New Blog Features
Posted by Stephen on
February 28, 2007
I’ve been slowly adding some new blog features that you may or may not have noticed over the last little bit. Here’s the lowdown…
Jumping On the MyBlogLog BandWagon
It seems like everyone has been jumping on the MyBlogLog bandwagon. I guess I can’t not jump on the wagon since most people have been reporting some reasonable traffic increases and new faces to their blog.
The first thing I installed was their sidebar widget. I set it to show a decent amount of people. I’ve been visiting the blogs of people I don’t recognize and I suspect that many others that have installed the plugin do the same. My community is all setup so go ahead and join it. I’ve already got 20 members, and I haven’t even told anyone about it.
The other cool plugin that installed in support of MyBlogLog is the MyAvatars plugin. This plugin pulls the avatar from your MyBlogLog account and displays it beside the comments in your posts. Though most people have been putting it to the right of the text, I decided to put it to the left because when I talk to people, I don’t look at them AFTER I’m done talking to them. I like to see their face first.
I Finally Figured Out That This Blog Had a LIVE ARCHIVE Built In
I don’t know if you were wondering why I didn’t have an archive page, but I do now. There are so many cool features built into this blog, and the one that I uncovered pretty much by accident was the Extended Live Archive.
The Extended Live Archive “enables fast and convenient digging through the archive, without the need to load large piles of complete pages over and over again”. You can check out the page right here. I initially tried to install the plugin manually, but gave up because it never worked. After digging around, I figured out that this plugin was already integrated into my template. All I needed to do was created a page and call the template. To think, I spent nearly 2 hrs on it in vain, and it was there the whole time 
Now I can remove the archives from the sidebar to make room for more stuff.
Selling My Soul to PayPerPost
Although PayPerPost (aff) Advertising Opportunities make me a little queazy at times, their new ReviewMyPost program that I talked about the other day seems to be a real winner.
The premise is simple. If you sign up and review one of my posts using the button, not only do I get paid $7.50 US, but you get paid the same amount. Plus, once you’re signed up, you can run the button on your blog too. The only downside is that you can’t review someones post if you’re already signed up, but you can continue to share some cash with others.
It looks like I’ve signed up two new users already, and I eagerly await their reviews. If you do a review of one of my posts, please send me the link. I’ll gladly post them up for everyone to see, good or bad, which means you get a free backlink from me too…and $7.50 US in your pocket.
ReviewMyPost…Hmm… Review one of your favourite posts on my blog and receive a chance to win something cool. That sounds like a great contest idea! What do you folks think?
I am currently having a problem with that mybloglog of your stephen, my avatar shows up fine on the sidebar, but as you can see it is not visible in the actual post that I write.
That’s kinda weird actually. Are you commenting with a different email address at all?
nope, same email adress, it works fine on john’s blog, i dont know whats going on.
Me neither. That’s really weird. I’ll try reinstallng the plugin later to see if that fixes it.
you dont have to do all that just for me. Unless there are others experiencing the same difficulty.
One thing I noticed about the MyBlogLog is that it just resizes the thumbnails images that you upload for the blog etc.
I noticed over on John’s site that sometimes the images are really big until after the entire page is loaded, then they shrink down to their post size.
I’d have my mug up if I had a picture of me that was decent enough to put. Perhaps I’ll go pose or something, then photoshop it so I look have decent!
Yeah, when you upload a picture, it gives you the dimensions. I think some people just upload any old picture, and it just HTML resizes, which an slow MyBlogLog down.
They should look at scripting it to resize upon upload.
Lol, I don’t think I have ever had a decent pic of myself so I just opened up our box of photos and grabbed one out of there. Not the most stylin photo but it gets the job done.
And now that photo is displayed in this post as my mug was in the screen capture that Stephen used. Doh!
Good post! please let us know the performance of this features and the impact they had in your blog
Nice hearing from you George C. I’ll see what I can do about that.
Already seeing a nice traffic increase due to MyBlogLog. Too bad there is a limit of 15 communities you can join per day.
It’s funny, more and more blogs are dumping MyBlogLog for various reasons. A lot of negative publicity since Yahoo purchased it.
MBL has received some negative publicity about some of the exploits but right now I don’t have any plans of dropping it from my site. I have been seeing a nice little increase of traffic coming from MBL and I enjoy seeing with other MBL users have visited my site.
Agreed, I always visit the sites of those that visit mine. Sometimes I actually find one I like to read, lol.