Often at the end of a TV show, they play some clips of what’s coming up in the next episode. It’s interesting to watch (Provided they don’t spoil things too much on you!), simple for them to do, and near enough guarantees you’ll remember to tune in again next time.
So why not do the same with your blog?
If you use WordPress’s future-posting to schedule your posts for a few days in advance, you can show parts of those posts on your blog beforehand to let people know there’s more to come.
If you’re a blogger, you probably use FeedBurner to monitor your feed stats. It’s a great free service that gives you a lot of details about who’s subscribed to your feed and some tools to promote it.
Google bought over FeedBurner in the Summer of 2007, and are now moving all of the FeedBurner accounts into their Google accounts.
The RSS subscriber count is the statistic I’m most interested in. It tells me how many people are listening to my tips and tutorials (Thank you to anyone that is!)
I want as many people as possible to click that little orange button, so I have chosen unique icons and put them in noticeable places on the site. But what about when they click those links?
Every blog wants as many subscribers as it can get. Attracting a reader’s with a noticeable RSS icon is one way of achieving that goal. The standard RSS icon won’t always cut it. With all the free icons available out there, there’s very little reason to stick to the default.
Back in April, I collected together 60 free RSS icons to use on your blog. With the 50 added here, you now have over 110 styles to choose from. The right one for your blog is bound to be in here somewhere!
Check out the first 60 feed icons here.
The standard RSS icon is too common. Everyone has seen it. Make your feed subscription more appealing by using one of the unique icons below.
The first 43 are all free, and many come with a range of color variations. The last section is probably free, but you’ll need to email the authors to be certain. Click an image to visit the source of the icon.
In the past few days, I redesigned my sidebar. It doesn’t sound like much, does it? But looking back, that one change has had quite an impact on the overall look.
In blogs in particular, the sidebar is a big part of your design. But also in blogs, they tend to be quite poorly done. The reason is that very few of us design our sidebars with content in mind.
I’m guilty as well. When I first designed the sidebar for this blog, I was thinking about leaderboard ads and various widgets. Since then, I’ve dropped the ads, changed the widgets and added a sideblog.
Odds are, your sidebar content has changed in the course of your blogging as well. It is important to reassess your entire blog every now and again, but the sidebar is one area that you should pay particular attention to because of its changing nature.
In this post, I want to go through how I reassessed mine, and worked to improve it. You can then apply the same process to your own blog.
When I reviewed the new Freelance Switch design, one thing I noted was how they display their subscriber count as plain text, not using the little FeedBurner chicklet.
This trick isn’t one that you usually see around the blogosphere, so I did a little investigating. The effect can be achieved using FeedBurner’s Awareness API.
Unfortunately, I’m yet to find a guide as to how exactly…
However, there is good news for WordPress users. Francesco Mapelli has put together a very easy to use plugin that does all the heavy lifting for you. Install the plugin like any other plugin, then fill in a few options, and you’ll end up with markup like this in your HTML:
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