Google search have changed their search-formula: sites with "not enough" content above the fold won't rank as high in search results as they did before - effective from the next time the blog is crawled.
So be careful about just what gadgets you put above your blog's header: it may not be such a good idea if you rely on search for a lot of your blog visitors.
(Yes there is a certain irony that Blogger-HAT's Followers gadget is up there at the moment - but it's a short-term experiment to see how much difference it makes to my follower numbers. So far, one week has seen a 10% increase!)
Friday, 20 January 2012
Thursday, 19 January 2012
Analytics "old" interface to live a little longer?
Back in Nov 2011, Google Analytics said that the "old" version would stop working in January.
However this week's announcement makes it sound like they're still workign on some key features, and so the deadline has been extended.
Also they're surveying for features that we use which aren't in the new version - even if you reported some before, it might be worth checking them now, and reporting them again.
However this week's announcement makes it sound like they're still workign on some key features, and so the deadline has been extended.
Also they're surveying for features that we use which aren't in the new version - even if you reported some before, it might be worth checking them now, and reporting them again.
Monday, 16 January 2012
Letting other people write in your blog
This article describes the ways that you can allow other people to write and publish on your blog. It looks at and the advantages and disadvantages of each approach.
Comments vs blog-posts, the case for team-blogs
There are two main ways that content can be put into your blog: comments and posts.
Blogger is designed, around the idea that initial discussions about new topics are started by you, and put into posts. Readers interact with you by commenting on your posts - although, yes, there are ongoing problems with readers not being able to comments, it seems mainly because of their security settings.
But there may be some people who you want to be able to do more than just comment. Increasingly people want to do more with their comments - they want to include links (eg to pictures that show what they mean), or they want to integrate comments with their social networks (for example, as shown in the ways that James from JS Blogstop has integrated Facebook and Twitter comments with his blog-comments.
And some groups of people want to work together to make a blog that they all write posts for, and are prepared to make and follow their own rules/guidelines (which aren't enforced by Blogger) to make this successful.
Team organisation vs Blogger tools
There are many ways to organise a team of bloggers.
Unfortunately Blogger cannot set up permissions for all the different ways that real-world teams work - there are just too many options. Instead, you need to design the way your team works, using the options that Blogger does provide. So - what are these?
Have posts emailed to you
This is the simplest way to let other people write for your blog: authors write their content in the tool of their choice, and email it to you. You load it to Blogger, do any formatting or editing and hit the publish button.
Pros
Cons
To make receiving posts by email less painful:
If you end up using this option because none of them others are suitable, you could ask your writers to send you HTML instead of a custom document format like Word.
Or ask them to work in Google Docs, which you can copy-and-paste from.
Or send PDF files: host these in a place that provides embed code (eg Scribd), and you keep their formatting by putting the embed code into your posts.
Have posts emailed to your blog
Blogger has the "mail2Post" feature, which lets you set up your blog to receive posts that are emailed to a "secret" address that you have set up.
You need to choose whether mail2Post submissions are automatically published or set to draft, and the "secret words" part of the mail2Post email address.
Then you need to tell the people who you want to post how to do so, ie what email address to send their contributions too, and how to handle things like pictures or videos that they want to include.
Pros:
Cons:
Making it work:
The last few problems can be avoided if you use email-forwarding and mail2Post together. This also lets you add rules / filters within Gmail, so reduces the risk of automatically publishing something inappropriate, and you can set up notifications to yourself about posts waiting your review.
Blogger Author rights:
Each blog can have one or more administrators (who can do anything), and or more authors, who can only write new posts, and edit their own existing posts. Authors and administrators are considered to be members of a team blog, and each blog can invite up to 100 people to be members.
Pros:
Cons:
Making it work:
Members of your team need to be very clear about how you work together, and what the consequences are if someone breaks the rules.
Administrator rights
A blog administrator has full rights over a blog: they can change the template, delete the blog, add other administrators, set up mail2Post, delete posts, etc - just like you can. Giving someone administrator right is the ultimate step in letting them write for your blog.
Pros:
Cons:
Making it work:
You need very clear rules about who is responsible for what - and a very trusting relationship with the other administrators.
Mix-and-match
Realistically, if your blog has a number of team members, possibly including guest-posters, then you will probably use a mix-and-match approach to giving rights to other people.
This means you will need to make choices about who can do what - and why.
