Embedding Google Docs to your WordPress blog post
July 4, 2008
Many times you may be in a situation to embed Google Docs like document or spreadsheets to your blog post. Here is a wordpress plugin which can do that using a short code. The plugin is called Inline Google Docs and can be downloaded here
Google Adsense New Improved Custom Search for better earnings
July 2, 2008
Google Adsense has an option for earning from the search results other than banners and text links. I am not sure how many of us use it and what is the potential of earning from the Google Adsense search. To be frank, I was using this only on one of my blog and I did not get much revenue from this. Today I received an email from Google Adsense support team encouraging the use of the Search feature.
There are many new features that they have added and I feel that everybody should try this.
List of Video Hosting, Sharing sites
July 1, 2008
Recently I have been working a lot on video hosting, video conversion, video optimization and video sharing.
I have below a list of video hosting sites where you can upload your videos and share with your friends, visitors and viewers. I have personally not used all these sites, so I am not sure about the quality of their services. I have used Youtube, Yahoo video, Revver, Blip TV, MSN video, Vimeo
List of Video Sharing / Hosting sites
Editing using Windows Live Writer, Multiple pings
July 1, 2008
I have been using Windows Live Writer as my blog editor. I recently read about getting banned from pinging services and bit worried as I mostly edit my posts or updates using Live writer.
Actually this post is promoting a plugin to avoid pings during edit and I am not sure of the consequences of multiple pinging. If you have any experience on this topic, please comment
Quality of Social Networking Traffic
April 20, 2008
I was doing some research on Social Networking Traffic like from Stumbleupon or Digg. Couple of my pages were submitted to Stumbleupon and my traffic really boomed up unexpectedly. I was going through the Google Analytics reports and studying the quality of the Traffic.
What does quality of the traffic means?
Suppose I get a visitor from SU (StumbleUpon) or digg, I found that the visitor hardly spent less than a minute on my website and hardly visited 2-3 pages of my blog. But when I look into a visitor who has come directly to my blog spends 20 minutes and visits about 10-20 pages. I did some googling on this subject and found lots of interesting articles by experts.
Some say even the traffic from search engines are of low quality as they just come to your page and see if they get what they want or just continue with other search results. Looking into this opinion I would like to say is if you have good quality content, the visitor may get impressed and go through other pages and even subscribe to your blog feeds. I usually do this.
My opinion for getting loyal visitors for you blog is to create content which will be useful for your readers and they bookmark your site or link to your posts. I do always link to posts and blogs I like and give the credit to the author. I was reading a post at SEOBOOK which gives some very useful information about the quality of Social Network Traffic
In a post at RandomJabber, the author has described why the social networking traffic sucks. He also feels that the quality of the traffic is very low and of no use for the blog rather than wasting the bandwidth.
One more thing I noticed with Social Networking traffic is the ups and downs in my traffic graph. One fine day, my traffic grows more than 500% and the very next day, it comes back to the same old position. If you do not have a dedicated server, you will even get notice from your hosting company as you may exceed the bandwidth limit. Some sites are down due to such traffic. I would like to recommend this post to be read which is about the results of digging an article called the digg effect
How can a Social Networking Traffic be useful?
If you are selling ads on the basis of impressions then such traffic can be useful for you. Social Networking sites gives you lots of hits, but the conversion or the quality will not be good as I mentioned above. You can sell ads on your blog on the basis of impressions and show your stats to your visitors. My concern about the advertisers is, if they are not happy with the results of the ad campaigns will they renew the purchase? If they are not happy with the CTR or CPA, then they may not be renewing the advertising campaigns. Again the other possibility is that you may get new advertisers who may want to try your advertising program without knowing the results and may use for a month and again they may not be happy with your advertising programs.
My Opinion
- Concentrate of creating good content
- Try to best to provide what your visitors expect from your blog
- Don’t take Social networking traffic as a good growth.
- Track your growth using Google Analytics which will clearly explain you the quality of your traffic
How to use Feedburner to burn your feeds?
April 13, 2008
If you have a blog, you should be knowing about feeds and RSS. In Wordpress, the Default URL for your blog will be http://yoursite.com/feed/. I Wordpress, you can get feeds for your comments, categories, tags separately.
Now let me talk about Feedburner. Feedburner is a free service to burn your feeds. All you need is sign-up for a free account, you can now use your Google Account to sign-in, (Google has acquired Feedburner). Once you sign-in, just enter your feed URL to the box as seen below
You can either enter you blog URL or if you know the Feed URL , you can enter the feed URL.
Thats it your Feed is ready, you can now use the Feedburner URL like http://feeds.feedburner.com/Asokans
You can burn multiple blog feeds and the service is 100% free. There are lots of options available like monetizing your feeds using Google Adsense, Email Subscriptions, Statistics of your blog feed and some widgets.
