Recently a friend of ours pointed out that a bunch of our subscriber links were broken – Thanks Mark from 45n5!

So this started me wondering if I actually had subscribers that were not being measured by our FeedBurner widget – it would be nice to think so, but, whether we do or not, it is a huge struggle to seem to get that number to grow with any significance.

At the end of the day, I really do not think I am qualified to give these types of tips as my subscriber list tops out at a max of about 20 right now … on a good day, but, there are a few articles out there which discuss this topic, two which I really like are 10 Effective Ways to Get More Blog Subscribers and 20 Ways to Grow Your Subscriber List.

What do you think? Do you have a specific formula for growing your subscriber list? I look forward to hearing from you!

Was monitoring my RSS email broadcasts this last week, which I publish through our beloved aWeber – I totally stand behind their service, but I noticed that the byline under our Blog Title was switched out from “An Internet Project” to “junk in the trunk”

I spent about 40 minutes trying to track down the cause, maybe I had changed something in my blog which was causing the issue, or maybe even changed something in the list… eventually after scouring everything I could think of, I requested an aWeber chat session – the person who helped me indicated that aWeber had an issue, they did not specify the details, but it seems pretty fishy that one of the variables which are pulled for their list was somehow changed like that.

The issue appears to have been resolved. Was anybody else affected by this?

We have been part of the DoFollow generation for a few months now, but now that there are nifty badges available, and with the notes from other DoFollow blog articles suggesting that it is a GREAT idea to notify our readers and visitors about our NoFollow or DoFollow status – here is ours.

We definitely support DoFollow – if you post a comment here, rest assured you will see a link coming in from Bloglyne to your site.

Let the comments commence!

C’mon – Stumble us… you know you want to *grins*

May was a great month and June looks like it is shaping up to be even better! Our Alexa rank took a giant leap this month, it is not reflected on the Alexa badge yet, but we have almost reached into the top 200,000 – Currently, we have reached a ranking of 208,581!

Some of the things which we attribute this success to is launching our first ever contest for charity, installing Quirk’s Search Status 1.20, installing the Alexa badge, and clicking on it from every computer which we work on. We also streamlined our subscription options through Feedburner this month – although, we do not really know what to think or how Google’s acquisition of Feedburner will impact things, we felt this would make things much easier for our subscribers. If we need to make adjustments, we can always compile different subscription feeds through Yahoo! Pipes…

Regarding the contest and the fundraising for the March of Dimes, we realize that you have read about it no less than 4 times this month, as we were pushing to raise as much money as possible for the March of Dimes. So far, we have raised $357 of our original $1,000 goal. We decided to keep the little widget which is linked to our donations page at the top of our sidebar for as long as it takes to reach the goal! I guess you could chalk it up to stubbornness  Also, due to the extensive and generous giving from the members of the Bloglyne.com community, we have decided to extend the contest until June 14, 2007. We will award links to the top 3 contributors up to June 7th per the original contest, but we will also award an additional top 3 contributors from June 7th to June 14th.

Thanks so much for helping us have such a great May – Let’s strive for an even better June!

Well, I find myself in a bit of a conundrum – I need to operate my regular daily business, and I am developing or re-designing an old affiliate site… for the past 2 weeks, I have been re-designing it, and coming up with new and original content… and it eats all of my time, so, Bloglyne.com suffers. I cannot keep up with comments at communities which I normally frequent, and so I am slowly seeing my traffic die down and my Yahoo! links dwindle.

What is to be done?

I would imagine many of you out there have faced similar dilemmas – It would be interesting to hear from you and how you resolved them… for now, I am hoping that the time slicing will be enough for me to keep from reaching the bottom.

For those faithful readers, thank you for your continued diligence and interest in the site. Again, I put the call out for anybody who would like to add original content here for an outside link back to their site, as well as some sort of text advertising. Email me at admin at bloglyne dot com – and we can discuss details.

This is really interestig stuff – I am excited to see that I made it on Alexa’s radar. It is nothing extravegant, but still for a site up less than 30 days, not too bad either.

3 month avg 742,880
1 week avg 154,634
Yesterday 92,439

At Technorati – I have progressed from >900,000 to 263,008 with 31 links from 16 blogs. So, a quick thank you is in order from everybody who is visiting the site and for those who comment and link to us.

Please take a moment to share any success story no matter how small you consider it to be – In this way, we can lift each other up. Remember, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step… (trite, I know – but still true!)

So, yesterday started out like any other – I thought I would read some of my favorite sites and see what was going on in the world.

Soon after, I decided to take the “bull by the horns” and fix the comment format issue I was having, and while I was at it, perform some needed updates. If you actually scan the changes you will see a massive comedy of errors. I am publishing this for all the folks out there who feel like they are the only ones struggling to get their pages “right”.

My message – A final design does not occur overnight. Don’t give up! If I can do it – you certainly can!