For example:
Your experiences?
I am keen to hear more about how people have made team-blogs work in practice: how did you decide what rules to follow, how did you sort out arguments, and prevent team-members from hi-jacking the blog? What other problems did you face?
Related Articles:
Making someone into an author on your blog
Making someone into an administrator on your blog
Setting up mail2Post / Post to profile on your blog
mail2Post: knowing who posted what
Using tables to show data in your blog
Converting from MS Word to Blogger - via Google Docs
File hosts: places where you can keep files that are used on your blog
How is the thumbnail picture for each post chosen
Comments vs blog-posts, the case for team-blogs
Blogger is designed, around the idea that initial discussions about new topics are started by you, and put into posts. Readers interact with you by commenting on your posts - although, yes, there are ongoing problems with readers not being able to comments, it seems mainly because of their security settings.
But there may be some people who you want to be able to do more than just comment. Increasingly people want to do more with their comments - they want to include links (eg to pictures that show what they mean), or they want to integrate comments with their social networks (for example, as shown in the ways that James from JS Blogstop has integrated Facebook and Twitter comments with his blog-comments.
And some groups of people want to work together to make a blog that they all write posts for, and are prepared to make and follow their own rules/guidelines (which aren't enforced by Blogger) to make this successful.
Team organisation vs Blogger tools
There are many ways to organise a team of bloggers.
- Some blogs are run by one person (the owner or manager), who recruits people to write for them (either for payment, or as volunteers).
- Some belong to a company, and are operated by an employee according to their job description.
- Some blogs are owned by a committee, who delegate one person to do all the work on them.
- Some have a team of writers who and designers, who all contribute equally and who make collective decisions about how things are done.
Unfortunately Blogger cannot set up permissions for all the different ways that real-world teams work - there are just too many options. Instead, you need to design the way your team works, using the options that Blogger does provide. So - what are these?
Have posts emailed to you
This is the simplest way to let other people write for your blog: authors write their content in the tool of their choice, and email it to you. You load it to Blogger, do any formatting or editing and hit the publish button.Pros
- Authors don't need to learn Blogger software
- You have total control over what's published, and when, and how it looks
Cons
- Time: You need to put time into converting each submission
- Conversion problems: Some formats don't convert well (eg Microsoft Word can only sometimes be successfully converted to blogger - and should never be copy-and-pasted)
- Wasted time - and risk of mistakes:
If an author has put a lot of effort into layout (headings, bold, italics, tables, footnotes, etc) you may need to recreate it all yourself - and some features, eg tables, may not be well-supported by Blogger. - Managing attached files:If a post includes a lot of graphics or videos, you need to receive these files too, and load them to Picasa (or an appropriate file-host for non-image files), and link to them from the post: your author will not be able to set up the links. Alternatively if your author has linked to pictures that are hosted somewhere, you lose control over whether these will continue to work in the future. And there won't be a thumbnail picture for the post if none of the pictures are stored in Picasa-we or Google + albums.
To make receiving posts by email less painful:
If you end up using this option because none of them others are suitable, you could ask your writers to send you HTML instead of a custom document format like Word.
Or ask them to work in Google Docs, which you can copy-and-paste from.
Or send PDF files: host these in a place that provides embed code (eg Scribd), and you keep their formatting by putting the embed code into your posts.
Have posts emailed to your blog
You need to choose whether mail2Post submissions are automatically published or set to draft, and the "secret words" part of the mail2Post email address.
Then you need to tell the people who you want to post how to do so, ie what email address to send their contributions too, and how to handle things like pictures or videos that they want to include.
Pros:
- Saves you time
- Lets people post even if you aren't available to Publish
- Writers can work in a familar tool, and only need to be on-line while they're sending their content
Cons:
- Attached photos don't always work, your writers don't control where in the post they are put, and you don't control where the picture files are saved
- There is no way to automatically add Labels to posts (you need to add them manually later)
- Content that you don't want may be put on your blog if a hacker guesses your secret-words-address
- There are no guarantees about formatting (bold, italics, bullet-pointed lists) being shown correctly: a lot depends on the writer's email client settings
- You cannot tell who the post-author was from the Blogger dashboard
- If you set incoming posts to draft, Blogger has no way of notifying you that there are new posts waiting for you r approval - you need to notice that they're there.
