help a lot with search engine optimisation (SEO). We recommend adding a heading to your existing bla.st cards. We've added headings to the top 36 cards so you can see what the new hover window looks like with a heading and caption.

Each card detail page now has a proper title and heading on the page which is very basic SEO- I didn't even realise it wasn't set up properly. If you're trying to attract search engine traffic don't forget to check the basics!

Another tip I learned recently is to make sure you don't use heading tags ie. h1 or h2, for your logo in the header of your site. This is exactly what we were doing with the bla.st name and slogan. The reasoning is if those headings are repeated throughout your entire site it looks like spam to search engines, and at the same time takes the emphasis away from the actual page headings. Instead simply use span tags to style them up how you want.

No doubt there are other changes needed, let us know if you have any other ideas, or check out ProBloggers tips for more ideas.

Make money online with the bla.st referral link

Tim Bromhead — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 02:26:01 +0000

If you're writing about bla.st, be sure to use the new bla.st referral link. If you send a visitor to bla.st through this link who then upgrades their bla.st card, you will earn 50% of the sale. This is a big percentage compared to many referral programmes. Read all the details here.

Joe from Joe Tech has recently had success with the referral programme, and has written a lovely article "I Quadrupled My Blog Income In 12 Days With Bla.st". Good work Joe and thanks for the write-up.

Several subtle bla.st changes

Tim Bromhead — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 10:30:05 +0000

Cards on bla.st look so much better in 'big' view, we've decided to make that the default size again everywhere except the homepage, where 'small' is the order of the day. Although small cards look impressive as a whole, the impact of each card is reduced.

The number of cards visible in big view has been increased from 24 to 36, so users will see more cards on each page view.

If you have any feedback, please send it on.

5 Reasons BlogRush Has Already Failed and Why Bla.st Will Take Over

Tim Bromhead — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 09:31:21 +0000

joetech.com have just written a lovely article discussing bla.st and blog rush. I haven't tried blog rush out at all, but from what I've read there isn't much of a "rush" and even if there was it won't be sustainable.

Thanks Joe for the blog mention!

bla.st should do this...

Tim Bromhead — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 20:28:44 +0000

Hi folks, apologies for the lack of updates recently, I've been flat out on other projects, including one I'll be announcing shortly.

I've also been thinking about ways to improve bla.st, and today stumbled upon a great site today called shoulddothis.com.

I've created a bla.st category which you can use to suggest what bla.st should do:
http://bla-st.shoulddothis.com/

Buckets of fun

More great bla.st reviews

Tim Bromhead — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 03:57:39 +0000

The bla.st reviews keep coming, a huge thanks to everyone taking the time to write!

The latest is a blog entry by Nan from chanceless.net, who gives an excellent introduction to bla.st. Here is her card:

Some more recent reviews include:
justinsweblog.com
adamok.net
makanon.com
petersen-inc.dk
And lots more which can be found on the Technorati bla.st page.

We've added 2c/day to these bloggers cards totally free, and you can too, simply by blogging about bla.st.

New Bla.st Marketplace Page: See who's using the bla.st widget

Tim Bromhead — Fri, 25 May 2007 05:08:03 +0000

Check it out at bla.st/site/marketplace/

There's a great range of blogs and sites using the bla.st widget, thanks to everyone who's trying it out and be sure to check out a few of the sites.

We'll be working on more referral statistics in the near future. Any feedback or suggestions very welcome.

How to Never Clear Out Your Inbox Again

Tim Bromhead — Thu, 24 May 2007 03:43:07 +0000

Do you organise your mail into folders? Like your inbox empty? With this simple system, you can throw those crazy ideas away, and at the same time never file away or categorise messages again. Here's how it works:

For every email that arrives, decide if it needs action or not.
If it does, flag it or do the task immediately. If it doesn't, leave it in your inbox.

That's it, nice and simple. All mail remains in the inbox (almost). No filing away is needed. We can use the search to find old messages, and the flagged items show you what you need to deal with. What more do you need?!

Leave all your mail in your inbox

Why fight a battle you can't win? Life is so much easier if you leave everything in your InBox. No folders, no organising, super easy. Where's that message you need? In the inbox. So simple (almost... see below).

Performance on my old G4 PowerBook is great, even with 5,600 messages in the 'ol inbox, and 25,000 messages in total. Launching mail takes about 10 seconds, and it uses 40MB of real memory on startup. Skype for comparison uses 43MB and that doesn't open 5,600 messages when it launches!

Use the search to find stuff

With Apple Mails brilliant searching, you can find any email pretty darn quick, for example, a search for "Claire" with the "from" search filter selected takes about a second, and that's searching all 25,000 messages on my G4 PowerBook. The "From", "To" and "Subject" search filters make searching much faster than using the "Entire Message" option, which typically takes around 10 seconds.

If things are slower for you, you might like to try this simple tip to speed up Apple Mail.

Flag items that require action

As a general rule, anything that can be done in less than 2 minutes you should do immediately. All other emails are flagged if they require action. Select a message and choose from the menu "Message" -> "Mark" -> "As Flagged". If you want to make this super easy, you can add the flag button to the toolbar (Right click the tool bar and choose "configure"). This toggles whether the selected message is flagged or not.

To view a list of the flagged messages, you can create a smart mailbox. 43folders.com have some great instructions on how to make a handy smart mailbox of flagged items (among other things).

I like to create another viewer window ("File" -> "New Viewer Window") and leave that on the flagged items smart mailbox.

Don't delete anything apart from Junkmail

There's no real reason to not keep every message ever received and sent, apart from obvious junk mail of course. For business it's essential to keep all correspondence. If you never delete anything, you'll never accidentally delete something you need. You might like to remove large attachments ("Message" -> "Remove Attachements"), which will keep storage space down.

Create an archive folder every year

There is one little gotcha with this system, and that is Apple Mail can't handle mailboxes more than about 2GB, so you have to archive old stuff into separate folders. Details in this Apple technote. Luckily search works across all mailboxes at once, and so do flags so it doesn't really matter.

I've created a folder for each year to store that year of email. If you receive a lot of big attachements, you might need to create archive folders more often.

So if you're using mail folders, and your email application has good search capabilities, why not give this method a go?

When advertising attacks

Tim Bromhead — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 01:47:06 +0000

Found on Reddit

A month with bla.st review

Tim Bromhead — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 05:25:52 +0000

Here's a well written one month review of bla.st at meridiancrest.com. Thanks Scot for the great blog.

We have a lot of stuff planned for bla.st yet, and we're going to keep working at it until it's successful. bla.st on!

More sites using the bla.st widget

Tim Bromhead — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 01:39:21 +0000

Here are some awesome sites trying out the bla.st widget. Be sure to check them out, and if you want to advertise on their sites, click the "Advertise here" link under the cards.

citrikacid.com is a great looking site, and their creative binge site looks to be a great way to promote your portfolio.

rugjeff.com is a "Rugjeff's blog about blogging" and has heaps of great info and tips about affiliate marketing, seo, blogging and more.

normanroberts.blogspot.com was an early site to try out bla.st, and now he's trying out the widget.

Scotts blog scottjanz.com is an interesting blog about what's happening in the online world- be sure to check it out.

Other sites include:
kponniah.blogspot.com
somemoreinfo.blogspot.com
desilyricz.com

Thanks everyone for your support! We all really appreciate it, and hopefully some referrals will come your way soon.