ROCKFUSE » Blogging

How to get your Feedburner subscriber count in Plain Text

admin — Mon, 11 May 2009 12:59:42 +0000

While tweaking down this theme, I wanted to use my subscriber count in plain text. Actually, it wasn’t that hard thanks to 45n5’s great tutorial in doing that. Not to mention, the dozens of other articles which pointed the exact same thing following that particular tutorial.

Anyway, all of them were from the time before Google started intergrating Feedburner into their own setting and because of that, the code was a bit outdated and gave a php error.

parser error : Opening and ending tag mismatch: meta line 1 and HEAD

And when I looked into the problem, I understod that it was because Feedburner specifications had changed around since the Google Integration. So, I worked around it and found the solution.

So here’s how to get the feed count in plain text.

In whatever place you want the feed count, insert these lines, possibly at the very top of the page (Don’t forget to replace myFeedburnerFeedId with the ID of your feed)

$whaturl=”https://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=myFeedburnerFeedId”;

$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $whaturl);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($data);
$fb = $xml->feed->entry['circulation'];

?>

Then, in the place where you want the feedcount to appear, just insert:

And we’re done!

You can see on the top-right of this blog, it’s at work. Have fun with it guys!
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I moved to HostClear! Probably the best blog host I’ve been with.

admin — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 12:57:57 +0000

A few months back I was on the hunt for a web host. I have used a lot of web hosts in the past for my sites. But with the growth of my blogs and other sites, I needed to move it all to one hosting account to keep track of things. And after much research, I found HostClear and chose to give it a try.

And here’s my unpaid, non-biased review of it, for all of you who are trying to find just the “right” host.

Why?

Their one and only hosting plan is an All-in-one hosting solution providing:

FREE Domain For Life
FREE Instant Setup
FREE Site Builder
Unlimited Domains
Unlimited Hosting Space
Unlimited GB’s Of Transfer
Unlimited E-Mail Accounts
Unlimited MySQL Databases

That’s a pretty good deal for only $3.95 per month right? $3.95 is the 24 month-price though.

12 month price is $4.95 p/month while the 6 month price is $5.95 p/month, and no Setup Fees for orders more than 6 months! Overall, it’s the cheapest hosting plan I found that allows unlimited space, bandwidth and sites.

Support

Support is one of the most important things when it comes to web hosting. And that’s one of the things I like about HostClear. I’ve used their support system extensively and would probably rate a 10/10 for that. They’ve got a

Support ticket system which responded to all my questions in less than 30 minutes

A toll-free phone support line (I haven’t tried that yet)

And the 24/7 Live Chat facility which resolved all my general queries within seconds!

Features

If you’re looking to host your blog, then you’ve got more than enough features on HostClear! I know that because I’ve got 6 Wordpress blogs there, functioning perfectly! And I got a new domain of my choice – for life! For a full list of their features you can take a look here.

They provide a 30 day money back guarantee, so you sign up at no-risk and plus, you get a 99.9% uptime guarantee. I should tell you that I have never experienced any downtime at all with them.

Overall opinion

I haven’t had a single problem with HostClear and it would be unfair of me if I didn’t rate it a 10/10. I’ve done a lot of research on blog hosting and Host Clear should be the host that offers the best value for money!

If you have been a reader of ROCKFUSE, you would know that I wouldn’t recommend anything to my readers that I’m not 100% satisfied with. So, in that sense, HostClear is probably the best solution, in my opinion that is.

Check them out now! – Rest Assured, you won’t regret it.

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15 Firefox Plugins that will make your blogging more fun and productive!

admin — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 05:56:21 +0000

There are plenty of Firefox Plugins for pretty much everything – including blogging. So I thought it would be cool to just share a few of those I found useful and made my life a bit easier. And here it is – a list of 15 Firefox Plugins (or Add-ons), what they are capable of and, how you can benefit from using them.

