Published at 6 October 2008
in Blogging.
Every day I use several tools and services for creating, maintaining and promoting my blog, tools that are absolutely fundamental to various aspects of the blogging process. Sure, I probably could get by without some of them…but I sure wouldn’t like to try! And I’m not referring to electricity or the World Wide Web – obviously blogging would be impossible without those!
The common denominator in this list is that they are all free, which probably has something to do with their market penetration. But their value is definitely far higher! Without further ado, here they are, roughly ranked according to how indispensable they are – although as I’ve already pointed out, I couldn’t really do without any of them:
Continue reading ’10 Essential resources for Blogging’
This morning I was checking out my stats in Google Analytics, and noticed that I’ve been getting a little traffic coming from StumbleUpon. Great stuff! But I wanted to know which article(s) were generating the buzz; unfortunately I had no idea how to find out. I tried the obvious: I tried searching StumbeUpon itself for my domain name, but that didn’t get me anywhere.
Now, I do happen to know how to find a specific page in Stumbleupon: simply navigate to http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/ and append the url of the page you’re looking for (thanks to Terence Chang for the tip). This can be quite a handy way of finding out who submitted your article, what they said about it, what category it was put in, etc. But still, the thought of repeating this for each of my posts to try and find which one(s) had been stumbled didn’t fill me with great excitement. So I decided to try to find the answer elsewhere.
Continue reading ‘Where’s the StumbleUpon buzz on your site?’
Every blogger or website owner should check their stats regularly to measure the progress (or lack thereof) of their site – things like:
- traffic
- subscribers
- revenue from ads and affiliates
The key, as with so many other things in life, is not to overdo it. Every minute you spend checking your stats is a minute you could have spent crafting that latest post or networking with other sites via commenting, social bookmarking, or whatever other means you choose to build your traffic.
I know I’m as guilty as anyone when it comes to this, which is why I was thrilled the other day to come across a plugin that automates the process for you and brings your stats right into the WordPress dashboard.
Continue reading ‘WordPress statistics plugin’