Making it work:
The last few problems can be avoided if you use email-forwarding and mail2Post together. This also lets you add rules / filters within Gmail, so reduces the risk of automatically publishing something inappropriate, and you can set up notifications to yourself about posts waiting your review.
Blogger Author rights:
Pros:
- It's fairly easy to make someone into an author
- The writer can use Blogger's tools for formatting their post, and for adding pictures and videos.
- Labels can be applied before a post is publihsed
- Posts can be scheduled into the future
- It's easy for authors to format links nicely (eg "this article on Blogger-HAT" instead of "www.blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com/XXX")
Cons:
- You cannot force writers to always let you review posts before they're published: you can ask them to save posts as draft, but there's nothing to guarantee that they will do so
- You cannot guarantee that authors will always use your preferred styles and formats
- Authors need to learn to use Blogger: we all know it's not that hard - but I will guarantee that some people think it is!
- You cannot stop writers from editing their earlier posts
- Authors can only edit their own earlier posts, and not those of other wrtiers. (This could be a problem later if some authors move on you have new-team members: only administrators can edit the work of now-departed authors.)
- You cannot control where your writers host pictures and videos: the post-editor lets them link to any location. this means that an author keeps all their photos in Flickr will write posts that don't have a thumbnail picture (because these pictures must be stored in Picasa-web-albums
Making it work:
Members of your team need to be very clear about how you work together, and what the consequences are if someone breaks the rules.
Administrator rights
Pros:
- This has the same advantages as giving someone author rights - and granting administrator rights is just a small extra step once someone is an author
- And administrators can edit the work of other authors too, which may be an advantage or disadvantage depending on your circumstances.
- Having a 2nd administrator can be a good safety precaution, in case you become sick or lost access to your account.
Cons:
- Someone with administrator rights has full control over the template and posts in your blog: they can do everything you can do.
- They can also remove other administrators - meaning they could remove your admin rights!
Making it work:
You need very clear rules about who is responsible for what - and a very trusting relationship with the other administrators.
Mix-and-match
Realistically, if your blog has a number of team members, possibly including guest-posters, then you will probably use a mix-and-match approach to giving rights to other people. This means you will need to make choices about who can do what - and why.
For example:
- New / prospective guest-posters may be invited to email posts to you
- Established guest-posters may be set up with mail2Blog, or even as authors inside Blogger
- Regular writers may be set up as authors
- Core team members will probably all be administrators - and you will have a range of measures (including regular backups and password change rules) to make sure that you are all honest with each other.
Your experiences?
I am keen to hear more about how people have made team-blogs work in practice: how did you decide what rules to follow, how did you sort out arguments, and prevent team-members from hi-jacking the blog? What other problems did you face?
Related Articles:
Making someone into an author on your blog
Making someone into an administrator on your blog
Setting up mail2Post / Post to profile on your blog
mail2Post: knowing who posted what
Using tables to show data in your blog
Converting from MS Word to Blogger - via Google Docs
File hosts: places where you can keep files that are used on your blog
How is the thumbnail picture for each post chosen
Sunday, 15 January 2012
How to put a gadget above your blog's header
This article is about how to put an item (any type of gadget) above the Title section in a blog made with Google Blogger.
Overview
If your blog has a layout or designer template, then (almost?) all of Blogger's templates start out with a nav-bar at the top of the screen, followed by a Header section showing your blogs title & description, or a custom header image if you've uploaded one.
And even if you go into the place in the layout-designer where you can re-arrange the layout by drag-and-dropping items, you cannot drag any gadgets to above the header.
But this is easy to change, provided you are willing to accept the disadvantages of editing your blog's layout template.
How to allow changes above your blog's header:
Follow these steps to make it possible for you (or any blog administrator) to add gadgets to the area about your blog's heading section:
1 Edit your blog's template
Old UI: Design > Edit HTML
New UI: Template > Edit HTML > Proceed
2 Download a full copy of your template, and put it somewhere safe (in case something goes wrong, and you need to restore from it).
3 Find this code in your template:
4 Change it to
5 Click Preview, to check that your template is working:
This shows you a view of the screen, but you won't be able to click the items on the preview srcreen. It's a good idea to do this even for very simple changes, so that you know that they will save correctly.
