After a long time I completly revamped this place (again). I am using a new theme, a new feed, a new advertising company, new wordpress plugins and also I registered the site in some blog directories like Blogwise and Blogalaxia.
New Theme:
I am using a modified version of the identification bands (3 columns right sided flavour). theme I had removed almost all images from the css since they made the blog really slow to scroll.
New Feed
I suscribed to Feedburner, my new feed is feeds.feedburner.com/tabo. Feedburner has advantages both for both feed subscribers and publishers, like:
- SmartFeeds: FeedBurner will detect the user agent accesing the feed and will output a feed tailored for that user agent. No more atom/rss1/rss2 nightmares.
- Browser-Friendly Burner: The feed has a nice looking stylesheet for those that click in the feed with a browser (looks better than many blogs).
- Extra content: You can add del.icio.us and flicker content to your feed.
- Pingshot: To automatically notify blog directories when there is an update.
- Stats: Detailed stats on how many people is reading your feed, and using what.
I initially redirected the old feeds to the burned one, but that was messing with the stats. Anyway if anybody wants to do that with wordpress, here is how:
Create a symlink of the old feed:
ln -s wp-rss2.php newfeed.php
Subscribe feedburner to newfeed.php, then add the following Apache mod_rewrite rule:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/(feed/|(wp-rss[2]{0,1}|wp-rdf|wp-atom)\.php)$ \
http://feeds.feedburner.com/tabo [R,L=301]
And that is all.
Update:
Now I am using this mod_rewrite rule:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Feedster
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !NewsGatorOnline
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner
RewriteRule ^/(feed/|(wp-rss[2]{0,1}|wp-rdf|wp-atom)\.php)$ \
http://feeds.feedburner.com/tabo [R,L=301]
This should solve the problems with the subscriber number that comes in the User-Agent of these aggregators.
New Advertising Company
After reading this review of a new advertising company called chitika I added them to the site. The ads are more relevant than the adsense ones for the visitors (since I can manually select the products advertised) and they look better. I have doubled this site’s income since I added chitika’s eminimalls so I am quite happy with them.
Note: You cannot use the default chitika eminimalls ads in the same page with adsense, you have to do some tweaking in the javascript that generates the eminimall first:
ch_non_contextual = 1;
var ch_queries = new Array('product1', 'product2', 'product3');
var ch_selected = Math.floor((Math.random() * ch_queries.length));
ch_query = ch_queries[ch_selected];
ch_nosearch = 1;
Replace product1, product2 and product3 with the products you want to advertise in your site and you are set.
Wordpress Plugins
- PHP Exec (link): To execute PHP code inside posts/pages. It is safe since I am the only person that can write content here.
- Smart Archives (link). This is the plugin that powers the archives section.
- Technorati Tagging (link). This one handles the tags you see on every post, the /tag/ section and the tags cloud you see on the right.
- Useronline (link). Shows how many people are currently browsing the site in the Meta section at the right. It can generate a page with the detail of every current visitor, like their IP and in what section of the site they are at the moment, but I’m not using that feature.
I coded in the template everything else you see, I may write a stats plugin in the near future if I have the time.
Extras and Community
I added some little details like a link to add a post to del.icio.us, or subscribing to blog aggregators with a single click. I also joined some directories like PeruBlogs, a very nice blog directory of peruvian blogs powered by PHP and MySQL. They are also the ones behind Blogalaxia, a blog directory that uses the BlogsPeru engine but has blogs from all Latinamerica and Spain.
If you have comments about the changes, please let me know.
Comments (17)
So… how an Apple G4 is relevant to this post?
SAD:
I meant relevant to the people that visits this site, mostly tech geeks. Sometimes I get completly bizarre ads from google, religious clothes for instance (i guess because of the flying spaghetti monster post) and even PSAs (public service announcements).
Definitively chitika ads are more relevant that the adsense ones in _this_ site because I can see in the stats that visitors are clicking a lot more in the Apple G4 ads from chitika than in the religious jeans from adsense :)
Acutually iBook is pretty related since the new theme has the same colour, do you get it?
I still can’t find the submit button
This looks like a Engadget. :(
The new layout looks a lot better than the old one, good job.
Hooray for wordpress! And yeah - this does sort of resemble engadget a little bit. Oh well, similar marketing never hurt anybody (except maybe the consumers feelings).
I really digg this theme you have on this site.. very good job.
I have a WordPress SEO plugin you may be interested in that I developed myself and use on my own site very well.
You upload it, activate it, and make some small modifications to your theme header.
You will need to be using Ultimate Tag Warrior to get the best benefit from it, but if not you can still use it.
It will automatically optimize your titles, meta tags, and autodiscovery of your RSS feeds, but since your using FeedBurner you will not want this last option.
It uses Ultimate Tag Warrior to fill in your meta keywords and description for you, and bases the Title on your post/page title. For most Wordpress installations this improves the very bad layout for your meta and head information.
You can get it here, WordPress SEO plugin
Jason, thanks. This post is actually quite old, and the theme i am using now is a heavily modified Hemingway.
I’ll take a look at your plugin, mostly for the metatags because I optimized the titles by hand.
cool concept on feedburner. i was curious, what script did you use to display the google search terms and the fact that i came from google to your site.
jason:
I use Landing Sites.
Sounds like a great theme.
I have been visiting this site a lot lately, so i thought it is a good idea to show my appreciation with a comment.
Thanks,
Jim Mirkalami
Nice post. One thing I have noticed is that SEO is a continuous process. It
cannot be done perfectly in one shot. You have to be on your toes and try out
different things to get ahead of your competitors. There have been instances
where my site’s search engines rankings have improved considerably with few
small tweakings.
- Michael
Great, thanks!
I’ve found a set of tools that can help you to spy on your competition and guarantee a top ranked site in all the major search engines. I’m even giving away a free eBook “SEO MADE EASY”. Just for stopping by. SEO-Power-Tools
We at search engine optimisation find the above post very informative, thankyou
Sounds like a perfect theme.