Shankar Ganesh

The following post reflects my personal thoughts and opinions, and is well suited for blogs of a similar niche like mine.

The design of a blog is as much important as it’s content. I believe that a site’s design need not be highly exquisite, but usable. So assuming that you have a WordPress blog or is looking to have one in the future, here’s an article that’ll tell you what you need to look for in a WordPress theme:
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As a blogger, you write a lot of posts – many a time, you edit them again after publishing. Atleast, I do

Sometimes, you forget the most important – and then go back and edit. So, here’s a checklist to help you out:
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[This post is a part of Techie Buzz's Make things better train]

Though I’ve moved to WordPress, I still have a little place for Google’s free blog hosting service, Blogger – in my heart. It’s a good platform, very useful for blogging newbies. But it needs quite a lot of improvements. Here’s what I would like to see in Blogger:

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As Wikipedia puts it:

Supplemental Result is a supplementary Google search Index of less important web pages according to the Google Page Rank

It is said that the supplemental results are really Google’s way of filtering out duplicate content. Therefore pages that are modified to contain enough unique content will eventually make there way out of the supplemental index and back into Google’s main index.

So supplemental result pages are those pages that have less significant or duplicate content (atleast Google thinks so).

But do you know how many of your blog’s pages are in the supplemental index? Here’s a quick way to check it:

Type in site:yourblog.com *** -view in Google’s search bar and there you see pages of your site that are in Google’s supplemental index listed out.

You can follow these tips to get your blog out of the supplemental index easily.

I’m unsure as to whether this post is worth it but I decided to publish it. Hope you’ll like it. StumbleUpon is a kind of a social bookmarking network that lets users visit a website randomly based on their interests. Bloggers can use StumbleUpon to get hits to their articles in minutes. Over the past few months, I’ve been using StumbleUpon and here are 5 things I learnt about it:
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Smorty is another way to earn money from your blog. Smorty connects bloggers and advertisers, letting bloggers review advertisers’ services and products.

Advertisers can advertise on blogs with quality content to get opinions on their products and services. Bloggers get paid for the reviews approved by advertisers via Paypal. The pay out is weekly, and this attracted me.

Reviews must have a minimum of 150 words and a maximum of 400 words. Bloggers get paid for the reviews approved by advertisers.

Smorty’s interface is really simple to use. All available opportunities are listed on the panel for you to accept/decline. There’s also a referral program that lets you earn more bucks by referring new sign-ups.

Something which I found lacking was the usage of RSS feeds in the system. It would be easier for bloggers to keep track of available opportunities via feeds. Many similar services have integrated RSS feeds in their system very well.

Overall, Smorty seems to be a very good platform that lets bloggers get paid for blogging.

Disclosure: This is a sponsored review

Random Redirect is a WordPress plugin that lets your users to easily visit a randomly picked post from your blog – in StumbleUpon style.

May be useful for those lazy readers who feel bored to go through pages and pages of archives and category posts.

It’s fun. Just download the plugin from here, install it, activate it, and just put up a link to yourblogdomain.com/?random and you’re finished.

Clicking on the link, your blog’s readers will be redirected to a random post on your blog.

Some bloggers have already installed it and they’re using a dice icon for the links to increase the fun factor. You can also see it live on this blog in the sidebar.

I liked this plugin very much and I recommend to you all to install this one on your blog.

Earlier, Yahoo! announced that they will be bringing major changes to MyBlogLog, a social networking portal that was acquired by them earlier, to get rid of spammers and other offensive stuff.

And they’ve begun with a little step…

Did you login to your MyBlogLog page today? If so, you should have seen something new on your profile page like this:

The MyBlogLog Blog has an long introductory note on this feature. So here’s what’s new:

From now on, people on [tag]MyBlogLog[/tag] can tag you when they visit your profile pages. For example, someone can tag me as a “blogger” by using the “Add tag” option visible on my profile page.

Your will be able to see the tags that other people used on you. If you hover over a tag, you’ll find who’s tagged you with that tag. You can delete a particular tag used on you by using the red button that appears when you hover over the tag.

People can also tag the blogs you own with this new tagging system. If you want to get rid of this tagging feature, you can use the option available under settings.

Find anybody spamming around? You can tag the person as schmoe (Social Media Optimizer ). Even if a user who’s been tagged schmoe by others deletes the tag, the MyBlogLog team will still be able to identify them and will investigate their behaviour around MyBlogLog.

You can also tag a person as a Hot Member, and if a person gets tagged frequently as a hot member, he’ll get featured.

Wading through tags is possible. To find people and blogs tagged as, for example, design, you can use the URL http://mybloglog.com/buzz/tags/design to find out. Cool.

MyBlogLog

Do you think this will keep spammers off the bay on MyBlogLog? Share your views in the comments.

CommentPower is a new Web 2.0 service that you can integrate with your blog and use it to enhance comments. Currently, the service is in Private Beta, but hopefully, it will be out soon for everyone to use.

Upon installing and activating the plugin on your blog, you get options that’ll help you and your readers rate comments. Ratings are stored in a centralized server, and the comment author is rewarded for his or her comments. Comment Authors are identified by their email address.

I liked this part: It’s AJAX paged, and the usability factor is high. You can sort comments based on user ratings – good comments first or last.

Good commentators can be recognized and this may add up to their reputation.

WordPress users can get a plugin, so integration is easy.

CommentPower Seems promising. You can sign up to be a beta tester here.

What do you think, readers?

Post slug is a mostly underused option in WordPress.

By default, if you write a blog post with the title “This is the heading”, your post permalink may be something like this domain.com/date/this-is-the-heading (if you still have something like domain/?p=55, you could change this in Options >> Permalinks)

WordPress generates these post permalinks based on your post titles. These can be very easily modified by using the Post slug option located in the right panel on the ‘Write Post’ page.

What are the benefits on modifying post slugs?

• You can use post slugs to shorten very lengthy URLs for the benefit of your readers. For example, a post titled “This url is very lengthy that I cannot remember it” will have its permalink as this-url-is-very-lengthy- that-I-cannot-remember-it. You can shorten this to anything, say for example: url-lengthy-to-remember
• You can use post slugs to eliminate less significant words like a, the, it’s, its, etc.
• Post slugs can be used for SEO optimization. You might want to write a catchy title to attract your readers, but this may have less or no significance in terms of SEO, with no keywords.
  This is another place where Post slugs come in. You might have a post titled “Have you seen the new look Google search pages?”. But for better SEO, you could modify the post slug option to google-search-pages-redesigned-review. Now you have a balance between writing titles for your readers and search engines.

But, make sure that you don’t turn permalinks irrelevant to your post titles, and also take care not to overstuff them with keywords. Share your views in the comments.