Posts tagged ‘blog’
Day 20: Go on a dead link hunt
Today’s challenge is another one that I read through on ProBlogger’s site and it immediately clicked with me. Every website that’s been around for a few years suffers from link rot to one degree or another. Sites that you linked to may disappear. Even worse, if you’ve moved your blog from one site/engine to another, many of your internal links may be invalid. Often blog posts will move over from one system to another just fine, but the links within those posts won’t be updated. Teach42 started off on Radio userland, then it moved to pMachine, and then I made the final move to WordPress which is what I’ve stayed with. Without a doubt, I’m sure I’ve got some dead links in there that I’ve just been avoiding hunting for all this time.
There’s nothing worse when you’re reading a blog post, you find just the link you were looking for, try to click through and find that it’s dead. It can be incredibly irritating to readers, and discouraging enough to drive people away from your site. There’s a few well known bloggers that have moved a few times, and I know how bothered I’ve been when I try to navigate through their archives only to find that all their internal links have gone awry. It certainly doesn’t encourage me to make a return visit.
Unfortunately, it’s one of those tasks that just feels like it’s going to be an absolute nightmare to do so everybody puts it off. However, this challenge is all about taking a good close look at our blogs and doing all the unmentionable tasks that would normally be swept under the rug. So it’s time to grab a broom and dustpan and do some dirty work.
There are two sites and one PC based tool that I’ve had recommended to me. The tool is Xenu, and the two sites are Dead-Links.com and the W3C link validator. All of them do the same basic task, which is to crawl through your site and test each individual link. If it thinks the link is invalid, it flags it for you. Based on the specific way each tool/site does this, it may come up with different results than the others. That’s why you will probably want to do at least 2 of the 3 tests. I’d suggest running one test, checking the results and making changes as needed, and then running a second test.
More than likely, this is going to take a while. I’d suggest starting the test up and then going to watch CSI or taking a nap. By the time you’re done, the spider should have some results for you. I’m going to be running this for myself overnight tonight and then making any corrections I find over the weekend. I’ll report back on what the results are and you do the same.
Let us know what the spider found. Did you have a mess to clean up or was your site all spic n’ span? If you want to have some fun, try running your school’s website through it and see how it does! Then you can add a few items to your webmasters todo list! But let’s be honest, better to know than to not know, right?
Day 19: Who do you love… and why?
Today’s challenge is a relatively simple one, and likely one that you probably do on a regular basis subconsciously. Today we’re just going to do it consciously. Basically, the idea is to spend some time visiting other educator’s blogs that fall into the same niche as yours, and analyze what you see there. This is one of the challenges that I really liked out of ProBlogger’s 31 day challenge. And I think he has an excellent list of questions to ask yourself while you visit other people’s blogs.
# What do they do well?
# What are the boundaries of the topics that they focus upon?
# What don’t they write about?
# How often do they post?
# How long are their posts?
# What level are they pitching their blog at? (beginners, intermediate, advanced)
# What questions are their readers asking in comments?
# What style or voice do they write in?
# What type of posts seem to get the most attention (comments, trackbacks, incoming links)?
# What is their design like? What do they do well and what do they do poorly?
# What are other blogs writing about them (use technorati to check this)?
The idea here is to get an idea of what are your options. It was doing this sort of activity that really made me realize that I should be inviting more guest bloggers (I actually have two lined up) and also drove home the point that if I wanted my blog to be more active, I had simply had to make the commitment to be more active. There are other bloggers that I respect that have full time jobs and families too…. actually most of them do. And I could do if I really wanted to, without any excuses. There are times when as a result I’m posting this challenge as midnight approaches (ahem, right now), but I’m still getting it done because it’s important to me and a priority.
So take a look at some of your favorite blogs and see what exactly it is that you like about them so much. From both a technical aspect as well as a ‘spiritual’ aspect. And see what you can learn from them.
As a follow up activity, leave a comment here pointing out a blog you really like and what specific things you happen to like about it. Are there any aspects you’re going to try to take back to your own blog to try to add in or incorporate?
