1400 subscribers! Yipieee!

I would be honest, its been some time since I checked our subscriber base and the core reason was that Feedburner had been acting stupid, although I know that its been hovering around 1400 since some time. It’s helpful that I have the rough idea, however its difficult to digest that a service, owned by Google has been failing to provide good and dependable results. Many bloggers aren’t happy, some have accepted the service as it still gives a rough idea although on the other side some have shown a decline in interest as in current scenario there are other ways through which visitors can subscribe to their content. These days, most of the bloggers are  focusing towards either email marketing or towards increasing the twitter or facebook fans.

What are the alternatives?

Feedburner has been a great service and one of the only service that gives you the stats, helps you make money through Adsense and doesn’t charge a single dime. They offer so many features that others have failed to offer till date, however its the inconsistency in the service that made Jean & Samir Bhardwaj to look for alteratives. These are some of the alternatives that I liked -

• Feedblitz – This is definitely second most popular service. Feedblitz is very stable and has got good reviews lately. It is popularly praised for its email newsletter service and looks like a pretty good alternative to Feedburner. It comes at a price although, it shouldn’t be an issue for professional bloggers if they are still interested in RSS stats.
• WP FeedStats – This is a free WordPress plugin that displays the RSS subscription stats of your blog. The plugin displays the hits all the versions of the feed, be it RSS2, RSS or ATOM. The plugin looks decent I haven’t checked it personally, however, if we go by Samir’s judgement then it shouldn’t be a bad alternative to those looking for a free solution.
• Aweber & MailChimp – These two email subscription delivery services have gained a major chunk of market share as more and more bloggers have realized that email subscription is still best suited for marketing and advertisement for subscription. These email subscription tools offer great features and are at par with rss subscription services.

It’s pretty strange to see that there are hardly any decent alternatives to feedburner and probably one of the reason, why Google isn’t putting the heart and soul towards the service as much they’ve been doing for various other properties. And one of the reasons we don’t see many alternatives is because services like Facebook and Twitter have acted as a source of stats as well as good amount of traffic. What are your thoughts about the same? Do you think if feeds are relevant anymore or not?

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

The service has now transformed from just a medium to display your daily status message to more of global information network. We know that everyone including celebrities, geeks and news channels have something or the other to display but here are some uses which you might not have known about.

Getting out of jail

James Earl Buck, a student of journalism got arrested by the Egyptian police for taking pictures of some anti-government demonstration. In times like these you can’t do make much use of cell-phone, not until, you tweet “ARRESTED”. He got heavy responses faster than it would take Superman to get to him. His friends in America read the tweet and armed him with a stream of lawyers and embassy people who got on the case immediately. He got free in less than 24 hours.

Write a book

With much acclaimed success of the mobile phone novels in Japan how could American novelists stay behind. Authors worldwide are now using Twitter for writing books and novels with the help of other novelists. Some novels have gained a lot of popularity like “140 Novel”. Here is one such novel : Smallplaces by NL -

“I can leap from each. A billion stepping stones to an uncertain future. The spaces become wider, the leaps longer. I try to grow wings.”

Watering plants

No. Not as a part of a joke, your plants can send you a tweet whenever they feel thirsty. All you need is a combination of water sensor, an Ethernet connection and an old mobile phone that can equip your houseplants with your cell phone number, bleeping you whenever they need water. Apart from this, they can also be programmed to “thank”

Creating a digital assistant

Twitter can be really helpful for digital assistance. Its not just another digital assistant, you can actually have your Twitter account set up in a manner to know what people all over the world are talking about you and where, inflating your ego. How cool is that? No more refreshing 20 pages can improve productivity considerably.

Turning humans into morons

I’m not sure if you saw that coming your way but if you didn’t you better open your eyes. With the help of Twitter people can now prove to the world why exactly they are morons. Applications like Twitter3D and 2D are great since they let you know the location of the live tweets moments after they happen. It’s all going smooth and great, the human species seem to be coming closer tying them by the single string of technology, reaching out their voices to millions until you see one of those voices tweet “Just put ketchup on my ice-cream LOLLZ!” And then you realize there’s still some more time for all that.

We love the way humans are tweaking technology and coming up with innovative ways to lose touch with the real world, hence, becoming more virtual. If you know of any more such ways, feel free to post ‘em.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

In the old version one could share posts with their friends with the help of notes, however in this new update we can even post our thoughts (very much like “what are you doing” at twitter).

There have been slight glitches that I’ve experienced and probably we’d see them go away as Google will listen to the complaints after the release. I’m pretty sure about the fact that Twitter has been doing a great job for me and for many others and with the release of these kind of features, Google reader engineers have shown that they got enlightened quickly that sharing of thoughts along with the posts is also important.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

The widget sits in sidebar and once you click on the tweet count, a small ajaxy window slides and one can start the conversations on that very website with the other visitors. Not only, it’ll help visitors to connect with each other (something Google FriendConnect also does), it’ll also help you be more social with your blog visitors and that is the real purpose of blogging & micro-blogging.

As of now, the service is asking the twitter users to ask for the invite, however due to traffic and instant buzz it has been facing issues in sending the invites. I requested for an invite the day the service surfaced on Twitter and got popular, however haven’t received the invite yet.

Due to the extreme number of Tweetboard Alpha invites being requested, we are maxing the # of replies that can be sent via Twitter per hour. No worries though, our system continues to *auto-approve* ALL requests instantly, even if you do not get an acknowledgment from us immediately.

Even though, they have publicly accepted and have asked users to go ahead and follow the install instructions, although, when I tried installing TweetBoard over here at Blog Design Studio, it wasn’t active. So, I’m guessing that my account hasn’t been approved yet.

