Great tip from Tarun, asking for an evaluation of the PsycHo template building tool. Well, as you can see, I took the assignment pretty seriously! Consider the tool evaluated.

As with any template builder, this would be great for a new site. If your blog is established, customised, and loaded with goodies, you may have to cut and paste a bit, but this is still a cool tool. It has built a great-looking (at least IMHO) template for Freshblog. I am still recovering from the sting of an inbound that said something like "bad layout, good content," and when I set out to fix the CSS in the template header it became a bit tricky.... Hopefully now the standard of the layout approaches the standard of the content.

There may be (will be?) bugs. Please leave me a comment. I'll be grateful for the heads-up. Font size, link color and such are on trial for the moment, and if the links are hard to find I'll choose a different shade of blue!

So. If you're starting out, and you want a slick looking template such as this, try PsycHo.
You'll find an easy interface that reflects your changes in real-time, and sub-divides the menu into the components of the page so that you can tackle one set of formatting at a time. There are also a number of spiffy export & share functions. Very good stuff.

And the Freshblog mantra? Back up your existing template before you make a change.

Filed in: freshblog blogtech webtech template blogger
psycho

Tom Raftery muses about maximising the potential of Del.icio.us, and holds up the inbox as an example of an under-utilised tool. Agreed. I'd also suggest the for:username tag as a tool that stays in the box of most account holders.

Leave a comment on his post to suggest other uber-user tricks.

Filed in: del.icio.us, social-bookmarking webtech

The Official Google Blog reports that the oft-rumored "seen in the code" ability of reader to share content has gone live:

You can send a link to your starred items in Reader, and you can even put a clip on your blog with recent items from your reading list. For instance, I mark all of the interesting posts that I find as "linkblog."

Looks like it is all label based... (can we please start calling the damn things "tags"?) and so requires a certain level of commitment to reader, and the frequent labeling of content viewed therein.

Here's the screenshots, anyway, to help you along with this new feature. It isn't difficult, I just really like screenshots! (These can be made larger by clicking on them)

1. So what's this all about? The general intro / help screen explains the send & sidebar functions.
2. Turn the thing on! Select a "label" (aaarrrggghhhh) from the left sidebar above (not shown) & you'll see the options for sharing that content:


It seems that this upgrade enables the viewing of fed content by tag, using an individual link for other users of reader, and an atom feed for anyone else. The sidebar widget could be very useful too, as a way of pulling selected relevant content out of your subscriptions and into your sidebar.... I'm already thinking of it as a way to have a clip blog or "links from del.icio.us" equivalent for those of us using del.icio.us for categories?

Sharing / export at the tag level is a promising addition to Reader. I'd like to see it become easier to add labels to content now, to foster the inclusion of posts in the share-able formats.

Filed in: google reader feeds rss webtech blogtech readers atom

Forgive the self-indulgence. Normal service will be resumed asap. Freshblog isn't really 3... I mean, Freshblog will be 1 in April, really, on the anniversary of the publication of my first del.icio.us for categories hack. This birthday post is sneaking out today because I've been blogging for three years...

What a difference a year makes. Freshblog turned two with minimal fanfare and no attention. The site turns 3 ranked just the wrong side of 3000 (out of 30 million) on T'rati, with 400 + subscribers, two additional contributors, and 100,000+ total page views....

Now, I realise this is an hour in the life of the Instapundit, and that my blogstats are not so much to brag about. Let's just say that I'm enjoying this a lot more now that there's a community of readers and contributors here, and now that the content is original, & useful to readers. It's great to open Gmail and find some comments, and the occasional "hey, did you see this & will you write about it...." Blogging is a little easier when the content (even some of the content) comes to you, instead of requiring you to go to it.

Some thank you's in the form of birthday link-love, because the content, energy and ideas have come from out there:

• Anyone who's left a comment, link, trackback or e-mailed to give me a heads-up. Thanks! Keep the good stuff coming.
  
• Greg Hill, Author of Freshtags & Freshblog Contributor, for letting me be the P.R. man for some damn fine hacks.
• Fritz from Cycle.icio.us. Freshblog contributor and the man who can put Technorati mini in the sidebar of your blog.
  
