Technology Tips

This post talks about steps 5 and 6 in pimping my blog.

5. Add del.icio.us, digg, and reddit links for people to easily bookmark and share your blog

Bookmarking and bookmark sharing services allow users to keep their bookmarks on the web, as well as sharing these bookmarks with their community. As such, it is very important for a blog to make it as easy as possible for readers to accomplish such tasks. I’ve implemented links to del.icio.us, digg, and reddit for my blog.

This step is usually accomplished by modifying the template for your blog. Because you’ll want to bookmark individual posts in addition to the entire blog, it is necessary to use variables within the template to indicate what the title of each post is, as well as what is the URL for each post (called permalink). Below is the code I used for Blogger:

del.icio.us: <a href=”http://del.icio.us/post?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>” mce_href=”http://del.icio.us/post?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>” target=delicious title=”Bookmark <$BlogItemTitle$> to del.icio.us”>add to del.icio.us</a>

digg: <a href=”http://www.digg.com/submit?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>&phase=2″ mce_href=”http://www.digg.com/submit?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>&phase=2″Â target=digg title=”Submit <$BlogItemTitle$> to digg”>digg it</a>

reddit: <a href=”http://www.reddit.com/submit?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>” mce_href=”http://www.reddit.com/submit?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>” target=reddit title=”Submit <$BlogItemTitle$> to reddit”>reddit</a>

In the above Blogger example, The variable meanings are:

<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>: The URL of the individual posting.
<$BlogItemTitle$>: The title of the individual posting.

6. Make it easy for people to subscribe

As you can see under the Subscribe: heading in the left-hand panel, I have added the ability to subscribe from a variety of sources. Below I include the code that I added to my template for them (you’ll want to replace http://feeds.feedburner.com/TopCatBlog with your own feed):

My Yahoo:
<a href=”http://add.my.yahoo.com/rss?url=http://feeds.feedburner.com/TopCatBlog” mce_href=”http://add.my.yahoo.com/rss?url=http://feeds.feedburner.com/TopCatBlog” >
<img src=”http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/us/
my/addtomyyahoo4.gif” border=”0″ alt=”Add to My Yahoo” />
</a>

Google:
<a href=”http://fusion.google.com/add?feedurl=http://feeds.feedburner.com/TopCatBlog” mce_href=”http://fusion.google.com/add?feedurl=http://feeds.feedburner.com/TopCatBlog” >
<img src=”http://buttons.googlesyndication.com/fusion/add.gif” mce_src=”http://buttons.googlesyndication.com/fusion/add.gif” width=”104″ height=”17″ border=”0″ alt=”Add to Google”>
</a>

Bloglines:
<a href=”http://www.bloglines.com/sub/
http://feeds.feedburner.com/TopCatBlog”> <img src=”http://www.bloglines.com/images/sub_modern8.gif” mce_src=”http://www.bloglines.com/images/sub_modern8.gif” border=”0″ alt=”Subscribe with Bloglines” />
</a>

Netvibes:
<a href=”http://www.netvibes.com/subscribe.php?url=http://feeds.feedburner.com/TopCatBlog” mce_href=”http://www.netvibes.com/subscribe.php?url=http://feeds.feedburner.com/TopCatBlog” >
<img src=”http://eco.netvibes.com/img/add2netvibes.png” mce_src=”http://eco.netvibes.com/img/add2netvibes.png” width=”91″ height=”17″ border=”0″ alt=”Add to netvibes”>
</a>

Pluck:
<a href=”http://client.pluck.com/pluckit/prompt.aspx?GCID=C12286x053&a=http://feeds.feedburner.com/TopCatBlog
&t=TopCat+Blog”><img src=”http://www.pluck.com/images/pluck/pluspluck.png” mce_src=”http://www.pluck.com/images/pluck/pluspluck.png” alt=”Subscribe with Pluck RSS reader” border=”0″ /></a>

My AOL:
<a href=”http://feeds.my.aol.com/add.jsp?url=http://feeds.feedburner.com/TopCatBlog” mce_href=”http://feeds.my.aol.com/add.jsp?url=http://feeds.feedburner.com/TopCatBlog” ><img src=”http://o.aolcdn.com/myfeeds/vis/myaol_cta1.gif” mce_src=”http://o.aolcdn.com/myfeeds/vis/myaol_cta1.gif” alt=”Add to My AOL” border=”0″ /></a>

My MSN:
<a href=”http://my.msn.com/addtomymsn.armx?id=rss&ut=http://feeds.feedburner.com/TopCatBlog&
ru=http://www.1keydata.com/blog”><img src=”addtomymsn.gif” mce_src=”addtomymsn.gif” border=0 /></a>
(the image can be retrieved from http://rss.msn.com/publisher.armx)

You can also host the images on your own site. I recommend doing this to ensure that your page load time is fast.

This post talks about the next two steps in pimping my blog.

3. Sign up for Feedburner

Feedburner is a feed management service. Since all blog software already provide a feed, you might wonder why you would want to sign up for a separate feed management service provider. There are several reasons:

1) Tracking: Feedburner tells you how many subscribers your feed has, via which service they are subscribing from, as well as how many hits your feed has received. You can also upgrade to TotalStats Pro to view even more metrics about your feed.

2) Optimizing: Feedburner can add a footer at the bottom of each content item, allowing your readers to easily “email this item” or “add to del.icio.us”, among other capabilities. Another service is called “Link Spicer”, which can retrieve the bookmarks you have set in services such as del.icio.us and Furl, and include them as part of your feed.

3) Publicizing: Feedburner can help you ping the most important services automatically when you publish new content. In addition, feed content can be published as regular HTML. There are several other gadgets that would allow you to promote your feed on a web page.

4) Monetizing: Once you reach a certain threshold, Feedburner can start putting ads in your feed, allowing you to monetize your blog content.

Setting up with Feedburner is easy. First, you enter the blog or feed address, then you provide a feed title and specify what feed address you want to use (this will be in the form of http://feeds.feedburner.com/[YourBlogName]). That’s it. Then going forward, you can start using your Feedburner feed as your regular feed to the world.

4. Sign up to Technorati

Technorati is a blog search engine. Upon creating your account, you’ll want to claim your blog in Technorati. To do so, you’ll be required to authenticate that you are the owner of the blog — Technorati offers 2 ways of doing this: you can either insert a special link to your Technorati profile in a new post, or add a short javascript code to your template. If you use this method, you’ll have the option to display certain Technorati links on your blog.

Claiming your blog allows you to get link counts, add your profile/branding to your blog, and set up tags for your blog. In your posts, you can also put in Technorati tags (examples are at the bottom of this post). This allows you to tell Technorati about tags for each one of your posts, in addition to tags about your blog in general.

As a side note, you cannot claim a feed in Technorati, as Technorati has no way of verifying you are the feed owner. So, for those of you who have set up a feed in Feedburner, you’ll need to give Technorati your blog URL rather than the Feedburner feed code.