Blogger Wish List

Amanda celebrates Blogger Buster's birthday by arranging a nice competition to suggest some new features for Blogger. As a Blogger user myself, I couldn't careless about it, especially since it comes with a really nice incentive ;) Okay, so here are my thoughts about new features that should be implemented:

1. Give option to show only snippet of posts with "read more" button

...or using the Blogger term: "Show excerpts of my posts, with links to the full text". This is the most important feature that I think should be implemented ASAP by the Blogger team (other than in-post comment, which already introduced in Blogger Beta). This feature will allow me to show more posts in the front page and let the reader to pick the one he/she interested in instead having to scroll all the way to the bottom page and check for previous posts.

2. More variety of widgets

I realize that some really useful widgets are missing in the Blogger, especially "Top Commentators" and "Top Posts". Top Commentators should display the most active commenters in the whole blog along with a link to their blog (as an incentive for supporting the blog by actively commenting it). Top Posts could be based on number of comments, traffics, or (even better) by popularity of the post decided by several criterias such as comments, traffics, number of links, digg, technorati, etc. Another widgets that I could think of are "Recent Posts" and "Recent Comments" (It is possible but with limit of 5 entries only). Emm... am I asking too much here? :D

3. Possibility to create additional pages

I would love to have a special page for author, links, and archives. Yes, it is possible by applying some sort of hacks but still I prefer to have it as a explicit feature.

4. Shows "possible related posts" by category or content

One of the best way to keep the reader stay in our blog after finished reading a post is by offering them to read another related articles. It is very nice if related posts are shown in relation with the content but related posts by category is also good enough for me.

You can also suggest a new feature directly to the Blogger team here. I'm waiting for the good news! ;)

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ScribeFire: A Must Have Firefox Addon for Blogger

For the last two years I blog with mostly the same procedure. Open a word processor, write my article, find/create related pictures/videos, collect all required references, login to my blog account, copy-paste my article, format my article, upload/link images/videos, and publish it. Every blog-writing-cycle requires an enormous browsing, tab-switching, and some boring stuffs.

I finally change the way I blog after two years of blogging, and its all thanks to ScribeFire. ScribeFire is an addon for the Mozilla Firefox Web Browser (which just reach the third version, in case you don't know) that let us to enhance our blogging experience. ScribeFire integrates the blogging capabilities with the browser. Posting, editing, and categorizing posts in your blog could be done much faster than usual.

Some reasons why I really love ScribeFire are:
1. I don't need to login or open any web site just to start posting
2. ScribeFire split my browser display which allows me to write and read website in parallel
3. Copying links or pictures is as easy as drag and drop
4. Works on multiple blogs
5. Compatible with many blog services, including blogger and wordpress
6. Creating links to my other posts (which I did a lot) is very easy and fast
7. Compatible with Firefox 3 ;)

So, are you a blogger? If yes, don't miss this great stuff!

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Google Analytics, a Tool for Bloggers and Webmasters

At my early days of blogging, I had a doubt whether there are some people over there actually read my blog. Thus, if that is the case, how did they know about my blog, where are they come from, and what did they read? I think this is quite common questions for blogger or webmaster.

Google Analytics answers all of those and even some more unthinkable questions. It provides a nice package of web analytics including:

• number of visitors and pageviews
• bounce rate
• average time spend on your site
• percentage of new visitor
• location of visitor
• source of your traffic
• detailed information about content
• keyword used to reach your site
• and many many many more

It wrapped nicely by google with a simple but nice interface (considering the number of features you get) and on top of that it is absolutely free! Are you using adwords? Then this tools also might come in handy, even though I don't know exactly how it works since I don't use adwords (yet). You can even customize your own goals in your blog/website. I believe those features will fit really nicely for a blogger/webmaster who really want to improve their website, or for people like me who enjoy playing around with statistics of my own website ;) Hey, I got a visitor from Moscow!


You can even put more than one website into this webmaster tools, as long as you really own them of course :) Google Analytics require us to put a tracking code into our blog/website (yea that is obvious).

If there is something lacking from Google Analytics then it must be because it updates the statistics on a daily fashion. For me, it is not that important to have a real-time statistics. However, a daily updates still seems too long. Let's just wait if Google is willing to give a higher update frequency. Meanwhile, it is still very useful and fun.

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101 Ways of Improving Blog

In the last few days I've been crazy thinking 101 ways to improve my blog. I was kind of bored with the old design... and... ta-daaa! Here's the new one :) Many thanks to blogger.com (and google?) for the new nice feature that allowed me to do this.

The second thing is to improve my blog traffic. I realize that my blog traffic is not that incredible and I want to make it as close as possible to incredible :P So I've been busy searching on the internet and I found several interesting link. BlogExplosion for example, it's a nice site for blogger who'd like to exchange traffic with another blogger. I was interested in its link exchange program but since it's not running yet so I guess I'll be waiting until next week. I have tried some other program but nothing is significant enough to force me to write it here.

Since this blog supposed to be a geeky blog (oh, you have no idea??), I also put a RSS Reader for "Java Technology Headlines" in the right side of the web so I can clearly say that this blog is absolutely "a programmer's thought" and not some random jokes with some strange writing that could be executed under a specific compiler.

I've also add an alexa traffic monitor for my blog that I assume won't last long since it gives impression to the reader that my blog actually worth nothing (thank you alexa for reminding me of this). Okay, it seems enough for now... I'll be back with some more worthy posts in the future.

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