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Show off your Identi.ca (Laconica) feed with a) WP plug-in or b) raw PHP/MagPie solution

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  • Solutions: Use the ‘dingshow’ WordPress plug-in or Publish Laconica (identi.ca) dents with PHP/MagPie solution.
  • Purpose: If you like to show off your identi.ca or any other Laconica microblogging feed on your site.
  • Features include working author links, @ links, general links and working #hashtag links.

PHP/MagPie: Download ‘DingShow’ a.k.a. ‘DentShow’

filzo.de/dingshow_plainphp.tar.gz

“Ding” is kind of a translation of “dent” to German. The meaning is “thing” or “something”.

MagPie had to be patched on my server. Solution and description is here:

@filzo Patched #MagPie here: http://is.gd/2fEV (Scroll to “Technische Notiz zu MagpieRSS”) Description etag bug: http://is.gd/2fF6

To show off your identi.ca/Laconica feed simply edit the last line of the index.php.

The Author of this PHP/MagPie solution for identi.ca/Laconica is:

Philipp Czora
Identi.ca: @filzo
Web: filzo.de

The idea to create the raw PHP solution was forcefully pushed at him after he developed the dingshow-plugin for WordPress 🙂

Thanks and a big hat tip to Philip!

SEO: Great list of web based (!) SEO analytics tools

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Hat tip to Search Engine Journal author Ann Smarty (nice name 🙂 who compiled a list of useful online SEO tools. She starts with three criteria for those online SEO analytics services:

  1. they are all useful for SEOs
  2. they are all web-based (no desk-top ones or FireFox extensions so far)
  3. they are all free

She divides her collection of online SEO tool into different areas (her table of content, *=main points, o=sub points):

* Backlink Analyzing Online SEO Tools;
* Keyword Research and Brainstorming Tools:
o Keyword Brainstorming Tools;
o Social Media Based Keyword Analyzers;
o Online Dictionaries and Glossaries that Help with Keyword Research
* Domain Name Online Tools;
* On-Site Analysis Online SEO Tools:
o On-page Keyword Prominence Research Tools;
o SEO Browsers;
o Page Size and Load Time Checkers;
o Additional Site Diagnostics Tools;
* Search Related Online Tools:
o Keyword Rank Checking Tools;
o Tools that Compare Different Search Engine Results;
* Website Traffic and Demographics Report.

What I like most is that she is using tables to give a nice overview of the different capabilities of the competing online SEO analytics tools.

Online SEO Tools – the Ultimate Collection

I am waiting for her future post: “ALL SEO FireFox extensions will be reviewed in my next huge overview (like I said in the beginning of the post, here I review only web-based tools).” In the meantime I might check out Ann Smartys article archive.

Tinyurl now with URL keyword power a.k.a. custom alias!

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Some competitors on the ‘make a long URL short’ market had the ‘URL keyword power’ feature long time ago but now Tinyurl.com also followed the market demands.

Tinyurl now also offers a custom alias (optional) a.k.a. URL keyword power!

In the past the long URL at the bottom would have been shortened to some tailing cryptic expression. Now you can create a less efficient but more powerful ‘speaking’ URL.


tinyurl.com/tinyurl-alterantive-services

Trap: Double check your alias for typos!!! Otherwise Tinyurl will throw “The custom alias could not be made because you’ve already created an alias for this URL” at you. Maybe you have to clean your cookies to get around that error message but I am too lazy now to check that. Just make sure you know how to spell right 🙂

Related: TinyURL service is down – 4 alternative services + 44 pictures (plain text version)

Tip: Get more from the delicious.com a.k.a. del.icio.us RSS feeds

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Reading the news on blog.delicious.com I discovered a valuable hint regarding the number of items in a delicious.com RSS feed.

We recently limited RSS feeds to 15 items, but you can change that by adding ?count=30 (or up to 100) to the URL.

Source

As the RSS feeds are a very fast source to get an overview about certain topics this possibility will enhance the research experience a lot.

More items in a feed may also be interesting for people who import feed items into their blog.

