Social media optimization is a big right now. There are a lot of sites that want to be featured on Digg, Del.icio.us, Facebook or one of the many other social networks. However, getting there isn’t always that easy. The first steps though is ensuring you have social media links on your blog to make sharing that content easy. My favorite tool of the moment for this is ShareThis.

ShareThis use to be a plugin for Wordpres that injected social media icons, and an email this, link into your posts. It worked very well but was Wordpress only until recently. It’s since been re-launched as a service that’ll work across any blogging platform or website.

Signing up for a ShareThis account is really easy. They just ask for your email address and a password. This information is then used to track the ShareThis button performance on your site. It’ll keep track of who’s clicking which options, your most popular content and other visitor information. However, the reports are not yet available for the public but should be by the end of the year.

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.

If you missed the announcement just before the Fourth of July holiday weekend, FeedBurner Pro is now free. That’s one of those good things about a Google acquisition; things become free. All users now get Pro stats and MyBrand for feeds.

Honestly, I never quite saw why the Pro features were so great. MyBrand is a cool thing, but I prefer to promote and use my own feed URL that has been redirected to the FeedBurner version.  I do this with the FeedSmith Wordpress plugin from FeedBurner.

The two additional stats items do sound nice though. Reach estimates the number of users that interact with our feed (including feed search engine or news filter sites) and we get better click though stats.

Now everyone is a Pro at FeedBurner thanks to Google.

[tags]FeedBurner,Google[/tags]

Safari 3, now for Mac and PC, recently came out in beta form. Included in this release was the ability for users to use visual editors also know as WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors. No longer do Safari users have to know code to make basic formatting in blog posts.

Safari 3.0.1 Beta on Windows XP

I’ve tested it in Wordpress 2.2 and it works great.* As far as I understand, previous versions of Wordpress don’t support Safari’s rich text editing. Testing it out under 2.0.10 confirms this.

I also tested out Blogger and had no issues. They seem to be on board with the Safari 3 crowd too.

TypePad however didn’t seem to support rich text editing with Safari yet.

With Safari 3 being so new, and brand new to the Windows world, blog software creators are working in Safari support as they feel the need.

If you use TypePad, or other software that doesn’t support Safari’s rich text editing yet, drop and email to their support so they know your interested.

I had a client recently ask me about a blog that was using TypePad’s domain mapping feature and it was causing duplicate homepage URLs for the blog. The first was to http://blog.clientsite.com and the second was to http://blog.clientsite.com/blog/. They were concerted that their Technorati rank and linking efforts were being compromised. And, of course, they wanted a fix.

I did some digging around it and it turns out that it’s the way the domain mapping was setup in TypePad that was causing the issue. It can be fixed, but there are consequences.

In the client’s TypePad account there are actually two blogs, each with a unique URL.

1. http://blog.clientsite.com/blog/
2. http://blog.clientsite.com/my_weblog/

Out of the two blogs above, #1 is setup as the ‘home blog’ meaning that it can be accessed via the main URL (http://blog.clientsite.com/) and the unique URL (http://blog.clientsite.com/blog/).

When the domain mapping was setup, the entire account was mapped to blog.clientsite.com, thus the home and unique blog URLs were included.

If just #1 was mapped to blog.clientsite.com, then no /blog/ folder would have show up.

Not every host has the ability to install and run Wordpress. Some hosts use Windows servers where PHP and MySQL are not usually included. So then what? What is the next best blogging software?

My first thought is Blogger. Since the new version was released, it’s back in the running. It has the ability to post to an external site in a directory which is a plus. I’d rather stay away from sub-domains if possible. Blogger also has labels (aka categories), editable templates and enough features for most bloggers. Plus it’s free. The downsides is that Blogger isn’t realy seen as a professional platform and when they have problems, you won’t be able to do much about.

Another one is TypePad. It has a domain mapping feature but I don’t think it can map to a folder. It has to be routed to either a domain or a sub-domain which is unfortunate. If I’m wrong, someone please tell me. I’d love be wrong in this case. Either way, to get domain mapping you need at least a Plus account ($8.95/m) and access to update your DNS records though your domain registrar. Other than that, it’s a pretty decent choice.

I’m declaring the 13th of each month as the unofficial blog backup day. Meaning that you should login to your blog software and download a backup of all posts. Also, if you have access to the template files, back those up too.

Avoiding issues are much easier than trying to fix them once they happen. I’ve never seen a blog just delete itself, but I have heard of people’s hosting accounts suddenly having a hardware failure and are non-recoverable. If you don’t have a backup of your files, who does?

Yes, a good host will make backups, but that’s placing your trust fully in a third party. What if their backups are in the same office as your website and they have a fire? All is lost. If you do have a good host, then a secondary set of backups never hurt and you’ll have them at your fingertips at all times.

Ok, so this is a perfect gloom post for Friday the 13th, but you must realize that technology isn’t perfect. Your blog could go down and if you have no backup, then you’ll have to start from zero. All your hard work down the drain.

How do you backup a blog?

For Wordpress blogs, use the the WordPress Database Backup plugin. This plugin is included with all installs of Wordpress starting with version 2 I believe. Once enabled, you just go tot he backups section of the manage screen, make a few selections and it’ll backup your blog posts to your desktop or email. I wouldn’t suggest backing up to the server as that won’t do you any good if your web server goes down.

For Wordpress.com blogs, click on Manage and then Export.

With TypePad just got to the Import/Export area on the Manage tab of your admin area. Here you’ll be able to export all posts to your desktop. [backup support page]

Movable Type users can login to their admin area and click on Import/Export and then select Export.

Blogger doesn’t allow an export of all your posts like other services. However, you can edit your template with a bit of custom code to output all posts on one page, then save that page and revert back to your old template. Not the best solution but it should work. [Blogger How-To Page]