Just A FeedFlare Test

I’m just testing feedburners feedflare. I should see some links at the end of this post in google reader if it’s working correctly.

OpenId: How To Create An Account

If like me you’ve migrated from blogger to wordpress and you comment upon posts on other peoples blogger blogs, you’ll have seen the new openid authentication that blogger now supports.

Now it all seemed a little obscure to me but this very useful post manages to keep it all simple. It works too.

Why Doesnt Feedburner Use Google Blog Pinging?

I’ve just been managing my feeds in feedburner and noticed that in the publicize / pingshot bit there’s an option to ping google blog search. Now that seems like an okay kind of thing to do to me. If the default is to ping technorati, bloglines, yahoo and newsgator why isn’t google a default? Seems strange given that google now own feedburner.

Anyone know why this is or why it might not be a good idea to ping google blog search?

My First Wirral Map

I’m just messing about with google mymaps and here is my first map. It appears that any urls entered in your profile or on your place makers are followed - so that’s a minor benefit I guess. I’ll probably try creating another one with photos, maybe to describe one of my circuits on my running blog.

For my local Wirral sites I’ll be creating various maps with photos, covering things like churches, shops, pubs, local landmarks etc.

Adwords Is Fixed For Me

I noticed yesterday that Adwords was finally behaving itself for me . I’d mentioned here and then here about the keyword status window presenting incorrect info, but it’s all back to normal now - which is good because I find that pop-up window rather useful.

Subscribing To Comments

I’ve finally got around to installing the subscribe to comments wordpress plug-in so I’m now able to let readers receive an email notification for additional comments on a post. I’m assuming the etiquette is to have the option off by default?

I’ve been meaning to install the plug-in for ages but just never got round to it, but having watched blogger now offer the same facility (but only for other google account users I might add) I decided to act.

I’m also currently playing with the all-in-one seo plug-in too on my running blog with the intention of using it here (and elsewhere) too. Need to upgrade to the latest wordpress first on this blog.

The more I use wordpress the more I like it!

Adwords Is Playing Up

A week or so I questioned if adwords was being problematic when it displayed the keyword status window. Now I did wonder if it was a me problem or not. Having put up with the problem for a time I really needed it to work yesterday so I emailed adwords support. They’ve come back to me this morning and confirmed it’s something their s/w engineers are aware of.

Well at least it isn’t me on this occasion.

Tell Google Your Geo-Target

It’s now possible to tell Google where your target audience is geo located (see here and here for info). For those of us who like to purchase inexpensive .coms and hosting from the States but whose target audience is the UK this is a useful facility.

For example, you’ll now be able to buy expatsinsunnyspain.com from someone like godaddy for about £5, host it on a server with a USA IP address but indicate to google that your target audience is Spain.

If your domain is already country specific (.co.uk .fr .ie etc) then whilst you can’t set the country for such a ccTLD you can further refine to a city/town/street address/post code. I suppose this could be useful if you had a local photography club, church, village take-away, whatever and wanted to define it’s physical location. If you are a local business you should be listed in the local business centre too.

I see that you can undo any geo-targetting preferences that you set, though presumably any intial and subsequent changes take time to filter through the system.

I’m going to use the facility for my running blog (which is a .com, hosted on USA servers) to start with as a test.

I’m not aware of any similar geo-targetting facilities from yahoo or msn, so consider that before you go on a .com spending spree!

Free Stock Photography

If you’re artistically challenged like me then it’s likely that you’ll find free stock photography a god-send. There are a few sites out there that offer free stock photos but my personal favourite is stock xchng

There are absolutely thousands of categorised images to choose from so you should find the images that you’re after. Just make sure you comply with the photographers usage guidelines - if you don’t like the restrictions for a particular image,  rather than ignoring them just use another image. After I’ve downloaded an image I use the free and simple-to-use irfanview utility to resize/crop/edit the photo before uploading to my host server.

Where do you get your stock photography from?

Why Is Blogger In German?

I’m a regular user of blogger and have seen it throw a few funnies every now and again. The latest is that it obviously thinks I’m based in Germany (well the last time I looked The Wirral was in the UK) because I keep seeing messages like (link changed to google):

in einem neuen Fenste

which I’m fairly certain means in a new window

Anybody else experiencing this or is it just me?

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