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Another Way Track Googlebot Visits To Your Blog March 23, 2006

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I’ve written a couple of times about how to track GoogleBot visits to your websites/ weblogs. Here’s another way, which also tracks your participation at other websites, provided you are using your full name.

What I do is use Google Alerts to track several topics. Each day, I get an email report for each topic. Each report has one or more website/ weblog article excerpts, complete with links. (It’d be nice if this service was available in RSS form, but it isn’t.)

Now, yesterday, for fun, I decided to track my own name using Google Alerts. I’m fortunate in the …

Sharing the Ad Revenue Wealth - Part 1 - General Algorithm March 22, 2006

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With professional blogging being a hot endeavour for both serious people and ne’er-do-wells, many bloggers have found that there’s synergy in blogging together, whether on a single blog or a network. Most such collaborative blogs are running some form of contextual advertising, including Google AdSense, YPN (Yahoo! Publisher’s Network), or Chitika eMinimalls (which can be either contextual or non-contextual).

Since these blogs are collaborative, everyone has to be compensated, according to the payout schedule. In a post at BlogSpinner, I gave a general guideline to revenue sharing, and the rules of (some) ad networks. Here, I’ll provide a very general …

Sharing Information and Gaining Web Traffic - Two Birds With One Stone March 21, 2006

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One of the obviously great things about the Internet is that there are unlimited, innovative ways for people to interact with each other. Right now, one of the popular ways is social bookmarking. Social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, and Digg are wildly popular, and could be what a blogger needs to increase their profile and web traffic. Related sites like Newsvine go one step further and include both reader-submitted stories and original newswire content.

While there are several purposes for social bookmarking sites, sharing stories and gaining traffic are some of the reasons bloggers should look into them. …

Shoutboxes - More Communication Tools For Your Weblog March 17, 2006

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Of all the ways you can communicate with your weblog’s visitors, shoutboxes have the potential to be the most interesting. That’s because shoutboxes turn your blog into a chat room of one focused channel.

Over the past year, I’ve come across one shoutbox after another. Most of the freebies required you to register and then serve up popup or popunder ads after someone used the shoutbox. No good, at least not for me. I despise both types of ads, and wouldn’t wish them on my visitors.

Now while I’ve come across a few WordPress themes that incorporate a shoutbox, if you don’t …

Building A Tag Cloud in WordPress March 15, 2006

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Some weblogs display a feature known as a tag cloud. This consists of the blog’s categories shown in varying font sizes. (See the bottom of the navigation sidebar.) The larger the font used for a specific category, the more posts that category has. Each category in the tag cloud links to a page containing all of the posts falling into the category. [MINOR REVISION: Mar 28/06]

The idea behind the tag cloud is that it gives visitors a visual cue as to the focus of the weblog. It’s much easier to tell, compared to a list of categories and their post …

Getting To Know Your Blog Platform Database

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Having surfed the blogosphere regularly, I ‘ve come across a fair number of bloggers who are non-programmers but have either written a plugin or otherwise modified their blog platform. Since many of the most popular blogging platforms are built on the PHP web programming/ scripting language, that’s actually not surprising.

PHP is a friendly language, relatively easy to use, and widely available for domains hosted by most Internet hosting providers. PHP is OpenSource, and is often paired with the equally OpenSource mySQL RDBMS (Relational Database Management System) package, especially for blogging platforms. MySQL is used to store information about a blog, …

Want To Really Talk To Your Site Visitors? March 13, 2006

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Alright, you’ve installed an Odeo audio-comments button on your site and have had a bit of feedback from your site visitors. Then you tried offering computer-generated audio versions of your weblog posts, but it’s not quite what you wanted, despite the ease of setup. So what are you left with? Real podcasting of course. (The remainder of this entry is based on a post at my RSS Cases journal.)

I’m currently using the PodPress plugin for WordPress by Dan Kuykendall. The plugin produces an altered RSS feed that includes a link to your podcast audio files. …

Want To Talk To Your Site Visitors?

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Okay, you don’t have lots of time to manage your weblog. You’re able to write and post fairly regularly, but you’d like to communicate more closely with your readers. You’ve tried the Odeo audio-commenting feature, but you feel that it’s one-directional. You’ve heard about podcasting and you’re thinking of offering audio versions of your entries. You don’t have the time or equipment to record your own audio podcasts. One alternative is to sign up for a Talkr account.

I first came across Talkr.com’s talkcasting feature over at the well-written Technology Evangelist site. The site makes great use of …

Yet Another Web Statistics Package? March 10, 2006

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The guys at Performancing are creating a buzz in the blogosphere regarding the about-to-be released beta edition of their new website/ weblog analytics/metrics package. Like the other bloggers linked to here, I got in on the Alpha tester list, and I’m happy to say that this package shows tons of promise.

There are two aspects about it that excite me most: the ability to track an unlimited number of blogs, and the API that’ll soon be released as well. In fact, the latter is the point of this post. I was approached today, via GoogleTalk, …

How to Track Googlebot Visits March 4, 2006

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Many bloggers want to track when the Googlebot visits their weblog, for various reasons. One way is to use Google Sitemaps, to see which of your pages Google has index, as well a relative measure of pagerank for those pages. However, this does not tell you when the Googlebot visited.

If you want a more accurate accounting on Googlebot’s visits, one way is to check your web server logs. These logs tell you not just when Googlebot visited, but other bots as well - provided you know how to decipher all of the different “user agents”. But if your host …

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