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There I was, minding my own business, trying to expand my blog readership when the unthinkable happened!
“What happened?”, you might ask!
Well, before I tell you, let me take you back a few weeks to where the story really starts….
I write this blog for you - my loyal readers! To this end, I’ve been doing quite a bit of research into what people want, and it seems that there are a few things that keep cropping up that I need to address.
Before I get onto that though, did you catch my earlier post on how to get a free ad on John’s Tech Blog? Time’s running out on this, so I’d urge you to read the post right now before it’s too late!
Anyway, back to what my readers want! 
It turns out that there are a couple of things which I do here that can really annoy people (sorry!). They are:
- Having links that open in a new Window
- Publishing an RSS feed which only contains a summary of every post
Let’s look at each one in more detail.
Links Open in New Window
My thinking behind this was that links to external sites should always be in an new window so that I wouldn’t lose visitors. Guess what though, you know how a ‘back’ button works! On top of this, if I’m doing my job and delivering good quality content on a consistent basis, you’ll keep coming back just because of the value that I get out of my site!
My goal now is to stop creating links which open in new Windows, and over time I’ll also remove any other links that I find around the site that still do (like the ad’s on the right, for example). Please bear with me whilst I make this change, and in the meantime, I’m sorry!!!
RSS Feed Only Contains Summary
This one wasn’t so obvious to track down! I noticed that I seemed to be losing subscribers to my feed almost as quickly as I was gaining new ones, so I started digging. It struck me as odd that whilst every other feed that I subscribe to myself ave me a full feed, my own was always truncated. I figured that was due to me being too tight to pay for some form of RSS feed publishing service, but then I spotted the option. The ‘Reading’ option. The default ‘For every article in a feed, show summary‘ option!
Doh!
So this option has now been corretly set to ‘Full text‘ and subscribers should start seeing what they were expecting. If this has been affecting you, again, I’m sorry!!!!
If there’s anything else that’s annoying you about John’s Tech Blog, please comment below. If not, why not subscribe via one of the RSS links on the top right of the page, or ‘Fave This Blog’ on Technorati using the green button in the top right-hand corner!
It’s rare today that I come across something that appears to be truly new on the Internet. Everything seems to be a different take on an existing theme - which is not necessarily bad - but if something catches my eye as a fresh twist, then I usually give it a chance to hold my attention.
This has happened with BlogRize, which positions itself as follows:
BlogRize is a blog community and blog aggregator that brings you today’s most interesting web content by harnessing the collective intelligence of communities of people who enjoy reading the same blogs.
The way I see it, it’s a way of allowing us to all keep our own blogs, but to have a central place to share our content and to read other blogs that we’re fans of. To put it another way, it’s like StumbleUpon or Digg, but focused more on the readers rather than the content producers.
When you join, you get to claim your blog, which you do by adding an HTML span tag such as:
<span id=’2094227332′></span>
Bear in mind that some platforms may strip out empty ‘SPAN’ tags, so they also give you an option of simply entering the id number in your most recent post, then deleting it later. Either way, you need to do this to get started!
It’s still early days for BlogRize, and the site currently looks very plain, so I’m keen to see what happens when they get some investment behind them!
Check it out for yourselves at www.BlogRize.com
As you’ve probably noticed already (if you’re a regular reader) I’ve been making some changes at John’s Tech Blog. We’re using a new theme to try to bring the site more in line with Web 2.0 type designs and this started me thinking about other Web 2.0 sites and how I could better integrate with them.
One of the big sites in the blogging world is Technorati, so I made this the focus and started preparing my blog to be more “Technorati Friendly”.
Regular vistors to John’s Tech Blog will no doubt notice a change in layout today! I’ve been wanting to do this for quite some time now so decided it was finally time to just do it!
I started out with a Wordpress theme and then customised it to fit more in line with my color scheme and overall site design. I also gave the header a subtle makeover as it was starting to look a bit bland.
Please use the comments on this post to give me feedback. I’m always interested in reading other people’s points of view!
