BlogAllAlong

Google Reader for many is without any doubt the best feed aggregator and reader out there. Giving you the ability to read all your favorite feeds online, from any place, at any time. Using the shortcuts (J, K & S), you can easily browse next, previous, and star your item. This makes it extremely easy to go through the 1000+ items I have queued for me to read forever. The ability to merge all the feeds and browse them together is a feature not available in many other readers, where you usually have to browse every feed separately. Recently also, and finally, they allowed searching through all those feeds, turning your feed reader into a rich bookmark for all items you may want in the future. There is also the newly added ability to share items with your friends and blog readers. Simply mark the item as shared, and all your Gmail friends will be able to read it. So now, and instead of posting about any good article I find without adding any value to it, you can go through my shared items on the side menu, where I will be sharing lots of the useful articles I find.

Popularity: 31% [?]

As I have promised one of my friends, here I list the WordPress plugins I am using and what I think of them:

• AdSense-Deluxe: If you are an AdSense user and frequently want to insert Google Ads within your post, WordPress editor by it self can get annoying in the way it manipulates certain scripts within the post. This plugin helps you organize the library of Ads you use and include them in your post with simple <!–keyword–> way.
• Anarchy Media Player: To allow easy embedding of videos inside your post. I still find problem with it however. I tried many solutions and figured the best way with my current WordPress release is to copy/paste embedded code from say YouTube and save at once. Any edit will require I remodify the code to be on a single line again. This problem does not seem to exist with WordPress 2.2 which is used to power my Daily Gizmos blog. However the list of not-supported plugins there is huge so the migration is not a walk in the park.
• Challenge: The protector of the universe.. Arr I mean my blog. It does not completely stop spam though, spammers still find their way through, but without it I get like 50 spam comments per hour.
• DoFollow: This is controversy. Google is completely against it. DoFollow removes the NoFollow from your commenter’s backlink. Meaning that the link will be counted by Google as a weighted link. The idea is that you did not chose to actually link to people who comment on your blog, i.e., it doesn’t actually reflect you were referring to them. It’s them posting, and many times just for the sake of backlink, that is true. So Google believes those links should not interfere with the site ranking weight. Others like Yahoo however don’t believe in this method and count all links, disregarding NoFollow attribute. I am having a second thought about it, but this is the issue of another article I will discuss it in detail later.
• FeedBurner Feed Replacement (Now called FeedSmith): This is a wonderful plugin. FeedBurner first of all is a site that will help you monitor and optimize your blog feeds. To do so however you have to map your feeds to them. This plugin does it in one click. Unfortunately this plugin is not WP 2.2 supported yet.
• Feed Footer: I am just trying out this plugin, and if you are reading my post through Feed Reader you should see a small Sponsored Ad at the end of the post. Many people (like me) like to read posts through RSS Reader as it’s much more practical. This however forbids blog owner privilege of delivering ads, unless they post incomplete RSS Feeds, which I hate to do. This plugin lets you make your readers happy while still get a chance to make some income.
• Google (XML) Sitemap: Sitemaps are easy way for webmasters to tell search engines about pages on their site that are available for crawling. For a normal site, this is possible manually. However with a blog, every day you are supposed to add a new page. So keeping up the Sitemap.xml file updated all the time is a tedious job. This plugin does it for you. On every new post, edit, or delete, this plugin builds the new XML Sitemap. You can also adjust the pages priority from a user interface. All you have to do then is tell Search Engines about your sitemap for better indexing. Use Google Webmasters for starter.
• Popularity Contest: This you can see at the footer of my posts. The popularity rank of each post based on number of views from main page, singe post view, feed view, comments etc. You get to decide how each factor weights in the equation. Ofcourse old posts will not have their history reflected here, but on the long run it’s good to have. Note to make however some posts have somehow strange results, like one that had %100 popularity, I don’t know how. Nothing special about it, and it’s like saying you got %100 votes in election. Not possible if you’re not alone.
• Sphere Related Content Widget: I recently disabled it to go easy on my blog response time. It got loaded with stuff it needs serious attention now. This plugin gives the user list of related articles to your post. The links are shown in new sliding window on click only, making it user friendly
• Show Top Commentors: Reward top commenting people on your blog by listing them on your side menu. Also, this most probably means that they are eligible to have the NoFollow removed, which the plugin does by default.
• Subscribe To Comments: Keep your users tied to the post. Alert them of new post comments by email. Pretty straight forward and useful. I was surprised how often people use it.
• WordPress Database Backup: For the bad days! Mostly you can do that through your host console as well.
• WP-Amazon: This is the strongest AJAX plugin I came across. It allows you through side menu in editor mode to include Images and links to Amazon with your affiliate id in it. This thing should be sponsored by Amazon it’s much easier and faster than using Amazon Affiliate site it self. You search for your item and is fetched on the fly with you affiliate Id added to it. last time I checked, it was not WP 2.2 supported as well :(.
• Wp-Cache: Some people have spoken great deal of this plugin, others and I have not see performance improvement of post caching. Either way, Do no come near this if you have Challenge plugin activated. I did so and ofcourse, the question got cached and displayed everytime, but the real answer is different. People couldn’t post anymore. Trying to remove did not seem so simple at all as well. Read my older post if you want more information on this.

If anyone’s got some comments on those, or further plugins to add, do share them please.

Popularity: 35% [?]

