Sara L Christensen has finally left the shackles of her 9 to 5 to put her English degree to good use. With her equal passions for technology and writing, becoming a blogger and web content specialist is without a doubt a dream come true. Having always been an entrepreneur in both mind and spirit, she is now a true Pajama Professional.
It’s no secret or mystery that RSS is a seriously important part of producing web content. It can increase your readers, help maintain a community and also earn you some extra money if you set things up right. I’m not going to go into how it works, what it does or how to set it up in this article. I just want to share seven cool RSS goodies that I think you might enjoy.
If you haven’t thoroughly checked out all the gadgets and gizmos on Feedburner then do that first. I will go so far as to say that you need this site if your feed is going to succeed. Use the Wordpress plugin to make sure your feed subscribers are counted all in one place, you can add social networking icons and various monetization options.
If you are sick of that orange brick on your site, HongKiat has a killer collection of 40 feed icons that are free to download. If you’re looking for something snazzier and more intersting than the standard orange square, you will definitley find something you love here.
For those of you looking to spice up your feed icon yourself, Feed Icons offers a developers’ pack for free. The download includes feed icons in various sizes, colours and file formats so you can hack and color to your heart’s content.
Everyone has their favorite reader. I am hooked on the perfect couple of News Gator and Feed Demon. This powerful duo (actually a trio when you consider the mobile apps) offers both a web-based feed reader and an app for your desktop. It is very easy to sync the two - you can even set automatic sync. You can add feeds using either application, there is a huge amount of customization available and the Clippings function allows you to save individual posts to read later. I also really love the Feed Demon panic button that lets you clean out your downloaded feeds based on counts or dates.
Toluu is a service (free) that lets you publish your OPML file - a file created by your feed reader - to share your feeds with others. It’s sort of like social networking through feed sharing. You can use your feed list to find other feeds you might be interested in and folks to interactive with. This site is currently open by invite only so I haven’t been able to sign up. If you have a Toluu invite code you are ready to share, I’ll link to your site if you send it my way via the Contact form.
A great way to display feeds on your blog (for example, in a sidebar, is by using the Wowzio feed content widget. WIth this widget, you can display up to 50 of the most recent posts from any blog. A great use for this is for those with multiple related blogs. You can cross-advertise by placing the feed from other blogs in the sidebar. Wowzio widgets are super-easy to set up and install.
Yahoo! Pipes is, at its most basic, a way to put multiple feeds in one place. It does a whole lot more than that, though. It’s highly customizable and full of features. I’m still exploring all it can do and I think I could spend another year doing so. Once I get everything like I want it, I will use it as a place folks can go to read the feeds for all my blogs, view all my photos and see anythinge else I’m publishing on the interwebs all at once. However, I think it would make a damn good overall feed reader as well if you organized it well.
There are many, many fun and interesting RSS-related gadgets and tools out there. This is just a very small handfull. A good place to start if you want even more is 120+ RSS Resources at Mashable.
Welcome to the new year and the return of Trip Around the Blogosphere. With my new polyphasic sleep schedule I should have plenty of time to read feeds and share some great links. My goal is to return to a regular Sunday posting schedule, but I may play around with the day to see how the traffic goes. Anyway, enjoy these great articles…
Catch the Posts! is a blog I just recently started reading. It has some great content, is well-written and just plain entertaining as well. Check out 10 Strategies to Create Valuable Content Based on Existing Material and then stick around and read some of the other great content.
This isn’t exactly a post, but Shirley from Online Grandma suggested I try Notepad++ since I was having problems with PSPad crashing. I love my PSPad, but I have been using Notepad++ for several hours now and it’s like I never changed at all. If anything, I like it better because there are so many options. Thanks Shirley!!
Maria Schneider offered up a great article on Copyblogger called A Quick Guide to Web Forums that Work. The clear four steps outlined in this post should help anyone get a good forum going if they are willing to put in the time. Just like a blog, you gotta show up.
If you have noticed a difference in your Twitter followers versus blog subscribers, Chris Garrett has a few good ideas why. With a large following himself, he was able to conduct a poll of his Twitter followers to get a better look at what was going on. As usual with Chris’ posts, this one is very intriguing and original. No rehashed fluff here.
In his post Drilling Down and Going Deep, Jack Humphrey discusses the pros of choosing just a few social networking sites to become very involved with rather than joining 800 and spreading yourself too thin.
A blast from the past here. Jakob Neilsen wrote Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes in 2005. As much as the web rules seem to change on a daily basis, this article still holds true today. In fact, I would consider this the evergreen list of blog no-nos. Of course, ths should come as no surprise being that the name Jakob Neilson is often followed by soaring epithets like “guru of web usability” and “the Web’s usability czar.” Neilson’s most recent article is Interaction Elasticity; also great.
Yaro Starak Revisits the 80/20 Rule, reminding us that even with all the new social and business tools popping up online, we need to find out what really works and focus on it. This post is very in-depth and full of great advice - read it twice, print it out and read it again once a week. If you can crack the Pareto Principle as it applies to your business, you’re on your way to serious success.
