Working at Home on the Internet

What Would Seth Godin Do? Increase Your RSS Subscriptions

 Last week I asked… Is RSS Hurting The Blogging Community? The overwhelming response was that it is the Lesser of Two Evils. People don’t have the time to surf looking for your articles. RSS saves time and effort on the part of the reader and it is up to us to provide good content if we want to draw them into the conversation.

Lets face it, we All want people read what we write. That’s why we picked Blogging as a way to reach out to others for Business or Pleasure. That’s where RSS comes in. It is a way to give your readers what they want (good content) and they don’t have to go looking for it. RSS will send it to their Feed Reader as soon as you update your blog. I’m not going to get into the debate of full/partial feeds, that’s between you and your readers.

What I am going to do is share a WordPress Plug-in I found (I really don’t remember where, I should write these things down) that could help you convert new visitors to your blog into RSS Subscribers.

It’s called What Would Seth Godin Do?

What it does is put a Caption on your posts to invite New Visitors to Subscribe to your RSS Feed and/or through your E-mail Subscriptions. Just download the file, upload the file to your Plug-in folder (yes it is only one file). You can change the text to whatever you desire. The times it is shown to newbies can be set to the amount you feel works best for you.

It can be set to show either at the top or bottom of posts. It will show only once on a page, but will show on individual posts if the visitor lands on an individual post. The only minor drawback is that All of your visitors will be considered New until their cookies show that they have been there the number of times you set. So, don’t set it too high, you don’t want your regular readers to have to deal with it too often.

This is NOT a Paid Review… Boy, I hate having to say that, Damn Review Me…

Technorati Tags: RSS, What Would Seth Godin Do, Plugin

New Here? You may want to Subscribe to my RSS feed for daily updates. Or if you prefer, Subscribe by Email What is RSS? Thanks for visiting!

February 22nd, 2007 at 01:40pm | Posted by Joe | Blogging, Plug-ins, RSS, Reviews | 4 reader remarks | Print This Post

My Choice for a Total Stats Package

Did I finally find the Stats Package I was looking for?

I may have.

 FeedFlare by FeedBurner.

I have had FeedFlare set up for my FeedBurner feed for quite some time. It provides a way for subscribers to E-mail, tag, share, comment and interact with a site. Now, if you use FeedFlare, you can get statistics for your Blog as well as for your Feed on your FeedBurner account.

I have just had it running for the Blog for a couple of days, so I’ll reserve the right to change my mind. But so far, it seems to be comparable to most other stats packages that I have used on my Blogs. If you are already familiar with FeedBurner stats for feeds, then the Site Stats will be easy enough to follow.

In the FeedFlare Site Stats package you get…

• Dashboard… This gives you some of the basic figures for your site at a glance. The percentages of new readers, from searches, came from (other) sites and landed directly on your site. It also gives Top Pages, Top Incoming Traffic Sources and Top Outgoing Links. 
• Visitors… You get a good deal of info on your readers with this. Again, you get the percentages as before, but you also get a Pie Chart on the Browsers your readers use. You also get Top Cities (you better know the flags of different countries), Top Languages, Top Operating Systems and Top Screen Resolutions.
• Pages… Tells you how many visitors and how many pageviews you have up to the 1/2 hour. It also gives you the Top 10 Pages viewed on your site and how many views of each individual page.
• Incoming… This is broken down into your Traffic Sources by visit which are further broken down into Top Search Engines and Top Referring Domains.
• Outgoing… You get a pretty good idea of where, within your site, or clicking on links you have provided, your readers are going.

To see what the Statistics pages look like for my Blog, continue on after the break…

» continue reading »

February 6th, 2007 at 06:26am | Posted by Joe | FeedBurner, Reviews, Stastics | 1 reader remark | Print This Post

WordPress 2.1 (A Very) Preliminary Review

I upgraded my WordPress from 2.06 to 2.1 last night.

The first Blog I attempted was Joe’s Freeware Finds. Installation was painless. Then I looked at the Blog. I got a syntax error where my Blogroll should have been. That’s not good I thought because I had 3 more Blogs to upgrade.

I tried to figure out the error and couldn’t straighten out the problem, so I disabled the Blogroll in the Sidebar Template. No more error, but no more Blogroll either. I’ll let you know how that one turns out when I can straighten it out.

The next 2 upgraded just fine. The WAH Archive page and the World Politics and the Internet blog went without a hitch. There are not a lot of the plug-ins that I have on the other 2, so there wasn’t much to go wrong.

On this, the Final and Most Important blog, the Upgrade was fairly smooth. As far as the Blogroll, it seems to be just fine. I haven’t seen any problems with it so far.

One thing I did notice, which is fairly important to me is that I am No Longer notified of Comments on the Blog. This has been and still is set to be notified of normal comments and comments waiting for moderation. Neither seems to be working at this point.

At first glance all of the Plug-ins seem to function correctly, but if I check the status of the Forum, it shows an error with the Post Slug. The Slug wasn’t changed, and it still leads to the proper page, but I wonder if it will cause a problem with different posts/pages.

The Uncheck category plug-in works normally and if you see Technorati tags at the end of this post, that plug-in works as intended.

I do like the fact that you can toggle between the WYSIWYG and Code editors. And they FINALLY included a Spell Check in the tool bar. I also like the auto save feature. It works as long as you have a Title for the Post. However, it will Not give you a Preview of the Post unless you manually Save and Continue as before.

As I said earilier, this is a Very Preliminary Review. So, let me know how you like the Newest version of WordPress. Have you run into any problems with Plug-ins? Comment notification? Anything else?

Update: Once you publish your post, you can’t make corrections like page/paragraph modifications. I tried adding page breaks in a few places and it reverts to the original. This was never a problem before, it is now. I even tried changing them in the code and still nothing!?! UD2:I DID find out that if you use the “code” “/code” in the toolbar of the code feature, you will get a page break.

Technorati Tags: WordPress 2.1, Reviews, Plugins, Tools

January 24th, 2007 at 01:56pm | Posted by Joe | Reviews, Tools, WordPress | 6 reader remarks | Print This Post