Day 16: Your Greatest Hits
On Teach42.com right now, I have 764 blog posts. I’ve written a few more, but they got lost between transitions before I settled on WordPress. Of those 764, 10 appear on the landing page. So when someone comes to visit my blog, those are the posts they see. If they have some time, maybe they’ll scroll back a few pages, but there may be some visitors that have no idea that I used to be an active podcaster. Or that I aggregated the top free WordPress themes for education. Or that I wrote up a summary of the things I learned from Twitter in a 24 hour period. Or that I built an iPod battery pack… out of an Atari 2600 cartridge!
The point is, as wonderful as a blog is for sharing your thoughts and ideas, information does tend to get buried rather quickly. Some of those posts, like the ones I mentioned above, are just as valid now as they were a 12, 24 or even 36 months ago. So today’s challenge is going to be adding a spot on your blog for your greatest hits, the posts that you think are your best, your most significant, and the ones that you think visitors to your blog should check out. Idea being, if they’re only going to be on your blog for a few minutes, what are the things that you’d like to show them?
So what posts should you provide links to?
- Posts of yours that have received the most comments
- A post where you describe your ‘blog’ mission statement, or why you got into blogging in the first place.
- A blog post that you’re extremely proud of, whether it got comments or not (some of my favorites have gotten zero comments)
- Any posts that you think would be worthwhile for people new to the blogosphere to read
- In a nutshell, your favorites.
I want to re-emphasize, number of comments does not equal quality of post. There are a few posts I’ve written that have received a decent number of comments, but frankly I’m rather ashamed of. Others generated a lot of conversation, but I don’t necessary feel are all that significant or worth pointing out to people. Perhaps the information is dated and not relevant anymore.
Take some time to scroll through your archives and try to figure out which posts you think are worth sharing with people. There’s no magic number here, but I’d say between 5-10 are a good number. As to where you put them, you really have three options. You could just post it on your blog, which is great to remind current readers of your greatest hits, but doesn’t help future readers. Once again, in 10 posts, it’ll have scrolled off the front page. The second place is to put it in it’s own page. If you do so, you can link up the post as well as write a brief description of why people might be interested in it. Then you add a link to that page in your blogs navigation bar (many blog engines do this automatically).
The third option, which is the one I’ll be doing tonight, is to add it in to your sidebar. If you do that, then those links will appear on every page throughout your blog, so regardless of how people arrive, visitors will still be able to see them. This gets those posts the most exposure, but it also takes up real estate in your sidebar, something we’re trying to keep concise. So long as you don’t let it get out of control though, it shouldn’t take up too much space.
If you’re a new blogger, then maybe this is something that you may want to create space for, and update as you go along. Veteran bloggers, this may take some time to dig through.
Either way, once you’ve done the groundwork, share a comment here with what you think was your most significant blog post to date and why. And don’t forget to share a link to it!
30d2bbb image by Jason Robertshaw is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License
Day 15: Find Thyself
First of all, before we even get started, congrats to everybody who is participating in this challenge! Today marks the halfway point. Some of the challenges have been easy, and others I know have stretched some of you. The second half will be more of the latter than the former. We’ll be building on some of the groundwork we laid in the first half and taking it to the next level. Don’t worry if you have joined recently, or have missed some days. Join in when you can, pass when you can’t, catch up if you want, or just skip over ones that don’t appeal to you. If you take any of these challenges and learn something from it, then I consider it mission accomplished. If you’ve kept up and done every challenge every day (or the next day when I post them late at night!), then my hat is off to you. This stuff ain’t exactly a cakewalk, and I’m thrilled to have so many people along for the journey!
