Having an iPhone, I have been waiting for this for a long time, and the new interface is great. I can’t wait to use it when I am traveling next week. You can read the updates here at Brand new Google Reader for iPhone and also Google interface for the iPhone at Macworld and there is more than just the look and feel that has changed.

Changes to Web Version of Reader

I didn’t read to much about changes made to the web version of Google reader, but now, all my “read” items are not showing in my feeds. The only way to get these read items back, that I can tell, is to unsubscribe to each feed one at a time (and I have over 600 feeds) and then add it right back.

When you do this, it pulls in all the feeds from previous posts, plus all the rest you hadn’t seen in a while. If you keep scrolling down, it will keep downloading new feeds. Without doing this step though, once you read the current feed in a subscription, the window shows nothing at all.

I hope that Google fixes this soon, I reference different feeds all the time, and most are feeds I have already read. Anyone else having this problem with this update?

Cool New Feature

One thing they did add was a link in the upper right corner that says show details. This is great, you can click on this link and it will now show you the average number of posts per week for this feed, and also how many subscribers.

Of course, I checked out some of my own blogs and they all said 2 subscribers and 0.0 posts per week. Now I don’t have many subscribers, but I have more than two. I also have several blogs I update on a daily basis, so it is a cool feature, but not quite working yet, perhaps.

Has anyone else seen any other updates to Google Reader over the last few days?

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There were to many to dial it down to 10, so here are the top 15 for you.

Top 10 15 Stars of the Week, April 29 - May 5

• 30 Beautiful and Innovative Flash Designs

• Will Your Website Pass a Google Review?

• Check if Your Images Appear on Google Image Search

• FeedBurner Moves to Google Accounts

• Search Twitter in Realtime, and Get Free(ish) Content

• A Remedy for Blogger Inferiority Complex

• How Spying On Your Friends Causes Reevaluation of Endorsed Content

• 16 Post Ideas for Your Blog - Different Types of Posts for Network Blogs

• Twitter Statistics with Yahoo Pipes and the Google Chart API

• Review: Twitter Clients For Adobe AIR On Linux

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As far as a blog goes, it is probably the single most important feature of your blog, and as a reader, it saves time and effort. Each time a favorite blog of yours updates their content, it sends out a rss feed, which can be read through a free program like Google Reader.

Almost all blogs utilize an rss feed, and now you can generally pull a feed from just about anywhere. There are feeds for news sites, blogs, hobbies, just about anything with active content. This is probably the best video out there on RSS Feeds, so give it quick look, it can explain a feed better than I can.

Don’t forget to sign up for my rss feeds, located at the top right corner of the menu at the top. As you look at the drop down, you will have a link to each blog I author, each with its own separate rss feed. In order to read the content of each post, you will need to subscribe to each blog individually.

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It is really amazing how many quality blogs there are now. I now have 686 feeds in my reader. Yes, not all are quite the premium material, but with so many good articles to choose from it is hard to narrow it down to 10, but, here they are.

Top 10 Stars of the week of April 21st

12 Ways to Be a More Interactive and Accessible Blogger

image by Jeff Bauche

Yesterday I wrote about being a ruthless blogger and named a number of areas that I find helpful to have more harsh boundaries in with the hope of it helping me become more productive and focused…

9 Ways to Make Money NOT Blogging

If you are trying to make money blogging then you have no doubt become well versed with the typical methods that bloggers use to try and make money online. The problem is that you and every other one

Instant Riches? Not in this Lifetime!

Author info: This is a guest post by Alan Johnson, the author of The Online Business Handbook. If you are interested in reading about something, you can rest assured that the information you are looking for is just one click away. If you want to talk to someone, all you have to do is pick up…

How Do I Get More Relevant Readers for My Blog?

@happygirl08 asks about how to - “get more relevant readers to your blog/ mailing list??”

Good question - some bloggers tend to focus on getting more…

26 Ways to Ruin Your Freelancing Career

Freelancing can be a rewarding career, with many benefits over being a salaried employee. But success in freelancing means there are a lot of things you shouldn’t do - things I’ve done over the past twenty…

Q&A Round 5 - The Answers

Cathlyn asks:

For affiliate newbies, should they really by By Rosalind Gardner’s book, the Super Affiliate Handbook? (?? Yes, even knowing you are…

Speed Posting - the Aftermath of Answering 19 Twitter Questions in a Weekend

This past few days have seen me experimenting with a new type of post here at ProBlogger - Speed Posting.

I set myself the challenge to answer 20 or so questions from my…

Thoughts on Forced Continuity and Similar Scams

What is Forced Continuity?

I had not actually heard of the term “forced continuity” before last week even though I have encountered it many times. It is where you…

SEO Weekend Update

Hey, friends. We’ve got a busy week ahead here at Bruce Clay, so let’s just jump right into some of the big stories of the day. Grab a…

Spice Up Your Blog: Guest Bloggers

If you are looking for additional way to add spice into your blog, why not try having guest bloggers?

