I’ve been blogging on this site for about 5 years now. Throughout the years, there have been many changes.
I started brand new like many starting today. No experience in blogging or writing tutorials. I’ve managed to learned a lot along the way.
Today, I still don’t call myself a professional blogger or webmaster, but I do all work and manage all changes on this site. I don’t pay anyone to fix or manage this blog.
Today, I want to show you how I got here and what I learned along the way.
When I first started, I followed the same path many do. Register for a domain and webhost. I went through many webhosts and domain names, some of them really crazy, until I settled on liberiangeek.net.
My first host provider was bluehost. I had already registered my domain with Netfirms, so I had to do a DNS change to point to bluehost IP address.
Like many, I was always tweaking my site. First started on Drupal, then switched to Joomla. Finally switched to WordPress and haven’t looked back.
On WordPress, I was always adding plugins, changing my themes, and content. Not what you want to do when running a professional website, but it was all fun.. I felt like I was making a difference.. adding my voice to the global community.
I always looked out for user comments.. thinking the more comments the more popular the blog is. During those first few months, all the SPAM comments, I approved.
And you know those SPAM comments mostly have nice things.. like “I love your theme”. ” Your website is so fast, what did you do to make it this fast” LOL
Well, it’s been a while.
WordPress have been my primary content management system. It’s wonderful.
I signed up for AdSense. Was making good amount of money. Money was so good, I started turning around few posts a day.
Around the fall of 2012, I was hit with Google Panda. Sucks!
Traffic dropped, AdSense income fell like crazy. That’s when the party came crashing down. I have been in recovery mode ever since.
In recovery mode, I switched from 1and1 hosting to Google Compute Engine. Switching to Google Compute Engine saved me a lot of money. I also switched from Apache2 to Nginx webserver.
I switched to Google domains. I removed many plugins, I currently run only 4 plugins, including Akismet.
I switched all my pages to all HTTPS from HTTP because Google promised a small bump in traffic for those sites that run HTTPS.
After a year running all HTTPS, I discovered it has negative impact on AdSense, so I switched back to HTTP.
I removed hundreds of posts, hoping to recovery my traffic and improve my AdSense earnings to what it used to be.
I wrote longer posts, not very long when compared to other posts online, but long enough to make Google happy.
With all the changes I made, there was no recovery. I waited for subsequent updates hoping to reverse the negative impact, but with each new update, this site went more into Google dark hole.
It came a time, I gave up and just forgot about the site. Didn’t update it, didn’t write and started focusing on my full time job.
This is where I am today. Focusing on my full time job while writing about once a week.. sometimes, none at all.
So, you see my journey. It all starts great, then overtime, if other things not under your control impact your site negatively, things will begin to really slow down..
If you’re just starting, start hard and make sure you love what you do..
Enjoy!