Blog Aught

Now that CLC 2007 has been deemed a huge success and has come and gone, I can begin focusing on the infrastructure of Blog Aught.

In just two months we’ve grown to more than 200 blogs. This growth has happened much quicker than I expected and tells me I need to kick up the action and move us to the next stage.

With this in mind, the following changes will be made over the next few weeks.

-Themes and Templates
We’ll be doubling the number of templates that are currently available.

-Plugins
There will be a plethora of plugins added to user accounts. These plugins will include spam related hacks, comments, and many more!

-Homepage
We’ll be adding a list of all active blogs to the homepage design. There will also be more community based edits made to the general theme, giving main page visitors deeper access in to the community.

-Support Forums
Currently we’re using the forums for ConservaBlogs.com. THis will soon change and you’ll be able to jump to a BlogAught based forum here on this site for support and community related discussion.

Stay tuned for more updates!

-Eric Odom

It’s official, Blog Aught’s free wordpress hosting service has made “site of the week” over at Politics Online.

From PO:

Blogaught.com is the web’s first conservative owned and operated Wordpress Blog Hosting Service. Blogaught allows you to write on topics of your choice — be it gadgets, politics, sports, family or anything that is on your mind.

The site is free of charge and prides itself on assuring its users that their content will be hosted without liberal bias in management or ownership. Maintained by founder Eric Odom, Blogaught’s simplicity and accessibility make it a unique tool for independent writers with something to say.

The site originated as Conservativeblogs.com, which has since become a part of advocacy giant Citizen Outreach.

We love that kind of mention!

-Eric Odom

Spend Three Days with 38 (and Counting) of the Nation’s
Most Powerful and Influential Conservative Leaders & Bloggers…

If You Never Go to Another Conservative
Conference the Rest of Your Life…

DON’T MISS THIS ONE!

Read on for a Sizzling “Dog Days of Summer” Special Offer!

Dear Fellow Conservative/Libertarian,

If you think this is “just another invitation” to “just another conservative convention” you’d be WRONG – and missing a HUGE opportunity.

This is a special invitation to participate in a critically important conference - being co-hosted by Citizen Outreach and Americans for Tax Reform - which will make your friends who don’t attend green with envy…especially if they’re frustrated with the direction our country and the “conservative movement” are headed.

You don’t believe me?

Then take a few minutes to read through this letter and you’ll change your mind. You’ll be happy you did – especially when you get to “brag” after the conference to all your friends who didn’t attend.

If you act quickly you can reserve a seat at this one-of-a-kind event. This is your opportunity to see, hear and actually meet with some of the most influential and powerful conservative leaders and bloggers in the country today.

This conference will be unlike any political or public policy conference you may have attended in the past…and inside this letter is a very special opportunity for you to attend this conference for what comparatively would be considered “chump change.”

Only 1,947 people will be able to attend the full 2007 Conservative Leadership Conference …nicknamed “Rightoberfest”…and I expect those seats will sell out fast…especially after you read Read more »

BlogAught.com is getting ready to pump out an official “we’ve gone live” press release on Spetember 1st, 2007. With this launch, we would like to have a bit of a buzz going throughout the blogosphere about our new free Wordpress blog hosting service.

What better way to do that than to give away a bunch of free stuff as a prize in a very simple competition? What are we giving away?

- Brand New Playstation 2 (yeah, we know there is a PS3 now, but we don’t have one, so a PS2 it is)
- Grand Theft Auto Trilogy (GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas)
- 16mb Memory Card for PS2
- Six DVD’s (The Cavern, Deuce Bigalow European Gigolo, The Polar Express, Health Inspector, The Departed, Stuck On You)

How do I enter?

It’s quite simple, actually. All you need to do is write a post letting your readers know about this competition. In that post, you’ll also want to include your guess as to how many linkbacks/trackbacks this post will receive by September 12th, 2007.

The winner will be the closest guess to the actual number that we count at midnight on September 12. In case of a tie it will be the blogger who guessed the number first.

Your post MUST include the following:
-A link back to the main site - www.blogaught.com
-A link to the contest post
-Your guess for the number of linkbacks/trackbacks

Here is a good sample of what your post should look like. Please change this and put it in your own words.

The guys over at BlogAught have announced a new blog competition. The winner will get a brand new Playstation, some games, a memory card and some DVD’s. All you have to do to win is guess the number of linkbacks/trackbacks the post will receive.

Note: I’ll pay the shipping and handling IF you are a US resident and in the USA. Any winners outside of the US must pay shipping and handling. There are no exceptions to this.

Have fun!

Hat-Tip: Blog Duck for the idea

My plan is to eventually have about 100 themes to choose from in the control panels, however, it requires an enormous amount of time to go through and edit them to make the WPMU compatable so please be patient and know that we’ll be adding new ones each week.

The goal is to have the majority of our themes widget ready so that you can move things around in your sidebar and make your blog a little more personal. For the first 50 or so themes this will be the case.

Because we are soon to be a “revenue sharing” site, meaning you get 80% of the revenue from the Google ads shown on your blog, we’ll be offering some themes that are optimized for Google Adsense, giving the ads a much more prominent placement scheme. These themes are currently being edited and will be available soon.

The first batch of themes being released contains Read more »

Today is August 14th, 2007, and BlogAught.com is now “unofficially” live and online!

Why unofficially? Well, for starters, I’m the only person, who as the time of this post, knows about it being online. So, in a sense I’m talking to myself. But that’s OK because posting this is serving its purpose.

1) I get to say I had the first post on the brand new blog hosting server!

2) After I hit publish, I’ll know if the site is operating the way it should be or if it will completely crash and burn, sending me back to the drawing board.

We’ll know soon enough.

Anyway… because people will eventually read this, yes, that’s you I’m talking about, I want to say I’m extremely excited about this project.

Conservablogs.com was our “beta” program for this beast of a project. It has been my vision for some time to offer actual Wordpress blog hosting at no cost. I know you can already do this on several other sites, including Wordpress.com, but I wanted something conservative owned and operated.

Too many times we hear about posts disappearing, bias being handed out with traffic distribution and on and on and on… but for anyone interested in fair play and a trusted management team, we’re here to try and change that. And I think we’re doing a damn fine job.

ConservaBlogs.com has done in nine months what I had hoped it would do in a year. The site is ranking VERY well, having enjoyed a place in the top 3,000 blogs at Technorati, and top 75 blogs at TTLB for the past month and a half. This month the site will pass 100,000 unique visits and more than 400,000 page views. For a new site that was, until now, in beta phase, we couldn’t be more happy with the results.

Thanks to Citizen Outreach scooping us up into their hands, we’re fully coming out of beta phase with the launch of BlogAught.com.

And here we are!

I hope you like what we’re doing. It’s taking a MONSTROUS amount of work to put it all together, but we’re getting all the pieces together and the puzzle is starting to come together nicely.

The home page design will be in place (with ALL graphics, which are not live as the time of this post) by August 18th.

To date I’ve been able to get the entire system in to place, making instant blog activation and creation live and ready to rock. I’ve got a huge ad network rolling into a month long beta phase starting Friday, which will give all bloggers a great chance to make some extra cash.

Indeed, this project is starting to come together and I can’t wait to sit back, crack my fingers, and start blogging knowing that the “build” part of the project is behind us.

With all that said… welcome to BlogAught.com!

-Eric Odom
BlogAught.com