Happier Abroad Forum Community

With my dating site I used forum. and blog. subdomains. I don't think it really matters since the subdomains get most of their traffic from the main site anyway.

It's quite nice having subdomains because you can host the sites on different servers if you need to.

I like Wordpress's cool themes, here's one I have a copy of:

http://demo.wpzoom.com/?theme=tribune

With kick ass quality articles and great photos, this would make an amazing site. Not too sure about its potential as a blog with many different authors though.

By the way, check out this article (I didn't write it but I kind of suspect somebody here did!)...

http://www.stickmanbangkok.com/ReadersS ... er8448.htm

He kind of makes the points many HA'ers do about AW. Plus he says ladyboys rock (lmao).

He also gave clues about the MGTOW movement - they have a forum which covers stuff also talked about here at HA.

Actually I kind of got a bit creeped out by ladyboys, but they are fun to chat to in bars. The young bar girls were a waste of space once you'd asked them where they were from, but the ladyboys knew how to keep a guy entertained.

Not sure I'll blog about them on HA though, maybe I need to write more about how I financed my 6 months of hanging around in bars.

OK my first blog entry is up now:

http://blog.happierabroad.com/2014/01/f ... broad.html

No ladyboys, just some useful ideas for guys who want to go and live abroad for a while.

I quite like Blogger but can I have a moan about the template we're using. It really messes up the formatting of my article (e.g. the headings) and looks horrible. It's also really slow. Can we have a better one? On another blog I'm using the Travel theme (the grey and orange one) and it's fabulous.

Nice post xiongmao!

The blog layout could be fixed, a short bio on the side could help. Can we get the post displayed increased. Put it up to display 6-8 at a time.

Let's make this happen guys! Happy New Year!

xiongmao wrote: I quite like Blogger but can I have a moan about the template we're using. It really messes up the formatting of my article (e.g. the headings) and looks horrible. It's also really slow. Can we have a better one? On another blog I'm using the Travel theme (the grey and orange one) and it's fabulous.

What's wrong with the current template? Your article looks fine. Which template do you prefer? Send me the link to the template you want and I'll have a look at it.

mguy wrote: Nice post xiongmao!

The blog layout could be fixed, a short bio on the side could help. Can we get the post displayed increased. Put it up to display 6-8 at a time.

Let's make this happen guys! Happy New Year!

The authors are already listed in the sidebars. You can add a bio to it. What we need is something that will show the author's name and ID under the title of the post. Usually blog posts have the author name under them. If a widget won't do it, then you will have to insert your name manually into every article. If you do, you can link your name to your bio or about me page on your own site.

Remember the backlinks you put in the blog count as real backlinks, which Google gives you credit for. But backlinks in the forum don't count because I attributed "nofollow" to them so the countless thousands of links here don't drain our page rank.

To maximize the effectiveness of your backlinks, use anchor text for whatever keyword you want to rank higher for. For example, if you want to rank higher for "Asian women" then use that as anchor text back to a page you want to rank higher for for those terms.

Do you mean you want there to be 6-8 posts featured on the blog homepage? If I did that, it would load up slower wouldn't it? That's why I reduced it to show the latest 3 posts on the home page.

Like I said guys, there's a lot of things I can't figure out about the Blogger template. So I would appreciate some help from those who are familiar with it. I still can't insert the Follow by Email widget, or set up RSS feeds. There's no simple solution to it.

Hi all,
I've just spent hours cleaning up the blog. I used a cleaner and simpler template and reorganized the sidebars so they look neater. Now it looks less amateurish and more modern. Check it out.

http://blog.happierabroad.com

What do you think? Better?

I was also able to add the "Follow by Email" widget successfully this time. I guess Blogger fixed the bug in it. It includes a feed URL. Now I have to figure out how to show the latest posts in the blog as a widget box on the home page.

Hi all,
I've finally gotten the "Follow by Email" and "Subscribe" widgets in our HA Blog to work. I guess Blogger fixed the bugs in its template. So please follow our Blog by entering your email in the "Follow by Email" box in the right sidebar of the Blog to receive updates by email on new content in the blog. Also click on the "Subscribe" link in the right sidebar to get feeds from the blog to your Yahoo Homepage, or whatever else is there. Here is the URL to our Blog, which is now a growing collaborative work by several authors.

http://blog.happierabroad.com

We need as many of you to "follow" the blog as possible, to help get our blog higher in the search engine rankings. I suspect that the more followers a blog has, the higher Google will rank it.