6 Click Save to apply the changes to your blog's template.
7 Quickly test your blog, to make sure that nothing else was accidentally changed. At very least, you should click one of each "type" of link on the main page (eg one post title, one page tab, on search button)
What you will see:
After you make this change, the next time you edit your blog layout (New UI: Layout Old UI: Design > Page Elements), then you will find that you can add or drag-and-drop up to three gadgets to the Heading section of the blog, making a total of four.
You can add even more gadgets by changing the number for maxwidgets to something else.
Related Articles:
Disadvantages of editing your blog's layout template
How to set up an extra administrator for your blog
Types of Blogger template
Planning changes to your blog - in private
How the data in Blogger blogs is organised.
Overview
And even if you go into the place in the layout-designer where you can re-arrange the layout by drag-and-dropping items, you cannot drag any gadgets to above the header.
But this is easy to change, provided you are willing to accept the disadvantages of editing your blog's layout template.
How to allow changes above your blog's header:
Follow these steps to make it possible for you (or any blog administrator) to add gadgets to the area about your blog's heading section:
1 Edit your blog's template
Old UI: Design > Edit HTML
New UI: Template > Edit HTML > Proceed
2 Download a full copy of your template, and put it somewhere safe (in case something goes wrong, and you need to restore from it).
3 Find this code in your template:
<b:section class='header' id='header' maxwidgets='1' showaddelement='no'>Hint: use your browser's search tool, (Edit>Find in Firefox, Ctrl/f in Chrome) to look for a key phrase like "id='Header1'
<b:widget id='Header1' locked='true' title='YOUR BLOG TITLE(Header)' type='Header'/>
4 Change it to
<b:section class='header' id='header' maxwidgets='4' showaddelement='yes'>Notice that there are two changes made:
<b:widget id='Header1' locked='true' title='YOUR BLOG TITLE(Header)' type='Header'/>
- Setting maxwidgets to greater than 1, and
- Setting showaddelement to Yes, instead of No
5 Click Preview, to check that your template is working:
This shows you a view of the screen, but you won't be able to click the items on the preview srcreen. It's a good idea to do this even for very simple changes, so that you know that they will save correctly.
6 Click Save to apply the changes to your blog's template.
7 Quickly test your blog, to make sure that nothing else was accidentally changed. At very least, you should click one of each "type" of link on the main page (eg one post title, one page tab, on search button)
What you will see:
After you make this change, the next time you edit your blog layout (New UI: Layout Old UI: Design > Page Elements), then you will find that you can add or drag-and-drop up to three gadgets to the Heading section of the blog, making a total of four.
You can add even more gadgets by changing the number for maxwidgets to something else.
Related Articles:
Disadvantages of editing your blog's layout template
How to set up an extra administrator for your blog
Types of Blogger template
Planning changes to your blog - in private
How the data in Blogger blogs is organised.
Saturday, 14 January 2012
Google CSE API documentation upgrade
Google's custom search engine API is now fully documented (announced here).
It won't mean anything if you just use a regular Google Custom Search on your blog, but for those who have coded their own special engines - or who would like to, this could be very good news.
They've also made the Help Centre prettier (like most of the Google tools are doing), and added more languages to it.
It won't mean anything if you just use a regular Google Custom Search on your blog, but for those who have coded their own special engines - or who would like to, this could be very good news.
They've also made the Help Centre prettier (like most of the Google tools are doing), and added more languages to it.
Friday, 13 January 2012
Giving another Google account control over your blog
This article is about changing the ownership of your Blogger blog. As well as looking at how to make the changes inside Blogger, it also looks at some other issues you may need to think about (eg comment moderation, items outside Blogger, advertising).
Blogs and Google Accounts
Initially, the account that sets up the blog is the owner. But if the person using this account gives someone else administrator rights, then there are multiple owners.
And once there are multiple administrators, any one administrator can delete all the others, or just demote them down to being authors, thus making him or her self into the owner,
So this is the very minimum that you need to do to transfer blog ownership to another Google account:
- Give the other Google account author rights, then once this is successful,
- Give the other Google account administrator rights.
But, unless you have a very, very simple blog, you cannot stop there: you also need to think about other things that may have been set up, inside Blogger, and in any other tools that the blog uses.
Comments
You may want to change who is notified about any comments that are left on the blog. This is done on the Settings / Comments tab: there are separate sections for
- Comment moderation (one email address)
- Comment notification (a list of email addresses)
Email Notifications:
If the blog is set up to notify anyone when it is published, you may want to review this - any any related Google groups or forwarding addresses you may be using to make this work.