Today’s challenge may seem a little egotistical, but believe me when I say that it’s a worthwhile activity for a blogger to do. You’re going to go on an ‘you’ hunt! Visit some of the different blog search engines, and see who’s linking to you, ensure that you show up in searches, and see which searches you appear in. One reason that we want to take the time to do this is to ensure that our blog is actually being submitted to different search engines every time you update it. Most blog engines will automatically submit your posts to search sites, but ONLY if you have it set to do so. We also want to see whether you actually appear in the searches that you think you do. If you search for you name, do they show up too? And if they don’t, why don’t they? These tasks aren’t hard to do, but they’re often overlooked.
I don’t think you’d find to many people that would disagree that there are two big boys when it comes searching blogs, and those are Technorati and Google Blog Search. Sure there are dozens of others, and some of them like IceRocket have got some great feature sets, but we’re going to focus on the major players.
Let’s start off by finding out who’s linking to you. Some blog engines do a decent job of letting you know whenever someone links to your blog by letting you know that you received a ‘pingback’ or ‘trackback’ on a post you wrote. If someone links to that specific post, it’ll show up listed along with comments. WordPress and EduBlogs does that automatically. However, even that will miss out on time when someone links directly to your blog in general, but not a specific post. You search for these links by typing your entire URL into the search box. So I would search for http://teach42.com. One thing you do need to be careful of is that you may get different results if you include the ‘www’ than if you exclude it. On both Google and Technorati I got more results by leaving the ‘www’ off. In theory, they should be the same, but reality is that they aren’t.
If you’re a brand new blogger, don’t be discouraged if you don’t have many, or any, links to your blog yet. It takes time and persistence. Regardless, all of these searches have RSS feeds associated with them. I suggest adding both a Google and Technorati search for links to your blog to your aggregator. That way you can keep an eye on any that might otherwise escape your notice.
Next up is to see how easily people are able to find your content. For this, we’ll be doing a variety of searches. Start off broad and do some searches for your name. In this area, I’m lucky. Dembo isn’t all that common a name, so it’s easy to browse through every hit for that word. If you’re last name is Smith or Jones or Nguyen, you may have more trouble and need to zoom in a bit more. Add your first name, and variations of it. For example, I’d search for Steve Dembo, Stephen Dembo, Steve Denbo, and even throw it into quotes, “Steve Dembo”. Without quotes, it’s finding any blog post that has the word Steve and the word Dembo. With quotes, it’ll just find ones that have Steve right in front of the word Dembo. Generally, one or two of those searches will work better than others. This is useful to see who may be mentioning you in a post, but was too lazy to link you up properly!
Besides just other people’s mentions of your blog, you SHOULD find your own blog posts. It may sound silly, but you do want your own blog posts showing up under your name. If somebody sees your name in a comment or social site, you want them to be able to find you in search engines. That’s why I always tag my blog posts with my blog name, my last name, and have included my full name in the actual title for my blog… to ensure that people can find me if they try to look. Just something to think about. We’ll be coming back to tagging later in the month.
The last set of searches that we want to do are for your blog name and keywords. Once again, that’s the benefit of me having a blog name like Teach42. There aren’t too many other Teach42′s on the internet. If your blog has more common words like 21st Century Open Education 2.0, then you’ll be competing in searches with more people. Hopefully, if somebody types in your full blog name, they’ll find your posts.
If you aren’t finding your posts, then poke around in your blogs settings. In WordPress and EduBlogs, if you go into the Settings->Writing menu, you’ll see at the bottom of the page a box where you can in include what sites to ping when you post something new. While there may be several listed there, make sure Pingomatic‘s http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping is there. It’s a general, all purpose pinger that hits most major (and minor) blog search engines. Most blog engines have a similar functionality somewhere in there, so poke around if need be.
Of course, the other half of this challenge is that when you find people who are linking to you, click through those links and see who they are and what they have to say. While you’re not obligated in any way to respond, it’s always a nice and polite thing to do. If nothing else, you just want to be sure that you’re aware of what’s being said about you, who’s connecting to you and ensuring that you’re hard work is circulating in a way that enables it to be found.
