weather widgets

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Plato DVD to iPhone Converter 7.87 (Demo)

Plato DVD to iPhone Converter 7.87 (Demo)
This application will enable you to easily rip all your DVDs and create iPhone compatible videos.

How to style an Atom Feed

How to style an Atom Feed
In order to have browsers render an XML Atom feed into HTML such that it is far easier for users to read, there are two things you must create. The first is an XSL stylesheet which instructs the browser on...

A:Muze Music News Widget 1.0

A:Muze Music News Widget 1.0
The A:Muze widget brings you the latest news and gig guide direct to your dashboard.

About A:Muze Music News Widget
Will keep you up to date with the latest music and gig news added to the site. The widget covers all aspects of the site, the gig guide, reviews, interviews and news. The dashboard widget is a great way of keeping up to date with A:Muze. We aim to update you with the latest happens and using the widget gives you access to the site RSS feed directly from your OSX Desktop.

60GB XBox 360 Shows Up in a NYC Target [Xbox 360]

If you are too impatient to wait for an August delivery, you should know that a 60GB console has shown up on the shelves of a NYC Target. It's not a guarantee that your local store will have it in... read more

How to display your RSS subscriber count

You've all seen the little FeedBurner subscriber counters on sites that display a site or more often a blogs number of RSS subscribers. Whilst this is a nice widget to display on your site there isn't much in the way of customizing to display something different.

Plaint text subscriber count

There is a way to display the number of readers you have for your feed by using FeedBurners API. This means you can display your subscriber count within some text, for example as part of a blog post. You could also have a separate message somewhere on you site saying X number of readers subscribe to this site.

You can use the PHP code below. You need to have PHP5 otherwise the SimpleXMLElement command will not work.

//get cool feedburner count
$whaturl="http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=YourFeedburnerFeedLinkHere";

//Initialize the Curl session
$ch = curl_init();

//Set curl to return the data instead of printing it to the browser.
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
//Set the URL
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $whaturl);
//Execute the fetch
$data = curl_exec($ch);
//Close the connection
curl_close($ch);

$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($data);
$fb = $xml->feed->entry['circulation'];

//end get cool feedburner count
?>

The next line of PHP needs to be located where you want the subscriber count number to appear. This code needs to occur after the code above for it to work.

I borrowed this code from Mark over at 45n5 so thanks Mark.

This post is from the Newsniche website and should not be reproduced elsewhere. Why not subscribe to the RSS feed and get this information delivered straight to your News reader.

Countdown to DEAD SILENCE - the movie!

How creepy is this widget?!!!!

--His eyes move when your cursor is idle,
--his eyes follow your cursor when your cursor is close to his face, and
--CLICK ON HIS HEAD!!!!! IT BOBBLES!!!!!

CREEPY!!!!

See the widget on the Dead Silence movie page inside MySpace at:

www.myspace.com/deadsilencemovie

Get this widget!

Steep and Cheap Widget 1.10

A widget that will display the latest item on the SteepAndCheap.com web site

About Steep and Cheap Widget
A widget that will display the latest item on the SteepAndCheap.com web site. The item name, picture and price are displayed, together with a gauge for the number of items available for purchase and the percentage off the MSRP for that item.

Clicking on the description will take you to the site where this can be purchased.

Rolling the mouse over the item image will show the description of that item in the same window.

The widget provides the ability to set a “refresh” time in case it is displayed continuously. Normally the refresh happens every time the widget becomes visible.

Countdown to DEAD SILENCE - the movie!

Get this widget!

Daniusoft Digital Video Converter 2.0.24.0 (Demo)

Will convert between popular video formats with ease. read more

SpringWidgets loves iGoogle

There is a lot of press today on Google Homepages... oops... I mean "iGoogle"

Since we at SpringWidgets are really big fans of Google and everything they do. I thought this would be a great time to officially say how much we love the iGoogle page by letting everyone know that we have recently added in support for automatic posting of all SpringWidgets into your personalized iGoogle page!

Just choose the widget you are interested in, configure it however you like it to look and function and then select the Google icon in the share it box.

The whole process takes only a few seconds and is one of the easiest ways to put one of our widgets on a page that we have available. Way to go Google!

With all the recent focus on widgets, it's not surprising that everyone is building a widget destination of some sort. We at SpringWidgets will continue to build support for each new destination as APIs become available and look forward to helping enable 2007 truly being the year of the widget.

Here is my iGoogle page. Complete with today's MLB games and a countdown to the next episode of NBC's Heroes!

Image to PDF Dynamic Link Library 2.22 (Demo)

It provides the ultimate flexibility and exposes the full functionality read more

SpringWidgets Blog is Here!!!!!

SpringWidgets Blog is Here!!!!!
We're using the tools available to speed up our communication process. We'll be using this as our What's Up?, New and Cool, Future "stuff" blog so you don't have to crawl through the Forums if you don't want to (of course, feel free, if you like . . . either's cool).

The "wizards" (as I like to call them), aka our development team will add info here as well . . . so keep checking back.

The Real Hidden Value of Old Post Traffic

Since creating my Weekly Digest, I’m forced to look through my blog stats on a regular basis, something I’ve been loath to do for many years. Most of it doesn’t interest me as I’ve been doing this too long to worry over the micro-statistics, but I’ve been watching an interesting trend that has now turned [...]

Old blog posts you’ve published with links to my blog content continue to bring me traffic, sometimes even a year or more after publishing.

Here’s some examples.

In January 2007, Smashing Magazine wrote a best of January 2007 list featuring my article Designing a WordPress Theme From Scratch, the 67th post published on this blog. What a fantastic way to start off my new year with a gift that continues to give. This was followed up in February 2007 with Smashing Magazine released “83 Beautiful WordPress Themes You Probably Haven’t Seen Yet” with a link to the same article. The oldest referral was in September 2006 for their The List of Lists for More Must-Have Bookmarklets published October 2005.

