I started my blog 13 years ago, in 2003. At the time, Movable Type was the most popular blogging platform; although a challenger, in the form of WordPress, had newly arrived on the blogging scene. Read More
Blogging
Blog Comments Design Gallery
Thanks to the rise of social media, blogs are no longer the discussion forums they used to be a few years ago. A well-designed blog comments section made the experience of reading through the discussion of an article a visually pleasing experience. This collection pulls together some of the best examples from around the web.
Read MoreFree Google Analytics Dashboards and Custom Reports
As part of their announcement about improved custom report and dashboard sharing, Google have released several custom reports and dashboards for Google Analytics users to install.
Online Charting Tool for RSS Feeds
If you use FeedBurner to deliver your RSS feed then you’ll want to check out Feed Analysis by BlogPerfume. Plug in your FeedBurner URL and Feed Analysis will spit out a variety of pretty charts of your site’s RSS activity.
Read MoreGet More Traffic: 18 Social Media Sites for Web Designers
Yes, it’s great to get your article on the front page of Digg’s design section — you get a huge traffic spike; hopefully your site stays up; you get a bunch of snarky comments — but it’s not exactly easy to do.
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Write Better: Online Readability Testing Tools Compared
There are a number of readability testing tools available on the web.
I was recently looking for a good online readability tool to use and as I was reviewing them I thought it would be helpful to write up my research. I found 12 tools worth checking out. My comparison of them is below.
I was especially interested to see how their results compared when analyzing the same text. I used the Gettysburg Address for my sample text (see “Conclusions” for some take aways).
Comments Are Broken
It appears that sometime on Friday my comment system broke. It may have something to do with my running out of disk space (which happened on the same day), although when I freed up some space on my server, comments were still not working.
11 Reasons Why You Should Write Long List Posts
It’s no secret that lists are a popular blog post format. Long lists of resources, in particular, can be a very successful type of post in terms of driving traffic and raising awareness of your site. Just check out Smashing Magazine for numerous examples.
Read MoreEasy Way to Display Well-Formatted Code on a Web Page
A while back I posted about a useful tool for presenting nicely formatted code in blog posts. Well, Quick Highlighter is a similar online service that includes color highlighting based on the language you are displaying.
Read MoreThe Best Article About Marketing Your Blog Ever?
ProBlogger guest author Tony Hung has written an amazingly comprehensive post about marketing your blog in 2007. In it he touches on just about every aspect of what it takes to develop a successful (i.e. popular) blog.