About a month ago, I remember reading someone's opinion that Hillary Clinton was a sure bet for the next Presidency. Right now she's slipping behind in the polls. I've seen and read in a few different places that she's becoming emotional, even tearful, and vowing to struggle on.

There's a theory that nothing the Clintons do is unplanned. Everything is supposedly mapped out in incredible detail. If you take Mrs. Clinton's emotion at face value, it seems very normal. She wants so badly to win that even the thought of not being able to take America in a new direction is enough to bring tears to her eyes. But maybe there's more to this.

Yesterday I saw a clip on a news program about what Hillary said when confronted with a statement along the lines of, "What do you think about voters siding with this other guy?" Her response was, "That hurts my feelings." It was at that moment that I realized she was probably advised to play up her differences as a woman, when compared to a man. The old stereotypes say men are stoic, and women are emotional. So Hillary was probably coached into making it as obvious as possible that she's a leader of a different caliber, and since most people are looking for change, that's a big selling point.

But here's where things get interesting. Hillary has fallen behind (or it seems that way, or it is being made to seem that way), so she gets emotional. That garners her more attention, and the more attention you've got, the more likely you are to gain public favor. If you're unknown, nobody cares. If people are aware of you, they'll make up their minds one way or another. So to win an election, it's best to get as much attention as possible.

I once read about a memory test done with average folks who sat down and looked at some names of people they'd never heard of. Then they took a break of an hour or two. After the break, they were asked to fill out a questionnaire regarding celebrities. The form had a bunch of names, and boxes that were to be checked off if a name belonged to a famous person. Most people ended up checking off names that weren't famous at all, but did in fact appear on the original list of random names. The conclusion was that the people looked at the questionnaire, recognized a name, assumed they knew it for a reason, and marked it as famous. This could work in politics, as well as with marketing your blog.

They say no press is bad press. A blog was once involved in a lawsuit. The "negative" press sent major traffic to the site, and it ended up earning record revenue. My theory for how this applies to politics is this: When you're falling behind, you need to get back in the public eye through any means necessary. The more people who are aware of you and what you're about, the more votes you'll get. That's a potential reason for why Hillary is hitting the media with a display of emotion. She wants more attention, which could lead to a reversal in her recent slippage trend.

How does this help us bloggers? The idea is pretty simple. Get as much attention you can, for reasons that appear on the surface to be entirely natural. If you come across as wanting attention, or obviously trying to pull some media stunt, it won't work. Hillary's getting attention because her emotional behavior is interesting, but not unbelievable. To put your blog on the map, you've got to be just like a Presidential candidate, and get enough attention and publicity to win over your fair share of voters and visitors.

I came across a post by Seth Godin, marking expert, called The 7% solution.

He presents the following problem: You're in business. Everyone else is lowering their prices. You must raise yours. What do you do to keep attracting customers, even with the highest prices around?

What could you do to make your blog or website worth visiting, even if you charge all your visitors a fee?

If you can answer that, you know how to achieve the edge online.

The problem Godin presents is a type of scenario that gets you thinking in a different way. When you solve it, you reveal answers to your own questions of, "How do I do better?" and "What should I do differently?" We often already know the answers to these questions, but it is difficult to find them within ourselves without phrasing things just right. Godin's way helps us do that.

Here's another question: If you knew you were going to die if your website didn't reach its goals this month, what would you do? How would you accomplish those goals if your life depended on it?

Sometimes we need to shift our perspective a little before solutions can jump out at us.

There are lots of other questions like these out there. I bet you can think of a few.

Not always, but sometimes. Especially when the story is already popular, and you're trying to pull off a blogger's "Dumb and Dumberer."

This idea recently became clear to me. A couple of weeks ago I began noticing headlines on the front page of the paper that seemed oddly familiar. A closer look revealed that the publication was reporting on stories I had already read about online, the day before.

Of course, perspective gained from a passage of time is helpful for interpreting events. But because I had already read about those stories previously, the paper couldn't hold my interest.

For different reasons, bloggers can also fall into the trap of reporting old news. It's deceptively easy, because technically the news isn't old at all. But there's a lag between the time the story breaks, and the time someone reads about it on the average blog.

Sometimes it can seem like a good idea to repeat what the big names are saying. After all, they're successful because they make good choices, and their choice of what to blog about must be brilliant right? So you post your take on things. But if you don't have a unique perspective, and you can't offer much more than what's already been said, you can sabotage your efforts to appeal to readers.

Say a surfer reads the story you read on the big name blog. Later he visits your blog. Same story! Boring. Exit, link right.

