When you’re in your Feedburner console, it’s easy to see the rise and fall of your own blog subscribers under the “Analyze” tab.  Now, click on the “Publicize” tab. If you’ve activated either “FeedCount” or “Awareness API” — you’re in for a treat.

Go visit FeedCompare. This site lets you compare the subscription history of any Feedburner feed that has either the “Publicize” or “Awareness API” option activated. You can check your own feed’s subscriber rate over time — and maybe even spy on a few competitors!

What this means. You can check the accuracy of the subscriber claims of quite a few Feedburner feeds.  Many times, bloggers deliberately check the “Publicize” or “Awareness API” option — often because they want to show off their superb subscriber numbers.

But a few times, I’ve caught a few sites that have been, ah, fudging their numbers, shall we say? In order to sell advertising, a few blogs boast higher numbers of subscribers than they actually have. FeedCompare lets you accurately check subscriber claims.

If you’d rather not have your own subscriber numbers be available to the general public, you’ll want to uncheck the appropriate options in your Feedburner dashboard. But if you’re selling advertising based on subscribers and growth — it’s a good idea to publish your subscriber numbers, anyway.

And, of course — if you’re selling numbers — you need to be honest about your numbers! Being open and transparent can help you — if you have a great story to tell!

How else will you use  tools like Feed Compare?

If I had it to do all over again — I would not put dates in my blog URL. It’s too late for me now — too much work to go back and 301 re-direct 100’s of pages. But when I start new blogs: I cannot recommend putting dates in the URL.

Aaron Wall, author of the extremely helpful SEOBook writes an article for Search Engine Land , explaining the four reasons why he doesn’t like dates in URLs. I agree wholeheartedly. Better looking. Better search…

Not that I have regrets or anything: but if you’re starting a new blog, skip the dates. 

There’s a difference between the name of a blog page and the title of your post. And it’s an important distinction.

The title of this post is “How to Shorten WordPress Page Names with Post Slugs”.

If you click on the title of this post, you will see the name of the page in the URL bar. The name of this page is:

 /shorten-wordpress-page-names/

Usually, Wordpress automatically takes your page title and makes it your page name…which can be a search engine friendly thing to do. But it can also be a problem, because…

Long titles that appeal to people might not appeal to search engines. And short titles that appeal to search engines might not appeal to people. 

Long, descriptive titles that get converted to long page names look spammy — which defy your search engine efforts. And short “keyword only” titles don’t appeal to people.

When you have a long title that appeals to PEOPLE — but not to search engines — use the WordPress Post Slug.

Shorten your page name to three-five descriptive words, and type it into the “Post Slug” area before you hit “Publish”.

Couldn’t be easier — or friendlier!

1. Instead, take a screen shot of an engaging frame of the video.
2. Link to the site that hosts it.
3. Ask your readers to watch it at YouTube (or SlideShare or whatever.)

Here’s why I quit embedding: many of my RSS subscribers request email updates instead of online feedreader updates.

Video embeds are slow to download on most email servers. (They slow down the blog, too!)

Try linking out instead of embedding in. This approach is kinder to your customers. It’s “pull” instead of “push”. 

And “not embedding” makes a blog load faster, too! 

Here’s a seven-second example of how it might look to link instead of embed:

Click on the image (yes, it’s a steamrolled tuba), and it takes you to the 7-second video. Push to play…

Simple. Fast. No email problems. No embed issues.

What’s not to like?

Today, I received my first stats report from Odiogo. Here’s a factoid:

Almost three times as many people downloaded my content than merely pressed the “Listen Now” option.

This indicates to me that people want to LISTEN LATER to written content. They’re ON THE GO.

Why else might you download the content?

Seriously — if you downloaded content from my Odiogo feed this past month, I want to hear from you. How did you use the download? And where? And when?

I upgraded my Wordpress installation at this blog. I’m at 2.3.1. I think I was about 10 versions behind the latest version. I’m bad.

What took me so long: I was scared. I thought it was going to be a major hassle. But including backing up my site and database, the entire process took 53 minutes. This included a 7 minute conversation with a colleague — so it wasn’t like I was totally focused, either. You can multi-task and do the upgrade.

Fifty three minutes, and my interface is much improved. And my new plugins work!

The new WordPress 2.3.1 is a mandatory upgrade with a security release. It also fixes some 20 odd bugs.

I should have done this months ago. If you’re procrastinating, stop it.

Just upgrade your Wordpress installation today. It is way easier that you think…

If you are going to comment at this site — or any other blog — please make sure you provide relevant comments. Anything else is blog spam.

What on earth does a blog spammer hope to achieve by typing in “good post” — along with their URL? How does this transparently faux approval advance the conversation? Am I supposed to be so flattered that I won’t care, and publish this fake praise?