The TypoXP theme author Everton Blair had published a method to add tabs at the top of the page, which I had been waiting for – so, I thought I would add them, but what I thought would be a simple upgrade turned into an entire day of trial & error, which is still not over…

Trial & Error (Version 0.00 Beta)

Put new .commentbody code sent by Nick Wilsdon in wrong .css

Trial & Error (Version 0.01 Beta)

Added navigation code to the wrong .css file (I detect a theme here)
Added navigation tabs to the top of the page
Every time the page would load, it would load with errors
Broken About link
Broken Subscribe link
BUMPzee! Widget broken (but didn’t notice yet)
MyBlogLog broken (but didn’t notice yet)
Sidebar Menu messed up

Trial & Error (Version 0.02 Beta)

Removed messed up Sidebar Menu code
Modified Title phrases for new links
Added Subscribe Page
Modified About Page
Subscribe page link still broken
BUMPzee! Widget broken (but didn’t notice yet)
MyBlogLog broken (but didn’t notice yet)

Trial & Error (Version 0.03 Beta)

Noticed that Subscribe page had weird URL
Modified new navigation tab to match weird URL
Subscribe page link fixed
Modified WP URL & Blog URL in Options to have www. prefix

Trial & Error (Version 0.04 Beta)

In the process of writing an email to the Everton, I finally figured out I had the .commentbody code in the wrong .css and didn’t have to send the email to him asking for advice on how to fix the comments
Moved it .commentbody to the correct .css, and the comments were fixed – YES! That is a very satisfying feeling
Noticed that the BUMPzee! Widget was broken
Noticed that MyBlogLog was broken
Page kept loading with Errors

Trial & Error (Version 0.05 Beta)

Removed all of the new tab navigation feature
Lost links to new Subscribe page
Lost links to new About page
BUMPzee! Widget working again
MyBlogLog working again

Trial & Error (Version 0.06 Beta)

Noticed that all of my BUMPzee! ratings were re-set and my articles were being pulled back into BUMPzee! so, I had to notify Scott Jangro

Trial & Error (Version 0.07 Beta)

Woke up this morning and received note from Scott that it was the URL options which had caused the issue.
Remembered about wrong .css with comments and thought the same thing might be happening with the code for the new navigation tabs
Re-added navigation tab .css to same file .css that the .commentbody code went to
Finally, navigation tabs working and the page is loading without error
Navigation tabs not causing BUMPzee! Widget to fail
Navigation tabs not causing MyBlogLog to fail
Archives tab broken now (not sure what caused this, but I think it is because of the URL options change and the fact that I do not have any articles published after the change).

Trial & Error (Version 0.08 Beta)

In process…

Will I ever be out of Beta?

One can only hope!

I am encouraged by what I have seen since starting bloglyne.com 16 days ago. I have found a more focused voice, I have a bunch of people who I respect making comments (good and bad) on my articles. Heck, I even have some affiliate network folks commenting on various articles.

I am amazed by the power and ability of a blog to add value and generate response. I do not think that this blog will ever really produce major income, but it gives me a place to chronicle my journey and hopefully provide additional value to a community that I see moving in a direction that I admire.

I am excited to see the affiliate community heading in the direction of helping each other instead of taking advantage of each other through the ol’ “get rich quick” schemes.

Thanks to all the folks who have taken part in bloglyne.com for the past 16 days, I hope you all will stick around for the next 16

Recently, I have noticed what seems to be a growing trend from sites and blogs that I consider to be legit, as well as, extremely valuable, promising money or fame for the quantity of comments left on their site.

What Do You Think?

I am curious what folks really think about this practice. To be honest, I am not sure what I think the about entire issue. I believe there are many ways and multiple sides to examine.

I think rewarding others by providing trackback links to those who write and comment about your site, or the products you are promoting, or your articles is a great way to say “thank you.” However, doing so based on models of quantity may ultimately backfire.

Human SPAM or Computer SPAM – It’s Still SPAM!

Most of the SPAM comments I have seen from my other blogs this year have been, “Right on! Keep up the good work!” or “Good Post” or “Great Article”, quite frankly, I don’t care if that comment comes from a human being or an automated posting application – I do not see any value in these comments. I’m grown-up enough not to need my ego stroked for no apparent reason. Also, there are many services today which provide that level of feedback from readers, such as, “digg” or “BUMPzee!”. I think comment value comes from well thought out reactions to our articles. It makes our articles better and the communities we are trying to build more valuable.

Moderating SPAM… really?

The sites that have started to promise these types of rewards affirm that they will not allow comments from folks who appear to be SPAMming, but, I have to wonder how many resources will be needed to really ensure that level of quality, and how long it will be before their comments are never read by those who frequent their site because they are full of “Good post” or “Wow, great article, couldn’t have said it better myself” or “Keep up the good work – Great Article.” All of which would take less than 10 seconds for a person to write.

An Alternative – How About Quality?

I really think it would be much better to re-consider the reward model being used and apply a “Post Quality” metric to reward your commentators that way. I doubt there would be a way to automate this, but for those of us who work hard to generate legitimate content – that is a manual process too. I do not believe it would be that much more of a time investment to read a few comments and make a subjective decision to reward the ones which we like and appreciate the most.

Your Turn – Let Us Know What You Think

{democracy:3}

Received feedback yesterday from a couple of guys who I respect about a few changes they felt needed to be made to help the site be more user friendly. So, I spent some time yesterday and this morning making changes to header styles and AdWords placement/style.

I cleaned up some of the Theme code for the sidebar, tried to make things look a little more uniform.

Hopefully, this work will make articles easier and friendlier to read.

I welcome any sort of feedback – good, bad, or indifferent. I am and will always be “in process.” I appreciate you folks for coming by and reading my stuff, clicking on my links and taking part in the site.

In the process of improving the site, I ran across a pretty neat resource called the Web Page Analyzer from Website Optimization. It is a free tool which will examine your site for size, composition, and download times at various speeds, and then makes very specific recommendations about how you can improve the speed of your site with best practices, HCI and website optimization. Check it out at http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

I found it useful and it made me begin thinking about how I could possibly improve the loading times for the Theme and Plug-ins I use. No major internal programming changes yet. But, it gives me another thing to think about with regards to the site.

I am hoping to add a forum in the next few days, if I can figure out how to get that set up.