As I mentioned in an earlier post Learning About & Problems With My RSS Feed, I was having problems setting up the RSS feed on this blog. I already had one at the bottom of the page, but I wanted to be able to use the universal RSS feed symbol.
Today as I was micromanaging my other blog, www.observationmountain.com, I realized it didn’t have a RSS feed (or not one I could find), so back to researching I went. I came upon this website: www.stepbystepblog.com, and found detailed information about Feedburner.
I followed the directions as outlined in the www.stepbystepblog.com website, and got Feedburner added as a plugin on both of my blogs. I then followed the instructions on the Feedburner website and got my RSS feeds working. At first, I got totally confused, but in the end, it’s all worked out.
I wanted to include the orange RSS feed button on my blogs, but on the Feedburner website, it didn’t list WordPress as an option (in the copy and paste code section). I ended up using the code for TypePad, and that worked fine
So…now I can quit stressing out about my RSS feeds, and go back to concentrating on posting.
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Stumble Upon is a new (to me) way to surf the internet. After you register, you check boxes for the types of sites you like to view. The categories are limitless.
After you add the Stumble Upon toolbar, you can click the “Stumble” button and see websites that fit your profile. You can rate the websites with a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”, send the website to a friend, add a site to your Stumble Upon Favorites, etc… Now I’m seeing websites and blogs I’ve never seen before compared to when I was doing a normal Google search. I think it’ll be a great alternative to searching the web.
As time permits, I plan to surf on Stumble Upon and see if I can find other blogs that are helpful or similar to mine, rate them, and become a frequent visitor to theirs as well.
Hint: I believe in order to install Stumble Upon, you first need to install the Mozilla Firefox program and toolbar. Mozilla Firefox is pretty easy to navigate, plus I like the fact you can have multiple windows open at once. You can also customize the look of it.
As mentioned in my previous post, I installed Google Analytics. I now have two days of stats and am very impressed with the results.
Google Analytics gives me beautiful bar and line graphs, information on my visitors and pages views, a “geo map overlay”, and a ton of reports I can generate. I’m glad I added Google Analytics so early in the game.
Keep in mind, the stats start when you add Google Analytics. I don’t believe they can give you stats for dates prior to adding Google Analytics. That appears to be the case for any stats that you activate, as my Awstats and Webalizer stats only give me information from the date I activated them.
For a new blog, or website, my stats are pretty low, but I will definitely find it exciting to watch the numbers increase as time passes.
Hint: Remember to add stats to your blog as soon as you set everything up. They will give you comparative figures as your blog grows.
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In an effort to increase traffic to my blogs, I came upon Google Analytics. It appears to be a well designed tracking mechanism. It apparently can analyze what improvements can be made to your blog to continue getting a good traffic flow, plus possibly increase your traffic flow. It also shows how visitors move around your blog (or website), and will alert you to problems your visitors may encounter as they’re navigating through your site.
I added Google Analytics to my blogs today and found it to be quite easy. I went through a few steps, and was then instructed to copy and paste a code to all of the pages of my blog I wanted tracked. They state to past it immediately before the </body> tag of each page you want tracked.
In my WordPress blog, I went to my “Presentation” section, and then to “Theme Editor”. I found every page that contained a </body> code, and pasted the code as they directed. (I found the </body> code at the bottom of the respective pages.) Some of the pages did not contain a </body> code, so I ignored those. I then went back to Google Analytics and “tested” it. On my first test, I got a warning that Google Analytics wasn’t installed. I double checked my pages, found I had missed a page, added the code, and then it tested fine. I should have my first reports in about 24 hours. It’s now showing “receiving data”
Google Analytics is also available in many foreign languages.
When I’m writing my blogs, this one and www.observationmountain.com, I post directly to the WordPress “Write Post” screen. I don’t use a text editor. I continue to click, “save and continue editing” until I’m happy with my post.
I often need to move sentences or paragraphs around to make my post “flow” better. I tried to “copy and paste” by right clicking when I was typing on the “Visual” screen, but I wasn’t getting that option. I decided to try to right click when I was in the “Code” mode, and found that works. So…if you need to “copy and paste”, just switch over to the “Code” screen.
How easy is that?
Too bad I’m not discovering that ease with my other challenges in blogging.
Hi. I'm Barbara Swafford & I'd like to welcome you to Blogging Without A Blog. Grab a seat, share your thoughts and join in the conversation. 
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