Technology

Setting up systems that automatically control certain aspects of your blog can be a great timesaver down the line, even though the initial time (and possibly monetary) investment may be difficult to swallow.

The great thing about many self-host blog platforms (WordPress and Movable Type in particular) is that they offer a great range of customisation options.

It’s possible to change a lot more than the basic layout if you know what you’re doing (or can hire/coerce someone who does).

Here are a few ideas for automating tasks so that you don’t have to spend time thinking about them and can focus on content creation:

Advertising

Ensuring that advertising slots are displayed in the correct place is simple if you have a good grasp of the design template your blog is using, but it’s also possible to use a plugin to handle the moving or rotating of adverts, or to only display them on certain types/ages of posts.

Related Posts

Many people use a related posts plugin to automatically display links to similar articles based upon keywords.

This doesn’t stop you from manually linking to related content, but it does mean you can encourage readers to click through to other entries without any real effort on your part, other than accurately and consistently tagging posts.

Special Content

Most blog platforms allow you to include additional fields (WordPress calls them “Custom Fields”). With some nifty programming (or installation of existing plugins) these can allow you a great deal of publishing flexibility.

Instead of having to hard code repetitive content into the post itself, using these custom fields allows the blog software to insert new content.

Link List Posts

It’s possible to tie up your Google Reader account to automatically publish a list of links from your new shared items. If you do this sort of thing regularly and you get a lot of links via RSS feeds it can be a great way of sharing them without additional work on your part.

Front Page Updates

Some blog templates have quite a distinct front page, often used as a showcase for the rest of the blog (I’m thinking of Brian Gardner’s Revolution themes, for example).

It can be good to include static text blocks as well as dynamically generating the latest headlines, but at first glance the only way of changing this is to edit the home.php (WordPress) template.

In fact, there are plugins (Get-a-Post for example) that allow you to specify where on the front page static text (or HTML) blocks should go, and then insert the content of a page or post.

These are just a few ideas that immediately sprang to mind. The fact is, if there’s something you are doing repetitively on your blog (apart from creating original content, that is) then there’s a good chance that task can be automated.

It may take a while to find the right plugin or to hone the design so that it does what you want, but imagine what it could do for your productivity if you were able to save even five or ten minutes per post and improve the visitor experience.

What things have you automated on your blog?

Matt Mullenweg recently published a great little article over on the official Akismet blog where he shares three reasons why eliminating spam is good SEO for your site. There are three things you definitely don’t want to encounter when running a blog and that is:

1. Undermineing Your Sites SEO
2. Attracting More Spammers
3. Damaging Your Reputation

I wanted to also bring to light a new technique that these comment spammers are using which I discovered through Growmap.com. Apparently, spammers are taking bits and pieces of already published comments and re purposing them into their own comment. This means their content is generally on topic and makes it harder to distinguish than a random, off the wall comment. According to Growmap, Akismet flagged a few of these comments for them so it’s good to see the spam catcher on the ball but I’m willing to bet a few novice bloggers will be publishing these as legit comments. How well has Akismet worked on your blog?

Google recently announced that the Google Analytics Data Export API which was in beta is now currently available to all developers. The API provides read-only access to your analytics data. On top of that, any data which is available through the standard analytics interface is available through this API meaning you could create your own desktop application to monitor your site versus using your browser. Now that the API is available to all, it will be interesting to see various widgets, gadgets, and applications spring up which allow you to easily keep tabs on your data in not so traditional ways.

For more information check out the official analytics blog post.

Chris Garret who has been a long time contributor here to Performancing.com has published a great writeup covering just about all aspects of what it takes to gain authority on Google. In his white paper approach, Chris covers trust, influences, good behaviour, traffic, and much more as all of it relates to your authority on Google. He even includes a visual aid at the end of the article which is a Google authority mind map.

People look at Wikipedia and think they rank so highly and so often because of pagerank, or perhaps because they have a gajillion links, but there is another powerful element we can overlook if we are not careful.

Once relevance, links and keywords are taken into account, the true engines of search engine success are now believed to be “Trust” and “Authority”. But what do those phrases mean in this context, and how do you get more of the good stuff?

How to build Google Authority.

Are you having a hard time finding cool looking icons to use on your site? If so, check out IconFinder.net. IconFinder is a search engine specifically created to look for icons within their database. Unfortunately, I was unable to find any WordPress icons but when I typed in money, I was greeted with eight different results.

IconFinder provides a number of different ways to hone your search such as the ability to control the size range from 0px to 128px, the number of icons per search result page, and the color of the background. The background color is particularly interesting because you not only get a chance to see how the icon looks on a white background, but also on a gray and finally, black background.

In the top left corner of the search results, you’ll find the image format while on the opposite side, you’ll see the meta information for that image which includes designer, license, package, and tags.

Overall, a very nice site that makes finding cool icons a very simple process. Oh, and they have a really cool logo as well!

Have you ever come across a file that you didn’t know how to open? There are thousands of file extensions in use today with the same amount of programs to open them. However, all of those programs are not loaded on your PC so when it comes time to open up an unknown file, how will you do it? If you’re using Windows, the operating system will ask you if you would like to browse the Web through Microsoft’s database to see if you can find a program to open up the unknown file extension. While you may find the information you need, Microsoft will not suggest free programs for you to use to open the file. This is where OpenWith.org comes into play.

OpenWith.org provides detailed information about most file extension and links to free programs that can open and create each type of file. Extensions are viewable on the site by their first letter, by search, or by category. If the extension doesn’t exist, you can easily submit the extension with the details you know to the site where the administrators will take over.

The best thing OpenWith has to offer is the links to free programs which will open the extension in question. For example, I checked out the .HED extension which is for Hi-Eddi Images. I’ve never heard of these types of images but thankfully, OpenWith has. According to them, Hi-Eddi Images can be opened with a piece of software called XnView 1.91.6. I can either visit the official website for XnView or I can download the software straight from the OpenWith website. Plus one on the convenience factor.

OpenWith.org should certainly be added to your list of resourceful bookmarks. You’ll never know when your friends will send you that awesome movie or picture in a format you’ve never heard of.

SEM Labs has released under the Creative Commons license 52 blogging inspired icons. The icons are 48 pixels by 48 pixels in size and are in PNG format. I’m not sure what the deal is with icons but there is an increasing demand for them. I know based on experience since the icon pack posts I published on my personal blog have received the most search engine traffic.

I’ve mentioned before in previous posts how I have come to love my purchase of SnagIt which is screen capture software developed by TechSmith. However, I’ve always got my eyes peeled for free alternatives. Today I’d like to feature Lightscreen. Lightscreen is an open source, free application for Windows that enables you to quickly create screen captures. In no particular order, the software contains the following feature set:

• Directory – You can configure which directory images are stored in after creation
• Filename – Enables you to create an automatic naming structure for your images
• Format – Choose between .PNG, .JPG, or .BMP image formats
• Delay – Program a delay in the form of seconds before the software becomes activated

You can also configure hotkeys for Lightscreen so that the program is only activated by a key stroke combination. Out of the box, Lightscreen supports capturing the entire screen, a window, or user specified screen area. Last but not least, you can configure the image quality for the screenshots.

If you’re looking for just a utility to take screen captures, this tool may be the right one for the job although, I have become increasingly spoiled by the post screen capture editing tools provided by SnagIt. Something Lightscreen does not currently offer.