More notes space coming soon too

Yes, we plan to increase the notes field to 1000 characters. This may not be in place right away after launch, but it’s in the works.

PS: You noticed that del.icio.us is delicious.com now? A great change. Congratulations to the delicious.com team!

Filed Under: RSS

Monetization: Look for specialists – Offer content development

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Creating a blog is like breathing for you?
What about the content?

And here comes a client who needs a website/blog.

Almost always somebody who needs a website/blog will have some special know-how in a niche. He/She is a specialist for a content niche (let’s say plumbing) but has no web development and (!) no writing skills (but maybe thinks so).

Artem is writing in Have Profession – Will Be Paid for Writing:

If you have skills in pretty much any area, you can easily earn extra $5-20 an hour by freelance writing in a relevant niche blog – the writer’s skills are not important.

His perspective is good and a specialist able to write can make some extra freelance money from his know-how. I always experience it the other way round 🙂

How I make long term money from content development…

Look for specialists and convert them to long term clients

I know many people who do web design or web development. In most cases it is project work meaning that work is done when the website/blog is going live. In my case I always try to convert clients asking for a website into long term clients by offering not only technical skills but by offering content development.

A typical web 2.0 content development scenario

  1. A specialist wants a website and/or a blog.
  2. Training him to write properly and regularly almost always fails and in the end I am writing the articles, add content, link out and publish as a ghostwriter.
  3. This is really good money if your are paid on hourly base and not on a freelance writer fare 🙂

Important is the 2nd point: The client fails in updating the content on a regular base. No client pushing needed. Just patience, experience and a good web development follow-up strategy.

Creating new rich content is a lot of work and many clients will realize pretty soon that their key competences won’t transfer automatically into written words.

Example for short content development reference paragraph

Now somebody who knows his CMS platforms and is able to offer/create a good blog format, a good article structure, writing capabilities, desktop research, an editorial calendar and last not least some SEO/SEM know-how will be of huge help.

Some Branches where I had success up to now (watch the diversity):

  • Photo agency
  • Painter
  • Record studio
  • Lawyer

The specialists know-how is needed for creating the new article ideas and the ‘what’s hot’ objectives. The supplier at arm’s length for content development can offer the specialized content development resources.

Key factors

  • The key for acquisition is a) having one or more nice dynamic websites/blogs yourself and b) content development references.
  • The key for good maintainability to keep away from the technicals aspects (and the client complaining about support costs) is a) to know your tools and b) to cut down the technical solution to a minimum.
  • The key for success is showing how nicely the clients pages pop up in Google a couple of days later.

Where are your specialists willing to hand out money for your content skills?

New Niche Blog: Develop a content driven concept FAST

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For a niche oriented blogger it is pretty natural to come up with new subject ideas all the time. Raj wrote an inspiring article How Many Niches Should You Pro-Blog? but focused on the questions involved and the problems showing up when doing multi-niche blogging.

Let me show you my very 1st concept phases for a new website.

The basic idea is to work out a content concept 1st and to ignore design issues. If you fall into the trap of designing a new site 1st then you will see how decelerating design issues are.

Phase Zero: Seed the idea

Skipping the analysis part of classical product development I will assume that some idea got into my head worth to develop a content concept for a new website/blog. Basically when an idea for a new website comes to mind I structure the idea in four parts:

  1. One sentence concept phrase
  2. Some example article keywords
  3. How to promote the site
  4. How to monetize the site

This should fit on a small paper notebook page and should not take longer than 15 minutes.

Example:

  • How to employ kids?
  • Playground, surrounding, specials (Technique: Google map, hCard, hReview)
  • E-book, PR/Media, Flickr group
  • Ads from local businesses (cafés, bakeries) around the specific playgrounds

‘Phase Zero: Seeding the idea’ is no brainstorming and no messing with mindmaps, design concepts and technical issues. Instead it is a simple process of taking a quick structured note for future follow-ups.

Concentrate on the content concept in a way that you can see the value of the content stand out from the crowd. Imagine a three-minute presentation to a stranger.