Guest bloggers could be considered as another way of livening up the blog since it brings a fresh voice and at the same adds value to the…

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I have approximately 700 feeds that I go through each week, and as always, there were some excellent articles written last week. Below you will find a few that stood out to me.

Top 10 Stars of the week of Mar 24 to Mar 31

New Owner Lays It Out There

via Blogging Experiment by Max Davis on 3/28/08

Hey there, this is Max Davis. I’m sure you’ve heard by now that Ben has sold his amazing website and many of you are interested to see what is going to happen next.

Linking To Differing Opinion

via Andy Beard - Niche Marketing by Andy Beard on 2/18/08

There is nothing wrong with having strong, even biased opinion about a product or service, as long as you provide a basis for that

Designers and Communication Skills: Why and How to Improve

via Vandelay Website Design by Vandelay Design on 3/26/08

Earlier this week I posted a group interview with several established and successful designers. One of the questions that was asked to each participant was “What do you feel are the most important skills

The Right Advertising Revenue for Your Blog

via Blogging Tips by kelbycarr on 3/25/08

If you have a blog, odds are good you’d like to bring in a few bucks. There are actually several options for doing this, but not all will work

A Step By Step Guide To Writing About Stuff You Know Very Little About

via Freelance Folder by Ram Karthik on 3/27/08

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with writing only on a handful of topics, but what if a client asks you to write on a topic you know nothing (or very little) about? Can you afford to turn down work?

10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.5

via Technosailor by Aaron Brazell on 3/18/08

WordPress is about to release version 2.5 into the wild (It just hit Release Candidate yesterday so the release date, though officially

Ten Killer Interviewing Tips

via Freelance Folder by Keith Johnson on 3/30/08

As a Technical Writer, I have had to interview hundreds of computer professionals to better understand the technology that I would be documenting. Programmers, Quality Assurance, Implementation,

Goodbye 800×600?

via Blogging Tips by John Leschinski on 3/29/08

As I was redesigning my own site I debated what resolution to use. More and more sites are optimized for screens at 1024×768, and the WC3 reports 80% of users have monitors that big or bigger. Even my…

Should I Change My Website Into a Blog?

via ProBlogger Blog Tips by Darren Rowse on 3/29/08

“Hi Darren, I’ve got a website at www._____.com which I’ve had for a few years and not really done much with. I’ve heard that blogs are a good way of building traffic and making money, should I change it to a blog?”

10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.5

via Technosailor by Aaron Brazell on 3/18/08

WordPress is about to release version 2.5 into the wild (It just hit Release Candidate yesterday so the release date, though officially not known, is coming soon). If you’ve been using WordPress.com or have peeked at the demo site you will know the biggest change coming to WordPress with this release.

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If you are not familiar with this list, each Monday morning I create a list of the top 15 posts from my reader from last week. You can see the entire list from the footer in the center where it says “starred items”. I am going to get right to the list since there were so many good articles posted last week.

Top 15 21 Stars of the week of Nov 26th to Dec 3rd

The Nasty Four-Letter Word That Keeps You From Writing

via Copyblogger by Brian Clark on 11/26/07

When it comes to the things that keep us from writing, you’ll see the usual villains pop up. Lack of time is a big one, as are the various other life distractions that take us away from the keyboard.

Writing for Multiple Blogs

via Vandelay Website Design by Vandelay Design on 11/26/07

Many bloggers either own multiple blogs or they write for others as well as their own. Those who aren’t writing for other blogs are missing out on a great opportunity to gain exposure and network with influential bloggers. For a few months I was posting 5-6 times per

How My Blog Traffic Grew 20% During a 3-Week Vacation (or How to Take a Vacation Without Losing Traffic)

via ProBlogger Blog Tips by Darren Rowse on 11/27/07

This is a guest post from J.D. Roth. J.D. writes about smart personal finance at Get Rich Slowly. He has been blogging since 2001.

The summer doldrums — most bloggers fear them. It’s not just that traffic tends to be lower, but bloggers are people, too, and need to take vacations. Yet even when big-name bloggers take a break, their traffic falls. Imagine what things are like for mortals like us!

10 Variables of Article Readability

via Wayne Liew Dot Com by Wayne Liew on 11/27/07

Do you remember 10 Reasons You Are Not Getting Comments? One of the points in there will be your posts are just lousy. I have a habit of bloghopping around and I find that sometimes, it is not that a blog

Push Marketing V.S. Pull Marketing: Using Both Strategies to Promote Your Site

via Dosh Dosh - Making Money Online by Maki on 11/27/07

In business parlance, push-pull marketing refers to different ways of promoting a business model in order to reach a target market. In push marketing, you ‘push’ your content or product towards the audience which may or may not be aware of it.