Why do we need to use Feedburner for this?
That’s something you will understand when you go through the Publicize tab of the Feed. I will be coming up with more features of Feedburner soon. Stay tuned in or Subscribe to my Blog by email for free
Upgrade your wordpress blog to stable 2.5
March 30, 2008
Wordpress has officially released the stable version of Wordpress 2.5 series. I just upgraded this blog to the stable version. My version was 2.5 RC-1 which was the first in the 2.5 series.
How to Upgrade?
The upgrade process is as simple and same as we did before.
Step 1 - Download the latest stable version of Wordpress
Step 2 - De-activate all your plugins and put your site Offline
Step 3 - Unzip the downloaded latest version and FTP it to your server replacing all the files
Step 4 - Visit http://yourblogurl.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php
Step 5 - Follow the instructions, Your database needs to be updated
Step 6 - Activate your plugins
Done
How to use windows live writer effectively
March 26, 2008
Every software has its own pros and cons and the to make use of all the features are very important if we need to use the application effectively. Most of us use many application, but many do not know about all the features that an application has. I have been using Windows Live Writer for some time now. There are lots of features available for this application and if we use it, this is an excellent application or I could say a must have application for a blogger.
You can download windows live writer first and install it. This is 100% free and this is updated automatically with windows update
Once you install it, you need to do the set-up as an normal application. Once installed just open the application and the first thing to do is to configure you blog. You can configure any number of blogs. WLW supports almost all the popular blogs like wordpress, typepad, blogger, blogspot, etc.
Adding a new blog to windows live writer
Just go ahead with the instruction to add a new blog and follow the instruction. You will need to provide the URL of your blog and the login credential.
Once the account is set-up the theme is updated to the live writer and you can view the web layout along with normal layout, HTML view and web preview.
This is the snapshot which I had done when I was writing this post.
This is the side pane of the windows live writer. You can find lots of links which are very useful. You can insert an image, hyperlink, tag, table, code, video, map and lots of features as you see.
Creating a new post
Creating a new post is very simple, just click on new and select the write weblog if you have configured multiple blogs.
Saving a post as draft on to the web server
You can publish the post directly or save as draft to you local drive or even post as draft to the web server. You can find the save draft button on the toolbar
Saving images using FTP
If you have problem in saving images to your web server, you can use the FTP feature
1. If you use Writer with more than one blog, on the Weblog menu, select the blog that you want.
2. On the Weblog menu, click Edit Weblog Settings.
3. On the Images tab, click Upload images to an FTP server, and then click Configure FTP.
4. Complete the following settings:
# FTP hostname: The name of your FTP server.
# Username and Password: The user name and password for your FTP account.
# Publish images into this folder: Include the full path to the folder on the FTP server. To find the path, click the Browse button.
# URL of image publishing folder: The web address of the folder where people can view your images. The address should start with http://, not ftp://.
# Click OK, and then click OK again.
Tags Feature
You an insert different tags using the tags feature. You can even create custom tags. By default, you can see wordpress, technorati, buzznet, etc.
Selecting the category
You can find the list of categories inside the category selector, which at the bottom of the page. You can even add new category from your windows live writer.
You can do almost everything that you do when you do a post by using the default posting page of a wordpress blog.
Plugins
You can install the necessary plugins by clicking on the add plugin link which you can see on the right bottom of the screen. You will be take the plugin gallery, just select the needed one and click install. Restart the application and you will find it in the plugin list
You can browse through the WLW Plugins Gallery for some good plugins that you would like to use
Hyperlink Glossary
This is something which I use much. You can save the links in the glossary. Just go to Insert Hyperlink after selecting the text that you want to add a link. If you have already saved this link to the gallery, then you will find the saved information inside the pop-up window, just click ok and the link is added.
Other Features
- Spell checks
- Automatic updates
- Pinging
Windows Live Writer is an excellent tool if you know how to use it.
Wordpress Templates / Themes that I like
March 25, 2008
Branford Magazine Theme
This theme was inspired by the great magazine style themes of Brian Gardner and Darren Hoy
This theme is mix of Brain Gradner’s revolution theme
Revolution Theme Pro Business
Revolution News
Revolution Pro Theme
All these themes are of very high standards and worth using.
How to exclude some categories from the category menu in Wordpress
March 21, 2008
You might be in a situation to exclude some categories which you might have created for some tracking purpose and you do not want to display to the visitors. You can do this by simply modifying the category function
Usually the categories on the menu can be found at the header.php file in your assigned template folder.
<?php wp_list_categories(‘title_li=’) ?> //change this to where 6 and 43 is the category id <?php wp_list_categories(‘exclude=6,43&title_li=’) ?>
