Posts Tagged ‘Blogs’

Found a new site today which I wanted to share. When posting an article to your blog it’s great if you get some reader participation with comments at the bottom. However, there may be times when you wish to encourage readers to share links of a specific type. For example, I may be interested in knowing the blogs of my readers (which I am!). In this case, it would be better to have all links compiled together in one place for me, and other readers to see, rather than scrolling all the way to the end of the post. This is where Simply Linked can help! Really really easy, and free to set up.

Go to their site and sign up for a free account. It’s a Beta site (still in testing) so there could be a cost introduced in the future, but hopefully that would come along with additional features. Once you are signed in, click the link to create a new list:

Enter in the name of your list. There is the option to select from either a standard type, or from a recurring theme. There are no instructions so I take the theme to be a way to group lists together and categorize them. You can either select from one you have already created, or create a new one easily.

Once your list is created, you will see the code displayed for your list. Copy it and then you can paste that into a web page or blog post:

When someone visits your site or blog post, they can easily add a link to the list. See the example below in this post. Once links are added, you will be able to review them from your Simply Linked account. Could be useful for follow up and review on your topic.

So, feel free! Give me the link to your blog, I would love to pay you a visit, and maybe others will too! I started the list going, so join in.

For a while I have wanted to do a post to highlight some of the coolest plugins and widgets out there for WordPress. Time in short supply, I still haven’t gotten round to it, so call it cheating, but I did search for some blog posts that already have done this! So, credit to all of these blog writers, and here are some links to some good information!

This post is all about plugins to help with your different social media profiles:

http://mashable.com/2009/06/16/wordpress-social-media-profile/

This article shows 50 great widgets for your blog:

http://mashable.com/2007/09/06/widgets-2/

30 cool plugins:

http://www.masternewmedia.org/30-cool-wordpress-plugins-for-web-publishers/

10 Cool WordPress plugins to show your ratings:

http://www.geeksucks.com/showcases/10-cool-wordpress-plugins-for-ratings.htm

Plugins designed to get your readers to your blog:

http://mashable.com/2007/08/02/wordpress-readers/

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Be sure to check out all of these great blogs, get some new ideas and have fun! Not sure how to install a plugin or figure out the widgets? Post your questions below and I will help where I can!

Yesterday I showed you how to set up your RSS feed in Feedburner. Once you have done this, you really want visitors to your blog to go through Feedburner so it’s captured and your statistics are more acurate. If you have WordPress, you can use a simple plugin to direct visitors through that avenue. From the Plugins section in your admin panel, click on Add New. Do a quick search and type in Feedburner. FD Feedburner Plugin is the one that I use. Click on the Install link on the right side. Install the plugin and then make sure to Activate it.

Once installed and activated, go back to the Plugins folder and click on Feedburner Configuration. Enter in the feed url that you created yesterday.

From the plugin, here is more information about how it works. Pretty simple!

If you have a blog, do you ever feel like you are writing articles and posting them out to the world, and never quite sure if anyone is reading them? Your knowledge is being shared, but it would be nice to know it’s actually being read right? Although there is no fool proof way to know how many people are subscribed to your feed, Feedburner is a great place to start.

Feedburner.com will take you over to Google. They moved over recently and now it’s even easier to manage everything all under one account. If you don’t already have an account, you will be prompted to create an account. If you do have an account, go ahead and log in.  You will be prompted to enter in your feed address. Then click the Next button.

The feed can then be named. It will also show you a new feed address. You can modify the url slightly if you want to, to make it more user friendly. Click Next. Then walk through the rest of the screens for more options and information you can set up.

Finally, next time you log in, you can take a look at the statistics for your feed. You can view stats for the current day, past few days, months and so on. You will be able to see how many people on average are viewing your feed.

From the Feedburner website, here is how it defines Subscribers and Reach.

Subscribers is an approximate measure of the number of individuals currently subscribed to your feed.

How is it calculated?

FeedBurner’s subscriber count is based on an approximation of how many times your feed has been requested in a 24-hour period. Subscribers is inferred from an analysis of the many different feed readers and aggregators that retrieve this feed daily. Subscribers is not computed for browsers and bots that access your feed.

Subscribers counts are calculated by matching IP address and feed reader combinations, then using our detailed understanding of the multitude of readers, aggregators, and bots on the market to make additional inferences.

Reach is the total number of people who have taken action — viewed or clicked — on the content in your feed.

What does it tell you?

Subscribers is a measure of how many people are subscribed to your feed. At any given time, you can expect that a certain percentage of this subscriber base is actively engaging with your content and this “Reach” measurement provides this additional insight.

Additionally, there may be people viewing your content beyond your known subscriber base. For example, they may view your content on a feed search engine or news filter site.

Reach aggregates both of these groups, providing an accurate and useful measurement of your true audience.

Yesterday we showed you how to create your own Gravatar avatar! If you have your own WordPress Blog and want to activate the ability to show avatars in the comments section, here is how you do it.

Log into the Admin panel, then scroll down to the Settings section on the left side. From there, click on Discussion.

Scroll all the way down to the Avatar section. First you need to actually opt to Show Avatars. Without this, no images will ever be shown. Determine the maximum rating of Avatar that you will allow to be shown on your blog. Finally, select a default avatar that will be used for those people that don’t have their own Avatar set up already. Save the changes and you are done! Pretty simple right?