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Archive for Defogging Blogging
New Comment Options on the Wardman Wire
I have redesigned the comments box on the Wardman Wire to include a number of options including threaded comments, notification of new comments by email, a preview of the comment as you type, the ability to make the box larger or smaller, and others.
Background
Making the Wire easier to use for commenters has been on the agenda for some time, for several reasons:
- Making it easy for visitors to interact is more likely to bring them back.
- I’ve had my eye on threaded comments for some time - as I find it makes the occasional long conversations more understandable. The site is now on a new version of Wordpress and - joy of joys - experiments with Brian’s Threaded Comments have proved successful.
- Importantly, this blog has quite a diverse audience covering several niches - and that makes building a “community” somewhat more difficult than for a more tightly focused site. Ease of use and ease of interaction should help mitigate that difficulty.
Today Ian Whickham of “Question That” (highly recommended, by the way) twittered that he would like a “preview while I type” facility - so I’ve spent a few hours sourcing and installing some new plugins to give this and other features.
Oodles of Options
These are the options you now have (and a reference to the Wordpress plugins I am using to provide them):
Threaded Comments
I have used Brian’s Threaded Comments plugin to allow you to answer to particular comments - rather than just to reply to the whole thread. This plugin requires Javascript to be turned on.
Link back to your last Headline
The Commentluv plugin (with an excruciating name) adds a link to your last article to the bottom of your comment. For this to work, you have to enter a valid web address when adding your details to the comment, and the site has to be able to find your RSS feed successfully in order to extract the first headline.
Comment Notification by Email
There is a box which allows you to opt to be notified of further comments added to the thread.
How do I find out my RSS feed address in Blogger? The Blogging Basics
I had a question on Google Chat from a blogger wanting to know how to finf the web address of their own blog hosted on Blogger. Here are three or four ways.
There are three or four ways. However, first let me explain that you (usually) do not need to worry about the difference between “RSS” and “Atom” feeds - both should work, but you can try the other if you are having trouble.
Sometimes you will see feeds labelled “RSS 2.0″ - this is a more developed version of RSS that provides for “Enclosures” (like file “attachments” on emails) and is used for automatic distribution of podcasts or other media files.
So, ways to find the web address of a blog feed.
1 - Look at the Bottom of the Page
A lot of Blogger blog designs have the address at the bottom of the page, where it will say something like: “Posts (Atom).
The screenshot is from my mattwardman.blogspot.com “holding page” blog, which just exists as a demonstrator when I need to show examples using Blogger.
You can see the address in the same place on (for example) Ordovicius and Macnumpty at the time of writing.
You can get the web address by using the “Copy link location” (Firefox) or “Copy shortcut” (Internet Explorer) option from the “Right-Click” Menu.
Alternatively, click on the link and just copy the web address from the “address” box in your web browser.
2 - Look in the Source Code for the Page
Use the “View->Source” or “View->Page Source) option from your browser to see the HTML (Ye gods, so many acronyms! I’m assuming you know this one) version of the web page.
There are a couple of lines of code (the Wardman Wire currently has three) that define the web address of the feed. These begin:
<link rel=”alternate”
Here is a screenshot of the source code from the Ordovicius blog:
Note that the source code lines have wrapped to make the screenshot a reasonable width, and I have highlighted the relevant lines of code (in red); these lines include the web address of each feed.
Answering the basic questions about Blogging
I’ve had a number of blog-related questions “how do I do this” questions over the last few days, including these:
- How do I find out my RSS feed address in Blogger?
- How do I prevent a particular Google advert appearing on my website?
- How do I put a button in my blog sidebar on Blogger?
So I’m continuing with a series of postings I started last summer under the heading “Defogging Blogging” by doing detailed answers to these three questions. The aim is to answer the question, but also to give enough information to give some insight into the “how it works” as well as “how to do it”.
The last time I spent a lot of time on “blogging basics” was when I wrote 2 chapters for Iain Dale’s Guide to Political Blogging in the UK
At 6pm today I’ll be putting out an article on “How do I find my RSS feed address in Blogger” as the first answer.
Do we need a “Getting Started” resource?
Previously I was thinking about publishing an E-Book about “Getting Started in Political Blogging”, covering different aspects of creating and developing a political blog.
Political Books and Amazon Affiliate Links
Iain has come out with a list of 75 top political books with links through to Amazon. This is probably the most widely use way of earning pocket money on UK Political Blogs. Nearly everybody does it - including me.
The way the Amazon affiliate programme works is that if a person purchases anything from the Amazon website within 24 hours of a click through on an affiliate link, then the affiliate receives between 4% and 10% of the purchase value.
