Vlad

Google Reader added feed trends. Cool!

I’m generally not a Google fanboy. Really! Though, I do think their search is the best thing since sliced bread and Gmail is the greatest free service (just a figure of speech, nothing is free these days). And I love the Reader.

Web feeds (RSS or Atom) are great if you want to track blogs, discussions, news and web sites of all kind. I’ve been using them for some time and I have a strong feeling I’ll stick to them some more. But consuming them is a long story. In time I’ve used numerous systems. Some were desktop apps, others were web services. I’ve had my share of passing OPMLs from one program/service to another. Read more »

Here’s a scenario Gmail -> Reader. Gmail -> Reader. Gmail -> Reader. It happens in most cases (I take a wild guess and say about 90%) for me (and probably for many others).

So it gets annoying when the link to Reader keeps moving from one day to another. Now it’s in the right place:

But will it stay there, or tomorrow I’ll find it under more?

Do not touch that button!

If you’re using WordPress to blog chances are you’ll want to see who’s reading your blog and what are the topics of interest. Enter stage left: wordpress.com stats!

The official stats plugin is wonderful and it integrates neatly into your blog’s (or your wp.com global) dashboard. It works great for people with many blogs, it works even greater if you already some wp.com blogs and some private hosted blogs. It’s hot!

But can it do more than satisfying your crave for ego bumping?

Can it help your blog? I believe so.

Here’s how: now matter how people are arriving on your blog (be it from a feed reader, a referrer link or some search engine) changes are they’ll be missing on what’s really important and interesting about your blog. If you could tell them what other people have found if interest maybe they’ll take so time and dive into those posts. Who knows, maybe you could turn them into regular visitors!

And you can do that, and it’s easy! WordPress.com stats plugin is able to give you that info. And this why I developed a stats helper plugin. It’s used right here, on this blog’s Most Visited Posts top panel.

Hope it will help you!

Is it just me or Google Reader just pushed a new layout for the home screen? Seems somehow related to Gears. Or maybe it’s just a coincidence that it popped up just as I was testing the offline mode.

I don’t remember seeing the rightmost column, the text used to be in different horizontal layers.