Friday Question: How Does Your Day Look Like?
Once in a while I get a question on my email inbox asking how my day looks like, what kind of blogging tasks I perform routinely and so on. Since I never answered to them before, I will try to post a summary of my day and my activities below.
7 am - 8 am : Wake up and check email
I go to sleep pretty early every day (around 10:00 pm) so I wake up naturally at 7:00. I really hate alarm clocks, and think everyone should try to live without them, but that is for another post.
The first thing I do in the morning is to turn my computer on and check my email. I have several accounts, but all of them are configured under Gmail, so I just need to go there.
On average I have 20 to 30 new emails every morning, but most of them do not require a reply so I manage to clear my inbox in 30 minutes. After that I go down to take breakfast.
8 am - 10 am : Blog maintenance
After breakfast I will sit in my computer again and start working on the blogs. First of all I will go through all of them approving comments in moderation, replying to any comments that are interesting or asking my opinion, and checking any big incoming backlinks.
The next step is to select the article that will be published that day (usually they have been written already), quickly scan through it to make sure it is all right and then hit the publish button.
Once I am done with the blogs I will hit my RSS reader and scan through all the stories. At the moment I am tracking 112 blogs via Bloglines. I have a Google reader account as well with many more, but usually I don’t have time to check that.
10 am - 12 pm : Article writing
Unless I wake up really inspired, I will only start writing articles and posts at around 10 am. Usually I can write two small articles until 12 pm, with a couple of 10-minute breaks in the middle.
Structured and linkbait articles obviously take longer. Some of them will take as long as one week to get completed, but that is because even when I have a killer article coming I will not write on it for longer than 2 hours a day. It helps to let the ideas settle down.
12 pm - 4pm : Lunch and sports
I have lunch at 12 pm, and after that I will just chill on the Internet or watch some movie for one hour. Once I am done with digestion I will head up to the gym or to the swimming pool, depending on the day of the week.
I always loved sports, and I have done competitive swimming for 8 years when I was younger, arriving to compete at national level here in Brazil.
When I moved to Italy in 2002 I needed to stop swimming though, and for 6 years I did not enter in a swimming pool.
Late in 2007 I started training again, and this year I will probably enter in a couple of championships. We’ll see how the return will go.
4 pm - 7pm : Diversified projects and promotion
At around 4pm I get back to the computer, but in the afternoon I will do all sorts of activities, and they rarely are the same from one day to the other.
If I have a good post on any of my blogs, for instance, I will work to promote it (with other bloggers and on social media).
Most of the times I also have parallel projects (new websites, consulting gigs, etc) going on so I make the afternoon hours dedicated to them.
Finally, before going off to dinner I also like to check my email and clear the inbox again.
7pm - 10pm - Closing the day
The nights that I stay at home I will have dinner and then surf around the web for a couple of hours more, before heading to bed.
Some nights I go out with my girlfriend so I shut the computer down at 7pm and will only turn it back on the following morning.
One habit that I have is to listen to podcasts on the bed before falling asleep. So many times I remember waking up in the middle of the night to turn the MP3 player off, else Leo Laporte would not let me sleep…
Conclusion
As you can see my work load is not that heavy. That is one of the reasons why I decided to quit my job a couple of years ago to start working full time on the Internet. The freedom and flexibility that you get are priceless in my opinion, and they by far out wight any negative aspects (e.g. the lack of social interaction).
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Friday Question: Should I Let People Hotlink to My Images?
Michael Murphy asks:
I recently had an incoming link from another blog, so of course went to check it out to see who had linked me. No one had, really, but they did find an image I had on my site and post it on their blog - which shows as a linkback (clicking the image takes the user to the image location on my site).
I don’t care about the obvious negative effects of hotlinking at this time. I’ve noticed this happening a few times with images and don’t mind when there is no real additional strain on bandwidth.
My question is…are there any positive benefits for allowing people to hotlink images from your blog? Is there any simple way to drive people viewing the image to the blog homepage?
First things first, what is hotlinking? Also known as inline linking and bandwidth theft, hotlinking refers to the practice of using objects (most of the times images) from one site inside the page of a second site.
While this practice was recognized by the original web architecture, lately people tend to associate it with malicious uses. When you hotlink to the images hosted on another site, for instance, you will end up “stealing” the bandwidth of that website and possibly infringing its copyrights. Should the owner of that site remove the image you will also be left with a broken link.
As you can see, hotlinking to other people’s images is not a smart idea. What about letting other people hotlink to your images, though?
Michael stated that he is not worried about it, because the increased bandwidth consumption is negligible. Personally I also am not too worried if people hotlink to my images, too. The only situation where you should care is when the bandwidth consumed by these external sites is significant, or when you have copyrighted images (e.g., art work) that you don’t want to see around the web without proper attribution.
If you want to block people hotlinking your images you can use the following .htaccess code (check the Preventing Image Bandwidth Theft With .htaccess article for a full explanation on how it works):
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://www.your-domain-name-here.com/" locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://www.your-domain-name-here.com$" locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://your-domain-name-here.com/" locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://your-domain-name-here.com$" locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^$" locally_linked=1
<FilesMatch "\.(gif|png|jpe?g)$">
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from env=locally_linked
</FilesMatch>
Michael also asks if there are any benefits from allowing people to hotlink your images. Yes there are some, provided that the hotlinked image has a link to your website. That will count as a standard backlink, and it might help your search engine rankings. Secondly, if the visitor clicks on the hotlinked image he will be transfered to your site. In reality he will be transfered to the image location, but there is a possibility that he will manually correct the URL to visit your homepage.
Finally, Michael asks if there is any way to redirect people that will end up visiting the image files to your homepage. I am not a .htaccess expert, but I suspect it would be possible to accomplish that with some code. I will ask some friends about it and post the findings shortly. If you know how to create such a redirect with PHP or .htaccess let me know and I will publish your solution.
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