Just came across this cool site called BlogBarter.com. It’s main purpose is to pair non-techie people with those who have the skills to get the job done — but on a barter system. So instead of paying someone to help you out with some tweaks you might need for your blog, you can trade for it — whether it be baking them cookies, sending them some homemade soaps, or buying them something from their amazon wishlist. Kind of a cool idea. When I’ve more time, I’ll explore it even further - but for now, just know that this resource is there for you.

If you’re going to put a lot of time into your blog, you might as well make some money off of it - and people are - to the tune of five figures a month!

You can make serious money with your blog by joining Google’s Adsense program, which serves up text ads based on the content on your site. If visitors to your blogs click those google ads, you’ll make some cash which can quickly add up to quite a large amount. People everywhere are now hyping programs on how to quit your job and make money from adsense while working from home. There’s a reason for the hype - making a living from adsense isn’t just a fantasy. People can and do blog for a living.

If you have a blog you can sell advertising on it very easily at blogads.com

You can also use affiliate programs to advertise products that relate to your blog (like if your blog is all about Madonna, you can link to places that sell her CDs, etc).

Here’s an article on Blogging for Dollars

Here’s what the folks at Google have to say about using Adsense to make money with your weblog

Here’s a post from a blogger who added adsense to his weblog in an attempt to cover the costs of his TypePad account, only to discover he was earning a second income from his blog!

This last article is a little dated, but still worth checking out: Blogonomics: making a living from blogging

What if you want to create a blog that wasn’t available to the general public?

I’ve been poking around in MovableType and WordPress, but haven’t yet discovered how to make your blog private on those platforms — I’d imagine you could password protect a directory by modifying the .htaccess files, but I’d like to see ability to make a blog private incorporated into the blog tools interface.

This is where TypePad excels. Simply create a new blog, and 1) mark it as private (which only stops them from listing your blog on the ‘Recently updated blogs’ lists ) and make sure the boxes for notifying third party services when you update your blog are unchecked AND then 2) go into the Control Panel and click the link that says ‘Password Protect a Site’ and then enter the shared username and password that you will provide to only those you want to access your blog — this allows you to limit access to your blog, or part of your blog, so that only you or those you choose can read your posts.

In Blogger, go to Settings | Basic, and make sure to pick ‘No’ from the dropdown box entitled ‘Add your Blog to our listings’. Note that A Public blog appears in your Blogger Profile. If you select ‘No’ they will not show your blog anywhere on Blogger.com, but it will still be available on the Internet. As such, if you host your Blogger blog on their free hosting site, BlogSpot, from what I can tell you will not be able to keep your blog private or prevent it from being spidered and indexed by the search engines. If you’re very careful not to link to it from any external site, theres a chance it will never be found..but you’ve no guarantee of preventing unwanted eyes from reading your private blog. If you host your blog on your own ISP or web hosting provider and FTP your blogger pages to them, it’s conceivable that you could password protect the directory, again by modifying the .htaccess file.

Again, not having yet installed b2evolution or blosxom, I can’t comment on those platforms. However, I checked out blosxom’s website and it appears that they have several Blosxom plugins that you can use to password protect your site.

So, at this point, it would appear that TypePad is the only blogging software I have tested that allows you to make all or part of a blog private from within the TypePad control panel.

Update Ping Services
You can copy and paste these URIs into your blog service ping options screen (in WordPress, you do it by choosing Options > Writing > Update Services) with each URI on its own line. In MovableType you can add these URI’s to the list of where to ping by going to your configuration settings for notifications.

While TypePad doesn’t officially support customizing pings, there is a workaround, albeit a bit tedious - simply paste the list of URI’s into the box entitled ‘Send a TrackBack to these addresses’ in the edit post screen (yes, this means you need to do this for each and every post you create). If you don’t see the field for sending trackbacks, make sure you’re using the advanced or custom post editor by clicking the link on the create/edit post page entitled, ‘Customize the display of this page’ (it’s below the preview and save buttons).

Not surprisingly, Blogger doesn’t support customizing of pings and since they don’t support trackbacks either, I haven’t figured out a way to get this working on Blogger. I don’t yet have b2evolution or Blosxom blogs installed yet, so I’ve no idea whether they support pings or allow you to customize them..

Anyhow, here’s my comprehensive list of ping services to ping to tell them that you’ve updated your blog:

I just started creating my categories for my Tool Reviews site (Power Tools, Hand Tools, Lawn and Garden Tools, etc) and discovered that you can create sub-=categories off of a parent category. Now that’s cool (and something I haven’t encountered in the other blogging tools I’ve tried - blogger, movabletype (update: MT 3 has subcategories), and typepad). And I’m sure it makes things even better for the search engines to figure out what you’re writing about.