Add-ons helping you to blog

ScribeFire Blog Editor – This is probably the most popular tool which allows you to blog from within Firefox. Formerly known as Performancing, this handy tool opens a window within Firefox in which you can do rich text editing and all sorts of stuff while doing your research on your web. And when you’re done, just hit the publish button and your post will go live on your blog. Works on a number of blog platforms including Wordpress and Blogger.

Live Writerfox – This is one of my personal favorites. If you think that Windows Live Writer is the next best thing since sliced bread, you’ll love the functionality it provides you to integrate Windows Live Writer with Mozilla Firefox. Helps you “Blog It” straight from Live Writer.

Deepest Sender – Primarily a LiveJournal client, but now supports Wordpress and Blogger. This Plugin provides similar functionality as ScribeFire. You can straight away blog something and publish it from within the Firefox environment. Doesn’t have as much functionality as the ScribeFire – although a strong second-in-place contender.

Add-ons enhancing text editing/formatting

Clipmarks – If there are phrases you use often while blogging, this tool will come in handy for you. Simply select a word/phrase that you’re using frequently and assign it to a shortcut key. Personally, this is really useful to me when I’m commenting on a blog. I’d just store my name, URL and e-mail on macros and inserting them into the commenting fields literally take seconds!

Text Formatting Toolbar – Gives you a handy toolbar to apply HTML/BBcode markup to any text area within Windows Live Writer. It comes really handy when you want to leave a comment on a blog with some HTML formatting or when you want to do some quick edit in any text area that allows BBcode – like forums. Save you a lot of time, and can cut the work in half for you theme developers.

CoLT – Hate it when you lose the formatting/link when you’re pasting a hyperlink from another page – while blogging? You got to have CoLT! This add-on let’s you specify how you want your links, the way you want it.

Fun tools

Zemanta – This is a fun too to work with. Just let it run while you’re blogging and it will automatically recommend relevant links and Flickr pics that matches your content. You can then insert that stuff on your post or read them to refine your understanding on the subject. Totally worth a go!

Feedly RSS News Reader – Another fun tool for your to play around when you want to kill a minute. Feedly RSS News Reader combines your Google Reader and Twitter in a “fun magazine-like environment”. An innovative way to catch the news I’d say.

Blog Management Add-ons

Wordpress Helper – Wordpress Plugin/Theme developers can’t ask for a better tool than this one. This literally puts the whole Wordpress Codex in your fingertips. When you’re ding an edit on a theme or a plugin within Firefox it will provide you with additional documentation and help if you run into some problem, straight from the Wordpress Codex.

Wordpress.com Sidebar – Managing a Wordpress.com blog? Have all the functionality of your blog from within a handy sidebar. This Firefox Plugin creates a sidebar which you can use to manage your Wordpress.com blog on the go!

Third Party integration Add-ons

ShareThis – This Plugin brings the legendary “Share This” button to Firefox. Easily submit your favorite content on the web for your Social Network buddies to see. Provides the same functionality as the Wordpress plugin for any page you are surfing.

FeedBurner Subscribers Display – Tired of checking Feedburner every time you want to check on your Subscriber count? Install this handy add-on and Get your Feedburner Subscriber count right there on the Firefox status bar, so it’ll be visible to you all the time. Additional options are available to display “feed hits” for your feed too.

Google Reader Notifier – Something like the Gmail Notifier, but for Google reader. Shows you when new items are available alongside the count of unread items. A good way to keep in touch with your favorite feeds.

Better GReader – Another GReader tool that enhances few things on Google Reader. It’s actually a Greasemonkey script and you need to install Greasemonkey plugin to activate it. It’s really customizable and has some pretty good tweaks to go with Google Reader.

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How to moderate your Wordpress Blog comments from your own Desktop

admin — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 05:18:32 +0000

Admit it! When the e-mail hits your inbox that a reader of your blog commented on the post you just published, you just put off approving the comment for an hour or two since it’s a painful process – starting up the browser, logging into Wordpress, going over to moderate comments and approving it.

