Blogging

The Importance of Feed Redirection

July 22, 2006
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Sure, I had set up basic feed redirection. I had set it so that the feed/ and feed/atom/ WordPress feed URLs would redirect to my FeedBurner feed.

But when I saw that the Best of the Web blog directory had listed my RSS feed as being http://www.johnlamansky.com/?feed=rss2, I knew I had to implement more extensive redirection.

I had heard of this “WordPress Feedburner Plugin” before, and decided to give it a try. After a little bit of trouble at first, I got it to work and – lo and behold! – the next day my Feedburner subscriber count had almost – not quite, but almost – doubled.

It just goes to show how important it is to make sure all of your feed traffic is directed to the right place.

I would highly recommend the aforementioned plugin to WordPress bloggers who are using Feedburner; and if you haven’t already, be sure to check out Feedburner’s feed redirection tips.

Blogosphere Trend: Customer Service Comments

July 20, 2006
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I’ve noticed something very interesting on this blog, and on others; it’s something I’m calling “customer service blog comments.”

It seems that it’s becoming more and more common for company representatives to post comments on blog posts related to that company or its products. For example, so far on this blog I’ve had comments from FeedBurner, Dell, and Microsoft employees, plus a comment from the CEO of FeedBlitz; the comments were in reply to various blog posts I wrote that were related to those companies.

What I find interesting is that even big companies like Dell are getting on the bandwagon. I think it’s a great idea: don’t make the customers come to you, making them wait on hold or for an email response; instead, go directly to the customers and help them solve their problems with friendly, personalized service. That’s the way to do it.

Using WordPress Categories as Tags

July 2, 2006
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You may have noticed that for about two weeks or so now, across this blog the word “tag” has been used in place of the word “category.” You might also have noticed the list of the 20 most popular tags (on the sidebar on the homepage) in replacement of the giant category list. And last but not least, another new addition to the site is the cool-looking tag cloud.

The reason I made this change was because, in short, I had a lot of categories. Dozens and dozens of them. The list on the sidebar was huge.

The problem was, I wanted to have more. Even if I talked about, say, DMOZ, just once, I wanted to have a category for it so that my post would show up in Technorati searches for that topic.

With the default WordPress system, that just wasn’t feasible.

I had known for quite some time that I wanted to make the change to the more flexible tagging system. So once day I decided to do some plugin searching, and I found the perfect plugin: Category Tagging. From the plugin website:

WordPress has a categorization system that lets users categorize posts. However, using categories is no longer state of the art: In the word wide web, tagging is established — and categorizing is obsolete. Tagging is quite different to categorizing since it is based on keywords.

[...]

[The] Category Tagging Plugin provides the following features:

  1. Tag cloud
    It displays all tags (categories) as tag cloud.
  2. Related posts
    When visitors find your website via search engines or other websites, they are often there for a reason and want to find out about a particular topic of interest. Presenting a list of related posts to a given post makes life easier for your visitors by showing them other posts you have written on the subject. This increases the chance that a visitor will stick around browsing your blog, and is perfect for existing visitors to find out your past thoughts on a particular subject.

Very cool.

I would highly recommend the Category Tagging plugin, although be forewarned that it’s not easy to set up.

While I was at it, I also fixed that annoying WordPress “bug” that causes categories to be arranged by ID when the categories for a post are listed. All I had to do was install the Simple Category Sort extension (link not working as of this writing; hopefully it’ll soon be fixed), click Enable, and tada! sorted categories… er, I mean tags. :-)

AdSense Doesn’t Make Sense

May 10, 2006
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As you might know, I’ve tried Google AdSense on this blog several times before. For those who aren’t familiar with AdSense, it is a Google service that lets you put ads on your site (the same kind you see on Google search results). When people click ads on your site, you get a portion of the what the advertiser pays Google. Here’s an example:

I’m not sure how relevant the above ads will be, but every time that I’ve tried AdSense I’ve removed it because I have not been happy with what ads have been displayed.

For example, after I published the post Mr. Monopoly vs. The Deet, in which I described how some deet-containing bug spray ate the ink off my grandma’s Monopoly board, then my AdSense ads started showing advertisements for, guess what?, deet-containing bug spray.

About a month later I published a post called What is Bug Control?, in which I attempted to present a pun concerning the fact that a dead mosquito landed on the Ctrl key on my keyboard. But AdSense started showing ads for bug control, mosquito repellant, and pest removal. Even though my post contained the words “bug,” “mosquito,” and “control,” the ads displayed weren’t exactly relevant.

Then apparently, the AdSense algorithms saw the words “John” and “Catholic” and decided to put up an ad for John Kerry.

Frankly, that was the last straw. I removed those AdSense ads and haven’t put them back up since.

Until Google can increase the relevance of AdSense ads, or until I get enough traffic to the point that I’ll get clicks regardless of ad relevance, I probably won’t be trying to use AdSense again. Maybe lack of relevance is just a risk that advertisers have to take. But in addition, I didn’t get a single click throughout my entire site during the entire time I was displaying AdSense ads.

So in summary, I’ve decided that for now, AdSense for me doesn’t really make sense… or cents.

FeedFlare? No Thank You.

January 28, 2006
3 Comments

FeedBurner recently released FeedFlare Phase 2. FeedFlares are links that allow blog readers to, in short, do stuff with blog posts, such as email the post to others or find Technorati links for that post. Phase 1 allowed FeedFlare links on XML feeds, and now Phase 2 allows FeedFlare links on blog posts themselves.

At first I put the FeedFlares at the bottom of my post and got all excited. “Wow, that’s awesome.” Then I wanted to tinker with it. I didn’t like those bullet points between the links and wanted to replace them with pipes, ala WordPress style.

However, the FeedFlare code that I’m supposed to put in my blog template is JavaScript, so I can’t customize the HTML directly. Hmm… that means “some CSS modification required.” Well, that’s okey-dokey with me, but this looks like CSS3 modification required, which I am quite certain will not work with Internet Explorer. Though Mozilla Firefox is superior in my opinion, Internet Explorer is what most people use. In addition, the FeedFlares are wrapped around a <p> tag, which will not be ideal for some cases in which I want to use the FeedFlares.

I finally got fed up with FeedFlare and made my own links. :-) Things like “email this post” or “add to del.icio.us” are easy to do. Check my links out at the bottom of this post (assuming you’re reading this post directly at the site). And I recommend you also avoid FeedFlare unless you’re happy with how it looks, you’re willing to use some CSS3, or if HTML to you stands for “Hard To Me, it Looks.”

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