Another not-so-new-yet-still-fresh post is The Importance of Backing up your Wordpress Site from Theme Lab. I found this post because I recently made a change to my sidebar.php file on this Wordpress template and hadn’t backed up the theme files for months (I have a nightly SQL backup run via Cron, but generally just FTP the theme to my local drive whenver I’m going to change it. Since I was making such a small change I - against my better judgment - just decided to go for it). Luckily my awesome host, Quality Host Online was able to send me a backup within just a few minutes. Not all hosts are as great as mine and it certainly isn’t their responsbility to backup your files. This article explains four ways to backup your website either manually or using Wordpress plugins.
Jean-Baptiste Jung has written an excellent tutorial about how to Create an Auto-Stats Page for Advertisers. This is a full how-to with code and all, anyone moderately familiar with Wordpress should be able to follow this. And if you aren’t comfortable with Wordpress, there is link to give you the background you’ll need.
i have never linked to one of my own blogs in the Trip, but I was trying to figure out which blog to post this article on anyway. Steve Pavlina recently announced he is going to begin experimenting with polyamory and I wanted to comment on his decision to go public with it. So here are my thoughts: Bravery Comes in Many Flavors.
And that brings to an end this return to the Trip Around the Blogosphere. If you have a blog or specific post you’d like to see featured here just leave a comment and I’ll check it out.
P.S. Is it time to change the graphic for the Trip Around the Blogosphere or should I let it remain as is?
I have been blogging about blogging for nearly two years now and I have no idea how I’ve missed Upstart Blogger. Their mission is to get beginning bloggers up and running - and making money - as quickly and easily as possible. But don’t let the “upstart” fool you. Bloggers at any level will find the articles helpful, interesting and very well-written.
If you click the pretty graphic at the top right, you will be taken to an information page about Upstart Blogger’s free 30 day blogging course. In order to receive the course, you simply have to sign up for a free 3-month trial of their hosting service. After that, the hosting - which is especially designed for bloggers - is just $6.95 a month*.
If you’re reluctant to sign up for hosting, start by reading 25 Steps to Launching your Blog and Making $100 in 30 Days. It is definitely written for beginners, but even seasoned bloggers can benefit from it. I found a couple of tips I hadn’t considered and some I needed to revisit. Sometimes even long-time bloggers can use some refreshing, evergreen tips.
And then there’s the Inner Circle. this mysterious organization is explained like this:
The Inner Circle is, as it’s slightly clandestine name might suggest, a highly secretive and exclusive network of bloggers working together to develop and grow their traffic and income. Not as clumsy or random as a normal blog network, The Inner Circle operates under the rules of a more civilized age. A time where friendship, trust and loyalty were more highly regarded than in today’s blogosphere.
In order to find out more about it, you have to send an email. I will be sending mine directly after I publish this post.
The last thing I want to mention is a current contest of sorts going on. You see, Upstart Blogger has a pagerank of 7. During the month of January, if you link to Upstart Blogger and then leave a comment on their post Free PR7 Advertising for your Blog you will be entered to win an ad on the blog for a full year. Ironically enough, I didn’t read about that until after I started writing this post, but I’ll certainly be taking advantage of the opportunity.
*I’m not affiliated with Upstart Blogger or their services in any way. I’m just sharing a good deal.
Is it possible that 2008 is officially over? It’s true that the older you get, the faster time passes. There are only two years left in the first decade of the new millenium. It’s crazy.
I don’t have anything deep and meaningful to say. I don’t even have a resolution. I have a ton of things I want to accomplish, but I don’t really believe in choosing one day of the year to set goals. And, honestly, they rarely work anyway.
My biggest wishes for 2009 are:
Get out of this stupid war and start focusing on the issues in our own country
America’s financial situation improves, especially for business owners and the middle class who have really suffered this year.
Civil Unions are legalized for same-sex couples. No more of this “yay! you’re legally recognized” and then two months later “Sorry, we changed our minds.”
Yup, I wish for peace, joy and equality. Not very original, but definitely sincere.
Hello my wonderful readers! I need some help tonight and I’m hoping one of you can provide it.
When I’m writing, I almost never compose posts directly in the Wordpress “Add New Post” page. I write them out first using a text editor called PSPad. However, in the last few months PSPad has been a bit cranky with me. Sometimes it will crash in the middle of a post. I tend to save often just out of habit, but PSPad doesn’t have an autosave feature so sometimes I just plain lose what I have been working on.
I don’t like that.
So, despite my love of the simplicity of PSPad, I am on the hunt for a new text editor. Here are the specs I’m looking for:
Free: If it has something really cool feature I can’t live without I’d be willing to pay a bit. But no more than $25.
Line Numbers: I don’t do a ton of coding in text mode, but when I do line numbers are very helpful.
Tabs: I always have more than one document open at a time - sometimes a dozen or more.
Spell Check: It doesn’t have to automatically spell check and it can be an add-on, but I need the option.
And that’s it. It doesn’t have to have fancy colors, fonts or any bells and whistles. I’m looking for a fast, user-friendly editor app that doesn’t hog a lot of memory.
I have Googled, but I thought asking my readers gives me a better chance at finding something quickly and right on the money.
Welcome to the new year and the return of Trip Around the Blogosphere. With my new 