• Johan Sundstrom, Scripter extraordinaire, who's greasemonkey script for categories survived the 0.6.4 upgrade and corners the market for integrated tagging.
  
• Singpolyma, whose collection of blogger hacks and custom version of Freshtags keeps the frontier of blogger customisation rolling back daily.
• Ted Ernst, who along with Marnie Webb provided the original tools and information that got me in this mess.... enabling the first "Del.icio.us for Categories" post on April 20th, '05.
  
• Ken Dyck, creator of the Xblogthis bookmarklet that I modified to generate del.icio.us tags
  
• Julie Meloni, author of must-have blogger companion volume Blogging in a Snap, which you should go to Amazon and purchase immediately. Best $16 you'll spend this year.
  
• Pete Hopkins, who saw fit to link Freshblog on Blogger Buzz. Much appreciated!!
• Top-Flight Blog Hackers Improbulus, Jasper and Phydeaux3, all of whom provide info and tools that are advanced, sophisticated, and well worth a feed subscription.
  
• All 400 Freshblog subscribers (and the friends that you're going to tell to sign up too?...) Your interest, energy and willingness to share your great ideas & efforts are appreciated. I'm happy to do what I can to get your hacks out there, so keep 'em coming.
  

There's more to say about content and community, (and, yes, Microspheres...) but that's another post. For now, I'm curious to see what the year brings, in terms of continued growth here and in terms of new services at (& for) Blogger. There's a Freshblog project in the works that ought to make hacks and other blogger-modding info even easier to come by. Here's to another year of top-flight collective hackery, and to bending blogger gently to make it do what we want it to!!

Use Haloscan comments? Sisyphean Musings lays out the Haloscan Recent Comments Hack for your template-modifying pleasure. There are 4 commented-out clauses in the code that tell you how to edit it to suit your purpose. Great addition to your sidebar if you're a Haloscan comments user.

Steve Rubel wants to see an impartial third party collect auditing and marketing data from the big blog networks...

Auditing keeps publishers humble. With social media networks, however, the game is more than just about numbers. It's about reaching influencers. This means that marketers need auditing that goes beyond reach and explores influence metrics. So far, Nielsen BuzzMetrics is best positioned to develop the kind of syndicated research marketers crave...

So when does the new media become more like the old media? My concern here is that this reinforces the a-list and their claim to be "proper" bloggers, (because they're listed / tracked / rated) and would make it harder for a breakout blog from the long tail to be recognised as influential... (Not tracked by X? Must not be consequential....)

Google Blogoscoped points to Bloginfluence, an interesting service that can aggregate many of the existing measurements of your blog's reach and interactivity into a single (abstract and isolated) number. I rate a 3734.4, whatever that means, (although Technorati didn't seem to poll, and so there may be more digits to be had at another time....)

My influence
[3734.4]

Anyway. Brings up an interesting opportunity to ask for your thoughts. How do you measure and value the activity on your blog? Is a link count sufficient? Is the "What's my blog worth in dollars?" a useful way to make a comparison? Are metrics irrelevant and content is king? Visits? Page Views? Adsense Dollars? What matters to you as a metric of blog performance? Will an abstract number like this start to take hold if enough of us sign on? Hit the comments & let me know!!

No in depth review just yet, but I have signed up, added the code, and look forward to seeing what the new service has to offer... Have also (in response to a helpful comment from David) moved my sitemeter stamp so that it is on every page again. Maybe now the exit stats will be a bit more interesting?

ProBlogger points out that there's something new at SiteMeter, which has been Freshblog's stats tracker of choice since day 1.... (or whatever day it was that I decided I would like a stats tracker....) :

That the free website statistics package has added tracking of outbound links to it’s offering.

The free version of their service will now track the last 100 URLs that your readers leave your blog to visit if you have the javascript version of their tracker installed on your blog.

As Darren points out, they're pre-empting Performancing, & may not win the war even with this new feature, but hey, more tracking is never a bad thing.... even if it does show most folks leaving Freshblog from the main page...