There are certain wrinkles:
- Some high value products (e.g., cameras) have a capped commission.
- Certain peripheral parts of the Amazon supermarket do not pay commission.
- There are several scales of payment, and you can select one up to 23.59 on the last day of the quarter.
The one thing I’m not sure about is if I publish a book review, and someone clicks on my affiliate link less than 24 hours after clicking on (say) Iain’s link, who gets the commission.
I’d expect Iain’s link to dominate if it was first, but then the Net doesn’t always do what I expect.
75 top political books is a fantastic idea for drawing attention to a range of books, and encouraging a range of clicks at the same time.
Tags: iain dale, top political books[tags]iain dale, top political books[/tags]
Analysis of Traffic Levels and Most popular articles on the Wardman Wire
Now that I have the links between my different websites in place, I have been looking at the amount of traffic being generated over the last month, and the most popular articles.
Total Raw Traffic
On this occasion I’ve processed all the raw log files using the free version of a utility called Deep Log Analyser, rather than relying on the data generated by a Wordpress Plugin.
However, once caveat is that at least 4 of the sites (those which aggregate Parliamentary blogs - www.senedd.me.uk, www.holyrood.me.uk, www.europarl.me.uk and www.parliament.me.uk) are all less than a week old. So I have had to include some judicious estimates in the figures.
Another difference is that certain files that are not part of the Wordpress installation are included in the numbers. The raw total of page impressions is 376,000 across all the 13 sites (the twelve in the toolbar and www.mattwardman.co.uk). More than half of these relate to www.mattwardman.com.
The Impact of Files that shouldn’t count
These are the top 5 files listed for www.mattwardman.com and what they are:
Page Views - Filename - What is it?
- 14,880 Page Views. polls-js.php.This is used for in page polls which are refreshed without reloading the page. This should be excluded.
- 14,452 Page Views. podpress_js.phpPart of the Podpress wordpress plugin. Not actually used on this blog. I should really find a way to exclude this.
- 13,872 Page Views. /blog/feed/index.phpThis is the home page for the RSS feed. This could be included or excluded depending on which statistics I am interested in.
- 11,747 Page Views. clickmanager.cgiThis is the redirector programme “bounced off” when I need to count clicks on a link. This indicates 11,747 clicks on links in 30 days. I use it, for example, to count the clicks on the toolbar (hover over a button and see the “double” web address), and the clicks on stories in the Daily Roundup. This should be excluded.
- 10,710 Page Views. /blog/index.phpAt last one that counts. This is the Blog home page. It counts for very few impressions out of the total. I will return to this - it is a sign of how important blog archives are for attracting traffic.
So - just to exclude 4 of these top 5 reduces the traffic to www.mattwardman.com by roughly 50,000 page impressions over the raw log files. Counting from inside Wordpress are cleaner, but still have a lot of “gunge” in the data.
So what is a Reasonable Total?
I am happy to quote a total number of page impressions for this 30 day period of “around 250,000” - a reduction of a third. But having done that - 250,000 page impressions in a month on a set of sites that are mainly only 8 months old is OK.
The figure for the main www.mattwardman.com site is around 130,000-140,000 page impressions (with approximately another 30,000 or so for www.mattwardman.co.uk). These figures themselves roughly tally with the numbers given by the Slimstat-EX Wordpress plugin (140,000 and 35,000 respectively - also probably containing some search crawling).
The Real Top Ten Pages on www.mattwardman.com
After filtering out the noise, the following are the Top Twelve pages on the site in the last 30 days. Go and have a look at the links, and write down your conclusions - then read my notes below.
Page Views - Date - Title and Link
- 3942 Page Views - 20070912 - In memory of free speech - Jesus and Mo - serious
- 3825 Page Views - 20070501 - Double Trouble - Posh Spice and Ananova - humour, morning funny
- 2130 Page Views - 20071010 - Wordpress Plugin - Category Images - tech tip
- 1616 Page Views - 20080213 - ABC Rowan Firestorm was started by the BBC - serious analysis
- 1422 Page Views - 20070904 - New Scottish Government launches official website - satirical
- 1280 Page Views - 20070905 - This posting may contain nuts - serious but funny - health and safety series
- 998 Page Views - 20070404 - Double Trouble - Guido Fawkes and Zorro - humour, morning funny
- 995 Page Views - 20070411 - Double Trouble - Morgan Lifecar and Thomas the Tank Engines - humour, morning funny
- 849 Page Views - 20071016 - Lib Dem leadership contest to replace Ming Campbell - humour, Lib Dems = box of ferrets
- 817 Page Views - 20070609 - Video Game Battle between Sony and Church of England - serious analysis
- 812 Page Views - 20080211 - Britblog Roundup - Ideas for Avoiding the Archbishop - serious
- 709 Page Views - 20070815 - Do Health and Safety Professionals Get too Much of a Kicking - serious - health and safety series
17 Tips to Keep Visitors on Your Bog
[Update on the typo: Yes, I know it’s a typo, but I quite like it so I’m leaving it. Also, this “teaser” article is in about 4 different places, and I’m busy this morning.]
