It’s been a great year for blogging. John Chow has proved to us all that there are small fortunes to be made, Shoemoney continues to inspire, Zac Johnson has made affiliate marketing accessible to everyone and Courtney Tuttle was just a welcome addition to my Google Reader. Those guys have done great things this year, but there are a select few bloggers who have achieved fame for all the wrong reasons and it’s these people that I believe are deserving of their place in the Angel Hall of Jokers Blogging 2007.

The king of con-tests

Darin Carter is the first joker to grace the hall this year. Darin made a name for himself when he failed to come through on a number of contests he held, one of which was one by the Cow about three months ago. Other bloggers who were stung by Darin’s dud contests included Ms Danielle and Egonitron. About a month ago, Darin issued this apology:

I ran some promotions and haven’t followed through on my end 100% not because I don’t have the prizes on hand but because of everything going on with me personally and that is a BIG NO NO in business.

So to all who feel cheated (and you know who you are) I appologize and will contact you with the status on your prizes in the next few days.

A month later and Darin is pushing this one under the rug. I asked Darin in a comment on his blog if he had resolved all the problems with his contests. Being the honest blogger with integrity that he is, Darin didn’t publish my comment, or my subsequent comment thanking him for not publishing it. He did give Egonitron his USB stick at Blog World Expo, albeit one that he likely intended to use himself had the two not bumped into each other. This hand delivery came after Darin told Egonitron this in July:

However I got your email’s and have actually packed the USB drive up to ship it out to you.

Nice on Darin. More photos from Blog World Expo please.

Blogger’s reputation implodes

Next up is Scot Smith, the blogger who came up with the ingenious idea of offering a service to fake the RSS count of any given blog. Initial skepticism turned to bemusement when Scot started lashing out at bloggers, calling them playground names and making himself look foolish. We haven’t heard from Scot for a while, but no doubt he will resurface at some point.

RSSXplosion doesn’t appear to have taken off just yet. Highlights in this debacle came when Scot called the Cow a “tool” and me a “moron”. Quote of the year came in the form of, “Blogs have no credibility. My service gives bloggers credibility with OTHER BLOGGERS.”

A blogging disaster

The third joker in this year’s list is Anthony Feint of Blogging Dosh fame. Anthony first hit the headlines when he borrowed the RSS counter of another blog and started charging his advertising rates based on the inflated count.

The bigger controversy was when Anthony violated a resell agreement on a graphics package and started selling it on his down site for $7, $3 cheaper than it was being offered on Deal Dot Com. Anthony then went on to label Deal Dot Com a scam. The real problem here was that Anthony was stubborn in how he dealt with the situation. Anthony’s blog now sits unattended collecting dust.

It’s not always good to talk

I couldn’t compile this list without mentioning Andrew Talk. This guy paid John Chow $400 to review a blog full of content plagiarized from John’s own blog. After being named and shamed, Andrew apologized and took down all the content, replacing it with a poll asking his new readers if they thought he would be able to bounce back – opinion was divided.

Andrew came up with a few lukewarm posts and some downright awful ones. At one point, he started his own affiliate scheme that paid $0.01 for every visitor affiliates sent to Andrew’s blog. I don’t know how many people took Andrew up on this amazing offer.

In a bizarre twist, Andrew’s blog has apparently been sold, I can only assume to a member of his family.

All mouth and no trousers

The biggest joker of all has to be Ashwin Khanna. This guy scammed the world by offering $2,500 as a prize in a blog contest. Ashwin fixed the contest so that a blog he had set up won. Contest Blogger was all over this one – and rightly so. Ashwin has since issued a feeble apology on his blog:

So it has been 2 months since I last posted something. I guess the first thing to do is to apologise to all the readers who entered the competition. The competition was something I stupidly thought of as a way to get a surge of traffic – which it did – however, I failed to think of the end result.

Common sense failed to prevail in Ashwin’s case. The poor guy now has a dead blog and a name that isn’t worth mud any more.

We could all learn something from these jokers. Just do the exact opposite of everything they have done and you will achieve success. Any more for the list?

Tags: Blogger light relief by Angel
6 Comments »

This is something I had been trying to wok out how to do for a while. It’s particularly useful for implementing links only on certain pages or for keeping stuff on your home page but off of the rest of your blog, or vice versa.

Conditional tags are a way of having bits of your blog show up only in certain places. The task I had yesterday was to implement some RSS code on only certain pages of a website. I needed to keep the code kept off of the front page and only under a certain category, let’s say “category A”, for example.

It was so easy to implement that I’m actually a little embarrassed that I didn’t learn this basic code earlier. Bear in mind that this code will only work when implemented in your template files and not in actual blog posts.

There are a range of conditional tags that you can use, all of which can be found on the Wordpress website. Here’s the one I needed:

<?php if(is_category(’category A’) ) { ?>

Code went here

<?php } ?>

Let’s say you want something to appear only on your home page. The code would then look like this with conditional tags:

<?php if(is_home() ) { ?>

Code goes here

<?php } ?>

It’s that simple. Conditional tags can come in handy for cleaning up your blog’s template. The possibilities are endless. If you want to use multiple conditional tags, you can do so as follows:

<?php if(is_category(’category A’) || is_single()) { ?>

Code here again

<?php } ?>

This would have the code show up only in category A and on single blog posts. Easy!

Tags: Tips and tricks by Angel
No Comments »

I’m disappointed with how the sale of Cash Quests has gone down. After reading that site daily for the best part of a year, there were times when I was inspired and educated to make money online. Although I often disagreed with the authors of Cash Quests, there were many articles that made that blog stand out. But now, after the blog was sold for $15,000, it’s been left for dead.

Somebody has obviously taken over the blog because the advertisements have been removed and replaced with large ad blocks. There hasn’t been a post on Cash Quests for more than a week and neither the old nor new owners have even mentioned the sale. Compare this with the sales of Blogging Fingers and Ryan Shamus’ blog and you see a stark difference – those sales were open and publicized.

Cash Quests was pulling in $1,300 a month, but why would any of the advertisers continue with their packages now? Furthermore, who is going to buy a review from Cash Quests? Take a look at the Cash Quests advertising page and, oh, wait a minute – there is no advertising page! It now point to a page on the website of the new owner(s) – IEntry.

It’s hard to imagine why a company would spend that kind of money on a blog only to kill it. Even the “About” page is now redirected to an IEntry page.

The iEntry Network consists of the best business-to-business web search engine, several targeted “niche engines” and email newsletters reaching over 6,000,000 unique opt-in subscribers. Total newsletter delivery is over 50 million emails per month.

It’s hard to believe that the owners of Cash Quests would let their blog fall into these hands when other bloggers have made it clear how important it was to them for their sold blogs to be treated well by the new owners. But then, it’s all about money, isn’t it?

Cash Quests is dead.

Tags: Around the web by Angel
4 Comments »