Thanks for all your help,
Winston

Mguy,
I found some sites with new templates we can use in our HA blog. Some of them have the feature I wanted where it will display the latest posts on the main page as snippets rather than showing the full article. Check them out. What do you think? Which one do you like?

http://btemplates.com/
http://www.mybloggerthemes.com/

Winston I am very interested, but can you tell me what kind of topics would be interesting enough to get significant traffic? I have a considerable amount of subscribers on Youtube and I could easily link my videos and account to the blog in question.

TheLegendSeeker wrote:Winston I am very interested, but can you tell me what kind of topics would be interesting enough to get significant traffic? I have a considerable amount of subscribers on Youtube and I could easily link my videos and account to the blog in question.

If your content is good, it will get a lot of traffic from being shared a lot. Some topics get a lot of traffic for being controversial and unique. Others get a lot of traffic because it touches a nerve in people. Dating and relationships are a popular topic.

What are your videos about? What do you write about?

My videos range from controversial, educative to shocking reality, The kind of stuff that gets people hooked. I'm very interested to work online for obvious reasons and also write about my travels but the problem is that there are already a slew of blogs on this topic already.

TheLegendSeeker wrote:My videos range from controversial, educative to shocking reality, The kind of stuff that gets people hooked. I'm very interested to work online for obvious reasons and also write about my travels but the problem is that there are already a slew of blogs on this topic already.

Do you write articles too? Or just videos? A blog is mostly articles with some pictures and videos. Where is your video channel or website?

Mguy,
I put up a list of proposed new templates for the blog at the link below. Go there and let me know what you think.

viewtopic.php?t=22653

I fixed the home page of the HA Blog so that full articles aren't shown on the home page. Instead, they are shown as snippets with a "Read More" link below them. That way the home page of the Blog will load up faster. Check out how it looks now.

http://blog.happierabroad.com/

However, I had to manually do this by inserting Jump Breaks at the point where you want the "Read More" link to show. I did this with the latest 7 posts already. It's kind of tedious to do this for every article, so I hope to find a template that does it automatically.

Until then, to all our Blog authors out there: Please insert jump breaks after the intro of your articles for now, until we find a new template. You can do so in the post form by clicking on the icon that looks like a white square with a zig zag line through it. Let me know if you have trouble finding it.

That way, the latest posts will be shown on the home page as snippets.

Thanks.

Update:

I was not able to get those third party templates to work. They have many problems. They are not customizable and have many fixed elements that cannot be removed. I tried playing with it but could not make many things work nor could I remove unwanted elements and widgets. So I put back the former template.

I fixed up and re-organized our blog. They layout looks better now and I put a header graphic at the top. The home page of the blog now features snippets from the latest 12 posts. What do you think of it?

http://blog.happierabroad.com/

I also put a better blog description at the top:

"Escape the Toxicity and Cold Isolation of America for a Better, Freer, Wilder, Healthier and Saner Life Overseas. Discover Foreign Women, Global Dating, Social Connection, Authentic People, Freedom to be Yourself, Lower Cost of Living, Healthier Food and Saner Cultures Beyond America."

What do you think? Doesn't that sound great?

To the other writers in our blog:

Once I put widgets showing our latest blog posts in the forum index page and main home page, your posts will start getting more traffic. When users see the latest blog posts featured on the home page and in the forum automatically, there will be more visitors and clicks for sure. So your articles will start getting more hits.

Ok I was able to generate a code to display the latest blog posts on any webpage. I generated it using this online tool:

http://feed2js.org/index.php?s=build

Here is the code. It shows the latest 5 blog posts, but can be modified to show any number of posts by changing the "num=5" variable.
If you have a blog too, you can use this script to display posts from it on any page. It's a good idea to display posts from your blog on your home page or forum, to get the most clicks on them.

I will look for somewhere on the home page and forum to put it.