When we start off a blog, we long for comments. I still remember how I kept revisiting my first few posts several times a day, just to see if a comment arrived from some god’s soul!
But as your blog begins to get popular and the comments’ section becomes more of a discussion thread, it gets difficult at times to manage the flow of information, users who comment and other relevant stuff. What experts believe today is, that threaded, portable and social commenting is the future of online discussions.
But with the advent of
Disqus, such problems are a matter of past.
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I confess that I am a bit cranky when it comes to WordPress plugins. I use as few as possible (to not compromise my WP install), and I also tend to like some old school plugins that were released years ago. My plugin of choice for adding a link to my RSS feed, for instance, was the
sig2feed one. I started using it early in 2006!
Recently, however, more people started scraping Daily Blog Tips, so I felt that it was necessary to add not only a link back to the blog, but also a link back to the original post. This should help Google to identify my original articles more easily and quickly.
When I tried to use sig2feed for this purpose, however, I found that it was not capable of (not without a good deal of PHP tweaking at least), so I decided to find a new RSS feed footer.
RSS Footer is the name of the plugin created by Joost de Valk, and it gets the job done perfectly. Basically it allows you to insert any message or link on the footer of your feeds, and it also comes with a check box that you simply need to tick if you want a link back to the original article.
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Finally Google will start rolling AdSense into Feedburner feeds. I guess the integration process was not that easy, given the time it took them after the acquisition. Regardless, this is good news for all webmasters and bloggers alike. Here is what they said on
their blog:
We’ve been hinting at this for awhile, but it’s finally time to spill the beans: Starting next week, we’ll be rolling out AdSense for feeds to a small group of publishers, in anticipation of a full launch to all FeedBurner and AdSense publishers “coming soon”. If you start seeing “Ads by Google” on an ad in a feed somewhere, that’d be us.
Publishers that are already part of the FAN (Feedburner Advertising Network) will keep serving CPM ads, while having AdSense ads to fill the remaining inventory.
Definitely another source of income to be considered by most bloggers out there. What do you think?
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@SeanBannister asks - “on Problogger your RSS shows the entire post but on DPS it only shows a teaser”
Whether to post excerpts or full feeds is something I’ve grappled with on and off for years now. I used on only do excerpts here on ProBlogger too but in the end decided to switch. The main thing that held me back from switching to full feeds on ProBlogger was the issue of duplicate content. I see a new blog scraping my content every day or two so there must be many sites with the same content as ProBlogger out there. This is frustrating and while I try to track down those who do so without any acknowledgement of source I can’t possibly stop them all.
The good thing now is that ProBlogger has authority in the eyes of Google as it’s been around for a few years and I’m pretty confident that Google ranks us as the original source of all the duplicate pages. I’m a little less confident of this with DPS so have kept it as an excerpt feed. Having said this - I’ll probably switch DPS to full feeds at sometime soonish as it’s got a fair ranking in Google now.
Further Reading on Full vs Partial RSS feeds: Read more
ComScore recently released a report confirming that Google’s paid clicks for February were only 3% higher than the same period last year. If we then consider that this February had one extra day, the real growth is practically 0% year over year. There is also a 3% declined month over month (February had 515 million paid clicks, while January had 532 million). One point that is not clear is if those numbers are coming from Google’s search network alone or from a combination of the search and the content network. The latter case would probably be bad news for website owners and bloggers alike. Regardless, there is a clear flat trend on paid clicks. Could this be the delayed impact of Google’s latest changes on the ad formats and clickable areas? Or the casual Internet surfer is just getting used (and blind) to contextual advertising? Time will tell. Source:
Silicon Alley Insider
Partner:
MakeUseOf.com Amazing Websites and Tools you Never Knew About
These plugins were tested ok on v2.5 beta. Without any major surprises, they should be working fine when v2.5 gold is released.
Announcement
- “Different message for different roles/users” feature fixed
- Removed TinyMCE (appears more troublesome than helpful based on feedback)
Pre-Publish Reminder
- Reminder List shows up in correct places
- Move to a folder structure
YouTube Comments
- Suppress errors/warnings; enable script to continue fetching comments instead of dieing
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For some time I’ve been wanting to do a major overhaul of my visual identity online.
So this year I am planning to develop a number of my personal website and business blog sites and try to bring them back to the core of my personal brand.
I would always recommend that you start with looking at the corporate identity of your business and work from there, but since my personal brand is so intertwined with the corporate identity of my business and the fact that most people come to know me through “Biz Growth News”, I made a decision to start with a redesign of this site.
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