Herself's Webtools

I found that lots of people were hunting around the TimesToCome Mobile Blog for posts that weren’t easily findable. You can tell this by looking in your log files. If you see some of your top views are for http://yourblog.com/label/something then people aren’t finding posts. 

Make it easier for them. Add in an archive by subject post and make it easy to find.

I haven’t figured out how to fully automate it but in the meantime, I wrote a couple of PERL scripts, one for WordPress and one for Blogger that fetch your RSS feed, pull out the links, sort them by subject and stick them in an HTML file. You can open the file in any editor and cut and paste it into a post. You’ll want to re-run it once a month or so and update your archive post.

Blogger archive building tool
WordPress archive building tool

Directions are in each file, it’s pretty painless. In WordPress you have to temporarily up your feed count. In both you just have to switch the temp url to your RSS url feed.

See also:
Installing PERL Modules

I’m running six blogs now and between working on them and trying to do new things it is hard to keep up with comments.

So I set up rss comment feeds for my blogs. Now I can check the rss feeds all in one spot and respond to questions and comments much quicker. Some rss tools will even notify you when there is a new item.

For Blogger blogs comment feeds are:
feed://yourblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default/

or if you have your own domain
feed://yourdomain.com/feeds/comments/default/

For WordPress blogs
feed://yourdomain.com/directoryOfYourBlog/comments/feed/

Find an rss reader you like, I found that GReader doesn’t always update the comments rss regularly. Safari does fine. There are several rss feed readers out there, just pick the one that works for you and put in all your blog comment feeds.

Keeping up with comments is a whole lot simpler this way.