Blogging Blog. General
Wordpress Admin Menu Bookmarklet
I found a really nifty little bookmarklet today, which allows complete access to your Wordpress admin panel menu with a single click:
Apart from a tiny caveat, which is that it only works if you’re *on* the blog you want to administer (IE, browsing), it’s an amazing little implementation.
Doesn’t actually add any functionality but it’s very pretty, and I think if you could set the Wordpress blog that it’s tied to, it’d be even better.
You can find out more over here – at the very least, it’s a very nice implementation of JavaScript.
Piwik – Free OpenSource Website Analytics
Piwik is an awesome little open-source project I stumbled upon today, entirely by accident. It’s aim is to provide Google Analytics-like features, in an open-source, self hosted package.
I installed it on my own blog earlier; and gave it a try – and I must say that it’s impressive. I had it up and running in a few minutes, and it’s giving me some pretty cool stats about my visitors.
I’m very much a fan of self-hosted apps, I don’t so much like using hosted ones, so Piwik was a brilliant find for me. It’s very fast, and the layout of the control panel is simplistic, but in a right balance – I like it.
Piwik also supports multiple websites, which means I can set it up to track BP and all my other little sites, and I’ll be comparing it’s stats to Analytics over the next few days, I’ll be curious to see the differences in reporting.
For those with their own self-hosted blogs who maybe don’t like Analytics so much, Piwik is a *brilliant* project.
Google CSE
I have been looking into the merits of using Google’s CSE (link) as a search engine for Wordpress (and any other blogging software); over the search automatically built in.
I’ve always liked Google’s search, and used it over any other search engine for as long as I can remember. I tried out CSE on my own blog a few days ago because I have multiple Wordpress installations for various other topics – physics and bits. It was simple to setup and as you might notice, it’s integrated quite nicely into the design of my website, which I think is a huge plus. The results are great because unlike Wordpress, their relevancy based; not date – from experience with larger blogs than my own, external searches help me find what I’m looking for *far* faster.
I’ve hooked my own up to Adsense (of course), which means I can also get ad-clicks (from ads that would be there anyway) from my search, as I don’t use ads on the rest of my site as of yet, this could be a small income stream.
Another reason the CSE is great is because it allows the cross-referencing of multiple sites, for instance on my personal site search I can include this site (as I write about similar stuff here) and the other blogs I run / contribute too, which could create a little sort of network-search – very useful for multiple blogs.
Google CSE can be found over here, and is available inside adsense.
Twitter and Blogging
I’ve been doing some reading recently into the link between Twitter and Blogging (yes, I’m aware that Twitter is a microblogging service but bear with me) – it looks to me like bloggers with an active Twitter presence who actually connect with their followers are several orders more successful than those who have not and do not.
I have a twitter account for this blog and for my own (@pearce), and since I integrated my blog with my account, my traffic has increased – I use feedburner to do the linking and it marks a good few clicks per post that are linked to Twitter.
I granted don’t have a huge number of followers, but normally about 10% of them seem to follow my links; and I’m not at all ashamed to admit that twitter makes up a small percentage of my traffic – small but noticable.
All the successful bloggers that I have run into so far in my adventures have all had very active Twitter presences; and I’m now starting to wonder if blogging is now not only about writing the posts but interacting with your readers to keep them on your site; as competition is very fierce in the blogosphere nowadays.
Hello world!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
Yep.
Welcome to my blog, about blogging. It’s a little side project that I took over from Jason Periera, an old friend, as the previous incarnation of this site wasn’t exactly doing much.
So I’m starting a blog, hopefully with a few co-conspirators, and I’m going to write about blogging. As this blog is Wordpress based and I’m a huge Wordpress user; it’ll mainly be following Wordpress but I’ll have a look at other things too, see how it goes.
Never know, maybe I can add my own little flare into the blogging world.
Enjoy!~