I’m really not in a position to say if the service will be able to deliver what it claims to do or if bloggers will use this service on their blogs to interact with their readers. Although, I’m hopeful that this service will improve not only the “community factor” around your blog, but will also help you become an active and power user!

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

The good thing is that the file is in iCal format thus you can easily import it in Google Calendar or most of the calendar applications that are in the market. If you use Apple Mac or Mozilla Sunbird, then you can also sync it Google Calendar.

Download the exported calendar from here and hope to see you in a blogging schedule!

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

This tool sits in the sidebar of Firefox and while you are writing content in your blog editor, it will assist you to find the right keywords for that blog post and will also tell you that how many times you have used those keywords in your blog post. This ensure that you get the clear idea about the keyword density and that on what keywords you should put more stress and which are the ones you can ignore. Good thing is that this plugin works with all the websites you come across and will work with any of the editor.
Hang on! Why the hell did you write the similarities between Firefox & WordPress, when this add-on works with all the website? Well, the only reason I did so was that I can’t hide my love for WordPress. I hope you understand :P Anyway, enjoy this wonderful tool and gain all the traffic that you can by using this tool wisely!

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

While going through CrowdEye & Scoopler, I was amazed to find out that how beneficial these services are! Scoopler offers more option by giving videos, delicious bookmarks, twitter etc. however, CrowdEye offers some Twitter data that other real time search engines aren’t offering like graphs and a wonderfully simple and easy to use interface. These services lets you stay on top of the news and information and when I searched for the term “wordpress” it showed other related searches and top links related to “wordpress” and all those links were quite informational too!

I loved CrowdEye and Scoopler the most, however other search engines were no less and I’m sure that these tools are going to become part of my must visit websites! Give them a try and feel free to share your thoughts about these services too!

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

The possibilities are endless with Adobe AIR and the best part is that the applications built on this platform work on all three major platforms i.e. Windows, Mac & Linux. There haven’t been many AIR applications around that work with WordPress and as far as I know, Moderator application is the only one that works directly with WordPress and is powered by Adobe AIR. There are other air apps that are good for designers and developers and would be useful for you too!

There was an application which was built on Adobe AIR and it allowed users to publish posts to their WordPress blogs called AirPress, although is not available at the moment because of no further development. I would definitely love to see some adobe air powered app that would go ahead and compete with other desktop blogging clients. What are you thoughts about that?

After the success of Adobe AIR, I’m confident about few things and one of those is that we’d definitely see lots and lots of Adobe AIR apps and may be it’ll act as the bridge between the gap that we see amongst all the major operating systems!

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

YubiKey costs $25/device up to 9 devices, however if you plan to buy this device in bulk, it may cost up to $10/device. There is a plugin (YubiKey Plugin for WordPress) available to set this device on your WordPress blog and it takes around 5-10 minutes for one to configure this little security device with your WordPress blog. In case you want to use this little device, your WordPress installation will require Hash & Curl libs enabled, else this plugin will not work.

1. Buy a Yubikey.
2. Create a Yubico ID & API Key.
3. Download, install and activate my Yubikey plugin for WordPress. (goes into wp-content/plugins).
4. Enter Key ID on the Users -> Profile and Personal options page.
5. Enter Yubico ID & API key on the Settings -> Yubikey options page.
Id/key confused ? Well the Key ID is the first 12 chars from the output Your Yubikey generates, they don’t change, the Yubico ID and API Key is used when communicating with the Yubico authentication server.
6. That’s it, enjoy the looks of Your new loginbox, and try logging in.

I would say that this is a wonderful security hardware that’ll make your blog secure and will ensure that hackers will not be able to gain access to your blog. This is by far one of the best techniques that I’ve ever seen and I have to say that I’m really impressed with it. So, if you are serious about your blog’s security then this is a wonderful device for you and will cost you around $40 (including $15 shipping). I think it’s a steal deal as the amount of security this blog will add is going to be lot more beneficial as compared to the price! (via Net security)

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink

Google is a huge company and should be doing better. They really let the marketing community down today in a big way. Companies that provide online software (sometimes called software as a service or Saas) should provide a public reporting mechanism to show when they are having performance problems.

When you’ll give a thought about it, you’d realize that as a webmaster/blogger you are so much dependent on this search engine giant. The thought of Google account getting hacked, Google playing evil role etc comes as nightmares to me! There is so many services of Google on which I’m dependent completely -

1. Google Search – Not only for helping find lot of interesting stuff on the web but also the traffic it sends to my blogs that helps me make my living.

2. GMail – It is the solution to each and every email need of mine. I’m using several GMail and Google apps accounts as they are without a doubt best and most comfortable email solutions provider.

3. Google Analytics – Helps me in tracking the visitors and thus help me improve my blogs.

4. Google Webmaster tools – Helps me in improving my blogs by helping me check web crawl errors, keywords information, links information and various other tools.

5. YouTube – For hosting the videos and viewing them.

6. Picasa – Of course, for hosting the images and storing them. Although, Flickr also helps!

7. Feedburner – I know that this doesn’t work as it is supposed to however there is no other service close to the offerings by Feedburner. We do get frustrated when we see it not work properly, isn’t that a sign of dependency?

8. News – Being net savvy, I literally don’t watch television and in order to keep me up to date, I use Google news as it gives me world wide news.

9. Google IG, Google Reader, Gtalk, Google Docs and what not!

Are you this much dependent on Google? Not sure about all of you, however I see many people around me who are completely dependent on Google like me.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2009. | Permalink