21 Factors that Influence the First Impression of Your Website’s Visitors

via Vandelay Website Design by Vandelay Design on 11/27/07

When a new visitor comes to your website for the first time an initial impression will be formed pretty quickly. A good first impression will drastically increase the chances of that visitor returning again, and a

Earn 10% on Amazon Kindle Referrals

via The Official Amazon Associates Blog by The Amazon Associates Team on 11/29/07

The Associates program is excited to announce that Associates can now earn 10% in referral fees on the Amazon Kindle wireless reading device and Kindle Edition books.

The Economics of Blogging for Attention

via rksmythe’s starred items in Google Reader by Bernard Lunn on 11/29/07

Earlier this week Alex Iskold wrote that there is no money for bloggers in the long tail, even if there is money from aggregating the long tail.

Google Fooling Around With Digg Style Voting

via John Chow dot Com by John Chow on 11/29/07

Read on both TechCrunch and BlogStorm that Google Labs is experimenting with a new feature that will let users vote search results up or down using a Digg style voting system.

5 Steps to Becoming a Better Blogger

via Vandelay Website Design by Vandelay Design on 11/29/07

All bloggers have room for improvement. Obviously, those who are new to blogging will typically have more to learn than those who have several years of experience, but we can all benefit by improving in these 5 areas.

SEO Expectations, Choose Your Own SERP and Blogger Burnout

via Bruce Clay, Inc. Blog by Lisa Barone on 11/29/07

Search Engine Optimization Expectations

Over at ClickZ, Steve Haar did a great job outlining some necessary SEO expectations and commitments that search marketers can use to help explain the SEO process to higher ups. His list includes

Build Some Traffic for Your Build a Niche Store

via Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills by Guest on 11/28/07

ShoeMoney: Last week I wrote a post about using BANS to build your own niche store. I received a ton of questions about how to build traffic and many other questions. Ian contacted me at the same time to do a follow up to answer these questions

This time of year is when everyone starts to splurge money on physical items such as toys, clothing, and electronics. I have had my BadCircuit.com BANS (Build a Niche Store ) for a little over week

What’s Your Long-Term Blogging Strategy?

via Daily Blog Tips by Skellie on 11/29/07

Unless you have a staff of full-time writers, a professional designer, an existing audience you can leverage and money to pour into promotions, the process of becoming popular rarely happens

7 Warning Signs That You’re Drunk on Your Own Words

via Copyblogger by Jonathan Morrow on 11/29/07

This is a guest post from Jon Morrow.

Tell me if this sounds familiar.

You sit down in the computer for a few minutes, hoping to whip up a quick blog post. Then an idea hits you. It’s vague at first, but it has a certain sparkle of possibility. You start constructing a post,

Why You Should Go Through the Trouble of Registering Your Copyright When Everyone Tells You That Your Work is Protected Automatically

via SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog by Sarah Bird, Esquire on 11/29/07

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire

May It Please the Mozzers,
Apparently I’m on a bit of a copyright kick these days. Copyright is stuck in my head like an annoying song. Does this ever happen to you? No, seriously.

Have blog, but have other online businesses too

via AdesBlog.com by Ades on 11/29/07

If you notice, many successful bloggers do not rely on blogging alone for generating money on internet. In fact, their blogs are usually the secondary source of income for them

How Much Money Do Bloggers Earn Blogging?

via ProBlogger Blog Tips by Darren Rowse on 11/29/07

Earlier in the month I asked readers to share their blog earnings for the month of October. As usual this poll was a popular one with 3054 responses. I’ve run this survey previously so will compare the results

Blog Reviews - $10.00

via Day Job Nuker.Com by DayJobNuker on 11/28/07

My last two blog reviews which you can see here and here I did for free. I am now offering to review your blog or website for $10.00.

1) You will be allowed to pick the day of the week I post the review on.

Want To Quit the Day Job But Can’t Afford To? Maybe You Can…

via Caroline Middlebrook by Caroline Middlebrook on 11/30/07

I’m sure there are a great many people who want to quit their day jobs in order to start a business making money online, or perhaps some other business but they don’t have the funds to do it.

20 questions that clients ask before choosing a designer

via David Airey :: Graphic and Logo Designer by David Airey on 11/30/07

Choosing a designer can seem like a daunting task. You need to know if you can trust this person with the reputation of your company, because what they produce will, in many cases, give a potential customer their first impression of your business.

6 Easy Ways To Increase Your Comment Count

via Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills by neilpatel on 11/30/07

Don’t you hate it when you write a great blog post and no one comments on it? Whether you have a few readers or thousands of readers reading your blog, it seems that many people are having trouble to get hundreds of comments.

Conclusion

A few more than 15 this week but sometimes that’s how it goes. If you don’t get a chance to read these great articles then just bookmark them for later reading. What were some of your favorite articles from this past week?

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I took a little bit of a break, on the computer anyway, and did a whole lot of outside “work” over the week, along with watching the multitude of football games that were played over the later half of the week.