My Askimet add-in has got my back. Your inane comments aren’t going to published here. Your efforts are a waste of everyone’s time : yours AND mine.

If you don’t have anything meaningful to contribute through a comment — then don’t!

Within a matter of hours, a newly-launched blog has hundreds of subscribers. (One post.)

Q: How did it happen?

A: The blogger has employees. (Or the blogger has a contract with the large employer…)

• The employer makes subscribing to the newly-minted blog an employment requisite.
• If an employee doesn’t subscribe within 72 hours, the employee is subtly harassed or even threatened.
• Employees are required to recruit at least one other subscriber through their personal “friends & family” network. It’s not spamming – it’s “viral” marketing.
• Vendors are ‘encouraged’ to subscribe. The threat to cancel future orders is implied.
• Vendors with blogs are ‘encouraged’ to rave about the newly minted blog in their blogs. Once again, the threat is implied.

Listen, all of us online Midwesterners — at one point or another — have furrowed our collective brows when we have been ‘encouraged’ to subscribe to “A-List” bloggers.

A-listers might be writing English, but they often talking in jargon that most Midwesterners just plain don’t understand.

But we’ll pretend to — and even strive to understand — for a while.

After all, we Midwesterners are polite.

But we don’t like implied threats. And we’re bored with almost constant in-circle New York or LA jargon.

We’ll eventually drop — but in the mean time: a couple thousand people see the spike. They wonder what the hub-bub is about.

So thousands subscribe. (After all, it’s free. And that’s about what it’s worth…)

Lots of high numbers breeds curiosity. So more people subscribe, comment, link. The buzz continues…over very little.

And that’s how the A-list (mostly) gets to be A-list.

It’s not much to be an A-list blogger.

If you have a publishing contract (for instance), you should have a huge subscriber base within a week — because your publisher will threaten just about every employee and vendor to subscribe and blog about you. If you don’t, you’ve just signed with a low-value publisher.

If you have a company with only 10 employees and you haven’t got a blog subscriber base of 100 within a week of launch, you should consider just going out of business altogether. You have no clout.

Within a matter of hours, a newly-launched blog has hundreds of subscribers. (One post.)

Q: How did it happen?

A: The blogger has employees. (Or the blogger has a contract with the large employer…)

• The employer makes subscribing to the newly-minted blog an employment requisite.
• If an employee doesn’t subscribe within 72 hours, the employee is subtly harassed or even threatened.
• Employees are required to recruit at least one other subscriber through their personal “friends & family” network. It’s not spamming – it’s “viral” marketing.
• Vendors are ‘encouraged’ to subscribe. The threat to cancel future orders is implied.
• Vendors with blogs are ‘encouraged’ to rave about the newly minted blog in their blogs. Once again, the threat is implied.

Listen, all of us online Midwesterners — at one point or another — have furrowed our collective brows when we have been ‘encouraged’ to subscribe to “A-List” bloggers.

A-listers might be writing English, but they often talking in jargon that most Midwesterners just plain don’t understand.

But we’ll pretend to — and even strive to understand — for a while.

After all, we Midwesterners are polite.

But we don’t like implied threats. And we’re bored with almost constant in-circle New York or LA jargon.

We’ll eventually drop — but in the mean time: a couple thousand people see the spike. They wonder what the hub-bub is about.

So thousands subscribe. (After all, it’s free. And that’s about what it’s worth…)

Lots of high numbers breeds curiosity. So more people subscribe, comment, link. The buzz continues…over very little.

And that’s how the A-list (mostly) gets to be A-list.

It’s not much to be an A-list blogger.

If you have a publishing contract (for instance), you should have a huge subscriber base within a week — because your publisher will threaten just about every employee and vendor to subscribe and blog about you. If you don’t, you’ve just signed with a low-value publisher.

If you have a company with only 10 employees and you haven’t got a blog subscriber base of 100 within a week of launch, you should consider just going out of business altogether. You have no clout.

That’s why I’m going to try something new at this blog. Earlier this month, I installed an add-in product called Lucia’s Link Love. Here’s what the add-in does:

After I accept 3 thoughtful, insightful, non-spammy comments from a commenter at this blog, the commenter becomes something of a trusted entity. So after three thoughtful posts, the nofollow tag assigned to their posted comments will automatically drop.

Huh? What’s that mean? In essence, this means that consistently thoughtful commenters get rewarded with some link love! Until now, all comments at this blog have the nofollow link to discourage spammers. But I don’t want to prevent legitimate commenters from commenting — and if you consistently provide relevant, poignant comments — why shouldn’t I pass on some PageRank to you for your time and trouble?

Anyway, I’m testing out this new add-in. If you have something relevant to say, please comment!

As always, I’ll let you know how it all works out…