Make Money from Blogs » Digg

More FeedBurner options – More flares

ashish — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:52:46 +0000

The last post talked about tweaking the FeedFlare options in your FeedBurner account to enable the options of posting to various Social Networking and other such sites in your feeds (if your users are impressed with the content, they can post your articles, and this will help in the growth of your page). The default FeedFlare options available with FeedBurner are limited, but you can extend this facility, since there is an option right there in the page for you to do so.
If you want to know more about what the FeedFlare can do, then read the official Google FAQ on FeedFlare (link)

FeedFlare changes the dynamic of how users interact with an RSS feed. Rather than just read content from a feed, subscribers can now take direct actions, such as being able to forward or save an item. In addition, publishers have long needed a way to tie their feed content back to their website, creating more of a community while maintaining a constant thread and connection to their content throughout syndication.

The FeedFlare page itself provides options fr how to extend the FeedFlare functionality through 2 options mentioned on the page – “Browse the Catalog” or “101 FeedFlare Ideas”
In addition, if you want to quickly add the following feeds, then use the following:
Reddit: http://dmiessler.com/feedflare/reddit.xml
For Twitter: http://www.feedburner.com/fb/static/flareunits/twitthis.xml

Just don’t fill your feed with too many options, it may irritate your readers.

Tweaking FeedBurner – Add SmartFeed and FeedFlare

ashish — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 12:04:53 +0000

Feed Management can make a lot of difference to the promotion efforts of your blog. A lot of people use FeedBurner (link) for optimization of their Feeds, since Feedburner gives the ability to analyze feeds, and a quick and easy way to offer subscribers a way to subscribe to the feed.
So, you have got your blog feed onto FeedBurner, and have displayed your feed count, the Feed Subscribe chicklet, as well as an option to get an email based subscription method on your page. What is it that you can do further to get more benefits from your FeedBurner account. Well, here are a couple of things:
1. Go to the ‘Publicize’ tab, and select ‘PingShot’. This notifies many feed collection services when your blog has a new post
2. Go to the ‘Optimize’ tab and select ‘SmartFeed’. Make it active; what you get from this option is “Translates your feed on-the-fly into a format (RSS or Atom) compatible with your visitors’ feed reader application.” This is helpful since your feed is an XML feed, and there are many different computing devices with different feed readers.
3. Add social networking. Would you not like your readers to be able to send your post onto different social networking and popularizing tools such as Facebook, Digg, and many others if they are interested in the post. Well, you can. Go to the ‘Optimize’ tab and select ‘FeedFlare’, and study the different options available over there.

Optimizing your WordPress account – 2

ashish — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 18:09:48 +0000

A few weeks back, I had written about how to take some basic steps towards optimizing your WordPress account. Imagine what would happen if more people started promoting your WordPress Blog, or wonders of wonders, it appears on the front page of Digg or Slashdot. In such cases, unless you have optimized your WordPress configuration already, you can be pretty much sure that your account will get to a state where the server is not able to handle the load, and will shut down; further if your account is on a shared server, you might have some uncomfortable queries from your host.
So, here are some points on how to optimize your account:
1. Since WordPress works on a database system, it pulls every bit of content from the server. If there are a large number of requests for your blog, your server has to make that many DB queries to fetch the content. This puts a lot of stress on your server. User a Super Cache plugin to Cache some of the load and serve static HTML files instead of querying the DB (link to plugin, and page).
2. When you serve various files such as binaries, videos, images, scripts, etc from your server, it becomes slow. Place them on other servers, so that the load on your server is reduced. For example, you can get videos from Youtube and Photos from Flickr, and also, you can even hire some hosting space on another server or on a service such as Amazon S3 for this purpose.
3. If you are more advanced, look at your server logs; it may be possible to determine multiple requests from a bot or script that is of no good, blocking these may make your server behave a bit better
4. Look to get stats on how your web page is loading. If it takes a lot of time to load your page, there may be a lot of plugins working, or scripts loading, and so on. Some tools you can use for this purpose are – LiveHTTPHeaders (link, displays the HTTP headers), Firebug (link, Look at loading times for various artifacts on a page),
5. Inside your wp-config.php file, remove some of the DB calls that are not necessary. For example, hard-code your Template Path, Stylesheet path (link to relevant site). You will get some improvements.
6. Review your themes. Some themes call a lot of graphics, and overall call a lot of files. If your CSS files are divided into multiple files, combine them. Replace graphics wherever possible with text.
7. Review the plugins your are using to see whether they are required. Plugins can make your site much slower, especially if they do a lot of DB access and inefficient. If you are advanced technically, monitor the performance of your plugins.
8. Refer to this quick cheat sheet for DB optimization (link to cheat sheet)
9. Reduce the number of posts on the front page of your blog. Typically, WordPress gives you 10 posts on your front page, you should reduce this to 3-4.
10. Use WP’s Built in Object Cache as described on this page (link). From the same site, refer to the MySQL Query Cache.
11. For some detailed technical analysis of what can be done (link)
12. Clean Options (Finds orphaned options and allows for their removal from the wp_ options table) – Get it from this page
13. The combating comment spam page on WordPress.org (link). If you have a good blog which is getting popular, increase in spam is only to be expected. Akismet filters out most comment spam, but just getting it into the junk spam list also adds some load to your server.
14. Page with 5 tips for making your Blog Digg / Slashdot proof (link)
15. High Traffic Tips For WordPress on WordPress.org Codex (link)

If you know more ways beyond this, please do let me know.

Adding a ‘Digg’ button to your Blogger / WordPress posts

ashish — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 19:53:05 +0000

Digg is a very popular site that allows users to vote for the content that they want to make popular, in the sense, the editorial decisions are made by people, not by a separate team. And what is Digg ? If you have not heard of Digg by now, you should have ! Description from the people at Digg !
Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users. You won’t find editors at Digg — we’re here to provide a place where people can collectively determine the value of content and we’re changing the way people consume information online. How do we do this? Everything on Digg — from news to videos to images — is submitted by our community (that would be you). Once something is submitted, other people see it and Digg what they like best. If your submission rocks and receives enough Diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of our visitors to see. And as per Alexa, 0.5% of internet users come to Digg (which is a huge absolute number).

So, how do you ensure that your posts are added to Digg ? It’s fairly simple now, all you need to do is to read a bit about the options posted on the Digg Tools page (click here). This page gives you the code that needs to be added to your blog (or other web page). However, in a majority of the cases, you would want the code to be added such that it shows up automatically in all your articles / posts. You can do this by adding the code to the template ? You might ask, how do do that ? Well, now it gets a bit complicated whether you use Blogger or WordPress.

For Blogger, if you are still using the older version of Blogger, then it is fairly easy to step into the code of the older Blogger interface, go to the Template option -> Edit HTML, and then go to the section of code where it says

If you are using the newer version of Blogger, then you need to update your template, a bit trickier option. Remember, if you update your template, you should take a backup earlier. Here is this excellent post detailing how to modify the template (click here). However, you cannot just use the code as described in the blog, since the Digg code has changed and is much simpler. You need to find the section of template as described in the article, and then use the code for Digg from the http://digg.com/tools/integrate page.

if you using WordPress (not WordPress.com hosted blog), then you need to modify the WordPress template for making this change. Login into wp-admin for your blog, go to the Design -> Theme Editor -> Single Post.
After you reach the line, php the_content(‘Read the rest of this entry, in the next line, add the code for Digg from the http://digg.com/tools/integrate page.

You should be good to go with this. As to the question of which Digg to use from the http://digg.com/tools/integrate page, I recommend that you go with the first option, where it says “Digg This” with Submit Capability.