Phase One: Community driven?

After seeding the idea (read: take a note because otherwise I will forget it) the basic concept will hang around for an uncertain amount of time. Maybe I will discuss it with friends and maybe I will set up some search feeds to follow the basic keywords to get a feeling for the existing websites.

Very important is to decide if the site should have a community part. Can or should user generated content be one of the big values your new website has to offer? The community question is one of the big web 2.0 questions. Yesterday it was ‘forum or not’ but today all is possible.

Depending on the yes/no to the community question you will have to think about different technical solutions. In my case I have three standard platforms (Please insert your own). Which platform to use?:

  • Single domain with Textpattern
  • Simple multi domain or sub-domain site with Pivot
  • If community response plays a part then I will consider Drupal

The community trap

In my mentioned ‘How to employ kids?’ scenario it might be very natural to reach out to other parents and get additional reviews and comments. But the crucial coming up question is: Will the concept be worth to develop a necessary ‘community management’ concept (read: time commitment) or will a simple comment function be enough? As I am not really interested in being a community manager I will always try to stay with the simple solutions as long as possible knowing that simple solutions narrow the extension possibilities of a site.

If you are not totally sure that a community feature is needed for your concept to work then better stay away. You will always have the option to offer a separate forum solution later.

Phase Two: Rough content sketches

After finishing the two basic concept phases I will try some concrete tests.

  • (Optional) Setup a basic installation with a basic three columns design.I prefer to do the 1st tests inside of a ‘no index’ sub-domain. The advantage is that I can show it off to other people compared to an installation on a local test machine. This step is optional because if you are more familiar with prototyping in your HTML editor then use that. Remember That we are talking ‘speed content development’ here 🙂
  • Create some basic content. Normally I will have one test article which is copy&pasted and refined in new articles all the time. I will not work on the ‘big’ design. Instead I will show content concepts inside of articles using article sidebars with float:left and float:right and some kind of test navigation links in the articles.

Using a ready made three columns template or a magazine style template with a test installation is not aimed at using it later but instead the aim is to answer the question ‘necessary or not?’. For small sites I love the ‘one column’ and the ‘left navigation + one column’ designs.

Phase Three: Design and template

And here we are already leaving the ‘content driven website concept’ part and it starts to become time consuming work. The more you could strip down your content concept in the phases before the easier it will be now to develop a nice and reader friendly design.

The ROI trap

If you are one of those guys who say ‘I will keep all my options open’ then you may end up investing more time than the site will pay back to you regarding monetization.

Strip down fancy features and your site will be up live and running much faster.

Blog archive: The publishing power of bookmarks

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  • Do you hammer out your daily dose of blog posts?
  • Are you and your readers satisfied with your blog format?
  • Are your readers leaving your page after reading one page?

If the answer to the last question is a proud ‘Yes Sir’ then we have found a bunch of classical blog problems related to ‘archive pages’.

  • Visitors read the latest article and leave
  • Visitors find a good article via search engine and leave

As the new performancing.com staff writer James Mowery pointed out in How To Make Your Previously Written Content Valuable Once Again there are good reasons to give your readers a lightning fast way to previously published great articles (Read: buried stone dead in the archives). Let’s use a more generic and less performance consuming approach…

Social bookmarks are perfect for publishing…

Be aware of WordPress performance problems

If you are a WordPress user like the ones the above mentioned article is aimed at you may want to check if there are other solutions then the mentioned WordPress plug-ins because WP extensions can lead to another bunch of problems at least if you consider performance to be important. Take a look at the number of database calls and you may see that your page is pretty slow because some WP plug-ins may add literally 1,000s of database queries to your site just for a fancy feature.

Why not use some powerful social services and take advantage of them?

Workflow sketch:

Find out about your best pages yourself

I am using the tool 103bees and a good analytics tool (old school Google Analytics in my case) to find out which landing pages are successful. But 103bees can do much more for you in this ‘best pages’ case then standard analytics packages do.