What did you find when you searched for yourself? Was it about what you expected? Any surprises? Did the different search engines have pretty similar results? Any search engines that I’m not mentioning that you think are worth sharing? Share your experiences below, and don’t forget to visit the wiki and list yourself there!
Day 14: Leave a Message at the Beep
Since I’m posting this one on a Friday evening at 10:00pm (yeah, the day kinda slipped away from me), and this week’s challenges have been fairly ‘meaty’, I figure it’s time for an easy one. In order to pass this challenge, all you need to do is look at your front page and ask yourself the question, “If somebody wanted to contact me, is it incredibly obvious how to do so?” If a total technophobe couldn’t figure out how to contact you directly from your front page, then it’s time to correct that.
Throughout the course of my blogging career, there have been dozens of times when I’ve needed to get in touch with somebody directly and been unable to find a means for doing so. There are several very prominent bloggers who do not have contact information for themselves readily accessible. To be honest, I’m stunned by that. If you’re taking the time to publish and share publicly, why wouldn’t you give people plenty of ways to communicate with you as needed?
There are some people who have tried to tell me that’s what comments are for. The only trouble with that is when the message I want to pass along has NOTHING to do with any of the posts on the blog. I hate leaving a comment that is completely unrelated to the post I’m leaving it on. Call it a pet peeve if you will, I call it poor blogging etiquette.
There are a few ways you can rectify this. Some people put their contact information in the sidebar, which is obviously the easiest for people to find. Personally, since I like to provide a variety of ways for people to get in touch with me, I created a Contact page and listed it in my navigation bar. On that contact page, I have two emails, my IM information, my Skype name and an embedded form that will get sent directly to me via email. People do use that constantly as it saves them the trouble of copying and pasting my email address into a mail application. It’s just a plugin I found that works for WordPress, but there are a number of other solutions. I do consider that to be an ‘extra’, and certainly not required. So long as you have at the minimum an email address for people to use, that’s plenty.
Some people I know are very worried about spammers and spiders grabbing their email address or link off of open web pages and flooding their accounts with junk. This would be particular worrisome for a work or school email account. Personally, I’m not so concerned about it, which is why I keep my address public. But if you ARE worried, stop by the Email Icon Generator. Put in your email address, style it, and it’ll generate an IMAGE that spells out your email address. That way people can see it clearly, but there is no text there for spammers to grab. Sneaky, eh?
You never know when or why people might want to contact you, why make it difficult for them to do so? Check into your contact information and make sure it’s easily accessible from the front page!
30d2bbb image by Jason Robertshaw is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License
Day 13: Declutter Your Sidebar Part 2
Well, you knew this was coming. Part one of the challenge was zooming in on the blogroll, assuming that your blogroll was even IN your sidebar of course. Part 2, today’s challenge, is to go through the rest of sidebar with a fine toothed comb and de-clutter it. This is one of the ideas based on ProBlogger’s tips that I knew was going to be included the moment I saw it. One thing to remember here is that de-cluttering does not necessarily mean removing things. It’s a matter of looking at each item you have there, considering whether it belongs in your sidebar or not, whether it is taking up more space than it deserves, whether it’s function is being duplicated elsewhere or could be consolidated, and whether there may be another way to achieve the same goal in a more efficient way.
If you’ve been following this challenge, then you’ve already added a few things to your sidebar. I think having a translate option is important and is going to stay. The Clustrmap is more of a vanity item than anything else, but it does an effective job of demonstrating the reach of your community geographically and I’m choosing to keep. Obviously, that’s a personal choice. I’m not going to preach that you should have a short sidebar or a long one, or what belongs there and what doesn’t. However, I do believe that what’s there should be deliberate and efficient in terms of space and form, especially considering how many options are out there.
