Web Cash

Part of developing a successful blog and your identity as a blogger is creating a web of blogs that you read and participate in. Imagine the blogosphere as a giant web. You want to connect your website to a bunch of others – you don’t want to just be a random thread connected to nothing.

Google Reader provides you with a nifty tool to help you do this. With the “Share” feature of Google Reader, you can easily syndicate a list of articles that you recently read and found interesting.
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Google Analytics is a great tool for gathering data about your website. You can track and analyze all kinds of data about your visitors, their navigation paths, and the effectiveness of your content.

To use Google Analytics, you need to place some javascript on your website. A commonly asked question in forums is, “How do I add Google Analytics to my Wordpress template?”
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Over the weekend, I decided it was finally time to learn how to use JS and AJAX. I’d deliberately avoided using JS for anything I could accomplish in PHP – but I admit that I was getting a bit intrigued by the AJAX hooplah.

I found some very useful resources for dealing with JS, AJAX, and DOM, so I thought I’d share them for any other eager learners.
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Digg can be a great source of traffic and recognition for tech related blogs. Some people take it to the extreme though, and show the “Digg This” badge on every article they write.

As others have pointed out, this can be counter-productive. People don’t like to read articles that have just one Digg – they seem unpopular.

So here’s a solution: use the Conditional “Digg This” Wordpress Plugin to only show the Digg Badge for articles that have a certain number of Diggs.
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I read about the Digg API the other day, and I thought it was about time I played around with it.

There is a ton of cool stuff you can do with this. Basically, you send a request to the Digg server and it sends back whatever kind of information you want – category names, recent diggs, recent stories, archived stories, etc. You can read through the API to see everything you can do.

For now, we’ll focus on one nifty little trick – grabbing a random story from a given topic.
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I’d seen this idea suggested on a forum, and it’s about time I got around to it. I created my first lens at Squidoo.

Why? I was able to work in a few nice backlinks to my site and my articles. I’ll earn some cash if it gets traffic of its own.
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Ahh, the never ending quest for backlinks.

There are plenty of places to look for free backlinks – some of better quality than others. One trick you can use to build up a decent collection of backlinks is to regularly post on forums in your niche.
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You know your site is finally getting around a bit when you start getting comments. Spam comments.

I started a (now defunct) website last year, powered by Wordpress. It never got too popular, and in the beginning I was excited every time I got a “New Comment” or “New Trackback” e-mail. Then I realized they were mostly all spam.
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One of the most frustrating aspects of web design is trying to make your website look good in every browser. If you use some advanced css techniques, you never know how an older browser or a different platform is going to handle it.

You can test how your site displays in a few browsers – for example, I often check mine out in Windows IE, Ubuntu Firefox, and Ubuntu Opera. But how am I going to check it on Mac browsers like Safari?
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I added a new script to the “Tools” section yesterday, which should be of interest to anyone that authors a website about HTML.

I’m sure we’ve all faced this problem at one point or another – how do we get sample HTML to display properly, without being rendered, so that users can view it? Moreover, what’s the best method of doing this?
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