Week In Review

There were several Thanksgiving day posts on various topics and I also tried to post something with a little meat to it about thinking globally, Thanksgiving is a U.S. Holiday, Think Global, which I think all of us, especially here in the U.S., should keep in mind when operating on the Internet where articles don’t see political borders.

There was still the musings on the Google PageRank, I guess that is here to stay, but there were also several news stories that came out of eBay, Overstock, and many of the online retailers in preparation for black Friday. I don’t normally star these items since they are very visible by all, but I have put some of them on the share list (see bottom left of the footer). There was still a great list of high quality articles I have listed below.

Top 15 Post and Feed Information

My feed reader is now up to about 370 subscriptions, not to many added last week since I tried to take a little time off myself. Something I have found feeds to be very useful for is searching and creating its own feed. I have posted about this before, but displaying a feed from these feeds can be quite useful (see footer), especially for niche sites where you can target information directly to your visitor.

If you are not familiar with this post, it is a weekly recap of the Internet happenings (as seen by me) from the prior week. As always, if you have other good articles to suggest I would love to hear about them. Even though it was a vacation week of sorts, there were still many high quality posts over the week and I have listed them below for you.

Top 15 Stars of the week of Nov 19th-26th

Del.icio.us: An Underrated Link Building Tool

via Vandelay Website Design by Vandelay Design on 11/19/07

On the subject of social media, Digg and StumbleUpon seem to get almost all of the attention right now. While the traffic potential for these two is considerably higher than other social media sites, Del.icio.us can be one of the most powerful resources for your link building efforts.

5 Powerful Techniques to Help Your Posts Stand Out

via ProBlogger Blog Tips by Skellie on 11/19/07

In this post regular contributer Skellie from Skelliewag.org helps you differentiate your content.

Blogs are now so popular that it’s very hard to find a niche that isn’t already saturated. There are probably dozens or hundreds of other bloggers writing on the topics you cover.

The Flagship Blog Project: Creating Multiple Blogs for Profit in 30 Day Cycles

via Dosh Dosh - Making Money Online by Maki on 11/19/07

Popular blogs are often read daily by a large audience. Reaching thousands of people, popular blogs can widely influence opinions and are terrific personal branding platforms as well

How to Create a Blog That People Really Digg

via Copyblogger by Jonathan Morrow on 11/19/07

Have you ever noticed that some blogs seem to rise to the top of Digg over and over again?

You might think that they’ve discovered some magic formula for getting attention, built a “Digg culture” on their blog, or they just get all of their friends to Digg their posts.

And they might.

40 Resources for WordPress Theme Designers

via Vandelay Website Design by Vandelay Design on 11/20/07

One of the reasons WordPress is the most popular blogging platform is its theme system. WordPress allows its users with almost unlimited design options when modifying or designing themes. This is a collection of 40 resources that every theme designer can

Why TLA (and others) has to follow Google

via AdesBlog.com by Ades on 11/20/07

There are couple of reasons why TLA and its counterparts LinkWorth, ReviewMe, and P-P-P… etc should be considering “nofollow” tags.

Are You Sabotaging Your Social Stories?

via Blogging Experiment by Ben Cook on 11/20/07

I’ve been a participant in the social media scene, both as a reader and content producer, for a quite a while now. I’ve had several stories I’ve written become popular and I’ve had even more submissions

International Copyright on the Web: What Rules Apply to Me and What Court Will Apply Them?

via SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog by Sarah Bird, Esquire on 11/21/07

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire

May it Please the Mozzers,
I present myself to you as your legal resource for all things SEO/M related.
A graduate of the University of Washington School of Law, I have spent the last three years litigating complex and diverse legal issues. With much gratitude and enthusiasm, I recently accepted SEOmoz’s invitation to bring my expertise to the SEO/M community.

The SEO Book Blog is Now Creative Commons Licensed

via SEO Book.com - by Aaron Wall on 11/22/07

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

When I published the SEO glossary I made it creative commons licensed. I wanted to do that with all the blog posts on SEO Book too, but just got around to doing so. If you like any of the blog posts here feel free to do what you like with them.

Readers vs Visitors - Whose Needs are You Meeting?

via ProBlogger Blog Tips by Darren Rowse on 11/23/07

The following post on meeting the needs of Readers and Visitors is a guest post by Lorelle VanFossen of Lorelle on WordPress.

Smashing Magazine asks Who Is Your Visitor?, using some new research into the preferences and characteristics of the average visitor to your blog and website.

10 Things To Do With Your Old Computer

via The Computer Zone by Adam McKerlie on 11/23/07

One of the constants in this world is the fact that technology will change, and it will change quickly. The average lifespan of a computer these days is between 2 to 5 years. Since technology is changing so quickly this equates to a lot of garbage from your old

Bonnie Brown On Her Years at Google

via Google Blogoscoped by Philipp Lenssen on 11/23/07

Bonnie Brown was working as massage therapist at Google from 1999 to 2004. Before that, she ran a private school for 10 years. Now, Bonnie is traveling and also wrote a book called Giigle: How I Got Lucky Massaging Google. I met up with her on Google Talk (the transcript below has spellchecking and punctuation added).

