Lot of my friends have asked me to put my blogroll on my blog, and quite clearly I have not. The answer is simple: I read around 50 feeds regularly (and some notorious feeds like that of digg.com/slashdot/lifehacker churns out 50 entries per day) so putting them on my blog will simply consume a lot of space.
Any serious blogger worth his salt uses some form of feed reader to keep track of blogs, I use bloglines for its web interface goodness. The link on the right hand side labelled Frequent Reads links to my separate blogroll.
Any serious blogger worth his salt uses some form of feed reader to keep track of blogs, I use bloglines for its web interface goodness. The link on the right hand side labelled Frequent Reads links to my separate blogroll.
The other awsome feature of bloglines is that it allows you to create email subscriptions. It is a really cool concept. It generates unique email IDs for you which are shown as feeds on the bloglines feed reader. Now how is this useful???? You would have subscribed to some emails( or would have given your email ID for registering to some service) and dont want it to hog you inbox space... simply give the bloglines email address and all the emails to that address will appear as feeds. Also its amazing if you use it with ChangeNotes.com. This site generates emails for you everytime some site you are monitoring(which does not expose RSS feeds) changes. Almost none of the University professors have RSS enabled web pages (or your college job employment site)... and since you have to keep an eye on them for any new entry, just generate a new bloglines email address and use it as your default email account in ChangeNotes. Now you have a RSS feed for your feed reader for a site that does not have a RSS feed exposed. How cool is that!!!
Another tech feature that I love is the performancing metrics provided by performancing.com. Notice the performancing label end of the sidebar (under the heading blogmates)... It is on the lines of google analytics, but unlike its google counterpart is completely *free*. It generates feeds too... Here's an example of what I get daily in my feeds (by performancing ofcourse)
And these are just the tip of the iceberg. I get information I never dreamt would be possible for me to get without considerable work. I get the demographics of people visiting the blog, browsers they are using, platforms they are using, screen resolutions, Outbound links etc etc... the list is endless. I was fairly amused when I saw that there were considerable amount of users using Linux and FreeBSD to access my blog. Also I came to know the different screen resolutions people were using and a decline in the number of visitors using higher screen resolutions... Only 65% of the users had 1024x768, 4% had 800x600 and rest had higher resolution (as high as 1536x960). I got hold of a bigger monitor and opened my blog... and man ..those people had a reason not to visit my blog again. The whole template looks weird on higher screen resolutions. Many blogs, with customized templates, had the same problem. Performancing helped me find a problem which I never knew existed... Thanks a lot Performancing... great job.I was trying to integrate LighBox JS and flickr into my blog but that would have effectively killed my low bandwidth readers.
Do you guys have any other kewl stuff that I can integrate into my blog? and which does not hog any space? (the two stuffs I explained above are just two links... so I would like stuff more in those lines). Also I am searching for an optimized tagging service. Technorati is good but I have'nt seen many blogger sites with visible tags or tag enabled services (i.e you can subscribe to feed labelled as... say "life" and ignore the rest). Google.... are you listening??
PS: I have decided to give technorati a try... hence the search box. Now I will be tagging my enteries too. Lets see how it works.... and yeah my performancing account crashed :(( and I lost all my metrics.
Tag:technology,blog
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