Jake’s Life

A few folks have e-mailed me lately and asked what tools I use on my blog. Well, on top of the visible ones, being Wordpress and Windows Live Writer (I’ve blogged on how much I like WLW before), I use a lot that may be invisible to my readers. This post will be dedicated to them (and how free they are).

ScribeFire: A great blogging tool I haven’t talked much about is ScribeFire. It’s a Firefox plugin which embeds a blogging app into your browser and makes certain things a lot easier. For example, when a tab is open and you create a new entry, go to insert a link and the URL of that page is automatically there for you. It gives you a WYSIWYG editor as well as a raw HTML code view. Control your previous entries and Wordpress categories from ScribeFire as well.

Paint.NET: Paint.NET is something I’ve used for a while now. I have Photoshop, but if all I need to do is create a thumbnail, modify a screenshot, or crop a photo, Paint.NET is much faster and more streamlined.

WebShot: If all I want is to grab a quick screenshot of a particular web site I usually use WebShot. It’s a very small app that lets you grab a screenshot and output it to a certain size. The great thing about it is that it will grab the entire page, not just one monitor’s worth, but everything from top to bottom.

Nick e-mailed me today and copied me on some PHP errors he got while commenting on my posts today. One had to do with SpamBam, the other was a general database error. I recently upgraded Wordpress to version 2.5, so that ay have something to do with it.

I tried to duplicate the error in Internet Explorer (not that you would use such browser, Nick), Firefox, and Safari for Windows. I also tried on the Blackberry browser and Opera Mini 4.1. Is anyone else experiencing any errors while commenting or browsing my site?

I commented in November how much my blog traffic shot up that month and how my outlook for December was pretty low because of the Holidays. Well, I was right.

It looks like 2008 is off to a good start though, just getting into the last week with about 1300.

I wanted to share a few other things I’ve done to my blog, mainly on your suggestions, to enhance readership and promote more interaction, and in turn more traffic and the opportunity for me to meet more people through my site. I’ve installed a few Wordpress plugins that will help:

• Subscribe to Comments: A very simple plugin that allows those who comment to notify them of follow up comments through e-mail. My blog will send you e-mails of all future comments, and when the post becomes old or you’ve had enough banter, you click the unsubscribe link in the e-mail. Simple! Just check the box in the comment form.
  
• Highlight Author Comments: This plugin is more geared toward me, and basically displays my comments on a post in bold.
  
• Comment Luv: Probably my favorite, and should be yours too. Even though a lot of my readers already read other readers’ blogs (let me know if I lost you there), it creates more traffic for you. When you check this box in the comment form, and you type in your blog’s URL, it grabs the latest post title from your blog and displays it.
  

For those of you who subscribe to my RSS feed, please shoot me an e-mail so that I know about how many of you there are. Feedburner has my count dropped from 30 to between 2 and 3 depending on the day, but its list of feed readers has a lot of types, so I’m not sure what’s going on. I know for a fact that more than 3 subscribe to me just due to comments and the fact that I know more people than that in person who do.

It may have something to do with my we server with the issues with my stats I had, and my e-mail times are all effed up too.

Thanks!

I have received several comments over the last few days, so I was a bit surprised to see that my site has received no visitors over the last few days. Awstats on my host’s server may be freaking out, as it happened last month for a few days too.

On the bright side, and unlike last year, I remembered to renew my domain name so there won’t be any interruption.

I checked my monthly ending web stats this afternoon and found my bandwidth within a hundred megs of my monthly limit! Sure, I may have to up my web hosting plan (or slim down my blog’s bandwidth), but overall I don’t mind that I’m getting more exposure. My RSS feeds are also being read by more, which takes up bandwidth, as well as all of the new readers (or stalkers, as none post any comments) I’ve received lately. Take a look at my year so far. In January I had my blog, but mainly used it to share files with friends and web storage. It wasn’t until around March or April that I actually started blogging regularly:

Jakeslife.net went from a couple hundred unique visitors per month to a couple hundred per day. Don’t get me wrong, I love the readership of my blog and hope it keeps growing, but it’s not my ultimate goal in blogging. If my stats dipped it wouldn’t hurt very much, as long as I still have my core readers and others stumbling on it each day for a random read or two.

Speaking of dipping stats, I know that a lot of fellow bloggers are college students, and during the Holiday season not only will their blogs go unmanned, but stats of other blogs will likely go down from their lack of visits. I’ll still be posting though, although with the dip in stats I may use this time to make some changes.

The comment form now gives you the option to subscribe to comments on that post by e-mail. I’m still working on ways to give readers the option to subscribe to individual post comments through a customized feed instead of Wordpress’ default subscription to all comments.

It definitely blew me away when I looked at my stats this morning. Each month I’ve been setting goals for unique visitors to my site and RSS feed subscriptions. Yesterday I gained some new subscribers and my stats more than doubled for the day. Maybe it has to do with the photo of Justin Timberlake playing with his junk, or with the many posts I’ve been churning out about Wordpress lately, I’m not sure.

Now that we’re on the topic of web stats, and since I haven’t posted about them in a while, they are on a steady rise each month. The beginning of every month I set a goal, higher than the last month’s stats, and try to get out as much content as I can, especially having to do with the posts that are most read on my blog. I also have to thank my referrers, led by Jay for the last 5 months straight, followed by Frozen Underwear and Our View On Superior. My own Blogger profile comes in fourth place, which could be linked from any comment I made on any Blogger hosted blog.

Other miscellaneous facts about my web stats:

So tell me, why is it that my stats have seemed to increase, but my comments have not? I still spend my time each day posting at least five or six comments on various blogs. Are my posts not open-ended enough? Not engaging enough? Interesting enough?

I ended up not having to work last night after all, so I laid in bed with Sandro most of the night, and today I made some minor aesthetic changes to the site:

• Related posts now show up on my single post pages before comments
• Links on the right at the top of the sidebar have new images
• Favicon (okay, I did this yesterday)
• A few blogs on the blogroll went bye-bye