There has been little to no content here for a while, not because I haven’t been thinking of the things I normally do, more just because I don’t have time to process it into something readable, so please except my apologies whilst I blog about some blogging tools I’ve come across in the last few months.
Browser Shots – A great website that let you check if you blog looks OK in browsers and Operating systems you can’t check them on. Check my sites example here
MySpace Cross Poster – This works as a Wordpress plugin and does what it says on the tin, it took me a few tweaks to get it working but it fixed the problem I had of trying to automate blog posts from wordpress onto my myspace blog.
Hearing lots of positive rumblings about mint enthused me to take a look into some statistics options. Ive been wary of getting too excited about stats for obvious reasons and could never quite find the $30 that I could fritter, it seems like a great tool but I opted for two options instead.
Firstly the wordpress.com stats plugin – This integrates into your wordpress dashboard which is its first plus, secondly it is very simple, and therefore easy to analyze. Whilst this was good to get an idea of which posts people where interested in, it didn’t tell me some other info that I was interested in, and thats where….
…Google Analytics comes in, as with most other things that google do, Analytics is free and it certainly is not skimping on features. I wanted an easy install so I used a google analytics wordpress plugin and set up an account with my current google account. Analytics has it all pie charts, referral stats etc. What I was most interested in though were the predominant browsers, OS and screen resolution information which control how the blog looks. For example if Im looking at my blog in firefox and 90% of readers are looking at it through the cloud of web design which is Internet Explorer I need to keep an eye on what the blog looks like when loaded in internet explorer.
Hope you’ve enjoyed this quick journey through the latest blogging tools Ive been using.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Laura Anne // Apr 30, 2008 at 9:21 pm
They sound great….only my blonde coloured brain doesn’t know how to use them or where to find them.
I got google reader and bloglines for example, and now can’t work out how to log back in. Sadly true.
Clearly my university education wasn’t helpful for the purpose of basic blog reading/writing.
2 Liam // May 1, 2008 at 11:01 am
If you ever need help with plugins let me know, though I dont know if they work for wordpress.com hosted blogs?
Google reader is great, if you have gmail account it will just be the same as that. So do you go to the actual websites all the time, that must be times consuming, I cant imagine a world without RSS now!
Let me know if I can help.