Wordpress users: Do you use Feedburner? If so, here’s something you may not know about:

By default, Wordpress keeps the original RSS feeds it generates, and your Feedburner feed is a separate feed that coexists with it. Some people will accidentally subscribe to the plain feed instead of the Feedburner one, throwing the accuracy of your stats. How do you prevent that?

You use the FeedSmith plugin. It sets-up a redirect so anyone who accesses www.yourdomain.com/feed/ will be sent to your Feedburner feed instead.

One word of caution: If you install the FeedSmith plugin, make sure the feed listed in FeedBurner’s settings is your blog’s RSS 2.0 feed, otherwise some readers could run into compatibility issues (Feedburner can generate compatible 0.97, 1.0, and Atom feeds from an RSS 2.0 feed, but going the opposite direction can cause problems sometimes [like missing pubDate tags]).

Full content or summaries? Nearly every blogger has asked his or her self that question at some point. Which is better? There’s no answer to that. The correct question would be “which is better for you?”

Full Content

• A lot of users prefer full content feeds because they can stay in their feed reader and avoid visiting actual websites. Some people even refuse to subscribe to summarized feeds.
• Full feeds make it easier for people to scrape your content. What’s feed scraping? It’s when someone republishes the full content of your posts on their website (automatically) without your permission and proceeds to make money off advertisements on the site.

Summaries

• If you use summarized feeds, you force your readers to hop over to your blog to read the full content. This means the users will see your cool layout, they may post comments, and they could even net you some ad revenue.
• Summarized feeds are smaller, loading quicker and putting less strain on your web server.

I only offer summarized feeds (I can hear the boo-ing already…), though you can offer either or both types of feeds. Personally, I, as a feed subscriber, don’t care which feed-type is available on a site. I use the MyNT RSS reader, so I read feeds a bit differently than most people.

In the end, it’s up to you (just ignore the complaints from your loud summary-hating readers ). Offer a summary feed, a full feed, or both.

Do you run a blog or website with interesting content? Would you like to gain a little more exposure, and help others do so as well? You could join the NTugo Network.

How does it work? To join, you must link to the Network page (linking guidelines available on the site), and then request inclusion in the Network. If you are accepted, you’re site (with link and RSS feed) will be added to the Network page. Also, your posts will appear on the page (and the NTugo home page) as well as in a feed of the most recent posts from the networked sites.

It’s free and kind of cool. This blog is a member of the Network, along with a few other sites.

It’s not too unusual for bloggers to run contests in attempt to raise their PageRank/Technorati Authority. You may have considered this briefly, but dismissed the idea when you couldn’t think of anything good to offer as a prize. Here’s a possible solution: Refurbished iPods. Apple will sell you iPods that have been returned (and fixed) for about $50 less than the list price. There’s nothing wrong with them, so they’re a great deal.

A refurbished iPod Shuffle costs $50, and a 2GB iPod Nano $100.

A lot of people don’t know about the refurbs, because Apple buries the link on their website.

• Not to be outdone my Yahoo and Microsoft, Google is working on a mashup editor. Personally, I prefer using good old PHP code and the SimplePie library. With SimplePie, it’s fairly easy to mash together a few RSS feeds into one, though you can do it through dragging and dropping if you use Yahoo Pipes. These mashup editors are great for newbies, but they seem to be lacking in capabilities. Yahoo Pipes is fun, though it’ll never match the power of RSS and SimplePie. If you do the coding yourself, you’ll be able to do virtually anything, while Pipes users will be stuck playing with Yahoo’s pre-built functions.
• AT&T CEO Randal Stephenson thinks people don’t want $10/month DSL. Uh, hello? No one wants dialup, and 768k is a heck of a lot better than 48k! In the middle of nowhere, I get “1MB” DSL (about 800k in reality) for about $45/month. What an idiot.
• Have you been wondering why you’re only making $.50/month off your AdSense ads, though you get 5000 pageviews each month? Maybe you should read this post on optimizing your ads. All of the tips are basic things that you should definitely know about AdSense optimization.
• ProBlogger: More Great Reader Blog Tips. A ton of reader-submitted tips for better blogging. There are quite a few good ones.
• They’re gone now, but a “TemplatesBrowser.com” had been distributing modified versions of Wordpress themes. They would add a bit of PHP code that would, when the theme was installed, add-in some potentially malicious code.
• “The story of Commodore and the Amiga was, by far, even more interesting than that of Apple or Microsoft. It is a tale of vision, of technical brilliance, dedication, and camaraderie. It is also a tale of deceit, of treachery, and of betrayal. It is a tale that has largely remained untold.” - Ars Technica’s history of the commodore Amiga, part 1.
• Before the iPhone was announced, people speculated about what an iPhone would look like. AppleGazette has a collection of 15 of the best ideas. Of course, none of them are as cool as the real iPhone. While you’re there, take a look at their History of the iMac.
• All the blogs in the Technorati Top 20 list fail W3C validation. So what? The standards are too freakin’ strict, and you need to go through a ton of #@$%# for your pages to work in Internet Explorer (Firefox follows the standard correctly, but does IE? No…).
• The Weblog Tools Collection 2007 Plugin Competition’s results are in. There are some cool ones in there.