Or when you see that comment which skipped Akismet spam catcher you just need to log in and mark it as spam before the virus spreads deep into your beloved blog community. Or., you just auto-approve all the comments since it’s a hassle to approve all the blog comments.

Not anymore! Moderator let’s you moderate all your Wordpress blog comments from your desktop. That’s right! You can specify a time interval you want moderator to check for new comments, and when new comment are available, you will be immediately notified of them.

After that, it’s take you a few seconds to read the comment, review it and then approve/discard it. It’s a pretty easy process and when you’re done, Moderator sits nicely on your taskbar till the next batch of comments come. It’s an Adobe AIR application so it’s super lightweight.

A word of caution – It’s still in the alpha release. So, bugs might exist, although within my short evaluation period, I didn’t come across any. You can download Moderator from here.

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6 Wordpress Plugins that Enhance Google Analytics on your blog

admin — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 02:11:14 +0000

Google Analytics, without a doubt is the leading site statistics tracking tool in the terms of usability, on the web. But, in a dynamic environment such as a Wordpress blog, we are too often limited to only experience a fraction of the features offered through Google Analytics.

You may just want to track the number of visits to you blog, or you might want to track every outbound link or even AdSense cliks and YPN too. Whatever your needs are, the following Wordpress plugins can give you exactly what you need from Google Analytics, without the hassle of copying and pasting tracking codes to all your pages.

RSS Link Tagger for Google Analytics

This is one of the plugins that has a specific usage. RSS Link Tagger for Google Analytics conveniently modifies RSS permalinks to include utm queries, so that you can track your feed subscription conversions, the same way you track non-AdWords advertising campaigns. » Plugin Home

DBD Footprints

Yeah I know. This is not exactly a branded Google Analytics plugin, but it gets the simplest job done – Adding Google Analytics tracking code. Since Google Analytics and other plugins are most of the time supplying Javascript snippets, it’s important to add these codes at the very end of the HTML body to save the page loading time. And this nifty little plugin gives you the ability to do just that. » Plugin Home

Google Analytics for Wordpress

This is my choice of a Google Analytics plugin. It does everything you need it to do,, plus more! The Google Analytics for Wordpress plugin automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links, links within comments, blogroll links and downloads. It also allows you to track AdSense clicks, add extra search engines, track image search queries and it will even work together with Urchin. Pretty cool, huh? » Plugin Home

Ultimate Google Analytics

This does the same stuff that “Google Analytics for Wordpress” plugin does. It’s suitable for those of you who don’t really know whether you want to use the Advanced Features of Google Analytics. In the basic plugin view, it’ll give you the basic features of Google Analytics. But if you wish to have more, you can switch to the Advanced views which pretty much integrates all the advance Google Analytics features to your blog. » Plugin Home

WP Google Analytics

Not as flash as the two plugins before, but can spherically be configured to track stuff like searches (as /search/{search}?referrer={referrer}), not track user roles (administrators, editors, authors, etc) and log anything in the admin areas in Wordpress. » Plugin Home

Local Analytics

Are you an efficiency freak? Worried about the page loading times of your blog? Then you should try out Local Analytics first. The plugin is highly configurable and also allows caching of the ga.js file locally, inorder to enable faster loading of pages. Includes support for tracking subdomains and main domain in a single profile as well as Yahoo Publisher Network ad clicks alongside AdSense ad clicks. » Plugin Home
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7 Things that you shouldn’t be doing when starting up a blog!

admin — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 06:49:00 +0000

Recently I’ve been engaged in starting up many small niche blogs in very varying niches. And there had come been many things I wished I hadn’t done when starting up some of them. But it’s all part of the game and it’s a learning process. We all make mistakes and we should learn from them. So as an outcome of my own learning process, I’ll present this code to you – my code of the things that shouldn’t be done when starting up a blog.

I only hope that you find it useful.

Waiting till you complete the blog setup to register a domain.

