Expert tips and services for building successful blogs
Just learned from Ryan's post at CyberNet that IE7 is officially released, and thought I'd mention this here for historical purpose: Internet Explorer 7 is available for download.
I don't think I'll even try it, cause I'm a solid Firefox guy, but for everyone interested, here's some useful info:
Internet Explorer 7 – direct download links:
32-bit versions: IE7 – Windows XP and IE7 – Windows Server 2003
64-bit versions: IE7 – Windows XP/Server 2003
Internet Explorer blog: IEBlog @ blogs.msdn.com
If you haven't seen this search engine yet, go check it out: Ms. Dewey is a fairly interactive search engine with a sexy girl sharing her wisdom based on your search queries.
Try searching for some general yet very deep topics like love, life, work or woman. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before there's a list of the best search queries for Ms Dewey is posted on one of the websites, but even now search is fun and interesting.
It's not a new idea, but definitely a successful, witty and funny implementation.
Ms. Dewey is definitely worth a look!
Just thought it's about time I start sharing some of the useful posts I come across during my week.
Here are a few for the past week:
Rajesh Setty from Life Beyond Code has written a very good article: 10 things they didn't tell you about blogging. Some of the points he made are simply brilliant, for example this one:
You can't get rich blogging.
Again, there are exceptions. Then, you don't include Las Vegas and Lottery in your growth strategy. Do you?
It did make me laugh. Surely, there is a different "rich" definition for every one of us, but in general he's right. It takes a lot of effort and time to get so good in blogging that it pays you enough to live off it.
It's easy to start but hard to maintain.
In fact, it is VERY hard to maintain. Since most bloggers are not depending on blogging for their living, it is walking an extra mile almost everyday. Plus, how do you motivate yourself to do something that does not have a short-term return?
Again, a very common problem. You've got to be really passionate about your blog's topic, otherwise you will not be able to stay motivated for long enough to see it gain traffic and your readers start commenting and motivate you to write more.
A few days later, Rajesh had posted another 10 things they didn't tell you about blogging, sharing some more of his experience with us:
Don't write if you don't have anything to write
You know – writers block affects bloggers too. It is REALLY OK to not post anything if you don't have anything valuable to post. Weak posts bring down the average value of your posts. Why take that risk?
The reason that you write should not be because you have a blog but because you have something valuable to contribute.
I totally agree on this one. I'm constantly struggling with myself over days of quietness on my blogs – whenever I don't have enough time to share an idea or some knowledge in a quality article. At first you feel really compelled to post ANYTHING, because your blogs have to appear dynamic and regularly updated. But when you realize that a weak post will have a much more negative impact than no post at all, you eventually learn to be patient.
Chris Pearson shared his observations after his website had finally got out of the Google Sandbox (congratulations!), and compiled a Graphical Look at the Effects of the Google Sandbox:
It really is amazing how powerful Google is in terms of pushing traffic all over the Web. I have literally been wowed by the rate at which my traffic and other metrics have increased over the last two months, which is basically the time frame in which I crawled out of the Google sandbox.
If you're interested in learning more about Google sandbox and ways to get out of it, I have previously posted an article about it, so please have a look: Simple Ways To Get Out Of Google Sandbox.
And last, but certainly not the least, is Paul Scrivens, explaining to some of us Why Your Web App Sucks with well-known examples. And excellent read with some links to other interesting articles from the same Wisdump site:
The reason it is so hard to make a great web application is because it is so easy to make it suck. The greatest ideas do not always translate into the greatest applications because of poor execution.
That should make 10 minutes of your reading today worthwhile. Enjoy!
It's been only few days ago when I felt the need to experiment more with AdSense ads formats on my local server, and I couldn't find a way of doing it without breaking the terms and conditions: they strictly prohibit showing AdSense blocks on your temporary/internal pages which are "under construction", and even more strictly prohibit clicking on your own ads.
Luckily, I've read a recent post by Thilak of TechBuzz: Running AdSense Ads in Test Mode, and it motivated me to find out more about the topic of testing AdSense.