I came across a comment on Problogger that is one of the best summaries I have seen of things you can do to make your blog “sticky” - i.e., helping visitors find other articles of interest, and encouraging them to stay. His tips are a balance of common sense, marketing nouse and a varied bag of tricks.
This is a good approach whether you are attempting to put your views across to your reader, or encouraging them to stay and view more adverts.
It is from Ross Hill, a student who runs an “Interview” blog called Hatchthat.
Since I cannot improve it, I’ve quoted the comment directly over at Poliblog Perspective.
Tags: blog tips, make your blog sticky, sticky blog, keep readers, defogging blogging
Milestone: 20,000 unique visitors in one month on the Wardman Wire
The Wardman Wire made an important milestone this afternoon: we just went past 20,000 measured uniques in a month for the first time.
On this occasion, I’m not apologising for posting statistics - since it’s taken 9 months and a lot of work to get to this point.
Figures for the Wardman Wire
These are a couple of screenshots of the display from the “Slimstat-EX” plugin. Firstly, the summary. You can click through for a fuller screenshot illustrating how our traffic profile is rather different (less purely “politico” than most political blogs in the UK).
“Visits” in this screenshot means “Unique visitors” (which is defined as the number of different internet addresses from which people visit during each individual day, summed across the month). “Hits” means page impressions.
And a sorted version showing monthly figures since we started:
These figures are not filtered for *all* search engines (it would slow the blog down dramatically), which is why I emphasize the “uniques” not the “hits”. The hits figures are likely to be high by perhaps 10-20%. The uniques figures will also be slightly high, but much less so than the hits.
There are two major distortions in these figures. The July 2007 figures went haywire because I posted an 18th birthday interview with Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter) at a cricket match. It is now up to 287 comments, which is ludicrous - including one from the man himself.
And the “Hits” (page impressions) figure for December is inflated by perhaps 25,000 over and above the 10-20% I mention above, since I left the “search engine pinger” turned on by mistake while posting 100 or so cartoons to appear on the blog between New Year and the middle of April 2008.
So the real “hits” figures for December 2007 and January 2008 are likely to be around 100,000 to 110,000 in my estimation.
And the UK Edition
The real figure for the uniques for the main site in January is likely to be 18,000 or 19,000, but fortunately there are another 4,300 or so who visited the UK Edition (again - click through for more detail) so it still comes in at rather more than 20,000.
Before anyone asks, I have not got the foggiest idea why a search for “development For sweater opportunity building” should land on my site, unless it was a visit from Gyles Brandreth.
Wrapping Up
OK - enough statistical self-abuse. Back to politics.
Did you realise that Mr Darling’s Capital Gains Tax reforms have abolished the indexation allowance for CGT (so you will be taxed on the increase in cash - not real - value of an asset, including if the value has gone down in real terms), and that in fact - like the last budget - they hit the poorer members of society hardest? More on that later when today’s Working Lunch is available online.
Except for the most important thing: a really big thank-you to everyone who has visited, and especially those who have taken the trouble to link to the blog or participate in the debate here. Your presence is very much appreciated, especially if you disagree with what has been written and help generate a wider debate. A wider debate is a worthwhile reason for putting hundreds of hours into building a blog.
Video and Audio Wordpress Plugins for Use with Wordpress
I regularly post video in Windows Media (.wmv) and Quicktime (.mov) formats, and Audio MP3 files (.mp3) here, and also embedded Flash Video (e.g., Youtube).
I have done a posting over on Poliblog Perspective about the Wordpress Plugins I use to post video and audio.
The other special things about these plugins, is that they all have tag formats that are capable of being posted from the Blogdesk offline blog editor into Wordpress without their tags becoming mangled in the process.
The embedded video plugin is capable of parsing the web address from Youtube, Google Video etc and generating the appropriate code to save you having to post reams of HTML code.
Read it all here.
Tags: embedded video, embedded audio, video, audio, podcast, vodcast
[tags]embedded video, embedded audio, video, audio, podcast, vodcast[/tags]