  • You can lookup your top landing pages and see which keywords and which phrases have led to the specific page.
  • You can lookup single keywords and see to which pages on your site they have led visitors.
  • You can lookup keyword phrases and see to which pages on your site they have led visitors.

Using the menu points “Top landing pages”, “Top search terms”, and “Top keywords” you get a list of phrases or single keywords. This is priceless information even if rumors say that there might be some price to pay for the 103bees service in the future.

Now we have found out:

  • What are the most visited landing pages which is good for identifying the most successful if not the best articles.
  • How to collect the data for keywords leading to specific single pages which can be a good source to create a ‘this article was found with the following keywords/phrases’ block for single articles.
  • Which pages belong to which keyword cloud which can give us a good list of related articles.

Now we can develop a little matrix of cross connected links.

Bookmarks, notes and tags used for publishing power

The list above sounds very complicated, doesn’t it?

  • Let’s use the ‘best landing pages’ scenario as a 1st case study.

The del.icio.us plug-in for Firefox is a useful bookmarking tool because you can bookmark a link, add a note and tags. Bookmark your top landing pages links in 103bees with a special tag like my:best:pages to del.icio.us. Done. The basic matrix for the ‘best landing pages’ scenario is finished.

Of course the best landing pages don’t have to be the pages you consider to be the best pages but you can decide yourself about the mix.

Repeat the bookmarking procedure from time to time to refresh the list if necessary.

Additional scenarios

  • Use a bookmark tag for fitting external pages to create a block of reading recommendations below a single article.

This can be done in the Firefox browser via the mentioned del.icio.us add-on. To speed up this process you can use a feed reader which is capable of tagging articles and sending them to del.icio.us. My favorite feed reader BlogBridge can do so. Just tap ‘t’ when reading an article and add tags and extended note in the dialog. After OKing the dialog the tagged article is sent to del.icio.us as a bookmark and the bookmark is ready to be published without further action.

Let’s say you have an article about ‘what great grid design can do for your blog’. The article is finished but you stumble across fitting pages because new articles about grid design pop up all the time. Bookmark the found article i.e ‘blog:grid’ and you can update your reading recommendations below the article automatically without touching the admin interface.

With the del.icio.us add-on for Firefox you can even exchange the external article title against a better alternative for your site.

Note: By looking up the original search engine referrer we are also able to find the related pages via the original search engine result page. If you link out to the top authority results you have a chance to receive some fitting backlinks.

  • Tip: Use an external blog editor to send short notes as asides to your blog.

You can send articles via XML-RPC (read: external blog editor) to a specific blog category i.e. ‘linkdump’. Now you only have to define a template block for that category to only contain these ‘linkdump’ articles.

Use the hosting power of modern social web services

Remember that WordPress plug-ins are a) only for WordPress and b) very resource consuming esp. when combined. A WP installation with plug-ins installed for a top commenter list, most read articles, most downloads, last referrers, etc. plus all the rest of the dynamic WP plug-ins might become very slow because of all the necessary database queries!

Let’s say you run a couple of websites which are not powered a) by WordPress, b) you want to use the before mentioned bookmarks on multiple sites and/or c) you love the idea of a ‘computing grid’. Maybe your hosting plan also plays a vital role (think about videos, music and photos).

As we have loads of free solutions on the web which offer great computing power and many of them offer personal RSS feeds why not use those resources to free our sites from performance bottlenecks, ISP download restrictions and gain publishing power by adding little snippets of external information to our websites?

Use the power of RSS subscriptions!

Publish your i.e. ‘best of’ bookmarks via RSS

On pretty every serious CMS or blog system you can subscribe to RSS feeds to show up in your content. These RSS feeds can come from your own sources (think blog network) or from external sources. If you don’t have the RSS subscription possibility then you can still install the powerful SimplePie or MagPie RSS aggregator solutions and add some PHP to your template code.

In our ‘best of this blog’ scenario we now only have to add a content block at the appropriate places and publish the my:best:pages RSS feed from del.icio.us. The latest list of the i.e. ten best pages will show up automatically.