Does Commenting on Blog Posts Really Increase Your Visitor Traffic - An Experiment

via mytropicalescape.com by Mark on 11/21/07

One of my new goals here at MyTropicalEscape will be to experiment (I am a trained scientist after all) with helpful techniques and tips (whether it’s attracting more traffic or making money) that other bloggers are suggesting and then report back on my success, or lack thereof.

30 Beautiful Blog Designs

via Daily Blog Tips by Daniel on 11/23/07

The folks from Smashing Magazine are always looking for beautiful designs around the Internet, and this time they published a list with 30 blogs that feature an appealing and unique look.

Post Frequency, Case Study on 5 Blogs

via AdesBlog.com by Ades on 11/24/07

This is a follow up case study on the 3 parts series that I had previously blogged - “Guide on blog posting frequency”

Lately, it seemed to me that, post frequency for the blogs that I read regularly, started decreasing i.e they started posting less. In order to to prove if my assumption was correct, I selected five blogs and recorded their number of daily posts, for each day starting from October 1 through November 22 (about two months).

Be Brave - Break Your Blog

via ProBlogger Blog Tips by Darren Rowse on 11/24/07

The following post on ‘breaking your blog’ and setting up test blogs was submitted by Michael Martin from Pro Blog Design.

One of the best kept secrets in design is that we don’t always know what we’re doing. Understanding design theory and color and all the

Conclusion

That wraps up a good list of blogs and articles from last week. There are always so many great feeds from the week it is hard to decide on 15 or 20 to wrap up an entire week, which is why I go over many times. What were your favorites for the week? I have going on 400 feeds in my reader but there is always room for one more, let me know what you suggest below.

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If you haven’t looked at them yet, there are several different graphs available in the “trends” section of Google Reader.

This week has been a little more quiet than the past few weeks. In part it might be the upcoming holiday here in the U.S. that had several of the frequent article writers looking for a little relaxation.

This Week in Review

There is still a lot of chatter about the PageRank system of course, and a new twist was with the release of a new TLA code, see my article TLA Changes Code, Says Refrain From Paid Links Text where it looks like the battle rages on between TLA and Google.

Another added component this week was a few articles that were written that talked about PayPerPost now being on the hit list for Google. I haven’t read to much about the issue quite yet, but the article, Use PayPerPost? Watch your blog PR drop to ZERO explains it pretty well.

Upcoming Holiday Week

I myself and going to try and use this week to catch up on some other projects and take some time off for Thanksgiving. I am working to implement a CMS blog of sorts in a niche craft market using a great Wordpress Theme by Brian Gardner called Revolution (using the Magazine version), which I hope will be ready early next year. It looks like a great theme to work with and hopefully I will have some time over the holiday to dig into the code a little bit.

So, lets get on to the top 15 stars of the week.

Top 15 18 Stars of the week of Nov 12th-19th

5 Tips for Show Top Commentator Plugin Usage

via Wayne Liew Dot Com by Wayne Liew on 11/12/07

Today I am going to write about a popular plugin which most of us might be using, the Show Top Commentator plugin by Nate Sanden. I will not be reviewing about it since it is a known fact that the plugin is

The Problem with Waffly Headlines

via Copyblogger by Sean D’Souza on 11/12/07

Headline writing is an art, right?

No it’s not. But you can’t have waffle.

So how would you define waffly-headlines? Waffly headlines have terms like this:

Does your office have workplace-stress?

What Topic Would You NEVER Blog About?

via Everybody Go To by Hyder on 11/12/07

We all have our favorite blogging topics be it Technology, Web Startups, Making Money Online, stuff about Blogging itself, among many others. But there are always a few topics that every blogger

Wanted: Bloggers for Hire

via Blogging Tips by Elaine Ramos on 11/12/07

Blogging is more than just a hobby, it is now considered as an income generator.

Aside from having blogs which has high traffic, one could be a “blogger for hire”. It means that you could be hired as bloggers for different topics provided that you would meet the requirement needed

17 Creative Link Building Ideas : Please Add Your Own

via Search Engine Journal by Miles Price on 11/12/07

For a follow-up to the post on link-building techniques, I’ve decided to take some articles off of my compilations for creative link-building ideas on the Search Marketing Wiki. I hope you enjoy these ideas for more and more are coming — Feel free to add any ideas you feel

Would you buy adverts on eBay?

via TameBay by Chris Dawson on 11/12/07

An interesting twist has come to light regarding the adverts eBay are testing on the site in search results.

eBay are consulting website owners to gauge their interest in paying for the adverts and gathering information on the likely take up rate and the amount users may spend per month.