For example, in my sidebar right now I have a Facebook badge, I have a ShowYourself badge, a Twitter widget, and a FriendFeed widget. The ShowYourself badge has a link to my Facebook profile and my FriendFeed widget displays my Twitter status updates, which seems kind of ridiculous now that I think about it. I’m going to eliminate them all. No, I’m not going to stop linking to those things and displaying my status, but I’m going to take advantage of a tool that Sue Waters (who is the spiritual co-author of this challenge!) recommended to me called Retaggr. It provides a nice clean badge that will give me almost all the functionality that those four items provided, but in one nice and neat package. It’ll have links to all my social sites, like the ShowYourself badge. It includes my headshot, company, and link to Facebook like the Facebook badge did. It will also display my most recent tweet, which is plenty. If people want to see my last 10 tweets, they can visit Twitter. The only thing I’m losing out on is that the FriendFeed badge displayed when I’ve uploaded photos or videos as well, which is pretty sporadic to be honest. Ideally, I’d love it if Retaggr would display my most recent post on Twitter OR Plurk, but that’s ok. I think the benefit far outweighs the few things it lacks.
There are a few widgets that I have that just don’t make the cut. I have a Now Reading plugin that shows what my ‘reading’ status is. However, it only works as well as my maintenance habits, which are poor when it comes to that. I never remember to update it so I have a choice: Change my habits, or just get rid of it. I don’t feel it’s that important, so it’s going bye-bye.
For the widgets that you’ll be keeping, bear in mind that there may be new versions of them available, or third party options that you could swap them out for. For example, check out all of these different Twitter widgets that are available. And that blog post is from a year ago! Many sites also offer you the opportunity to modify the color schemes for a widget, enabling you to try to blend it in a little closer to your chosen theme. You may find it worthwhile to give a few ‘keeper’ widgets a makeover as part of this challenge.
While we’re at it, let’s talk Archives. Typically there are only three ways somebody visiting your blog can find your posts once they’ve scrolled off the front page: 1) Search 2) Categories 3) Archives. I do think they’re important to keep around, but once you’ve been blogging for a few months, they start to take up a HUGE amount of space. However, that’s an easy one to do something about. Most blogging engines now have an option to shrink your archives down to a drop down list. So instead of it taking half the page, it’ll only take up a line or two. Unfortunately, that option is usually relatively hidden. In WordPress (and EduBlogs), you have to find the archive Widget and click Edit and the option will pop right up. In Blogger, it’s pretty similar. Go to Layout -> Page Elements and choose to edit the Blog Archive gadget. Lots of options there, including changing it to a drop down box. Very very easy thing to do in order to save a lot of real estate in your sidebar.
Finally, there are three things that I think you need to make sure are somewhat obvious in your sidebar: A search bar, a way to contact you and a way to subscribe to your blog. I never understand why some bloggers don’t have a search bar on their blog. It makes me leave their blog and jump through some Google hoops just to find information they’ve written that I know is there! As I mentioned above, there are precious few ways to find your content once it has scrolled off the front page. Don’t make it more difficult for your readers.
Contact information seems like a no-brainer, but I’m always stunned by how many blogs I visit don’t provide any way to make direct contact besides leaving a comment and hoping they see it. Some of you put your contact information in your About Me page. That’s fine, but if you did so, you should also have SOMETHING in your sidebar that clearly states, “This is where you can go to contact me” and then points to the About page. Once again, if somebody reads your blog and wants to communicate with you, you want it to be easy for them to do so.
Same thing goes for subscribing. Now, if you did the Feedburner challenge, then this should be a non-issue. But step back and verify that in your sidebar there is an obvious way for people to subscribe to your blog. Your RSS or Feedburner icon should not be so subtle that people can’t find it. I recently visited a very prominent blogger and was flabbergasted that there was no RSS link available. I had to view his source code in order to find out what his RSS feed. That’s inexcusable on a blog. So double, triple check to make sure that your RSS feed is represented in your sidebar and that it points to the right one if you signed up for Feedburner.