You can decide to show the title only or add your bookmark notes.

Javascript solutions

If possible don’t use the offered Javascript solutions by Flickr, del.icio.us, etc. because their content will not be indexed by the search engines. For your readers the Javascript solutions will still be better than nothing.

Extended possibilities

There are many possibilities to add content via RSS. Think about adding weather information, news, videos, photos, blog search results from Google, Technorati or many other sources.

But please: Take care about copyright restrictions if using external sources!

For external full content feeds I can only recommend to republish them via i.e. FeedBurner and shorten the feed content.

Resume for the ‘best articles’ scenario

del.icio.us is your friend …

This del.icio.us way I am also solving some archive presentation pages issues. For every month I ‘develop’ a certain del.icio.us linkroll … with or without excerpts and put them onto a page or into my sideboard

Here are the steps in short:

  1. Use a d.i.u tag for your best articles
  2. Publish the RSS feed for that tag as an aside
  3. Your finest content will show up automatically

Related articles

  • Publish mini blogs as asides
  • Intuitive Navigation with Tag Clouds – Lengthy article but valuable ‘archive structure’ discussion in the comments.

Feel free to add more links to related articles in the comments.

Encounter the Yahoo! del.icio.us blocking policy

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Follow-Up to Search Engine and Social Media Shenanigans: Yahoo! Blocks Other SEs From Spidering Del.icio.us?

OK, Yahoo! blocks spider from other search engines. Who cares?

How-To create your own copy of your del.icio.us bookmarks

It is as simple as creating a local copy of all your bookmarks stored at del.icio.us. Basically you have two pretty easy possibilities:

  1. Static del.icio.us copy via export
  2. Syncing your del.icio.us feed into an RSS feed aggregator

And maybe somebody has some cool ready made del.icio.us API solutions to offer (I don’t).

Let’s elaborate about the two mentioned possibilities…

Straight forward: Static del.icio.us copy

Del.icio.us offers an export function. Play around with it and create static pages in your webspace. Having static bookmark.html pages is not a bad choice.

  • Use keywords as filenames.
  • Take a look at this SEO relevant article: Matt Cutts About Subdomains And Subdirectories

Tip: There used to be some Firefox Add-Ons around which could sync your del.icio.us account with the local bookmarks. The right del.icio.us add-on could help a lot.

Tip II.: Define and subscribe to some del.icio.us add-on and/or tools search feeds. The link list in the article will Desktop Research: Trends 2008 (Bonus: OPML File) help.

Advanced: RSS aggregation of your del.icio.us feed(s)

It is only very little initial work necessary but with the help of a database, an RSS aggregation software and some reblogging tool you can create a synced copy of your future del.icio.us bookmarks.

The important thing is to find solutions which will keep your del.icio.us RSS feed items. A simple subscription tool will only show the actual feed content.

My del.icio.us RSS feed aggregation software tips

My latest Bookmarks (feel free to send me a beer for the great free resource 🙂

  • del.icio.us … aggregator software
  • del.icio.us RSS aggregation

The recommended software which I have tested

  • Gregarius – A Free, Web-based Feed Aggregator To-Do: Is republishing or reblogging possible? Is ist only a reader? … Gregarius is a web-based RSS/RDF/ATOM feed aggregator, designed to run on your web server, allowing you to access your news sources from wherever you want.
  • reBlog by Eyebeam R&D – RSS aggregation and reblogging software … To install your own reBlog, you will need a server with PHP, MySQL, and Perl CGI scripts.

I am using Gregarius with a pretty straightforward standard installation. Click on the link to see my personal syncronized del.icio.us repository realized via RSS feed import.

I have once installed reBlog once but they have a crazy security concept (if I remember right). It was something about having the admin directory above the user pages without additional login security. I did not get it to work with the standard html security options.

Combination of both or using the del.icio.us API

I can’t help you too much with the combination and esp. not how to bring both solutions together but maybe there are some del.icio.us API gurus around who will write a little program???