Posts tagged as:

wordpress

Back from Holiday, New URL, New Name

by S. Jonathan on September 11, 2009

After a well deserved break I’m back to the daily grind. After some thought, a staggering 5 minutes! I decided to shift the focus of this blog a little and change the name – more on that later.

Is Twitter worth 5 to 10 billion dollars? Not in a million years but some beg to differ. While on holiday it was a really useful tool though, and provided many a joke. I just wished more of my friends used it but unfortunately they’re all heavily entrenched in FB.

In other news, England are through to the FIFA World Cup Finals after thrashing Croatia 5-1. Should we Brits brace ourselves for more heartbreak come next summer? Who knows – But I remain optimistic.

And moving WordPress to another domain is not as difficult as you may think. Here are some useful tools and links that I recommend.

How to Share Like a Pro

by S. Jonathan on September 1, 2008

Sharing your content by making it easier for your visitors to bookmark and distribute your content with like minded people around the web. Is a great way to increase rankings, generate buzz! and promote your website or blog.

If you are using a blogging platform like Wordpress, there are a bunch of plug-ins you can download and activate free of charge. Once installed you’ll see neat little share-it buttons like the ones you see below this post.

Popular Share Software

The most popular share-it software has to be ShareThis and AddThis. Both are available for Wordpress as plug-ins or the less than manageable copy and paste variants. But which software do you choose? And which services do you want your content shared on?

If tracking how many visitors shared your content is important to you, then I recommend you try either of the above. As both ShareThis and AddThis offer free analytics as part of their service. If analytics are not that important to you then I recommend Sociable.

Be Sociable

The reason I preferred Sociable over the other two was simple. Sociable is non-intrusive, customizable and available as a standard Wordpress plug-in. I wanted to keep the design at J.T clean and I dislike Ajaxy buttons that expand and take over precious real estate.

aideRSS Rocks my Socks

Secondly I use a great RSS analytics package called aideRSS. If you’re not using aideRSS then I highly recommend you give it a try. Basically aideRSS tracks the popularity of your RSS feed by using what they call PostRank™.

PostRank™ ranks each article on relevance and reaction and you can judge which posts or content you deliver to your visitors where the most popular or relevant across the web.

Using aideRSS you can also view who digg’d, twitter’d, and bookmarked your content. Hopefully they’ll add other social services in the future but for now those options are available to you.

Which Services to Choose

This is a tricky one and there really isn’t any right or wrong. The choice is after all up you, I touched upon the importance of not overwhelming your visitors with too many options here. But if you’re really stuck I found a great article that discusses the most popular ShareThis data.

Using that research I whittled down my services to 11 choices. Strangely enough they don’t provide a MySpace button yet, but I found a temporary remedy here. Also including Twitter and Pownce was a no brainer for me, but you might decide otherwise.

Ultimately the choice is yours but I hope this information was somewhat useful in your quest to share your content like a pro.

Image Credit: creativecommoners