You might have noticed that when opening one of the blogs that you get redirected to a new domain: Duoblogger.

Ownblogger + Donkeyblogger = Duoblogger

Mark (the owner of OwnBlogger) and me decided to merge our blogs. We have both been friends since we were eleven years old and got to know each other in the old-school game Tribes 2. We kept playing computer games together such as Warcraft 3 oder WoW and became friends. I visited Mark in Papendrecht in 2006 and he then visited me in return in 2007. In fact, while I am writing this I am currently in the train to Rotterdam and will then stay 1 week at his place (finally we can take some pictures together hehe).

We wanted to do some business together and hence both of us wrote about the blogging niche we then decided to put our work together. We only saw advantages in doing so, two experts always know more than 1. Mark is going to focus on blogging related topics and I will mainly focus on advertising related topics. Make sure to let us know some feedback about the new layout and idea of blogging together.

Problems we had with merging the blogs

Of course, there are always some problems when merging your blogs. The biggest one is of course that the old URLs will no longer work. All your content will move to a new domain. It is very important to redirect your old domain properly to your new domain. If you won’t do so and Google indexes your new domain then it will notice that that website has duplicate content and punish that website (in some cases even with a ban). Furthermore if you do not redirect your blog all your old readers and visitors will be lost. The only way of solving that problem is to set up a so called 301 redirect using an .htaccess file. I am not going into detail here, but that way we were able to forward all the posts to our new blog while keeping the links in tact. 301 stands for permanent and has something to do with the apache webserver. The next problem we had was that Mark was using a different URL structure than me and consequently we were not able to use the same redirect rules.

Until now all seems to be working fine except the “All In One SEO plugin”. When we activate the option of rewriting the thread titles all people are getting a white page when loading. Reloading the page solves the blank-page but  still, reloading all the time is not an option, especially because the visitors of course do not know that they should do so. Unfortunately I can not look into the php errors of my webserver or else finding a solution would be way easier. Until then we have no rewritten thread titles and surely lack the most important factor of on-page SEO. If anyone knows a fix, then please let us know.

Update:
Cforms was causing the problems. We noticed that when having a look into the .log files of All in one SEO. So finally we now have no more white pages and SEO friendly titles.

So, don’t forget, send us your feedback and help in case you know how to solve that blank page problem. I attached a form below where you can drop us an email or if you don’t like to you can of course also write a little comment.

To start off, these applications for your computer are not essential, but they do increase your ease with blogging. Using good blogger apps you can increase your productivity. First up is…

1. Mozilla Firefox

Yes that’s right, I’m a big fan of Firefox since 2.0 and haven’t even thought of switching back to Internet Explorer. That being said; Firefox is limitlessly extendable, fast, and lightweight. If you’re still using any other browser (even Google Chrome), then switch to Firefox immediately, it’ll boost your productivity – I can guarantee you that.

There are also countless plugins available, check this post on the 25 must have plugins for bloggers.

2. MemoKeys

I’ve discovered a nice Tool that will help you saving time by saving common used text in a specified keynumber(for example F1 to F12). Just save the text you want in one of those F keys and press it somewhere in word or msn and it will paste the text immediatly into the window.

Click on the image on the right side to see a complete overview for it.

3. Microsoft Office 2007

Not as highly needed for just the Word, since you can use notepad which is already giving in Windows itself. It is handy for making PowerPoint Presentations and Excel sheets. I also have it for Outlook since it can handle multiple mail adresses.

If you don’t have the money to buy it, then I recommend the OpenOffice, which is free and some say just as powerfull.

4. WordWeb

Misspelling much in English? Try out WordWeb.

It is a powerfull English Dictionary tool with about 150,000 words in its database, although it also allows you to look into online sites such as Wikipedia. WordWeb’s a feature rich dictionary & thesaurus tool and a must have for bloggers who write their own content.

5.  Digsby

Digsby is an all-in-one IM/social networking client. It supports most of the IM protocols out there, like Yahoo!, MSN, ICQ, and AIM. It even supports Facebook chat! It features tabbed conversation window, allows you to manage your email, and stay up-to-date with everything that’s happening on your Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and LinkedIn accounts. As its makers say: Digsby = IM + Email + Social Networking.

What Do You Use?

I’m sure that I’m just covering the most important ones here, but I’d love to hear from other PC using bloggers – what applications are you using?