Day 18 - Roundup · Dominic Foster

Day 18 - Roundup

August 18, 2005 on 10:27 pm | In 31 Days to a Better Blog, Blog Housekeeping, Blogging |

Well I didn’t feel too creative this evening after last nights disruptions - so I have done some Blog House Keeping jobs which I have been saving up for times like these.

I have added some links to Blog Utility Sites (can’t think of a better name for them - somebody please correct me). You can see them on the left hand side of my page. They are

Pluck An online News Reader thingie - a bit like BlogLines. I saw this on Steve Pavlina’s Blog - so I had to have one too.
MyBlogLog - an utility which tracks outgoing links from your site. The idea being that you can find out what else interests your readers (because they are clicking the links) and engineer your content for their tastes - thus retaining readers. This is an affiliate link by the way.
BlogTopSites - This is a kind of Blog Ranking site. Darren Rowse has it on ProBlogger - so, yep, I had to have one too. It was hard work signing up for it as Darrens site is Number 1. However, when I signed up I was 65 (last) but in the last couple of hours I have shot up to 42. Incredible - It’s got to do wonders for your self confidence! Get one! Now!
Feedburner, BlogLines and NewsGator were added a week or so ago. I recomend getting these as they have generated a reasonable amount of traffic for my site.

Another Blog House Keeping job I’ve been working on is tweaking my AdSense. I’ve managed to insert a square block of ads into the first post of the page with some help from a handy post at the Wordpress Forums. It involves faffing around with some PHP in the index.php file - so you may want to back this file up if you plan to have a go yourself.

I have also done a spot of Blog Stubbing over at my Nicolas Darvas website - after being encouraged by some un-noticed Search Engine generated trafic and a sudden increase in AdSense revenue (only a couple of bucks though).