Mail2Post:
If the blog is set up to receive postings by email, you may want to change the secret words (so the old owner no longer knows them). If there is an intermediate email-address used so that the owner can tell who made Mail2Posts, then the new owner should either take over this account, or set up and use a new one.
All set under (Settings / Email and Mobile /Posting Options)
Mobile Posting:
If the blog is set up to receive postings by SMS, you may want to change the device that is registered, so the old owner no longer has access. (Settings / Email and Mobile /Posting Options)
Custom URL:
If your blog has a custom domain, then you'll almost certainly want to transfer control of this.
If you purchased the domain inside Blogger, then you should have set up a domain-administrator account shortly after registering the domain-name. The easiest option is just to tell the new owner the login name and password for that account - and tell them how to access it.
If the new owner doesn't want to keep the Google (ie goDaddy or eNom) link, then they can log in to whatever domain registrar that they want to use, and request a transfer. You will get an email and need to do some things in response to make the transfer successful. Make you you read it carefully, because each registrar is different.
But I'm not currently sure if there's any way for the new owner to keep the Google (goDaddy/eNom) link.
Items controlled outside Blogger
These days, most blogs include some items which are stored outside Blogger. If you transfer the ownership of a blog, you may also want to transfer these items, or at least make a plan for what will happen to them.
I've put notes about a few that I know about here - If you know about any others that are popular, please leave a comment below and I'll update the list.
RSS Feeds created in Feedburner
To transfer ownership of an RSS feed, log into Feedburner, click on the Feed that you want to transfer, and click on the Transfer Feed link. You are prompted to enter an email address, and Feedburner say that they will contact that email to arrange the transfer within 72 hours.
Photos / Images
Any pictures that you upload via Blogger are stored in a Picasa web-album that belongs to the account that did the uploading. Unfortunately Google doesn't yet provide any way to transfer ownership of individual web-albums. I don't (yet) know if the recently introduced collaboration features help here or not, but they may.
Also, pictures uploaded before Blogger started using Picasa-web-albums (possibly sometime in 2007 I think) cannot be transferred.
Calendars
???
Docs files
If your blog links to any files hosted in Google Docs or Sites file stores, then these are owned by the Google Account that created or uploaded them. Check with that site to see if it's possible to transfer.
Custom Maps
I don't think that there is any way to transfer ownership of these.
An option is for the old owner to provide the export file location (view the map, right click on "view in google earth" and choose copy URL), and the new owner could then create a new map (and put this into the blog) - however this will be a lot of work if may maps are used.
Custom-searches
I don't think that there is any way to transfer ownership of these.
Videos
(if you own them - not ones owned by others that you're just linked to)
Social Network sites
For example Facebook pages, Twitter accounts. (These may not be inside the blog at all, but may be a key part of it's promotional tools - if you are taking over ownership of a blog, you will probably want to take over these too.)
For items that cannot be transferred, you need to transfer them manually (if this is possible), or to reach an agreement between the old account owner and the new account owner about what will happen to the items. For example, you may agree that the old account owner will not delete the web-albums for one month, and that they will download the photos and provide them on CD to the new account owner - who will then upload them, and change all the photo links in the blog to the new URLs.
If your blog has any advertising (eg AdSense, Amazon Associates, Chitika, or indeed any other advertiser) you may need to transfer the account that this is linked to.
For AdSense, if the advertising was set up through Blogger, you can change the account under the Monetize tab. However if any ads were put inside individual posts, these posts will all have to be edited, and ad-units for the new owner will need to be added. (I don't think you can just replace the Publisher-ID, because the ad-unit has and ID as well.
I'm not sure how sophisticated this is as yet: if you want to keep the advertising, rather than removing and then re-creating the advertising, it may be a good idea for the new account to set up advertising accounts for itself on another (test) blog first, and then switch it over in the blog that's being changed, so that the existing ads/ad-structures are kept.
An Alternative:
Depending on how many items-outside-Blogger that the current account owns, it may be better for the person who owns the current account to just give it to the new owner, and to get themselves a new account.
Even better: If there's a chance that the blog will ever change hands, set up a new account just it when you start the blog. I'm going to write a whole post about this one day soon - but for now I'm convinced that you really need to think about the future as soon as you start your blog.