Just for the sake of an example, I’m going to leave my blog’s sidebar as-is for the rest of the day, and then will fix it up as I’ve outlined here tonight. Enjoy the mess for now, it’ll be a leaner, meaner sidebar soon 
I have to admit, the comments on these posts have been phenomenal. So don’t be shy here, did I miss anything? Is there anything you consider a ‘must-have’ for your sidebar, or that you think is a faux pas that bloggers often commit? Got a great widget that you think would add value or make people’s sidebar content more efficient? Share some of your favorites as well as the ones you hope to never see again! Also, if you’d like to get some feedback on your sidebar, share a link to your blog and I”m sure people would be willing to take a look.
Day 12: Declutter Your Sidebar Part I – Blogroll Audit
Well, today’s challenge is the first of a two-parter. The longer you have a blog, the more cluttered your sidebar winds up. New social site? New widget! And it all adds up. Pretty soon your sidebar is a veritable circus of colors, banners and links. It’s time to reign it in, but if we’re going to do it we should do it right. And that means taking a thorough look at what we have there, determining what can be eliminated, what can be consolidated, and what should be… pruned. Which leads us to your blogroll.
The blogroll is one of the most popular sidebar items with good reason. It let’s people know who you read, where you get your information from and who you recommend to other people. There are many tools that make it easy to keep up… But therein lies the problem. For example, I use Bloglines for my blogroll. Anytime I add an EdTech blog to my aggregator, *bam* it appears in my blogroll. Delicious, Google Reader, and many others allow you to do the same thing. Trouble is, that means it’s just a little too easy to keep adding blogs to it, and after a while it sorta of loses it’s value. Looking at my blogroll as it stands right now, it’s just a series of links to a bazillion EdTech blogs. Unless it’s deliberate, it’s meaningless. So it’s time to do some trimming.
There are several ways to do a blogroll. WordPress, Blogger, Typepad and Edublogs all support blogrolls natively. Or you can use third party tools like Google Reader, Bloglines, Delicious, or any number of others. To be honest, the tool that use doesn’t matter so much. The important thing is selecting what you want to list there, and how you want to organize it. Do you want to list a few of your favorite blogs to read? Do you want to list bloggers that you admire? Perhaps you just want to share your favorites in a specific niche, like Special Ed or ESL. Really, it’s entirely up to you and there’s no wrong way to do. So long as you do it deliberately and maintain it.
Maintain it? Absolutely. Sometimes good blogs go stale. And if the blogger hasn’t posted since 2006, does it really still deserve a spot on your blogroll? Most likely not. While your pruning, you just might find yourself feeling a little guilt. You really like ‘John’, but you haven’t read his blog in who knows how long. Should he still be in your blogroll? In my opinion, if you even have to wonder, go ahead and take it out. If you share a sprawling list of 50 blogs there, it’s overwhelming and deters people from exploring them. If you have a concise list of 10 blogs, people see that these are personal recommendations from you and will be more prone to clicking through. It’s more meaningful that way. So don’t feel guilty. It’s your blog darnit! Do what you need to do. And if you’re going to have more than 10-15 of them, consider breaking them up into multiple categories so they’re more manageable.
If you don’t have any you want to remove any, at least do a ‘freshness’ check to make sure all of the blogs you’re linking to are still up and are active!
Good luck! And don’t forget, if you haven’t joined the wiki yet, stop by and list yourself there. And get ready for tomorrow, when we give the rest of your sidebar the royal treatment!
And now I’m off to do some trimming myself!
Day 11: Introduce Yourself to Another Blogger
I gotta say, I’ve been blown away by how many people are participating in this challenge! Absolutely fantastic so far, and more people are jumping in every day. It’s never too late to start, and you can always work through these challenges at your own pace. Don’t forget to list yourself on the wiki as well. That way everybody can support each other’s efforts as they make their way along in this journey. I’ve heard from a few people who are keeping up with them every single day that they could use a relative break, so today’s challenge is going to be an easy one. All you need to do is introduce yourself to another blogger.
