Blog Tips

With the help several people, I spend a lot of time collecting and updating my list of nonprofit blogs, which I publish on my Delicious list. Over the past months, this list grew to 549 blogs.

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"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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I wrote before on how to use Twitter to drive traffic to your blog. I also published a short case study about the influence Twitter-generated traffic had onto my blogs.

Most of the evidence of Twitter-to-Blog traffic was circumstantial though: Google Analytics only tracks referral site traffic. As More and more people use a desktop or mobile applications, most of the visits from people clicking on Twitter-ed links are registered as “direct traffic”, and not originating from Twitter. Quid?

Now the mystery is solved, thanks to bit.ly, the URL shortener I use for all my Tweets. Bit.ly always tracked the clicks per link. Via their website you could track exactly that: the clicks per link, which looked like this:

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