Blog Tips

"Google Browser Size" revisits the optimum blog width

In a previous post, we looked at the optimum “blog real estate”: the surface of your blog which is visible on a visitor’s browser window. I mentioned that, according to the statistics from 350,000 visitors my main blog, 91% was using a monitor width of 1,024 pixels or more. Based on that, I suggested you lay out your blog to a maximum width of  1,000 pixels (or anything between 950 and 1,000).

Google Labs just released “Google Browser Size”, a simple and coarse visualization of that recommendation: it takes a faded image of your site, and overlays it with a set of contours, showing “how many people see what of your site”. For example, the “90%” contour means that 90% of people visiting Google have their browser window open to at least this size or larger. The tool confirms our claim: 90% (I said 91%) see 1,000  pixels wide.

My first reaction was: “OMG, I am missing 10% of my audience with all my sites having 1,000 px widths.” Then again, “the useful” and “the optimal” are sometimes two different things: I would not want to change my blog width to 600 px, just to reach that 1% who still uses ancient hardware or software. Nor would I change it to 800 px to reach that extra 5%.

And that is not what this tool encourages you to do neither: Mostly, Google Browser Size is a handy tool to remind you which important parts of your homepage fall outside of how many people’s browser window. If your ‘donate now’ or similar buttons on a fundraising blog fail to be hit 10% of your audience, then I’d suggest to move it.

(Google + Feedburner) = Death_of (Twitterfeed + RSS2Twitter +DLVR.it) ?

I have posted before about how you can capitalize on your Twitter social community to increase traffic onto your blog. Regularly tweeting the new posts on your blog is the secret. I tweet a few thousand posts per month, accounting for over 100,000+ visits on my aggregator blogs.

What tools are on the market to automatically convert RSS feeds to Twitter, and which is the best? An overview.

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One of the great many things one can use Twitter for, is to share pictures “on-the-fly” with your social community: From about anywhere in the world, I can take a picture with my mobile phone and within seconds post it on Twitter, for all my followers to see.

The most popular picture-posting tool is Twitpic. This free Twitter utility converts pictures Emailed from your mobile phone into a post. Each time a new picture is posted, a link to it is automatically tweeted from your Twitter account.

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Selfhosting a blog is like building your own house

In a previous post I touched on the subject of selfhosting in a series about selecting the blog platform suited for your needs. The subject is important enough to elaborate a bit more.

When you start a blog, you have the choice of either using your blogservice to host your blog, or to rent server space yourself. Of the popular blog softwares, WordPress.org and Movable Type allow you to use your own server. Others, WordPress.com, Tumblr, Blogger and Typepad don’t give you that option, and will run your blog on their servers.

Intuitively, organisations, and the more “independent minded” bloggers would be inclined to choose for selfhosting, but the choice often is made uninformed. Let me share some of my personal experiences.

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Sites linking back to your blog’s homepage or to a post, are a measure of success for a blog, as we explained before. It is always interesting to check the backlinks, to see what are others saying about your blog, what has been quoted or commented on.

As you know, you can find backlinks via the Google backlink checker, Google Blog search, and the webmaster utilities from Google, Yahoo and Bing. However these require you to check online regularly. And if you have a few hundred backlinks, it is difficult to pick out the most recent ones.

There is a way to get an automated Email notification when new backlinks become active, using Google Alerts. And it is for free. The only thing you need is a Gmail account, the log-in credentials Google uses for all its services.

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