When I first read this one on the Problogger site, I have to admit I was a little dubious. Introduce yourself to another blogger? Why bother? Why waste their time. Then I started thinking about all the times people have emailed me over the years, just to say how much they’ve enjoyed something I wrote or broadcast, or just dropped me a note to say that something I posted made them think a bit. Considering the amount of junk mail we all receive or how much email we get that is job related or requires us to actually… well, DO something… It’s really wonderful to just get an email from somebody who is just saying hello and letting you know they enjoy what you write.
To be honest, this one doesn’t really NEED to be a blogger, it could be a Twitterer or a Plurker too. Pick somebody that you may have followed, read, or listened to from afar but never made contact with before. Then introduce yourself. Let them know who you are, and why you read their work. Perhaps you want to reach out to someone you saw at a conference recently, a keynote speaker who you thought had an interesting point of view, or an author in an educational magazine that wrote an article you enjoyed. Up to you. But go ahead and make a personal connection with someone that you ‘follow’ in some way. If they write back to you, that’s wonderful! If not, no worries. Consider it a good deed, a mitzvah, a little bump in your karma for the day. And if the personal connection is reciprocated, all the better. But either way, it makes all the future connections that much more meaningful.
Have fun and report back who you contacted!
30d2bbb image by Jason Robertshaw is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License
Day 9: Burn Baby Burn! Your Feed, That Is
One of the more confusing aspects of blogging is RSS, but that’s truly the heart and soul of a blog. Without the RSS feed, you just have a web page. Your RSS feed allows people to subscribe to your content via aggregator or email, or allows you to take your content and republish it in a variety of ways. For example, it’s what allows you to announce your blog posts on Facebook or on FriendFeed and so on. Your feed is an absolutely critical piece of your blog and you always want to make sure it’s functioning, happy and standards compliant.
While just about every blog engine out there supports RSS, most are fairly basic feeds. They do the job, but not much more than that. Of course, that begs the question, what else would you like your RSS feed to do? Wel, for one thing you might want to engage in podcasting. Most people don’t know it, but it’s your RSS feed that takes a link to an MP3 file and turns it into an actual podcast. It realizes that you’ve linked to an MP3 file and then adds in some special code that let’s podcatchers like iTunes know how to get access to the audio file. Interestingly, it doesn’t just do it for audio files. PDF’s, Video files, and documents of all sorts caqn be sent out via a podcast. That is, if your RSS feed handles the data right. And that’s barely the tip of the iceberg.
While most RSS feeds are just adequate, Feedburner is a free service that can take an adequate feed and make it superior. I’ve been using Feedburner to remix my feed for about 4 years now and can’t recommend it more highly. There’s a few reasons that I suggest using Feedburner to upgrade your feed, but the biggest is a very simple practical one. Bloggers move around sometimes. You may start on Blogger, then move to EduBlogs.org and then wind up hosting your own someday. Who knows? Maybe you’ll start off on your own and then move to a school server. You never know what the future is going to bring. Typically, every time you move your blog you’d need to alert all of your readers that your RSS feed is changing. They need to unsubscribe from your old feed, and then subscribe to your new feed. While some people will do so, more than likely you’ll lose readers that way. If you have people subscribing to a Feedburner feed instead, you just change were Feedburner gets it’s information from and your readers are unaffected.
Let me step back just a little bit and ensure you understand what I mean on this one. Typically your blog engine (Blogger, EduBlogs, WordPress, Blogmeister) creates your RSS feed. When you sign up for Feedburner, you supply them the link to your RSS feed and then they give you a shiny new Feedburner feed. Then you hide all instances of the original feed and make sure that everybody is subscribing to your Feedburner feed. The feedburner feed passes along the EXACT same information, but it mixes it and mashes it up to make it more standards compliant, enables all sorts of additional features, allows you to keep a closer eye on your subscriber data and more. So it’s just a shiny new version of your original feed, but with a new address.
I’m not going to take you step by step how you sign up for feedburner, because they already have some great walk thru’s for it, depending on your blog engine. This page has quick start guides for Blogger, WordPress, Typepad and MySpace. Sue Waters has a phenomenal write up of how to add Feedburner to your EduBlogs blog. And for the record, most of her steps will work just fine on other WordPress blogs.
