Did you ever wonder how Darren Rowse from Problogger started? Or what was John Chow’s first post about? I did, so I began a hunt for the very first posts they published on their blogs. Let’s see what famous bloggers had to say while they were starting with blogging. I think this will be interesting reading and maybe you’ll learn something in process.
Darren Rowse - Problogger
Darren published up to 10 posts a day but I suspect he just transfered them from previous blog or something. In his supposed first post “Get to the point“, he talks about how long should your posts be and how to allure readers to longer posts. Preety useful I guess.
So keep things short and to the point. I know this sounds crazy coming from me - but the stats show my longer posts are often largely are ignored.
John Chow - JohnChow.com
It’s interesting to see that John Chow was posting 2 to 3 post a day when he started his blog. The oldest post I could found on his blog is titled “Welcome to the new JohnChow.com“. It’s very interesting posts, because it tells you how John Chow started his blogging career. He talks about his first website that made him popular.
On April 1999, I started a little technology site call The TechZone. That site has risen to become one of the largest hardware tech sites on the net. Currently the site has over 10,000 pages and gets over 200,000 page views per day.
Jeremy Schoemaker - Shoemoney
It was hard to find Shoemoney’s first post on account of not finding his archive. I didn’t find it because it doesn’t exists. I think this is big mistake and I don’t really know why Shoemoney has no archive page. Anyhoo…here’s his first post titled “So I met Paris Hilton” where he talks about how he met recently very famous Paris Hilton. Nothing to interesting.
I thought she was trying to tell me that I was offering too much money for the website so I put the guy on hold and asked her what was up. She then told me she just saw paris walk down the hallway and that she was near the elevator.
Kevin Rose - Digg
His first entry on his blog is very short and dated not so long ago. The post is titled “Welcome to my site..” and published on April 30th. His blog is dreadful but I guess it doesn’t matter when you’re famous like Kevin. Rose also does a popular weekly podcast called Diggnation with co-host Alex Albrecht.
I like this better. Short snips of my life. Makes it easier to update.
Seth Godin
Seth’s first blog post is dated from January 2002. The title “Boring” tells nothing but after reading this post I realize he wanted to point out how consumers tastes changes to quick for retailers to adapt. I saw him talking at TED conference about marketing ideas. He really is a great speaker.
Having done most of my shopping online lately, I’d nearly forgotten how boring it is. Every merchant alive needs to read Paco Underhill’s book, Why We Buy.
Matt Cutts - Google
Matt’s first post is titled “.htaccess 101: how to password protect a directory“. The post talks about the easiest way to make an .htaccess file in Unix/Linux so that a directory is password protected. I don’t really know exactly what’s that all about and it certainly doesn’t help me but I guess it’s a good post since it has over 40 comments.
Make an .htpasswd file. The htpasswd command in Unix does this. You should put the password file outside of your web directory. So a command like “htpasswd -bc /home/matt/.htpasswd review donotenter” will create a new file using a username of review and a password of donotenter into the file /home/matt/.htpasswd . If you were to run the command “cat /home/matt/.htpasswd” you might see a line like “review:M1OdtjdGiDn1Y”.
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Interwebhunt
Good posting. Always interesting to see what others were saying when they first started out. Its a fun side project to look back and see how far SEO has come and what hasn’t changed along the way.