Well it’s out, Wordpress 2.3 has hit the internet and it packs a few great new features along with internal code cleanup and bug squashing. Here are a few of the highlights to the release.

1) Advanced Editor
The WYSIWYG editor evolves and now includes eleven new ‘advanced’ functions. Just hit the little colored squares icon on the right of the main toolbar and you’ll get the additional buttons.

Included are:
Format dropdown for header tags.
Underline
Align Full
Text Color
Paste as plain text.
Paste from Word. Fixing my previous complaint.
Clear Formatting.
Clean Up Code. OMG I think I’m in love.
Special characters.
Undo and Redo.

2) Tagging
Ultimate Tag Warrior is no longer needed now that Wordpress will do tagging. Actually, Ultimate Tag Warrior had many more features so I guess it can’t be ruled out all together. But the new tagging functionality is nice. I can see people getting confused with tags and categories now as they are very similar.

A nice touch is the ability for Wordpess’ tagging system to import tags from other plugins. The Wordpress team was really thinking on this one.

Everybody loves the social media site Digg, or they think they do. It happens to be the social news site that everyone wants to get on because of it’s history, possible traffic and exposure that can come from it. However, Digg is not good for a lot of industries. Instead, look for a Pligg site that is a better match for your news.

What’s Pligg? Pligg is an open source social news & voting software. Basically Digg. Anyone can download it for free and install it on their servers. Sites are popping up all over the internet that are like Digg, only targeted to different topics. This means that their users may be a better match for your stories and you may have better success with a Pligg powered site than Digg.

Pligg is powering sites such as:
Sphinn - For SEO
Foxwire - Firefox & Thunderbird news.
Buddhist Events
Hot2Canada - Canadian News
Killer Startups - Covering internet startup companies.
Blogg Buzz - What’s hot on the internet right now.
Design Float - Design tutorials and tricks.
Dealigg - Social Bargain Hunting
Blogs4God - Christian Blogs
Vroomer - Auto News
The Knit Pligg
YardBarker - Sports

Looking at the success of a blog can be done in many ways and you should have a clear understanding of what you want out of the blog in order to get to those results. Here are a few blogging key performance indicators.

Self Satisfaction
This is great goal. Some people do really just post for the fun of it. They are not concerned with readership, money or anything like that. They just post because they want to. However, this goal usually becomes obsolete after a while. Eventually, you wonder why you’re blogging.

Community
Blogging can be a great way to connect with people and share information. Comments are a great way to interact with your visitors. For some, this is their goal, to be informative and helpful and gain respect. If this is your goal, consider how you are writing your posts. They should be open and honest and give readers the feeling that their input is valued. Ask questions at the end of the post and showcase top commentators on your site.

When is the last time you stopped to think about the health of your feed? Maybe it’s time to head over to the Feed Validator and ensure it’s in peek performance.

While checking a sites feed the other day I ran across a validation error. It seems that Firefox’s built in feed reader couldn’t render the feed. Google Reader got around the issue, but I wasn’t sure about other readers. One way or another, the feed was in need of a fix.

A quick run though the Feed Validator and it spit out the problem; a blank line before the XML declaration.

The nice thing about the Feed Validator tool is that it gives you helpful hits on what to look into. It said:

Solution

• Check your wp-rss2.php and wp-atom.php files for blank lines outside of <? and ?> bracketed sections.
• Check your wp-config.php file for blank lines outside of <? and ?> bracketed sections.
• Check your theme’s functions.php file for blank lines outside of <? and ?> bracketed sections.
• One by one, disable plugins and revalidate until you isolate the one causing the problem.

While out at SES San Jose, I couldn’t pass up the SEO Through Blogs & Feeds session. On the panel were Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts, Rick Klau from FeedBurner (now Google), Doug Hay of Expansion Plus Inc. and Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR.

Here are a few of the blog optimization tips they gave out.

• Ensure your feeds are showing the full post, not just excerpts.
• Up the number of items in your feed from 10 to 20 to give users more.
• Consider promoting other feeds such as categories & comments.
• Be sure your blog has a good internal linking structure. This can be done through category names, tag names or linking to your other posts inside new posts.
• The date archives are kind of pointless, instead, use good categories or tags to organize content.
• Promote your top 10 posts.
• Add nofollow to date based archives and comments links to help redirect search engines to other, more valuable, areas of your blog.
• Claim your blog at Technorati.
• Use the SEO Title Tag plugin.
• When naming your blog, use keywords if possible as that’ll help out in the log run.