This is an absolute no-no. If you’re concerned about your Return-on-Investment from the blog, the sooner you start earning money from it, the better. And Search Engine traffic being the best kind of free traffic that you can get, it’s extremely important that you start pumping up traffic from Search Engines as soon as possible. To do that, the sooner you register the domain and let Search Engines get familiarized with the domain, the better off you’ll be. So, once you come up with a domain name, register it and set up a temporary page till you get done with the set up.

Don’t order a gazillion links within the first few weeks.

Intelligent Search Engines like Google had developed advanced mechanisms to spot the trends a certain site might be developing over time. And this applies to the trends of Paid Links also. It might sound really weird, but sometime back, I had around 500 paid links pointing to one new blog. The traffic dropped drastically. And immediately after I removed the links, the traffic went back up. When 500 sites suddenly start pointing to a new website, Google gets cautious. So avoid ordering a ton of links till the blog gains osme solid ground.

Do not wait to monetize it

Some people may tell you that you should be waiting around 2-3 months to monetize a new blog, but so far from what I’ve heard, all I can say is – I don’t know why you should wait to do something that you’re eventually going to do anyway. I mean, if you’re eventually going to put up ads on your site, you might as well have them from Day 1 because

You’ll start earning some money from Day 1
The people that wouldn’t like to see ads on your site wouldn’t want to see them even 10 years later.

Do not start your blog on free domains having the thoughts of moving it to a paid domain once you get some money

I hear this in a lot of blogging forums from relatively new bloggers. They would always go like “Should I keep my blogspot/wordpress domain or should I move to a new one?”. Here’s the deal – if you move your domain, most of the things that are attributed to your domain including links and popularity is going to lessen drastically. So either you spend 10 bucks and keep a domain from the beginning, or you just have that free domain going. Don’t plan to move out down the line – it’s going to be really hard.

Do not wait to pump up your best pieces

Psychologically, new blogger tend to “hold on” to a great topic they find for a post till they have a little more subscribers, a little more traffic and so on. But the truth is that till you get some quality content on the front page of your blog, it’s going to be some time before “a little more traffic” becomes a possibility. If your blog is fairly new, take a chance on that great post. Promote it a bit on Social Media sites, and if it’s really going to make a difference, you’d experience that difference right then than later.

Don’t gear down your blog promotion

Many new bloggers tend to wait till they have around a good number of articles before they actually go ahead and do prominent blog promotion. My 2 cents? Don’t wait. Even if you have 2 blog posts of really good quality content, go ahead and do some blog marketing. Submit your feed to RSS directories, Submit you articles to Social Media sites (through others if possible) and do some article marketing in various article directories. Either you can wait for your blog to grow or you can do something now and accelerate that growth.

Do not sell links till you get a solid PR

The more you sell links on your site, more deprived your PR is going to be. People will come to you giving you a $7 per month deal on your 10 PR1 pages for 4 links in each. Don’t take it. If you do, probably in the next PR update, it’s going to go down to a big 0. Surely, you don’t want that to happen?
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41 Places to find Free Images to your Blog or Web Site!

admin — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 13:06:35 +0000

Lately I’ve been scouting a bit on the sites that supply copyright free images/photos for one of my projects. So, i the process, I thought, why not make a compilation of some of th worthwhile sites that I come across? And here it is – a list of 41 sites that offer photos and images absolutely free of charge.

Some of the pictures are totally free of charge, some may require you to credit the copyright holder, and some may not be available for commercial use. But plenty of options are there to go around – so enjoy!

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Bloggers! Do you pay attention to your “Content Accessibility”?

admin — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 14:42:09 +0000

Most of us are masters of writing what we know and what we don’t know. That’s why some of us make a living out of it, right? But have you ever considered the possibility that the potential of your great content is limited just because you don’t tend to pay much attention to the simple thing called “Content Accessibility”?

If you’ve never heard of the term, well, I don’t blame you. Just for the record, it’s the simple process of making sure that the better part of your content can be accessed by the poeople who refer to your blog.

The point I’m getting onto is that writing great content is only half the job. The other half consists of promoting that content and making it accessible.

What’s the difference between promotion and accessibility?

