Blog Review : Ft. Hard Knox

The Ft. Hard Knox blog was started on May 25th, 2007 and is quickly making a run to the top of the blogsphere. Ft. Hard Knox has only been online for less than 60 days and they have already had over 6000+ visitors. What makes them different than the millions of other blogs out there?

From the Ft. Hard Knox™ blog:

About the FHK Project

The goal of the FHK project is to assist politically-conservative bloggers, social-networkers, and citizen journalists to navigate the wild, wild world of Web 2.0 more effectively. The project consists of three parts.

• The FHK Blog
• The FHK Discussion Forum
• The FHK Wiki

The Good

As far as I know Ft. Hard Knox has found an untapped niche in the blog world. There are thousands of conservative blogs out there that regurgitate news with a conservative political spin, however where FHK breaks from the mold is they also post about ways to use social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Del.icio.us to help your blog attract new visitors. Along with political Op-Ed articles of interest to conservative political activists FHK provides tips and information to help you understand new internet technologies and sites that can help you find and attract new readers.

For instance, I have seen people use TinyURL.com before when sending me a link to their blog post. I did not understand why they were using TinyURL.com or what it was all about. FHK explained what and why TinyURL.com can help me with their simple and easy to understand post, FHK SitRep 07.19.07: TinyURL.com.

Suggested Improvements

What I would like to see Ft. Hard Knox do to improve their site:

• Use a better WordPress permalink structure — Instead of using the standard default numbered permalink structure that makes their permalinks look like this:

  http://forthardknox.com/?p=327

  They would do better using a more reader and search engine friendly permalink structure like:

  http://forthardknox.com/digg-is-trending-down/

  In the WordPress Dashboard goto Options>>Permalinks and select Date and name based or my personal favorite Custom (enter: /%postname%/). One of the downfalls to using only the postname as your permalink structure is that you can NEVER use the same post title twice. That is not an issue for me because I try to come up with a new and unique title for each of my posts, but for someone that has used the same title for many of their posts in the past this can become a problem. For these people I suggest using the Date name based permalink structure.

Review Wrap Up

FHK is quickly becoming one of my must reads each day. I have added Ft. Hard Knox to my blogroll/links page and I hope you will too.