A Basic Guide to WordPress Template Tags

via Randa Clay Design by Randa on 11/12/07

Recently a reader asked how to add the time of a post to a theme, so I thought I would give a basic overview of WordPress template tags. This is one of those things that seems like it must be really complicated, but actually isn’t.

How to Transform Readers Into Raving Fans

via ProBlogger Blog Tips by Skellie on 11/13/07

In this post regular contributer Skellie from Skelliewag.org explains how you can turn readers into fans.

The notion of ‘raving fans’ brings to mind a screaming crowd at a Beatles concert. For bloggers, a more accurate version of a ‘raving

WWLD? No. 2: Keeping Connected

via 43 Folders - by glassdog on 11/14/07

Our great friend, Leslie Harpold, passed away in December of last year. In addition to being a swell pal and an old-school web mandarin, Leslie was an endless source of advice and opinion on practically everything.

How to Attract Comments on Your Blog

via bluejar.com - the webmasters guide to the galaxy by Sarah on 10/17/07

Photo by greggoconnell.

My blog is a little over 3 months old and right now I have a total of 107 posts with 1,091 comments. I have tried a lot of things to attract comments on my blog, many which have worked out well and

A No-nonsense Guide To Clearer, Sharper, And Better Writing

via Blogging Bits by Mohsin on 11/12/07

A great idea wrapped in flimsy writing is a waste of words.

On the other hand, an average but clearly expressed thought enjoys more attention.

Why bother about good writing practices, you ask? You are a blogger, not a would-be author of the next best-seller.

Do You Thank Your Stumblers?

via Caroline Middlebrook by Caroline Middlebrook on 11/14/07

I’m sure many of you enjoy the benefits of large volumes of traffic from StumbleUpon, but do you take the time to find out who gave you those thumbs up and stop to thank them? If not, then read on to discover why you should.

[on a side note: you have to go read her follow-up to this post and see the emails she received by doing this post. They were not nice!]

How I Make Money Blogging

via ProBlogger Blog Tips by Darren Rowse on 11/14/07

Every now and again I give readers an update on how I’ve been making money through blogging over the last few months.

It’s been a over six months since I last did it and a number of things have changed since that time - so I thought

My Blogging Advice To Connect With Your Readers

via Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills by ShoeMoney on 11/13/07

First of all if you are reading this site for blogging advice you are at the wrong place. problogger is hands down THE blogger and has the best advice and reads.

Improve Your Productivity with the 80-20 Rule

via Winning the Web by Gyutae Park on 11/14/07

Have you heard of the Pareto principle? If you haven’t, you’re missing out on a key business idea and may be working inefficiently for little gain. This is a principle mentioned in Timothy Ferris’ popular book, 4-Hour Work Week and is extremely relevant in online business and

Using Google Webmaster Tools with Go Daddy

via Google Blogoscoped by Tony Ruscoe on 11/14/07

The Google Webmaster Central Blog recently announced that Google and Go Daddy were working on a pilot together so that Go Daddy customers could more easily access Google Webmaster Tools.

Here’s how it works:

Who is Blogging and Why? Is the Blogosphere in a Digestion Phase?

via Read/WriteWeb by Alex Iskold on 11/15/07

Last week Marshall and I attended the Blog World Expo conference. The gathering, held in Las Vegas, drew over 1,500 bloggers from different parts of the country and overseas. The conference

Savings is Sexy

via W Revenue dot Com by Scott on 11/18/07

Everyone reading this blog wants to make more money, but once you get it, do you know what to do with it? Let’s face it, most people don’t have any savings and if they do, it’s maybe a few thousand dollars. That’s not necessarily because they can’t save, or because

Conclusion

I think that about wraps it up for a week of starred items. If you are not familiar with this post, each week on Monday’s I post an article called Top 15 Stars of the Week. In this article I review the web happenings from the week before and post some of the articles that I starred in my Google Reader from the week before.

I hope you enjoy reading these articles, or at least marking them for later reading. Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

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Make this page work to your advantage. Making the best use of these queries can bring the user back into your site instead of showing a dead page that will most likely cause the visitor to move on to some site that doesn’t show errors on their site.

What is a Server Response 404 File Page Not Found

The 404 error page has been with us as long as there have been web pages, and for the most part is a request for a page that doesn’t exist on your site. Wikipedia states it like this:

The 404 or Not Found error message is an HTTP standard response code indicating that the client was able to communicate with the server but either the server could not find what was requested, or it was configured not to fulfill the request and not reveal the reason why.

We have all come across these pages from time to time, some have even made some humorous cases out of the 404 page, but either way, it is an error as far as the visitor goes, and you want to convert these visitors in some useful manner, not have them leave because they think your site is not working properly.

Customize The 404 Page to Increase Traffic Conversions

You can make this page useful by doing some basic customization to what is seen when the 404 error response is given.

The standard domain or blog usually has access to the 404 page just like a normal .php or .html page that is called when a specific url address is given.