I did not know about this before I read about it on Google System blog. It’s a very nice decent blog, heavily focused on Google by the way. I thought you may not notice that from the blog name so I told you(!). Anyhow, the article goes through SearchMash.com. A new experimental Google powered search site. What is unique about it is how easy it is to search different types of content. If you search for CAR for example, you would get the web results for that, and on the right side are expandable dynamic menus to browse results for Images, Video (with play option on same page), blogs and Wikipedia. You can give your feedback on every category according to the search results, so it’s building it’s knowledge based on customer satisfaction. To browse for more results, you simply click More Results at the bottom of the page, and new results will pop under right away. This is really cool, but could get bad if your browser is heavily loaded.

I am not sure what the goal of this project exactly is. Is it to gather customer feedback, candidate replacement for the current Google interface, or become a separate search engine for the people with such taste. I don’t know about you, but I would still miss the old interface and I can’t imagine they might take it out, even though the new one is awesome. If we compare it to Live.com, I already like that one more. It is much more faster. There seems to be a slight stability problem with it though. Very often when I search I get the “Oops, an error occurred! Please try again later.” Even when I searched for google. Did you try it? You got results? If yes keep trying several times and you may get it as well. If the search does not return any results also, your search query is not shown so you have no idea what you entered exactly. Not unless you sneak on the anchored data parameters http://www.searchmash.com/search/, which is not trivial ofcourse.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Ron Gilbert have started his own Monkey Island themed guild in the World of Warcraft called Threepwood (can you imagine no one used that name?) and is inviting all Monkey Island fans to join the team under one condition, you have to have a Monkey Island character name. Well, too bad I am away from those games, otherwise it would have been fun to act as Murry, the most fearsome demonic skull… Muwahahahahaaa… Sorry I just got over excited a bit.

Anyways, thanks for World Of Monkey Island for sharing the news. And for more, no better than reading Ron Gilbert’s blog for more details.

Popularity: 21% [?]

I have recently transferred my blog from Blogger http://babdullah.blogspot.com to my own hosted WordPress, which is great. Now my experience with Blogger hasn’t been bad at all, and I won’t suggest to all to do the same thing. However, no matter what, a blog hosted by other party must have some limitations. From my short experience with Blogger, I list below the Pros & Cons I came across.

Pros:

• Quick setup time: Within few minutes, and without any technical knowledge, you can have your blog site up and running.
• Simplicity: The nice formatting editor, ease of uploading and inserting images makes it really convenient.
• Quick exposure: Since your blog is hosted by Google Blogger, it automatically gets added to their indexing engine, and the Google News service I think I was wrong here. It gets added to Blog Search only. I have some Google News Alerts setup, and whenever I blog about the same topic, I get the Alert next day in my email. So if people are alerting for a hot topic you are writing about, you can guess how many hits you may get. There is also the links to this post on Google Official Blog. Whenever you write and link to a post on Google official blog, it will be added to their list of Linking In articles. In addition to all of that, many people will start reaching your page from other Blogger pages through the Blogger header if you have it activated. This all cuts things short and easy for you instead of waiting for sites to index and include your site in their News service.
• Easy add to Google Personalized Page.
• Ability to switch to your custom domain. Though I haven’t tried it, but they give the option to point your registered domain to your Blogger account.

Cons:

• Can’t add your own pages and features. Blogger gives you the ability to blog, and have a profile page. It does this so good, but thats all about it. You cannot have other pages like Contact Me or something like that. What people do is they post a blog with very old date, and link to it as Contact page. In addition to that, you cannot add your own features like mailing group, voting, and any other type of dynamic pages.
• Pinging restriction: You only get the option to ping (notify) Weblogs.com of new posts, which is not bad, but you may want additional flexibility.
• Up time: Occasionally I get 404 response for mine and other blogger pages as well. Yesterday for example both my and Google RSS feeds were not loading, while all other non Blogger feeds were OK, so it didn’t seem like a problem from my side.
• No export feature: Sadly, Eric Schmidt have talked about how Google wants to make it easy for the users to take their data and go somewhere else if they like to, but this has not been the case with Blogger. There is no Export feature, and rather I found individual posted workarounds. Unfortunately, those didn’t seem to work as well. They included modification to the template, and the code suggested as a template was not accepted by Blogger because it was not properly formatted. Maybe this is a new checking in the just out of Beta Blogger release. Eventually, I had no choice but to copy/paste post by post and comment by comment. I did not see that feature from WordPress, but as long as you are hosting it, you can always get a dump of the data from the database.
• Terms of service: Although their terms are not so strict, but still it will forbid and control your move in the future in commercial terms. So if you are looking for some real strong blog which you can turn into business later on, perhaps you would feel more comfortable hosting the blog your self and not having to worry about any legal terms.
• Subcategory: While Blogger makes it extremely convenient to categorize posts with their auto-complete AJAX powered suggestion feature, you still can’t make category parent and child. So you can’t have Ruby to fall under Programming category for instance.

That may seem like I am strongly against Blogger, but the fact is I am not. It depends on your intention from the blog. If you want something to share thoughts, discuss with friends and have fun, Blogger is the only thing I will suggest. If you have no technical background at all, even though WordPress are so generous and offer to do the setup for FREE, I still think you should still stick to Blogger. If you have some technical programming skills, WordPress takes only 5 minutes to setup. It will take sometime to know where all the bits and pieces are and be able to customize it, but as I said, you can customize it! You can also search for the available free plugins on the internet.

I hope this small post helps some of you make their choice.

Popularity: 9% [?]