Herself's Webtools

Now these are figures for the top 25 blogs which may or may not differ from what traditional websites need:

Which means about each 8 links you collect inbound from various sources will get you 1 visitor a month.

But also remember popular blogs have lots of links from low traffic sites. Actual numbers of inbound links per visit are probably lower for most sites.

Source for link and visitor numbers Popular Blogs | eBizMBA

See also:
How Google Measures Link Popularity

I needed to make a link list of all the posts relating to specific plants on Herself’s House Plants. I wanted people to be able to quickly scan the list looking for what ever plant they are looking for instead of having them click the specific plant label and load up 60 plant entries. Blogs are a great format for webpages but some information can get buried.

It was a far more challenging task than I planed. I still do not have a good way to do this. This is a two step hack. You can see it Herself’s House Plants here. About mid way down the side bar is a lengthly list of links to specific plants. You can also see a list of Topics in AI on the sidebar of Herself’s AI.

This is how I did it.

Step 1:
You need to create a feed that will fetch only the items from that label. I learned how to do so at Purple Moggy’s There are several feed instructions and examples there so if my example doesn’t do what you need check those out.

Feed URL

Replace {BLOG ID} and {LABEL} with your information

http://beta.blogger.com/feeds/{BLOG ID}/posts/full/-/{LABEL}

The Feed URL I used (wrapping to fit in column):

http://beta.blogger.com/feeds/999999999999999999/posts/

full/-/Specific%20plant%20information?max-results=100

What it took me several hours to figure out:

- use ‘beta.blogger.com’ not your domain or your blogger account

- 999999999999 is your blog id number Detailed directions to find your blog id number. You will see it in the url when you are logged in and working on posts etc. (?blogID=1234567890123456&post )

- Specific%20plant%20information This is your label, put %20 in place of any spaces.

-?max-results=100 This is the maximum urls you would like in the list. I only have 60 or so plants so 100 is more than I need.

That actually was the painful part. Once you have your feed test it in GReader or some place and make sure you have it correct.

Second Step:
You need a JavaScript to process the list. I used the one from Cut n’ Past JavaScript RSS Feed here. There are thousands of JavaScript from feed tools all over the net. If you have a favorite place use that one.

Then you just paste the JavaScript into a HTML/JavaScript element in your template.

WordPress
For WordPress the feed for a specific category:

http://www.yourwebsite.com/wordpressDirectory/category/CategoryName/feed/

category and feed are fixed, you have to customize to match your blog and category:
www.yourwebsite.com
wordpressDirectory
CategoryName

Then you will need to place the JavaScript some where in your sidebar template. Work on a copy of your template, they are fragile.

There is also a WordPress plugin to show information from certain categories I have not tried it. I just ran across the information while researching how to do the category feed.

* If I can figure out a way to do this with out relying on a third party JavaScript/RSS processing place I’ll come back to here and post the directions.

4/2/10 See also How to lists posts by category in WordPress; for a newer, easier way to do this.