I ended up sending an email to the Google AdSense support team, and they confirmed once again that this solution is absolutely correct and valid:
All you have to do is add google_adtest = ‘on’; to each AdSense block you're testing on your website. It will still show all the ads, but will ignore any clicks on your part until you remove this test option from your code. It is allowed to change the AdSense block source code to add this line, so you will not violate any terms or conditions.
This is how your code might look (I've obviously blanked the ad client ID of mine:
<script type="text/javascript"><!–
google_ad_client = "pub-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx";
google_adtest = ‘on’;
google_alternate_color = "FFFFFF";
google_ad_width = 728;
google_ad_height = 15;
google_ad_format = "728x15_0ads_al_s";
google_ad_channel ="9517067767";
google_color_border = "FFFFFF";
google_color_bg = "FFFFFF";
google_color_link = "336699";
google_color_text = "000000";
google_color_url = "336699";
//–></script>
Yep, it's that easy. Enjoy!
Feed Button is a service to help you get a cleaner look of your blog sidebar by replacing all the possible ways to subscribe to your feed via various online services like Google Reader, My Yahoo!, Pluck and others with a nice-looking button and a bit of code attached to it.
The idea behind the feed button is that you conserve the precious space by showing only one button, but when your visitor hovers the mouse pointer above the button, it automatically expands to show you all the possible subscription options.
The idea is simple, and I believe any blog which currently has more that 5 feed subscription buttons can probably benefit from using it. All you need to do is give their feed button generator a link to your blog, and your piece of code is going to be provided in just a few seconds, ready for you to copy & paste onto your blog's sidebar code.
Go check it out: FeedButton Beta.
Okay, I've seen way too many blogs requiring some kind of registration before you can leave a comment, and I think it's about time I let you know my opinion on this.
I hate it when people require you to register. Unless it's some kind of really busy and popular blog with a proven successful track and long history, there is absolutely no justification whatsoever to make people register just because they want to comment on one of your posts.
To me, low-traffic blogs with required registration or completely closed comments, immediately mean one of the two things about their owners:
And when I see an interesting post and I have some useful information to add, I'm really pleased to see an indicator of open comments – like a number of comments left so far, etc. But when I click the link to leave a comment and see a message asking me to register, I immediately realize: the blogger asks for too much. He may get it from someone else, but not from me.You see, comments are adding value to his blog. By leaving comments, people share their opinion, ask questions and interact in all other possible ways.
Without comments, a blog looks strange. So, in effect, you're doing the owner of a blog a favor by leaving your comments. So he should be open and grateful to such favors.If, instead, the owner wants me to register – to pick a username and to provide one of my working emails, this immediately makes it obvious that the owner doesn't respect his visitors and commenters at all.
It is plain wrong to make people give you something personal (like an email) for a chance to do you a favor.If you have been this kind of blogger so far, change your tactics immediately cause you now understand why you are wrong! It's better to disable comments completely than leave them seemingly open but then ask for a registration.
While this is a serious and quite real problem for many bloggers, there is a number of solutions available, and you don't have to be a rocket scientist to make them work:
Captchas
This is the most common way of protecting yourself from spam. Your blog automatically shows some image representing a textual information, and asks commenter for a confirmation of what is shown there.The logic behind this is that most spam is automatic. So if it's a spam bot, it will not likely "see" the textual information on the image, and won't be able to confirm it.
For human commenters, though, it's going to be quite easy to look at an image and type what they see in a separate field. Thus confirming the human nature of a comment and raising the possibility of a comment to be a real thing and a genuinely useful information.
Captchas usually show letters in different colours and shapes, so it's fairly hard to automate the recognition of letters on such images. For people it's still quite easy to do this, so captchas are very common and effective.
Spam word filters
Looking at spam comments left on your blog, you can probably see the nature of most of them and spot words which contradict the topic of your blog so much that it would be safe to make an association: if a comment contains some specific word, it's likely to be a spam and should not be shown on your pages.
Many blog engines support such filters and allow you to greatly reduce the number of spam post which get through.
Automatic spam filters
One word: Akismet. Speaking of spam protection, this is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Akismet is a centralized spam filter, and online engine which allows you to use its vast knowledge base to effectively filter out spam comments.
