Life is a bitch. Today I spent a lot of time learning all about things that I am sure all you have known since their inception. Things like RSS Feeds, Feedburner, WordPress Widgets, etc. I had to redo my sidebar.php file to “widgetize” it. However, the CSS formatting is all messed up, so tomorrow my designer will take a look at it.
I was able to get Gravatars set up for commenting, but there are some remaining formatting issues. I also found a plugin that displays the author avatar next to each post. I am hoping to get a few other plugins installed including MyBlogLog. Tag Clouds and some sort of search functionality are needed as well.
Why put myself through all this hell? Well most of the functionality is required to aid in the distribution and sharing of our content to other users and other social news and media sites. Additionally, many of the tools allow us to measure and track the number of visitors to our site as well as the number of subscribers to our RSS feeds. It is nice to know if all of this work is yielding any tangible results.
In summary, a clean, modern, ad free, web 2.0 style design is important to attract and keep visitors. The web is full of junk blogs. I am hoping to keep my blog simple and easy-to-use, like our vacation rental listing service. To be successful in the social media world, a blog needs to have tools to help readers share the material with their friends and with their networks.
On a final note, I am down to three avatars from the over 40 submission to my avatar design contest at SitePoint.com. In an odd twist of events it turns out that the submission that I liked the best was copied from iStockPhoto.com. Five minutes and $3.00 later I owned a licensed copy of the image:
Here are the other two I really like:
In the end I chose the image that you see next to each of my posts. It’s a caricature of me as a superhero with my screen name underneath it. I really like it and will be deploying it across all the social news and media sites that I participate in!