You can see an example on my blog when you type in any url that doesn’t exist and you can also see how other domains handle their 404 pages by doing the same thing. It can be any url that doesn’t exist, like http://scott.islandzephyr.com/tHisPagE (which doesn’t exist) will show you how this one is setup.

When you customize the page make sure you say a few things.

• Explain in lay terms what page the visitor has reached and why
• Offer a way out, at least back to the main page
• Provide useful links or additional articles to the visitor to click through
• Use your standard design layout so it looks the same as the other pages
• Try to avoid the standard “ERROR” language, look, and feel

I have used my 404 page like I would any other page on my blog. I setup a static sitemap of sorts with a short explanation of the page they have reached and what the visitor can do at that point.

Monitor Your 404 Page Requests

Something I didn’t think about at first was to keep an eye on which pages are getting requested. There are several ways you can do this. If you are running a blog, the easiest way is to use a plugin. There is a very good Wordpress Plugin by Alex King called the 404 Notifier that will send you an email or rss feed of your 404 page requests.

This plugin is easy to use and install and it provides you a list of exactly which page addresses are being requested. I was surprised at home many pages were being requested, but I never would have know without looking at the list being created.

If you are not working on a blog but on an ecommerce store site check with your hosting provider for exact details on how to access the 404 file page. A good way to monitor non-blog related pages is to use Google Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster tools will give you the page in question, the date, and the actual server response.

Correct the 404 Errors If You Can

If you are going to monitor the 404 error reports you should also do something with that information. I couldn’t believe how many error reports were being generated, but I noticed some of them should be, and could be, eliminated by changing a few page titles around.

There could be a typo in your url or a page you deleted by accident could be re-uploaded. There are probably several 404 reports that you could eliminate just by correct a few actual errors you weren’t aware existed.

Check the Results in Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools

Once you have found and corrected some of these errors you can check the various stat tracking sites to see the results you have accomplished. What is great about these two particular tools is that when a page is not found and then the visitor goes to a page that is found, you can get an idea of how many visitors are utilizing your 404 file not found page.

In Google Analytics check to see where the user came from. If you know it is a page that didn’t or doesn’t exist then you know your 404 file not found page was utilized to bring the visitor back into your site.

Following the example I noted above, when I check my stats for traffic on the page http://scott.islandzephyr.com/tHisPagE I know this page doesn’t exist. When I see traffic to other pages that came from that particular page, I know the user clicked on a link on my 404 page.

What Does Your Company Do With the 404 Error?

There are so many different way to deal with your 404 file not found error. Some don’t know or choose not to do anything, but I think you can utilize your 404 page to work for you and bring traffic back into your store or blog. Don’t loose traffic that would otherwise stay if it wasn’t for an error on your page.

Does your company have a specific procedure for handling 404 requests? Share it with us.

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If you are new to this blog and this weekly post, each Monday I post a top 15 list of my starred items from the previous 7 days, as starred in my feed reader, Google Reader. This week it happens to be a top 20 list.

This post also serves as a week in review recap of sorts as well, so keep reading and you will find the top 20 stars of the week at the bottom. My subscriber feeds that I read (not that are subscribed to my blog) are up to 339 now, I think I added about 15 this week.

I can get through just about all of them each day in one way or another, but with this many, I may have to start a top 15 dud (not dude) list as well.

New Free Footer Link Love Added

I just finished a new footer of sorts that will be an extension to my post, Add Value to Your Blog, Offer an RSS Feed in Reverse, where I use the feeds in my Google Reader to create a blog roll from my public reader feeds. I added this to just show what I think are some of the better articles posted for the week.

At the moment, it will show the three feeds, my shared items, my starred items, and blogs of interest. The last one is a list of blogs I find interesting and wanted to offer some free link love. What is different about that page over a normal blog roll is that it offers a combined feed for all the blogs on the blog roll and a link to each individual blog.

Now, if Google will just get it together and make these “pages” where we can customize them and add Adsense feeds to them you will probably see everyone using them. It generates some cool content and is a need way to keep an updated list of the movers and shakers in your particular interest field.

I haven’t figured out what the problem with viewing these feeds in Safari is (all other browsers look fine), just can’t get them to show up, so if anyone has a quick suggestion that would be great. What I really wanted was the Hemingway footer blocks in plugin form but I don’t think one exists, so this will have to do for now.

This Past Week in Review

This past week saw the first annual BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas and from all the posts about the events, it looked like it was a great conference and I will have a post about it later in the week. There is still talk about another PageRank (PR) update over the weekend from Google from a few different blog, although we didn’t see any change ourselves.

Something else that just came up is a new money making scheme exposed by an article, This Months Stupid Cow Award, and Being A Fake Is Harmful For Millions of People Who Want To Learn How To Make Money Online, about selling RSS readers.

Some seem to have no problem with, but for the most part I think legitimate bloggers have voiced their opinion in opposition to this practice. I think it is going to bring the wrath of Google in the form of PR penalties down the road, and perhaps even Feedburner for trying to sell RSS subscribers (real or fake, couldn’t tell), besides deceiving the readers of the participating blogs.

