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!

Related Reading on Teach42

• Curse you Amir Dembo!
• Day 26: Tag, you’re it.
• Day 28: Link It Up
• Hey, leave my feed out of it.
• Day 3: Write a thank you note

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.

Related Reading on Teach42

• Blogging Pro Theme
• Be a Better Blogger in just 30 Days
• Day 9: Burn Baby Burn! Your Feed, That Is
• Day 5: Globalize Your Blog
• 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!

Related Reading on Teach42

• Totally blogless
• Information Overload
• Where do blogs rate?
• I really want to like Google Reader. But I don’t.
• Day 13: Declutter Your Sidebar Part 2

One of the most popular widgets out there is the Clustrmaps. It tracks your visitors and adds dots to the map corresponding where they hail from. It’s always fascinating to see where your visitors are coming from, and I don’t think I’m alone when I say it’s kind of a thrill when you see that you had a visitor from a land on the other side of the globe. If you haven’t installed a Clustrmap on your blog yet, you can consider that to be a sub-challenge for the day. It doesn’t take much time, and it’s another one of those little gifts to yourself that keeps on giving. If you do have a Clustrmap already, consider this a reminder to check it periodically and see where your visitors are coming from.

So why do I mention Clustrmaps if that isn’t specifically today’s challenge? Quite simply, to remind you that it isn’t just the people in your state, country, or even continent that are going to find your content. When you publish your thoughts and ideas on your blog, you are publishing for a global audience. It’s entirely possible, and even likely, that you are getting visitors from around the world without you even realizing it. So shouldn’t we be making our content as accessible as possible?

Of course, even without considering visitors from around the globe, if you live in a culturally diverse community, you may have parents who aren’t native English speakers. There’s one district nearby me that has a school where over thirty different languages are spoken by the different students. Publishing the great things that your students have been doing on your blog doesn’t do you much good if your parents are unable to read it.

That’s why today’s challenge is to provide visitors a means to translate your blog into their native language, no matter what it is. Google Translate, while not perfect, does a very adequate job of translating web pages into other languages. However, we can save visitors more than a few steps by putting the Google Translate widget directly into our sidebars. Once it’s in there, with a single click, people can translate your content into their native tongue. All you need to do is visit this page, copy the code and paste it into your sidebar wherever you want to display it. If you are targeting a specific language (for example, if many of your parents speak a specific language) you may want to call attention to the widget in both English and that language.

Just in case you don’t know how to embed HTML into your blog, here are a few resources for you. If you’re using Edublogs.org, click here to see how to embed code into your sidebar. If you’re blog is hosted by Blogger, visit this article to see how to do your embedding. If you’re using Wordpress.com to host your blog, unfortunately you’re going to need to do a workaround. They don’t allow you to embed in the Google script (for security reasons), but if you visit this thread, you can see how to make a small widget full of text links for translations, or if you scroll about midway down the page it’ll show you how to display a series of flags that will provide one click translation.

That’s it for today’s challenge! Leave a comment when you have done so and let us know where some of your visitors happen to be coming from! What’s the farthest away location or the most interesting? Or will you just be starting to track that today? Good luck!

Related Reading on Teach42

• Day 13: Declutter Your Sidebar Part 2
• Day 10: Do you see what they see?
• Day 17: Mobilize Your Blog
• Themes, themes and more themes
• Day 16: Your Greatest Hits

So long as we’re near the start of a month, there’s no better time than taking a good close look at your blog’s statistics. We want to know who’s visiting, where they’re coming from, how long they’re staying, and much much more.

By watching your statistics carefully, you can learn all sorts of interesting information about your blog and your audience. For example, by studying those reports I’ve learned:
1) That my traffic drops off dramatically every weekend. People tend to visit Teach42.com during the week, and my busiest day is Tuesday. This means that if I have something I want to publish that I really want people to read, if I publish it on Tuesday morning I have the best chance of reaching the most people.
2) Despite the fact that I work exclusively in Firefox, and do all my design and planning in Firefox, over 2/3 of my readers are still using IE. This means that I absolutely MUST double check all of my design and theme work in IE to ensure that I know what most of my readers are seeing.
3) That I get as many hits by people searching for “Jeopardy Questions” as I do for most other search terms combined. Not sure how useful it is, but it certainly provides some insight to what’s hot on your blog and how people are getting there.
4) The vast majority of my readers come, read an article and then leave. Most don’t stay and explore the site very often. Based on this, I can either A) try to take actions to make my site more sticky, or B) optimize my site for in-and-out users.

You get the idea. You can never have too much data about your site and it’s easier than you might think to get good data. If you’re using a hosting company like Bluehost (my hosting company) or Dreamhost, you more than likely already have access to great site traffic tools like Webalizer and Analog. Just go into your control panel and look around for them. Often you need to turn them on before it will start collecting data for you.

If you don’t have access to those tools, you can install them for free provided you know your way around Unix. Otherwise, you can take advantage of tools like Sitemeter. Just put their widget somewhere on your site, and it’ll start logging traffic for you. Some of the stats are available to the general public. It’s how SiteMeter advertises for itself. But most are kept private.

Of course, in addition to these tools, there’s the Big Daddy of the traffic tracking world, which is Google Analytics. While I’m not sure it is any more or less accurate than the others, it certainly gives you the prettiest reports, and a wide variety of ways to manipulate your data. It isn’t too complicated to set up, but you do need to be able to edit your HTML theme to do so. Just register there and they give you a block of code to insert into your site. Once you do, it’ll start tracking your data.

You should definitely be using at least one tool to log your site traffic, but since different tools monitor and report in different ways, I do recommend using 2-3 of them. Since there’s no cost involved, it’s just a matter of setting them up once and then checking them periodically. Plus those graphs are good for the ego and can be highly motivating. For example, the days when I do post a new blog, I clearly see a bump in traffic, which is always incentive to post more often!

Are you already logging your site traffic? If so, what lessons have you learned from it? Are there any other tools that you recommend? And how often do you actually check your traffic statistics? And if you’re new to blogging, all the more reason to start tracking early. It can be quite fun and informative to watch your numbers grow over time!

For more information on this challenge, you can visit ProBloggers post on the same subject.

Related Reading on Teach42

• Day 3: Write a thank you note
• Day 12: Declutter Your Sidebar Part I – Blogroll Audit
• Totally blogless
• Day 28: Link It Up
• Day 9: Burn Baby Burn! Your Feed, That Is

Been meaning to write up some quick thoughts about Google Teacher Academy: Chicago, but realize that time is fleeting and I just didn’t see myself getting to it soon. SO, I decided to go the video route and do a quick vlog wrapup about it.

FYI, that’s the last time I use the camera on the front of the phone. While it’s great because I can see comments that are typed in live, and I can see myself and make sure I’m centered and such, the quality is SO much worse than the camera on the back. So from now on, I use the good camera and even if it’s a little laggy while watching it live, at least the archive will look much better. And let’s face it, thats’ much longer lasting.

Related Reading on Teach42

• Researching a digital camera? Use Flickr!
• What’s next for NECC?
• On blogs and relationships
• Podcast: Early morning NECC reflections
• BLC06: Hands on with Marco