Related Articles:
Understanding Google Accounts
Granting administrator-level access to your blog
Setting up a new author for your blog
Deleting blogs and blog-posts
Setting up email posting for your Blogger account
How to resolve conflicting Google and Google Apps accounts
Why RSS / Subscribe to Posts is important for your blog
Understanding Picasa-web-albums
Getting started with Blogger
Wednesday, 4 January 2012
It's annual performance review time - how did Blogger-HAT do in 2011?
This article is an review of Blogger Hint and Tips's performance in 2011, and includes a some statistics, and plans for 2012.
2011, the year in review
Most jobs have an annual performance review. Done well, this is a chance to look back at what you've acheived, what worked and what didn't, what you have learned, what you need to learn, and what you want to achieve next year.
So it makes sense for a blog to have an annual review too. Here's mine.
Thanks to BloggerSentral, whose 2011 Statistics post inspired me to write this.
The numbers
The tools don't tell me what the subscriber numbers were in 2010, but at the end of December 2011, Blogger-HAT had
Traffic:
The number of visits per month per month:
Conclusion: traffic grew pretty steadily through the year:
Top traffic sources:
The most popular posts were no surprise - you can see them in the widget on the sidebar.
The bounce-rate is quite high, though (between 55 and 70%) - and it's been increasing steadily. This is probably something to work on, it may be related to the number of articles that need updating for the Sept-2011 interface change.
Screen resolution
People keep saying that this matters, and that we need to design for smaller screens. And personally I've been using a Netbook a lot recently, because it's just so portable. But it doesn't look like Blogger-HAT visitors are working like that:
Conclusion:
Mobile may be "hot" - but small screen aren't being used when people want information about how to use Blogger. Personally, I'm picking that most of my 80% of visitors using wide screens do have small screen devices - they just use them for different things.
Achievements:
The big success of the year was a re-write over every single post: during 2011, every post in Blogger-HAT was reviewed: the format was standardised, and the contents reviewed. For many articles, this meant a complete re-write, or splitting one post into 3 or 4 smaller topics. This process started in late April, and finally finished on 31 December with a total re-write of Combining a forwarding-address and mail2Post, so you know who posted what.
This is also the year when I started to take social media seriously: Blogger-HAT's activity there is still small (I'd rather focus time on researching new content), but growing.
Plans for 2012:
I'm just about to launch Blogger-HAT-Lite where I can share quick but unresearched notes about announcements form other products that may affect Blogger users.
Updating existing articles to include "new blogger interface" info is a big priority. Anything tagged YY - needs Sept11 review still needs to be done. Right now, that's 149 articles.
I think that customizing mobile and dynamic templates will be a hot topic in 2012 - although very niche-specific. I'd love to investigate this, but not sure if I'll get time to work on it. But I noticed recently that Southern Speakers has been doing a good number of posts about how to modify dynamic template blogs using CSS, so maybe I won't bother.
Lastly, I've started another blog that involves cataloging music and song books on a very specific topic. Blogger is a fantastic base for sharing this material, especially the "detailed song information" behind it. But I'm building the content for a detailed database, and maybe I'll be looking for a tool that lets visitors request structured database queries (not just searches) and then shows result sets inside posts. Any hints on options for this are welcome.
What do you think?
At the end of most annual reviews, the boss looks over his/her glasses and says "Overall, I'm ranking your performance as <whatever>" for the year".
I'm a bit short of bosses in this "job" - but would love to hear how Blogger-HAT could do a better job in 2012. You know where to find the comments-box, just under the page-links section, so please let me hear your thoughts.
Related Articles:
Combining a forwarding-address and mail2Post, so you know who posted what. (2011's last edited post)
Removing the attribution gadget from your blog (this year's most popular post, by far).
Adding a Facebook Like, Send or Share button (in 2nd place)
Setting up Google Analytics on your blog (if you want to get your own statistics)
Finding out how many email subscribers you have
2011, the year in review
So it makes sense for a blog to have an annual review too. Here's mine.
Thanks to BloggerSentral, whose 2011 Statistics post inspired me to write this.
The numbers
The tools don't tell me what the subscriber numbers were in 2010, but at the end of December 2011, Blogger-HAT had
- 419 Feedburner subscribers, of whom,
- 103 are email subscribers (79 active, 24 pending verification).
