Tag: blogging

Categories
blog seo

More fun with Alexa and stats

As any blogger I can’t help but look at the stats now and then. At certain moment I realized that I don’t see Alexa in list of visiting search engines. I also realized it’s wrong. So I ventured in depths of my memory and just before hopelessly sinking there I remembered someone posting about Alexa redirect and how that helps your Alexa score.

What I did was I gave out just one redirect link (http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.dontdateguy.com) to our friends’ blog DontDateGuy.com on a not very crowded forum and watched stats afterwards. In just several hours I saw a tremendous boost in Alexa’s “curiosity”. Alexa was going over the site like there is no tomorrow, superseded by Google only (but who can beat that guy, eh?). For last 8 days (since the blog became active) Google hit it 143 times, Alexa 93, Yahoo 65 and Ask.com – 27. Comparing to this blog where Alexa also wasn’t showing up – pretty impressive to me.

So I have set up some more redirect links to two aforementioned blogs and will keep watching what will happen by the end of the month.

UPDATE: Alexa’s redirect doesn’t work now. Guess it got abused too much.

Categories
software

Blogging Editors – My Wish List

At various moments I tried to use different blogging tools. Most of the time I blog using WordPress admin interface. However, sometimes I feel like I need a special piece of software, that would help me work the words.

This post was written with the help of yet another (after Windows Live Writer, Writely and many others) blogging editor – BlogDesk. It successfully imported categories from existing blog (had troubles with encodings on my Russian blog though). It tests login and upload procedures on set up of the blog. It is, however, missing some features I’d like to see implemented. So what this boils down to is the Blogging Editors Wish List:

  • Starting WordPress 2.3 tags are built-in feature. I want to see my list of tags in the editor.
  • Unicode support.
  • Custom fields support (I just created a hack for my blog and it works through custom fields)
  • Posts Map. Now this is something coming from software projects or similar. I want to be able to form a map or a tree of posts. For example – I have a main post (About Widget One), then I have several posts that link to the main (How I Used Widget One, How I Didn’t Use Widget One, Why Did I Spend Money On Widget One and so on). Then I create couple of more posts that extent some of the previous posts. I want to see this as a tree or a map. This way I immediately realize if there is a possibility to expand some more on existing topics, maybe even discover some things long forgotten that could be resurfaced for various reasons.
  • Ability to download all posts into the editor. With simple posts structure of a blog (especially with self-hosted, like WordPress) it must be a breeze. Having an offline backup is a huge thing, having an offline backup in your favorite blogging editor – humongous! This feature along will attract thousands of users.
  • Word counter/analyzer. Something similar to WordStats plugin for WordPress. It counts words, sentences and calculates readability for your post based on Gunning-Fog, Flesch-Kincaid and Flesch indicies.
  • It looks nice (perhaps even skinnable), loads FAST and doesn’t clog your resources if it sits in the background.

Sometimes I feel a real urge to write something like this myself. The only problem that I have is that I want this editor to be very inexpensive.

Categories
blog

The Year Of A Blog

Looks like we’re a little late to the party, but it doesn’t mean we can’t have our chunk of fun. In addition to the blog we set up earlier for Don’t Date That Guy – not just one, but two more blogs emerging on our servers.

One will be in Russian (sorry, folks), and will deal with weight problems that Russian immigrants (especially of older age) are dealing with. Unfortunately, their life in former Soviet Union wasn’t as bright as our lives here and now. Science of dieting was not popular and not many people could afford to eat as healthy as we are now. So, we hope that by creating this web site we will provide valuable and necessary information for our own parents and relatives. Stay tuned, the launch is scheduled for February.

Second upcoming blog (hopefully) will launch approximately at the same time. It is targeted to a more younger crowd, people who are bored with existing places they go out to, but not sure where to go instead. Now, don’t confuse it with Zagat survey, it will look more like Events section from Village Voice then CitySearch listings. Plans are (so I heard) to include a lot of free or very inexpensive places. As it turns out not – not every 20-year old kid drives a Ferrari and makes a fortune on eBay.

Not sure if disclosing our future plans is a good idea, but it would be a nice experiment to see how things turn out. Zealus Web Design always tries to support our customers’ ideas and provide them with insights and knowledge of things they would otherwise have a hard time figuring out.