You use it by installing a plugin for your blog engine and entering an Akismet API key (get one free at WordPress.com after you sign up for an account there), and it automatically and – very important! – discreetly analyzes all the comments left on your blog, and marks spam ones for your later review. Whenever you log into your administration panel next time, you can see right away how many possible spam posts have been filtered out since your last session.
I like Akismet a lot, I use it for all my blogs and I enjoy lots of spam filtered out daily on an automatic basis – I hardly do anything about this spam. I log in, glance throgh all the spam, and click the "Delete all" button. That's it! Incredibly useful.
That being said, your mileage may vary ;) I hear, some people don't like Akismet at all. Oh well, I'm sure they have some alternatives then ;)
Valid reasons for closing comments
Like I said at the very top of this article, I get the above mentioned negative impressions ONLY when I see comments turned off on a low-traffic, unpopular blog. But my attitude towards major blogs with comments disabled is different, simply because there is always a chance of them having a genuine valid reason for closing comments.
Here are just a few valid reasons for you to close your comments:
This implies that you have a dedicated discussion board setup, where you invite all your visitors to comment on your posts. There are various approaches here, but it's quite popular for large sites to post an article on their blog, and then automatically create a forum discussion thread for any comments.
Of course, you're going to hit the same spam problems with discussion boards, but the clear advantage of having it separate is that your original content is going to be separate from comments and therefore any comments on your discussion board will not be directly associated with your articles.
Again, this is quite a possible scenario – I've seen it few times and it works just fine. But it is very important to highlight such a nature of your resource and make it easy enough for new users to join.
Encouraging people to join should really go beyond a "Want to leave a comment – give me your email" invitation. Be creative! There's got to be something you can do in return – something people will benefit from by joining your community.
It could be access to members area of your website or an individual profile page on your website they can link to – but there's got to be something your community members find interesting and valuable to them, if you want them to participate.
If you have some definite indicators that people love your content (many incoming links, solid traffic and thousands of visitors a day), and you notice yourself spending more and more time sorting your email out, it is a decision you're eventually going to have to make – either keep communicating to everyone who leaves a comment, or close your comments and instead concentrate on providing more of the great articles everyone keeps coming back to your blog for.
That's about it. I've been working on this article for a few days, and there's just too many thoughts on the subject.
The message I wanted to give you all is this: leave your comments open unless you have a valid reason for not doing so.
Usability of your blog is one of the most important factors of how successful and popular it is. Yet, it is often neglected.
Read on to find reasons and motivation for improving the usability of your blog, and once you feel totally convinced, I'll show you some of the best tips to greatly improve your situation, listed along with instructions and links to respective online resources.
What is usability?
Speaking of web, usability is a term used for showing how easy (or hard) it is for your visitors to browse your online resource. Usability applies to all kinds of online resources: it can be a regular website, an electronic library or a personal blog – it doesn't really matter. What matters though is how easy it is for people to move around your collection of resources, and how comfortable you make this experience for them.
In general, usability indicates just how easy it is for people to use a particular tool in order to achieve a certain result. When you project it into the world of blogging, this makes your blog a tool. It is both a tool for you to share the information and for users to receive it. So improving your usability means making both primary uses of your blog a pleasant experience.
Why improve usability at all?
With millions of blogs updated daily, the pressure is growing every day for every one of us to raise the standards of our blogging. Demanding visitors expect increasingly more, and this means that the basic level of usability has to be maintained by every blog, including yours.
Unless you're a selfish genius who writes posts for himself, you would really want to make sure your visitors get what they expect to see when they arrive at your blog, and it's therefore absolutely vital to make them feel comfortable browsing your pages. Especially so, if you hope for some of them to come back to your blog again and again.
How To Improve Your Blog Usability
As with anything else, in order to improve your blog usability you need to find out reasons for doing so. After you understand all the reasons, you can focus on one particularly beneficial usability feature or another. Essentially, you want to define and write down the following:
Here are just a few examples of how you would align your usability improvements against your blogging goals.
If your blogging goals are:
…then your usability improvements should be respectively aimed at:
Again, here is a list of most obvious reasons you might have:
And they would mean the following directions in your usability enhancement:
Technical details
Now that I've got you interested in usability enhancements, I offer you the following list of WordPress articles and plugins which I believe you will find useful:
Consider using Justin Blanton's Smart Archives plugin, which will provide you with a very quick and effective way of showing your blog archives – with monthly sections and links to every individual post of each month.