Filed in: statistics, traffic, blogtech, webtech, outbounds

Googlist present a considered and provocative list of 18 things that would make Blogger a much more potent and respected blog host. I particularly like number 1 - Categories with Tags... Imagine that?) and numbers 11 & 12 - navigable file storage for images and other blog-post enclosures, as well as (maybe?) some room for template images. Just the thing to get a discussion rolling. I have a suspicion that a lot of this stuff is coming, whenever Blogger gets its next makeover.... We'll see. Check out the list & let me know what you think...

via Google Blogoscoped

Filed in: google, blogger, blogtech, webtech

Have finally added the new hacks from January & February to Blogger Hacks: The Series. The post is getting a bit unwieldy now, & I'm wondering about other ways to organise the list.... Anyway. Current good stuff now available, incl. Labelr, Freshtags for Wordpress, Comment Editing,... Just when you thought it was safe to stop editing your template.....

A new tool for the definition of and participation in a "microsphere" of blogs that are topically related to your own. Similicio.us

is a mashup of del.icio.us and easyutil.com. It's an experiment...to see whether I can quickly find relevant web sites based on people's tags/bookmarks on del.icio.us, using the engine from easyutil.com. It answers the question "people who tagged this site also tagged what other sites

Looks pretty cool. It will show you what else was tagged on del.icio.us by the folks who tagged your site, and will therefore give you a look at related readings, as well as a sense of the "genre" that your readers think your blog is in. The creator, Ying Xie, is just pulling popular information from Del.icio.us at the moment, to avoid hitting their servers too often.

Via ThomasHawk.com, where there's some discussion of the limitations / strange associations in the service, as well as the future of relevancy as a driving force in social web services.

Filed in: blogtech, webtech, del.icio.us,

Good news for WordPress users! The FreshTags blog navigation system now comes in a WordPress flavour, thanks to the tireless work of Singpolyma. Since WordPress has native support for blog categories, this plug-in allows familiar FreshTags features like "tag grabbing" (extracting tags out of inbound search queries) and "tag passing" (passing reader-selected tags to the next blog).

Singpolyma has also advanced the state-of-the-art for blogrolling. His FreshTags for WordPress plug-in also supports the innovative "peek-a-boo" blogroll method, whereby relevant headlines from your "peer blogs" can be dynamically-loaded - sweet! Now you can tempt your readers without forcing them off your page. Who wouldn't want that on their blog?

Kudos to Singpolyma for pushing the envelope yet again ... I'd better get cracking on the next FreshTags release!

Filed in: freshtags, wordpress, webtech, categories, blogger-hacks, del.icio.us

I have a strong interest in the sometimes shady world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). SEO and SEM is the use of techniques to improve the ranking of a web page in search engine results. If, for example, you have a website selling blue widgets, you want people who Google for "blue widgets" to easily find your page.

One way to enhance your search engine placement is to buy links from other websites. Google frowns on this practice and will penalize your site if they catch you doing it, but some highly ranked websites make decent money by selling links to your page.

Bloggers are also known to accept money to make favorable mention and provide a link to a website. Your hypothetical seller of blue widgets may visit a site where link selling occurs and offer $20 to any blogger who will write a post about his site.

Would you accept an offer like that? Let's say you write an average of three posts per day. If you took one paid posting per day at $20 per post and did that five days per week, that's $400 per month of income for your blog.

Where do you draw the line, though? Do you keep the advertising (and that's what it is) on topic for your blog? Do you disclose which posts are paid advertising? If you don't disclose, what's the risk of being outed?

What if the paid advertising comes not from Sam's Blue Widgets, but from somebody like, say, Wal-Mart?

The New York Times article doesn't describe that exact situation -- the article describes instances where Wal-Mart marketing has developed relationships with bloggers and sends them what are basically press releases in blog-style format, complete with HTML markups. But it's not a stretch to believe that large corporations are paying influential bloggers for favorable mention. Boing Boing, for example, is very clearly a commercial blog. I believe it's only a matter of time before their suggest-a-link form includes an option to pay for express evaluation.

So, how about it bloggers? Is a measly $20 worth the trust of your faithful readers?

Moshare have developed a very cool php-based category method that works w/ blogger blogs that are published to host servers via FTP. If you're on blogspot, this won't work for you, but if you have a server, bring on the heavily integrated categories. Another great method!!

Filed in: blogtech, webtech, categories, blogger-hacks,