I use a plugin to post to twitter every time I post a blog post. I also have Facebook pull in my new posts and notes. This works reasonably well and I get some traffic from them.
You can also use twitter tools to post your tweets on your blog after a certain threshold. I don’t use that because I want to keep things separate. I’d rather have a block that shows my latest tweets somewhere.
There are so many ways you can cross post from your blog to twitter to Facebook and LinkedIn. For me personally this is too much cross posting of not too related content. Let me explain.
On twitter I have mostly techies, locals, bloggers and new age marketers. On Facebook I have friends and family who for the most part are not techies at all. On LinkedIn I have co-workers and professionals.
So for me at least these networks mean different things. I saw a tweet yesterday on LinkedIn it was a personal quote about love. Also when you see auto posted blog posts with tweets and link bits it seems less personal and mechanical. You know the blogger hasn’t taken the time to write something.
I prefer to post separately to each network depending on what I have to say. This is except for getting link backs for my blog posts which I mentioned first.
I’m sure there are people with a consistent profiles across networks that pull this off well, but I’ve yet to see one.
My 2 cents is keep things simple and think of the audience for your post before you setup automatic cross site posting.
Popularity: 2% [?]
I’m not really a writer. I prefer to code 100 lines than actually put down a sentence. But the blog thing was hot and I’m glad I jumped in the bandwagon at the time. I was once introduced as;
a fellow blogger that blogs now and then
and that fits me.
I’ve seen more than a few people fold up and shutdown their blogs in the last year or so. I’ve thought about it too but this thing costs me next to nothing to keep and so what if I don’t blog as often.
It’s good for a cubicle code monkey like me to have a public channel, even though only 12 Kottu visitors read me sometimes 
A lot has changed for me in the last year or so. I’ve moved to Australia, and we had our first born here. Well thats 2 things if I say it like that, but its a world of change.
So I think its fair that I didn’t have the time to put down some words in a while, but anyway I’m back.
Popularity: unranked [?]
Looking at my stats I found the following.
- Hits go up from Monday to Wednesday. Then goes down towards the weekend.
- Weekdays visitors come first thing in the morning or after lunch around 2pm
- There are less hits in the weekend, but visitors stay longer and read more posts.
So most visitors drop by for a quick check on weekdays starting on Monday. They probably check on Kottu and just pop into a few posts they like and go back.
This means my current tendency for short regular posts during weekdays work well. Visitors don’t have time to stick around for a long read anyway.
Its a good idea to write longer and in-depth content during the weekend.
Popularity: unranked [?]
Here are a few links for the badges I use on the side pane. If you have some favorites please share them in the comments.
Google Talk Badge
Popularity: unranked [?]
Google Webmaster tools was complaining that my content had duplicate meta descriptions. I found that it was always displaying the blog description on all the pages.
I found quite a few meta tag plugins but I settled for the Improved Meta Description Snippets plugin with a small modification.
I added this else block at line 119 In the improved-meta-description-snippets.php
else {
echo '<meta name="description" content="' . get_bloginfo('description') . '" />';
}That displays the default blog description on the home page. Then I removed the default meta description in the header.php in my current theme.
References:
How do I change my site’s title and description?
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Improve snippets with a meta description makeover
Popularity: 6% [?]
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