Have you played around with SimplePie? If not, start experimenting. SimplePie is an amazingly useful file you include in your PHP scripts so you can parse RSS feeds. It’s fast, it’s powerful, it’s easy to use, and there’s a lot you can do with it.

In addition to the ordinary stuff, like displaying feed content on your website, you can also utilize SimplePie for more interesting things….like combining RSS feeds. Why would you want to do that? Well, some of us have multiple blogs. Using SimplePie you can create a feed that aggregates all of your blogs’ feeds. Blog networks may find this technique useful as well. Read the rest of this entry »

LastRSS. MagpieRSS. Neither have been updated in over a year. What’s the best way to parse RSS feeds and output them with PHP? Simple, use SimplePie.

What is SimplePie? It’s a file you include in your PHP scripts, allowing you instant access to RSS-parsing capabilities. You can display RSS headlines/items on your website, combine several feeds into one, and anything else that you can think of. If you know a little PHP, the possibilities are endless.

You see this PHP code:

require('simplepie.inc');
$feed = new SimplePie("http://feeds.feedburner.com/Webmaster-source");
$feed->handle_content_type();
echo "<h1>".$feed->get_title()."</h1>";
foreach ($feed->get_items() as $item) {
echo '<h2><a href="'.$item->get_permalink().'">';
echo $item->get_title().'</a></h2>';
echo '<p>'.$item->get_description().'</p>';
}

That’s all you need to display a feed’s headlines and descriptions. Of course, that was only a simple example. It’s unbelievable what you can do with SimplePie.

Over at NTugo, SimplePie is used extensively. The MyNT RSS reader is powered by SimplePie. The “Recent blog posts” and “Recent posts from the NTugo Network” boxes on the home page are built with SimplePie. The RSS feed aggregated from all of the NTugo blogs? SimplePie again! It’s amazing what you can do with SimplePie.

If you know PHP, you’ll definitely want to take a look at SimplePie.

So, you’ve got your blog up and running. Are you tracking your blog’s usage statistics? No? Then stop right there! It’s important to know how many visitors/pageviews you get in a month. Why? Well, it’s a good gauge of how well you’re blog is doing.

I’m serious, no one should be without blog statistics. It won’t cost you a dime, and it won’t take much effort to set up. Read the rest of this entry »

• 30+ Plugins for Wordpress Comments: Stop spam, encourage commenting, add avatars, add a Rich-Text comment form, and more. Yet another Mashable post.
• If you’ve got an iPhone, beware of PDF spam. You know how exorbitant AT&T’s charges for data traffic are…
• You’ve got an Amazon Associates account, don’t you? What blogger doesn’t? North X East has a new post on making more money off those affiliate links. Now, if only there was an easier way to place the links in your posts…
• Some people (not me) don’t like using their blog’s web-based post editor any more than they have to. There are a few desktop clients to get around this, but which one is for you? Nutshell Journal recommends Qumana, and has a review up.
• Problogger Darren Rowse is at it again. 31 Days to Building a Better Blog - 2007.
• Microsoft HD Photo considered for standardization by JPEG Committee. No, you do not want to standardize any more Microsoft products. Are they mad? I agree with bradym80’s comment on Digg. Microshaft’s going to make MSHDP hell for anyone not using the latest version of Windows, and Internet Explorer. By now you know that Firefox rules, and I’m tired of Windows.
• Google’s getting serious with their plans to become a cellphone/internet service provider. They’ve got a couple of “gPhone” prototypes in the works.
• PC Users: There’s some more nasty malware (what else is new?). W32.Deletemusic deletes all your MP3 files. Nice. My question: Does it delete WMAs or AACs? Despite not liking Microsoft, I admit to using WMAs because a 64k WMA seems to be about the same quality as a 128k MP3. The files are noticeably smaller, and my MP3/WMA player only has a gigabyte of storage.
• Microsoft is combating piracy in China by reducing the cost of Windows. What the heck? The article states that they’re lower the prices by 50%. Why can’t they do that here too? We all know that they’re making huge profits off us. Seriously, they’re lowering their rates in China, and they’re still making a substantial profit off the sales. Don’t tell me that Microsoft has to charge $250 for Vista. The problem with monopolies is they can charge whatever the hell they want.

Apple Inc is the maker of the worlds coolest computers, as I’m sure you already know. Their website has, for the last few years, been very innovative and has started several design trends. What has Apple’s website like in the past? Let’s find out, with a little help from the Wayback Machine. Ready? Let’s get started. Read the rest of this entry »