The title tag is probably one of the most important items on your blog posts. It not only attracts visitors, but is also used to help determine how the post ranks. However, what’s good for search engines, isn’t always good to attract users. The good news is that with Wordpress blogs, you can target the best of both worlds a lot easier.

To do this, you’d create a post with a title that is targeted towards getting people from blog search engines or grab their attention in feed readers. Something that jumps out a little or that makes the reader want more.

Then, using SEO Title Tag, you can customize the page title for search engines. This may be a bit more formal and include a few more keyword phrases. Still very relevant to the content, but maybe not as edgie as the actual post title.

As an example, your post title (the one that shows up in feed readers and blog search engines) can be: How I Royally Screwed My Site on Google. Now, for the actual page title you could say: Hidden Text - My SEO Experience and Google Lesson Learned.

Getting the feed for a particular label in Blogger is much harder than it should be. Really, Blogger should just give them to us, but instead, they send us to help documents that may not help.  To make it even better, just because your label feeds use to work, they may no longer work as I found out the other day for a client. I did my research and here is how you can get your own label feeds on Blogger blogs.

If you have a Blogspot blog:
http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/labelname

Just be sure to change blogname to match your blog. The labelname is what appears in the URL of your blog label page.

Example URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/search/label/personalization
Example Feed: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/personalization

If you host your own blog:
http://www2.blogger.com/feeds/blogid/posts/default/-/labelname

The trick here is that you need to find your blog id. To do this, login to your Blogger dashboard and click on the new post link. In the URL bar your blog ID will show up and it’ll look something like this:
http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=1234567980123456789

Example URL: http://www.yourblog.com/label/personalization
Example Feed: http://www2.blogger.com/feeds/1234567980123456789/posts/default/-/personalization

If you have spaces in your label, your feed URL would look like the following.

As blogs become more and more mainstream, issues are coming up that blog software is not quite ready to take on. One of them is formatting issues created by copying and pasting content from Microsoft Word, Explorer, Outlook or even from Firefox!

The issue is that users are creating or finding content with other programs, then copying and pasting it into the WYSIWYG editor in their blog software. When that happens, the editor does it’s best to keep the same formatting including fonts, font sizes, line spacing, colors and much more. Any content copied from a Microsoft document will also come across with hidden, Microsoft only, tags such as the <o:p> and [endif] tags. This formatting then overrides the blogs default font, size and formatting tags giving your blog an inconsistent look and feel.

Here are a few examples:

The first one is what the code looks like when copied from Word. Can you tell what it says?

The second one is what the code should look like in Wordpress’ WYSIWYG editor. Much nicer.

Here are a few of the inconsistent layout options that can result. There are different fonts, sizes and use bolding.

Wordpress.com is all the rage, but Blogger has been around for quite a while and there are a few perks to using it. Here are a few I could come up with.

1. Editable Templates - No extra fee here, you can customize your Blogger templates to meet your needs.
2. Easier Widgets - This one comes from Anthony who feels that the ability to add widgets (or page elements) to Blogger is easier than over at Wordpress.
3. AdSense - Blogger makes adding ads quite easy. Before you know it, you’ll be making a quarter a day!
4. Video Upload - Currently in draft mode, but Blogger is going to allow direct video uploading into your post. The functionality is much like you already do for images. Sadly it doesn’t also publish to YouTube from what I can tell.
5. FeedBurner - FeedBurner functionality is built right in now that Google owns FeedBurner. More integration is probably coming too.
6. Publish via FTP - This is a big one, the ability to FTP your files to a directory on your own site is great. This means you can host your own blog, on your own site, regardless of your server setup.

Have you ever had to install Google Analytics on each page of a website manually and wondered if you got every page? Or wondered if a new client’s site already had Google Analytics running? If you are a developer, than you know a quick peek at the source and you’ll know in no time. But for those that don’t know what to look for, you can install the GA? bookmarklet and it’ll do the checking for you and report back.

The GA? bookmarklet code is a small piece of JavaScript that simply checks to see if Google Analytics is installed on the page you have loaded in your browser. If it is, it’ll return “Yes, Google Analytics is installed on this page” if not, it’ll say “No, Google Analytics is not installed on this page.”

Install GA? by dragging the link below to you bookmarks bar or right click on it and adding it to your bookmarks.

GA?

Now, I had plans of making this a Firefox extension that automatically checked, or a Greasemonkey script, but both didn’t work out. There is more research to be done in those areas. If you already know how to make it work, please do tell me.