- 259 followers in Google Friend Connect
- 58 Facebook fans
- 55 Followers in Twitter
- 7 people who had added BloggerHAT's Google+ page to a circle
- 199 posts: you're reading the 200th right now. This could would have been higher, but I deleted some particularly useless ones during the year - see Achievements.
Traffic:
The number of visits per month per month:
Conclusion: traffic grew pretty steadily through the year:
Top traffic sources:
Conclusions:
Source: Google / organic (ie search results) 79351 57% Google.com / referral (ie Help Forum) 41092 29% Direct 12606 9% Google.XXX (search from various countries own Google sites) 3096 2% Blogger.com / referral 827 1% Feedburner / feed 718 1% Search / organic 397 0% Google translation 280 0% 191 0% Facebook.com 154 0% Swagbucks.com / referral 100 0% Ask / organic 87 0% Aol / organic 76 0% Feedburner / email 67 0% Too-clever-by-half.blogspot.com / referral 58 0% Yahoo / organic (ie search results) 58 0%
- This blog is very dependent on Google, and gets almost no "Binhoo" traffic (ie from other search engines) - I'd be worried, except that it's reasonable that most Blogger users will use Google to search.
- Almost third traffic comes from questions I answer on Blogger-help-form: this is worth doing.
- BHAT is starting to get links from a range of other sites: this is probably something to work on.
The most popular posts were no surprise - you can see them in the widget on the sidebar.
The bounce-rate is quite high, though (between 55 and 70%) - and it's been increasing steadily. This is probably something to work on, it may be related to the number of articles that need updating for the Sept-2011 interface change.
Screen resolution
People keep saying that this matters, and that we need to design for smaller screens. And personally I've been using a Netbook a lot recently, because it's just so portable. But it doesn't look like Blogger-HAT visitors are working like that:
Screen Width (px) % of total visits Less than 320 wide 0.33% 300 - 767 wide 0.76% 768 - 1023 wide 1.56% 1024 - 1151 wide 15.62% 1152 - 1278 wide 1.86% 1280 + wide 79.88% Grand Total 100.00%
Conclusion:
Mobile may be "hot" - but small screen aren't being used when people want information about how to use Blogger. Personally, I'm picking that most of my 80% of visitors using wide screens do have small screen devices - they just use them for different things.
Achievements:
The big success of the year was a re-write over every single post: during 2011, every post in Blogger-HAT was reviewed: the format was standardised, and the contents reviewed. For many articles, this meant a complete re-write, or splitting one post into 3 or 4 smaller topics. This process started in late April, and finally finished on 31 December with a total re-write of Combining a forwarding-address and mail2Post, so you know who posted what.
This is also the year when I started to take social media seriously: Blogger-HAT's activity there is still small (I'd rather focus time on researching new content), but growing.
Plans for 2012:
I'm just about to launch Blogger-HAT-Lite where I can share quick but unresearched notes about announcements form other products that may affect Blogger users.
Updating existing articles to include "new blogger interface" info is a big priority. Anything tagged YY - needs Sept11 review still needs to be done. Right now, that's 149 articles.
I think that customizing mobile and dynamic templates will be a hot topic in 2012 - although very niche-specific. I'd love to investigate this, but not sure if I'll get time to work on it. But I noticed recently that Southern Speakers has been doing a good number of posts about how to modify dynamic template blogs using CSS, so maybe I won't bother.
Lastly, I've started another blog that involves cataloging music and song books on a very specific topic. Blogger is a fantastic base for sharing this material, especially the "detailed song information" behind it. But I'm building the content for a detailed database, and maybe I'll be looking for a tool that lets visitors request structured database queries (not just searches) and then shows result sets inside posts. Any hints on options for this are welcome.
What do you think?
At the end of most annual reviews, the boss looks over his/her glasses and says "Overall, I'm ranking your performance as <whatever>" for the year".
I'm a bit short of bosses in this "job" - but would love to hear how Blogger-HAT could do a better job in 2012. You know where to find the comments-box, just under the page-links section, so please let me hear your thoughts.
Related Articles:
Combining a forwarding-address and mail2Post, so you know who posted what. (2011's last edited post)
Removing the attribution gadget from your blog (this year's most popular post, by far).
Adding a Facebook Like, Send or Share button (in 2nd place)
Setting up Google Analytics on your blog (if you want to get your own statistics)
Finding out how many email subscribers you have
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