I'd Rather Be Writing » Feedburner

Feedburner Add Customizable Subject Lines to Email Subscriptions

Tom Johnson — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 05:56:11 +0000

Feedburner Add Customizable Subject Lines to Email Subscriptions. Holy smokes, I’ve been waiting for Feedburner to roll out this feature forever. For all of your subscribed to email updates of my posts, you can now look forward to customized subject lines of the actual post, rather than just seeing the blog name.

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WordPress Tip: “Crunching” and “Burning”

Tom Johnson — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 22:30:13 +0000

With a title like crunching and burning, it may sound like I’m writing about a painful illness, such as having leprosy with third degree burns and walking on sharp gravel. But actually this post is about the terms some companies use to try to make their applications look super-cool. If you’re a web 2.0 company trying to establish your product as the bomb, all the rage, critical to being hip, etc. you can’t use generic names and emotionless adjectives. You want to conjure up some inner appeal to coolness.

So when you upload images into WordPress, you see a progress bar that says “Crunching.” Crunching is sexy. Crunching sounds exciting. Crunching makes you feel like you’re on the edge of some new functionality that is so revolutionary, no other term can quite describe it. But really, all crunching means is resizing. When you upload images in WordPress, the image editor resizes the original image into three separate images: thumbnail, medium, and large.

"Crunching" is really just resizing

The problem with using the term “crunching” rather than “resizing” is that, although it’s cool, most users don’t actually realize what’s going on. They don’t realize that they can set the dimensions that the image is being resized to. They don’t realize this because crunching is vague. Crunching is eating grape nuts, or stepping on cheerios, or feeding tickets into Chuck-E-Cheese counting machines. Crunching rarely means resizing. The tradeoff for cool interface terms is confusion.

I’ve been uploading images into WordPress for my posts for months, always watching the crunching bar extend across the screen. Just last week I made the connection between the dimensions under Settings > Media and the sizes that the uploaded images “crunch” to. Making this connection has been tremendously helpful, and I can’t help but wonder if better terms would have helped me see this connection earlier.

This page doesn't even use the word "crunching"

Even if WordPress kept the cute term “crunching,” they should change the title of this page from Image Sizes to Crunching Sizes, or something.

Burning

Burning is another great example. Feedburner allows you to “burn” a feed, and when you go to their site, you’re presented with a large field that says “Burn a feed right now?” It sounds cool to burn a feed. I’ve got a few things I’d like to burn, and the idea of watching a feed burn right before my eyes appeals to the pyro inside of me. Yeah, let’s burn my feed. Right now. Burn baby burn. But like crunching, “burning” in the context of RSS feeds means almost nothing.

"Burning" is really just routing

In fact, were Feedburner not the only application in its class (surprisingly), other services using clearer terms might fare a lot better. When you “burn” a feed, you’re really just routing your feed through Feedburner. You can track hits to the Feedburner feed because you’re routing it through them. Because your original feed is routed through Feedburner, you can keep the same Feedburner feed even if your original feed changes. Does “route” communicate all that? Not really. But it communicates more than “burn.”

Companies face tough decisions. Give something a cool name, and you create a little community that speaks a unique language. This unique language may give users a sense of pride and exclusivity, possibly. On the flip side, the unfamiliar terms exclude newcomers and create confusion.

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Tip: Automatically Push Your Latest Blog Posts Across Twitter

Tom Johnson — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 16:57:26 +0000

I know Twitter isn’t for everyone (even though David Pogue on the New York Times recently praised Twitter’s ability to quickly gather information from your followers.) But if you have a blog, you’d be crazy not to provide a Twitter feed for it. On my blog, I give people three main subscription options: RSS, e-mail, or Twitter. Granted, with Twitter they also get other microthoughts, but they also get my post titles.

It’s generally a poor practice to use Twitter only to syndicate your RSS feed. But having some information on Twitter is better than nothing. Here’s a simple way to automatically set up Twitter to publish your latest blog posts:

Make sure you’re routing your RSS feed through Feedburner. This isn’t essential, but you’ll kick yourself later if you neglect Feedburner, since you’ll have no ability to track your followers (nor change your feed if you change domains).
Sign up for Twitter, of course.
Go to Twitterfeed.com. To get through the Twitterfeed door, you need an open ID (because they’re too cool for regular username and password signup). The myvidoop open ID service is most amusing, as it allows you to has you choose images as passwords. However, if you already have a Yahoo login, use that.
Click the Create New Feed link in Twitterfeed’s simple interface.

Twitterfeed allows you to push your RSS feed across Twitter

Enter your Twitter ID, your blog’s RSS feed, and how you want the post titles sent across Twitter.
On your site, provide users with a “Subscribe to Twitter” option.