Once you’ve signed up for Feedburner and have your shiny new Feedburner link, there’s two things that you need to do in order to make sure that people find that instead of your old feed. The first is add a Feedburner chicklet to your sidebar. Log into your Feedburner account and go to the Publicize tab. One of your choices is the Chicklet Chooser. Follow the steps there to create a chicklet that appeals to you. Grab the code and paste it somewhere in your sidebar so that people can find it. Then glance through your sidebar to make sure that you don’t see any other references to your old RSS feed. At this point, I would also suggest that you alert your current subscribers to switch over to your new and improved feed. If they don’t, no worries for now. They’ll still receive content via your old feed. It isn’t turned off or anything. But you do want to encourage them to move over to the new one.
The second thing you need to do is fix your auto-discovery options. If you use Firefox 
, Flock, Opera, IE7 or Safari 
, you may notice certain notifications when you’re visiting web pages that have RSS feeds. When that icon appears, that means that there’s subscribable content on that page. Clicking on the RSS icon takes you to a page that gives you a variety of ways to subscribe. However, we want to make sure that it’s providing ways to subscribe to the NEW Feedburner feed. If you use an official redirection service like a WordPress Plugin (same goes for Edublogs) or Blogger’s Feedburner redirection service, then no worries, it should handle it for you. In Typepad, you can connect your Typepad blog to Feedburner and then it’ll handle it for you. If you use anything else, you may need to edit your template yourself to do this part. While it may seem intimidating to do so, it’s not that complicated. Just a matter of tweaking a few lines of code. This blog post will show you how.
So today’s challenge is to upgrade your RSS feed to Feedburner today. It’s one of those things that may seem like a pain the first time you do it, but trust me when I say that you will never regret it. It’s well worth the effort in the long haul. If you’ve already upgraded your blog to Feedburner, then use this as an excuse to browse through the site and see what options have popped up since the last time you visited. Most people set up Feedburner and then promptly forget all about it. Did you know that you can mix in events from your Google Calendar? Or add icons allowing people to forward on your articles, promote them on Digg, or GeoTag them for you? Is your Creative Commons license in your feed on and up to date (not everyone actually VISITS your blog)? Are you allowing readers to subscribe via email? Feedburner is adding features all the time, take a few minutes to flip through the features you may not have seen recently.
If you have any problems with this challenge, let us know via comments below. I’ll do my best to try to point you in the right direction. Also, don’t forget to add yourself to the 30D2BBB Wiki, so people know who you are and where your blog is. That way we can all try to support each other!
30d2bbb image by Jason Robertshaw is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License
Day 21: Give a comment a promotion
Bill Ferriter had some solid remarks about commenting from Day 8′s challenge:
He’s dead on. And for that reason, it’s incredibly important to respond to your comments. While you can respond publicly on your blog, or privately via email, I believe the best solution is to do both. I’ve been pretty awful about this during the challenge, mostly due to time constraints, but typically I respond to comments directly via email, but then copy and paste that into a comment on the blog as well so it is embedded into the conversation for future visitors. It demonstrates that you respect your reader’s opinions enough to consider them a part of the conversation.
For today’s challenge, we’re going back to commenting with a slightly different spin. Your challenge for today is to integrate a comment into a new blog post of yours. This can be a comment that somebody left for you on your own blog (like I’ve done in this post), or a comment that somebody left on somebody else’s blog. This may require a little digging, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Honestly, there are times where the comments left on a blog post are perhaps more significant than the blog post itself.
Take a little time to find a comment that you think is worth promoting into a blog post, or integrating into one. Don’t forget to link directly to the comment itself on the blog post it came from and whenever possible, throw a link to the commentor’s blog as well.
And then leave a comment here explaining why you chose the comment that you did and where we can find your post! Oh, and if you haven’t listed yourself on the 30D2BBB wiki yet, be sure to do so.
30d2bbb image by Jason Robertshaw is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License