Simply said, promoting your content will bring your great blog post exposure within the time that it was published. Accessibility makes sure it continues to get some exposure (not as much as it used to, though) even after it’s published.

Let me take you through this process by a few practical examples that I employ.

It’s almost a cliche saying that you must have “Popular Posts” in your blog, because everyone does it now. But how many of you actually edit them to reflect on your blog content? Face it. Sometimes, the content on the top aren’t the most enlightening. If you’re really sure that you have better content in your blog that didn’t receive the exposure it deserved, don’t forget to push the numbers. It’s a bit shady, but after all, you must not forget that it’s your blog.
Making your blog categories more accessible and promoting them more prominently can give your old blog posts continued exposure. There’s a ton of ways you can do this. Be innovative – capture the visitor! For the record, I do this by having the categories up on my blog header.
Creating good archives can really tighten the lasso on those curious visitors of yours. I use an ajax plugin for this purpose, which effectively organizes my archives for easy access. Take a look at it if you already haven’t.
One thing that we bloggers are really lazy to do is to find old posts and interlink them with the new posts. But it’s worth the effort I tell ya. It would make sure that when your new post goes double platinum, your old post would at least go platinum. So in that way, interlinking your posts will make sure your blog will go triple platinum instead double

Tags: content writing content accessibility expose content blog posts
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Does updating your blog more give you more visitors?

admin — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 15:36:15 +0000

I always wondered about this. And as any of you would think, I went for the seemingly obvious answer. That was of course before I tried investigating it myself. So did I change my perception about the whole thing? Did I end up with the conclusion that I was wrong? Well., to sum up my stand on this I would put it up this way.

Posting more definitely gives you more visitors, but it’s up to you to find out whether it’s worth the effort.

Before justifying my stand on this, let me tell you why posting more gives you more visitors.,

By posting more you’re creating content and the more content you have, more search engine traffic you will get. But it’s always not the best way to get traffic. Simply because, without doing sufficient seo, you’re not going to get much out of it at all. And creating good, quality content takes time, which can probably hinder your potential.

What if you can simply cut down your posting frequency and try promoting your content more prominently?

Let me give you a real life example. I used to post six or more times per week sometime before. My goal was to create as much content as possible. As a result I was putting aside good number of hours for this blog alone. But with time, I changed this approach and concentrated on creating content whenever I felt like I had something important to share. And I put that leftover time and used it to do more seo and social media promotion.

As the result, I’ve steadily improved my traffic and I did it within a fraction of the time that I used to commit to this blog, earlier than this.

But ultimately it all comes down to you. Like I said you should decide for yourself just how much is too much. Think about it and you just might save some of your valuable time.

Technorati Tags: posting more blog traffic posting frequency update blog blogging
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Technorati Tag Generator

admin — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 18:20:23 +0000

This weekend, I took some time to develop a tool which I think most of you will find very useful on a day-today basis. Yeap! It’s the Technorati Tag Generator. Just specify the Tags you want you blog post to be tagged with and the Technorati Tag Generator will output a HTML code which you can copy/paste at the end of your blog posts.

This will make Technorati index your page under specific topics. And you’ll be entitled to a piece of Technorati’s huge search traffic, depending on the ‘hotness’ of you post.

Feel free to Bookmark This Page and generate Technorati Tags whenever you publish a blog post.

Why should I use Technorati Tag Generator?

Technorati is still one of the most sought after blog search engines. Using tags will help Technorati visitors find your blog posts.
Free backlinks from Technorati! You heard me! Certain Technorati tag pages get indexed by Google. And when they do, if your page is tagged with the tag of that page, you’ll get a backlink to your site from a ‘considered important’ site by Google.
If you’re a news blogger, with a bit of luck, your relevant content might find it easier to get into the Technorati’s frontpage, if you use tags!

Note to my Subscribers: Some of your feed readers may not be able to display the above tool which allows you to generate Technorati tags. If so, please visit this page and bookmark it.

Technorati Tags: technorati tag generator technorati tagging
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