That’s it. Now once you’re on Twitter, occassionally toss in a thought or two that you have throughout the day. As Pogue counsels, don’t tell us what you just did, if it’s something as mundane as eating a peanut-butter sandwich. People aren’t so interested in the mundane details of your life, but they are intrigued by your unique perspectives on those details.

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How to Get Everyone and Their Dog/Family/Friends Reading and Subscribing to Your Blog — 10 Tips

Tom Johnson — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 06:34:04 +0000

Just a few days after someone begins blogging seriously, he or she starts hungering after subscribers and comments. We want readership, we want lots of people visiting our site, reading our posts, subscribing to our feed, and regularly leaving comments. This, my friend Clyde says, is the “payoff” of blogging.

Although I try to write for a higher purpose outside of trying to get more readers and comments, I must admit that the interactivity of blogging is what makes it fun. To this end, I offer ten tips for increasing your readership:

Be patient. My friend Ben Minson is just starting out with his Gryphon Mountain blog. He currently has 4 subscribers, but he’s been writing excellent posts for the past 2 weeks, and he’s starting to get noticed. My wife has a witty, fun-to-read blog (whataboutmomblog.com), but only has 51 subscribers. To people who get discouraged at a lack of subscribers, I say be patient. It takes time to accrue readership. I have ~~471~~ 472 posts on my blog.
Use Twitter and Twitter Tools. Twitter is the most surprisingly useful tool I’ve seen. I’m starting to check it almost as much as Google Reader. When I publish a new post, through the Twitter Tools plugin, that post is automatically published as a tweet on Twitter. Lots of cool people (e.g., Robert Scoble, Darren Rowse, Chris Pirillo) will follow you on Twitter if you start following them. Check out the Twitterati here. But really, you want to follow people like yourself. Through your tweets, they’ll pay closer attention to you and your posts.
Search-engine-optimize your posts. My site stats show about 65%+ traffic from Google. Google finds you by matching keywords that searchers use with keywords for your site (obviously). Pack your titles with search engine keywords. And use the WordPress SEO plugin to differentiate the title your readers see from the title Google sees. For example, this post’s Google title is more generic: Increase Subscribers to Your Blog — Tips for Increasing the Number of Readers. Boring, I know. But it’s the kind of string people search for. I want to be found.
Link abundantly in your posts. People check you out when you link to them. We’re always curious to know the contexts in which we’re being mentioned. The pingback brings people to your site, and if you look interesting, they subscribe. You’ll notice I’ve linked to everyone I mentioned in this post. Linking to people is like tapping them on the shoulder to get their attention.
Make intriguing titles. I find myself reading posts with interesting titles (for example, Dear WordPress, A Response to Your Letter). Even when the post is outside my category of interest, I’ll click a clever title out of curiosity. Copyblogger also has excellent advice about titles. I think learning to create intriguing titles is an important art in drawing readers in. (Holly Harkness reminded me of this lately.) Don’t worry so much about keywords and use the WordPress SEO plugin I mentioned in #3.
Catch the attention of people with influence. If you catch the right people’s attention, they can mention you on their site and boost your readership far more than you can alone. One of my earlier posts caught the attention of Joshua Porter (Bokardo), and overnight my readership grew by 80+ new subscribers. Some of the people I interview for podcasts (e.g., Anne Rockley) mention the podcast to their large readership base as well.
Use the Feedburner chiclet to watch your readership. I don’t watch site stats as much as readership stats. I’m convinced that good posts will naturally attract new readers. If my readership shrinks, I know my writing stinks. If it grows, it’s because the posts must somehow be worthwhile. People naturally link to interesting posts, which grows your readership. Without Feedburner, I don’t see how you can measure readership at all. (By the way, the numbers always artificially dip on the weekends. I am still inching toward my 1,000 mark.)
Leave comments on other blogs. I always check out the blogs of those who comment on my posts. And I try to leave comments on posts I enjoy reading, if only to let the person know that I read it. Commenting on as many blogs as possible is a tedious strategy for gaining readers, but when you’re new, you need make yourself visible. No doubt you read blogs already, so add a comment. Other commenters are also attracted by an interesting comment you leave, which leads more people back to your site.
Write a few home run posts. The best post I’ve ever written was 20 Usability Tips for Your Blog: Condensed from Dozens of Bloggers’ Experiences. It has 293 comments and trackbacks. I spent weeks writing it — it was the core of my presentation at least year’s Doc Train conference. It is certainly my home run post. Everyone has a home run post inside them. Rhonda’s is a little post about blueberry muffins, which has surprisingly attracted thousands of hits. When you write it, your readership will take off.
Write useful content. A vague assertion, I know. But if your information isn’t useful, practical, or somehow noteworthy and interesting, no one will subscribe. Part of the appeal of sites like Lifehacker and The Blog Herald is that they provide useful information.

Bonus Tip: If you want quick exposure, write a guest post for my blog. Simply contact me and send me either your post or an idea for one.

photo by cogdogblog