To see this in action, check out Perfect Blogger Archives page.
One of the easiest way to increase usability of such lists is to provide a total number of posts found in each of the categories. This will make it easier for your visitors to decide what category to read next, by helping them realize what categories of yours have most posts.
To achieve this effect (you can probably notice how it looks right here on this blog), you need to use the list_cats function of WordPress:
<?php list_cats(FALSE, '', 'name',
'asc', '', TRUE, FALSE,
TRUE, true, FALSE,
TRUE, FALSE, '', FALSE,
'', '', '',
TRue); ?>
Tags are more specific than categories by their nature, so don't be surprised to end up with a long list of tags in your tag cloud.
The idea of tag cloud is that it's going to highlight (using different font sizes) the most popular tags of yours (the once set for most number of posts), once again highlighting the most talked about topics of yours. The working example is found on this very site on the left sidebar.
Ultimate Tag Warrior is the best plugin for this purpose. It's rather complicated, but well worth the time it requires to be properly setup.
If you prefer doing everything yourself, you might like this Building A Tag Cloud in WordPress article.
Don't expect people open up a separate window with HTML code of your blog to find the feed link manually (although that's exactly what I do for far too many blogs simply because it's impossible to find their feed button on the page). Most people won't be like me, they will just wonder where your feed subscription might be, decide to come back to your blog, and eventually forget to do it.
A bright visible feed button is the least you can do for your future readers.
Another usability improvement here is to install a Feedburner Feed Replacement plugin and get all the various formats of feeds (RSS is only one of them) redirected to your one and only public feed, which you need to configure at FeedBurner.
Setting your FeedBurner account is easy enough, and having a single blog feed will make your life easier in many ways: not only will FeedBurner automatically show the feed in expected by a client program format (for instance, your feed aggregator might expect your feed in Atom, RSS or RSS 2.0 format, or it could be just a regular browser opening the feed URL – FeedBurner will show a nice looking page with your posts in this case), and most importantly it will allow you to effortlessly track your readership.
Open this page in your browser to see my FeedBurner feed in HTML: PerfectBlogger.
I suggest you explore the Comments Plugins section on the WordPress development site.
You can also benefit from reading the Editing your blog comments article by Lorelle on WordPress.
I prefer specifying relevant topics myself, and for this purpose I suggest you use a Terong Related Posts plugin. It simply adds a link to your post editing window in WordPress, and allows you to select the relevant posts from a global list of all the posts. Selected posts will then be given as a neat list of links at the bottom of your post.
If you would like relevant posts to be identified automatically, you should have a look at a Related Entries plugin by W.A.S.A.B.I. then.
External links
You should find these resources interesting and relevant to this article:
Linkbaiting seems to become a hot topic once again. Having enjoyed reading quite a number of really interesting posts on the topic in the last few days, I thought you would benefit from looking through them.
So here it is, the linkbaiting roundup for you:
This should be enough to get you started, and if you come across another useful article or two, please let me know! In the meantime, I'll probably get busy creating a Blogging Glossary entry for linkbaiting.
I just have to share this link with you! Lorelle VanFossen from the Lorelle on WordPress blog has just posted a great article on editing your blog comments.
The important lesson you can learn from this article is that comments on your blog, even left by visitors, are still associated with your blog. It is therefore in your own interest to make sure these comments look their best and bring the clear message across to other visitors and readers of yours.
Lorelle seems to have covered every reason you may want to edit a comment for, and she also has thoughtfully given you tips on how to deal with certain situations like moving a comment to a new location in the most elegant way.
Truly, an excellent article I suggest you all read: Editing Your Blog Comments.
I've just added Dark Room to the Blogging Tools/Editors section on this site. Dark Room is an amazingly simple yet effective text editor.
It has no fancy toolbars and doesn't care about WYSIWIG, but it gives you a wonderful platform for creative distraction-free text writing.
Here is how a typical session in Dark Room looks like:
Link to this editor page on Perfect Blogger: Dark Room
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