Certainly, if you're the first with a brand new update on a matter that has already been covered, then by all means get Dugg! But most of the time doling out a rehash of the same old ideas isn't the most compelling way to post.

So the lesson here is to be as unique as possible, in subject, in perspective, and in timing.

I know, everybody who's anybody has already heard of BlogRush. Well, I finally got around to getting this site in on the action, so I figured I might as well give a quick rundown of the service.

If you've got a decent blog, it might be a good idea to sign up for BlogRush. They provide a free, simple widget that earns you traffic. It doesn't interfere with AdSense, and every time someone loads a page from your blog, you earn 1 BlogRush credit. Why? Because that page load included a load of the widget, which itself showed 5 links to other related blogs.

Each time the widget is loaded, you earn another credit. And all those credits you continue to accumulate will be used to get your latest blog posts shown as links on other people's BlogRush widgets. One credit earned equals one showing of a link to your post.

The really interesting part comes when you can manage to refer a good-sized group of people. BlogRush keeps track of everybody you refer, and everybody they refer, on and on for 10 generations. Every time anyone in your referral network earns a credit, you will earn one too, or a fraction of one if they are a certain number of generations away. John Chow at one point had accumulated 10 million credits! Of course, results like that demand incredible traffic.

What I like about the widget is it's easy to add, it's low maintenance, and it's designed to be clicked by anyone, including the blog owner. Free, functional, fantastic.

For those of you who've been planning to sign up (or who just decided to), I'd be grateful if you'd do so through my referral link.

I'm no black hat expert, but I have heard the term, "scraper site," which I believe is used to describe a site that is automated to scour the web for suitable content, which it then copies onto itself.

Over the past couple of weeks, Misinterpreted.org has apparently become mildly attractive to a few different scraper sites. I've received 13 comments so far from random sites that upon visiting display either a snippet of a certain post I made, or the entire post itself.

I remember learning a scraper site's goal is to capitalize on the content generated by owners of websites that aren't very well-known. I think what happens is the scrapers end up ranking in the search engines in the areas that really should be occupied by the owners of the scraped sites.

The fact that I've only gotten 13 comments so far doesn't really bother me, since I'd only worry if I was getting such comments left and right. And since each one contains a link back to a bogus site, I don't approve them.

The plus side is that each of my posts that has been copied onto another site features a link back here, so that's good. Although I wonder if Google and other search engines will penalize me for having a few "bad neighborhood" links?

Cheater cheater pumpkin eater… Don't scrape me, bro!

This blog used to be located at nuclearnoir.com. I've since decided to use that domain for another project, and move to a new site where the main focus can be my blog. I figured it wouldn't be too difficult, and it really didn't seem that way, at first. I was able to copy everything, but when I finally went to click on a post's permalink, I got a 404 error.

I searched the web, and tried a few solutions. My old permalink structure had been the "year, month, day, post title" kind, so I wanted to keep it that way here. After a short while of trial and error, I found a solution. Now my permalinks work just fine. Here's how I did it.

First, I had to move my blog. I logged into my dashboard at nuclearnoir.com, and clicked on the Manage tab.

In the subset of tabs, I clicked Export.

I clicked the "Download Export File" to save all my old posts to my computer.

Then I installed a fresh version of WordPress at Misinterpreted.org, using the Famous 5 Minute Install method.

Then I FTP'd to NuclearNoir and copied the entire wp-content folder to my hard drive.

I FTP'd to Misinterpreted.org and copied the wp-content directory in its entirety over the "blank slate" version the fresh install had created.

I logged into my new dashboard at Misinterpreted.org and clicked the Options tab.

On the subset of tabs, I clicked Permalinks.

I changed the setting from Default to "Date and name based," which is how I had it at NuclearNoir.

Then I clicked the main tab Manage, and the sub tab Import.

On the Import page, I found WordPress at the bottom of the list of links, and clicked it.

I uploaded the saved export file from NuclearNoir, which added all my old posts to the new site.

Hello World was still showing as my first post here at Misinterpreted.org, since I had just installed WordPress, so I tested it's permalink. 404 error.

After various other attempts, I FTP'd to Misinterpreted.org and changed the .htaccess file.

This is what it contained before I altered it:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

Then I added a little bit, to make it look like this:

<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
</Directory>

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

I tested the permalink, and got a 500 Internal Server Error.

I tried to load my homepage, but got the same error.

I changed the .htaccess back to the way it was.

My site came back, and permalinks now work!

If I hadn't found a solution, I could have left permalinks on Default, since that was the only setting that worked to begin with. But I figured the date and title would be more helpful.

I hope this helps some of you trying to resolve the same problem. If anyone can tell me why changing the .htaccess file and then changing it back worked, I'd love to know.