Content Writing & Copywriting Blog

FeedBurner makes FeedBurner Stats Pro Free

Jul 04, 2007 2 Comments »

I just read on the Pronet Advertising blog that FeedBurner Stats Pro has been turned into a free service. Previously you had to pay a monthly fee to use the service. I have never used the service as, I know this is not good, I haven’t used or studied web stats with the kind of seriousness they deserve, and this is precisely the reason I don’t get as much traffic as I “think” I should get. But I’ve been using the Google Analytics and of late I’ve also been trying to use the 103Bees search traffic analysis tool.

FeedBurner already provides decent amount of user data to an average stats users like me. For instance, if you use FeedBurner to manage your RSS feeds, it provides you the following services and stats:

• How many subscribers you have
• How many posts are actually being read
• Compatible feeds for all major feed readers
• A pinging service
• A daily ticker that lets you show off on your blog or website the number of subscribers you have acquired so far
• The percentages of your subscribers using various feed readers
• Post popularity day-by-day

and many other features.

Technorati Tags: feedburner, feed burner, feedburner stats pro

Randomly generated tag clouds

Jun 27, 2007 2 Comments »

Tag clouds are those highlighted and dimmed tags/categories you often encounter on various blogs and websites. The most read categories, or the categories with maximum posts under them, get the maximum emphasis. Tag clouds are a good way of telling your visitors what are your greater interests and what posts the visitors on your blog or website read the most.

But the problem with such tag clouds is that their emphasis is governed by the number of posts you’ve written under particular tags or by the number of times the posts have been read. This is a good way, but sometimes lots of important posts are neglected merely because they don’t belong to a “popular” tag, or many people haven’t read them yet. They’ll very soon get buried under the more popular posts.

The Focus cloud concept [ link via Focus Cloud [concept] ] counters this problem by leaving the highlighting to “god”, that is, your items are randomly highlighted. This works well if your blog or website doesn’t have lots of irrelevant content (you shouldn’t anyway have irrelevant content but sometimes we cannot help it). Some bloggers post 5-6 less important posts and then a couple of important posts every week and if their tag clouds are generated randomly, the important posts won’t get the desired exposure.

I still prefer the first method of managing your tag clouds. The first method, dictated by performance and content, makes sure the good, popular posts get more exposure. Of course, its downside is that sometimes posts that don’t deserve much fanfare get maximum exposure due to some search engine quirk or time-based relevance, or even fad value. A good solution would be a tag cloud that is driven by the popularity factor, but can also be controlled by the publisher.

Update: Aaron from http://foobr.co.uk/ just posted a comment saying:

Hi, I think you picked up my post wrong. I wrote my version of the Focus Cloud as I was annoyed at other people’s ‘random’ implementations.

Instead my concept uses a points system which ensures that the most recent tags (your current focus) are given an extra ‘boost’ so that they can perform on an equal footing with more established tags.

Aaron makes perfect sense. According to Aaron’s idea of generating tag clouds the most recent posts too get some exposure so that they get the initial needed push. But I wasn’t referring to his post when I wrote about the tag cloud being generated randomly. I mentioned that I got random tag cloud link via his blog.

More links on tag clouds:

• Tag Clouds for Democratic Debate
• Tag clouds - what they are with examples
• What Does Your Tag Cloud Say About You?
• The Usefulness of Tag Clouds

Technorati Tags: tag clouds, random tag clouds

MovableType 4 Beta released

Jun 07, 2007 No Comments »

Remember MovableType? OK, OK, I’m joking. I know there are hundreds, or may be thousands of blogs being run on MovableType. I used to manage a few of my blogs with MovableType when it was freely available. I switched to WordPress when MovableType started coming at a price. It’s not that I didn’t want to pay for it. It was just a coincident that I discovered WordPress exactly when I was about to purchase a licensed version of MovableType. There were two things I never liked about MovableType: it was CGI-based; it was very heavy.

WordPress, on the other hand, to my pleasant surprise, turned out to be a PHP-based program, a language I’m comfortable with, and it was not as heavy as MovableType. So why would I pay for a software I didn’t like, especially when a better, free alternative was easily available? Hence the switch.

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Essential Tools for Bloggers

Jan 24, 2007 No Comments »

OK, this is not to dissuade you from blogging, but here is a list of essential tools every blogger should have and I don’t agree with most of them. The most essential tools a blogger needs are:

• A good blogging software (WordPress, for instance)
• A reliable host to run your blog coupled with a domain, of course.
• A good wordpressor; if you cannot afford MS Word, you can download OpenOffice.org that is as good as MS Office. And there are plenty of Web 2.0 word processors available online, for instance Google Docs, Zoho or AjaxWrite.

Of course if you want to run a photo blog then you need a decent digital camera and an image editor. But it beats me why you need expensive software like Dreamweaver and Photoshop CSS to run a successful blog. And why on earth you need an LCD screen?

A quintessential aspect of blogging is that anybody with a net connection can do it. You don’t need expensive gadget, you don’t need expensive software. Yes, you must have lots of things to say :-).

Technorati Tags: blogging tools, successful blogging

Prototype 1.5.0 Released and Has Its Own Website Now

Jan 19, 2007 No Comments »

If you dabble with Ajax (I do, sometimes) you’d be happy to know that Prototype 1.5.0 has just been released. As the website says:

Prototype is a JavaScript Framework that aims to ease development of dynamic web applications.

I’ve used Prototype on one of my clients’ website and it really rocks. A big problem was that there was no official documentation for it and you had to scrounge the Internet for tid-bits of tips and tutorials. Fortunately, now they have complete section dedicated to Prototype documentation.

Technorati Tags: prototype, prototype documentation, javascripting, dom scripting