Top 15 20 Stars of the week of Nov 5th-11th

Attack of the 20%’ers

via Official Google Reader Blog by dolapo on 11/6/07

At Google, 20% time is core to our culture and today’s Reader release incorporates features developed by two engineers in their 20% time. Those two engineers would be us!

Answers to Questions for Rand: Round 2

via SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog by randfish on 11/6/07

Posted by randfish

Sorry it’s taken me so long to get to all of these. The past few days trying to get grounded after a week in Stockholm have been even

So who’s doing all this searching anyway?

via Compete Blog by Jeremy Crane on 11/7/07

For the past few weeks I’ve been peeling back the layers on the search onion to understand a few questions. How effective are each of the engines? How do people use search? Who is using search?

SitePoint Afffiliate Program pays $98.00

via AdesBlog.com by Ades on 11/7/07

We all have tried Amazon’s affiliate program with no or little success, didn’t we? But if your visitors are mainly web programmers, you might want to give Sitepoint Affiliate Program a try (www.sitepoint.com/affiliate/). Because the earnings for every book

Court talks scents in trademark case

via TameBay by Sue Bailey on 11/7/07

eBay have won their suit for trademark dilution against perfumebay.com. Three judges from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld a lower court’s ruling from September 2005 that the similarity of the two domain names could encourage users to

Thriving as a B-list Blogger

via Bruce Clay, Inc. Blog by Lisa Barone on 11/8/07

Leading this one are Jeremy Wright and Allen Stern to talk about attitudes regarding B-list bloggers.

Jeremy says there’s not a lot of value being added by A-listers. There are better sites than TechCrunch and Read/WriteWeb out there. Blogging is about creating your personal A-list and reaching your own

Are You a Link Whore?

via Randa Clay Design by Randa on 11/8/07

Since the whole I Follow Movement thing last spring, there have been lists of blogs published with titles like “10 High PR I Follow Blogs” encouraging readers to visit and comment, and “be sure it doesn’t look too spammy or it might get deleted.” Now that page rank has

10 Reasons I Delete Your Email

via Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills by ShoeMoney on 11/8/07

1) Start it with “Dear Sirs,”

Seriously…

2) Spell my name wrong.

You want to make misspellings? Thats

10 Reasons You Are Not Getting Comments

via Wayne Liew Dot Com by Wayne Liew on 11/7/07

I am sure that every blogger loves to see comments on their blogs. I am somehow lucky to get comments in each and every one of my posts on Wayne Liew Dot Com but some bloggers is facing problems

StumbleUpon Get Their Own (Unofficial) Top 100 List

via Average Joe Blogger by Nate (Average Joe Blogger) on 11/6/07

Top100 lists have always been an intriguing look into what makes a super user. Whether they be the top money makers, top digg users or top whatever, they’re always fascinating.

5 Reasons Why Blogging Sucks

via Blogging Bits by Mohsin on 11/7/07

You thought blogging is all fun and money? Well, that’s not quite true.

Instigator blog published an excellent list of not-so-fancy aspects of freelancing, so I thought since blogging, and especially problogging, is a freelance activity, I’ll list the cons of problogging.

Blogger’s Guide to Creating Better Content

via Vandelay Website Design by Vandelay Design on 11/8/07

Yesterday I wrote about the effects of creative blog content. Now that you know about all the benefits that come with creative content you may be wondering what you can do to improve your posts.

Use Feedburner Statistics to Interpret Reader Habits

via ProBlogger Blog Tips by Darren Rowse on 11/9/07

Can your Feedburner stats reveal habits of your readers that could help you make your blogging more effective at reaching them? Guest poster Max Pool finds out.

As we know FeedBurner counts can naturally fluctuate.

The 7 deadly sins of instant messaging

via 43 Folders by Chanpory on 11/9/07

I heart instant messaging, but I heart it too much. If you’re a chat addict like me, you understand the lure. It’s convenient, connecting you to faraway buddies with little cost. It’s safe, releasing you from

Blog World 2007: Paid Text Links, Google, and You

via W Revenue dot Com by Scott on 11/9/07

I’m at Blog World Expo today in Las Vegas. It’s a new and fairly small conference, but it is packed full of sessions and a lot of big time Internet business folks are here: Leo Laporte (of TechTV and TWiT Podcast fame) gave the

BloggingZoom Sucks More Than BlogRush

via Web 2.0 How-To Spot-er by TheSpot-er on 11/9/07

BloggingZoom is a hot new comer to social networking scene that allows bloggers exchange traffic by presenting their content in relevant location. While it doesn’t perform same function like

12 habits of a successful blogger

via bLuefRogX by bLuefRoGX on 11/7/07

I’ve always wondered - “How did they make it to the top?” If someone could tell me the 10 ways to make me a popular blogger and make everyone