Why should I care about old blog posts linking to my old posts? All these continue to bring in traffic consistently. Today, each of these three incoming referral links brought in a combination of 67 people.

I’ve been a huge fan of Darren Rowse of Probloger and have been honored to guest blog for him on several ocassions. Yet, it isn’t my guest blog posts that bring in the most traffic from his site but his two blog posts featuring highlights from my month long series on WordPress Plugins in February 2007, one on monetizing Plugins links to Monetizing WordPress Plugins and the other a recommendation to check out Lists of Your Favorite WordPress Plugins. These two incoming links consistently bring in traffic every day, even after over a year.

I write full time for the Blog Herald and you would think that a lot of my posts there bring in a ton of traffic to Lorelle on WordPress. Yet, only one ever shows up on the chart on a regular basis. Writing and Publishing Code in Your WordPress Blog Posts written in July 2007 is the winner for referrals from the Blog Herald by a wide margin.

My work on this blog has brought a ton of awards, honors, and being on lists, but no list continues to drive in traffic more than the Top 25 Blogs About Blogging by Daily Blog Tips published in May 2007. I’m often embarrassed by these but a part of me would think that being nominated and winning some of the blogosphere’s top awards would bring in more traffic than a list of the top blogs about blogging from Technorati. I guess you are only as good as your last blog post, not award.

chain links As I dug through the new WordPress.com stats feature for historical summaries of my blog’s incoming referrals, I noticed that Lifehacker did an article on content theft in March 2007 featuring What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content, which continues to point new traffic my direction. While I have other articles that attract a lot of consistent traffic, this one article has incoming links from an amazingly diverse collection of websites, blogs, forums, bookmarking sites, and social site submission services from around the world, including Digg. Two years after it was published, there is rarely a day that goes by that someone doesn’t link to and recommend that article as a resource for tips on how to respond to a copyright violation. As of today, there are 206 trackback links published on the post from blogs with trackback capability. The article gets more traffic and attention now than when it was originally published as more and more people are getting their blog content scraped. Makes it worth the four months I spent fussing and verifying everything in that article, and my anxiety that the only comments would come from the “Internet is free” crowd. I’m still so proud of how much that article has helped so many.

I also found out that I was FAMOUS. I was listed in Wikipedia in an article on bookmarklets, which directed visitors to More Must-Have Bookmarklets published in October 2005, though it is no longer listed. I wonder why? Still, it brought in a lot of traffic for a very long time - enough to push it high into the all-time incoming stats list.

In an amusing twist of creative backlinking and cross blog communication, Staska.net resorted my list of the favorite Wordpress Plugins as defined by users into a statistical chart that highlighted the top 30 WordPress Plugins in the Blogosphere in March 2007 and that list continues to drive traffic my way. What a gift and contribution to my month long series on Plugins.

There are so many bloggers I’m grateful to for their continued, and unwitting, support of my blog like WPBits, Christine Davis, Jan of Circular Communication, Best Blogs on WordPress blog, kl3tt.de, and…oh, the list is very long. Thank you all, no matter if you send me one or one thousand links to any of my posts, no matter how old they are. Each link is appreciated.

In true WordPress-love-in style, the oldest, consistent traffic link referral comes from someone I hold close to my WordPress heart: Kaf of Guff.Szub.net. He didn’t write about me or my blog in his article on his popular Post Templates by Category WordPress Plugin, as Lorelle on WordPress debuted a month later. However, in December 2006, someone in the comments recommended my article, Creating Multiple Single Posts for Different Categories, which, if memory serves, was a team effort in which he helped along with other fine WordPress fellows. A lot of people head to that article about his Plugin and track their way to my blog from the recommendation from the comments. Proof that a link from almost anywhere can be a good link.

What a world we weave when first we conceive to link.

Site Search Tags: blogging tips, blog writing, links, backlinks, incoming links, referral links, the power of the link

Subscribe Via Feedburner Subscribe by Email
Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.

How to style an Atom Feed

Don?t Write Away Your Rights

Don?t Write Away Your Rights
Jonathan Bailey has done it again with a superb guidelines article on the Blog Herald called Don’t Sign Away Your Rights, which bloggers need to read now. Many bloggers dream about getting a recurring guest blogging position. Whether paid or unpaid, many bloggers toil in relative obscurity for years before being offered a chance to write [...]

Jonathan Bailey has done it again with a superb guidelines article on the Blog Herald called Don’t Sign Away Your Rights, which bloggers need to read now.

Many bloggers dream about getting a recurring guest blogging position. Whether paid or unpaid, many bloggers toil in relative obscurity for years before being offered a chance to write for a large site.

However, the excitement of being offered a new writing position often causes bloggers, as well as other writers, to make serious mistakes. When they receive their first contract, they either do not read the document carefully or, in a desperate bid to please their new employers, sign the contract with little regard to the rights that they surrender.

Once your hard earned blogging reputation puts your writing, photography, graphics, and/or cartoons in demand by other online and print media, contracts enter your life. As a blogger, you are used to controlling your own content, rights, and publishing.

Do it for someone else, especially for pay, and now you are under the control of someone else and what they want out of it. What they often want is total and long term control of your hard work in words.

As Jonathan recommends, pay close attention to the details of the contract. Give away nothing that puts your career and future income at risk or loss. Don’t let the excitement of the “I’m going to be published” take away your common sense. You have the right to edit contracts and change things.

Moving from blogger to professional writer happens the moment you get your first pay check for writing. Make sure you read the fine print so your hard work is protected, and you clearly know what you are signing away when you sign for the income from writing.