A review of our progress four months in

Today Technology Blogger has been live for 4 months – or 17 weeks and 3 days if you want to look at it like that.

Now after the first two weeks of being on the net, I wrote an article about what we had achieved as a community. Today I am going to do the same, but 17 (and a bit) weeks in, just so you can get a sense of scale as to the amazing feats that we have achieved.

Technology Bloggers LogoAs of today, the 13th of August 2011:

  • Our 15 writers have posted 65 articles
  • Our 120 commenters have posted 788 comments
  • We have tweeted 68 tweets to our 24 Twitter followers
  • We have posted 45 status updates to the 11 people who like us on Facebook
  • Our homepage has been awarded a Google PageRank of 3
  • Our Alexa traffic rank is 165,351
  • A fantastic community blog, which everyone should be proud to be a part of!

Take a look at our Google Analytics, (below) to see the true scale of the growth our blog traffic has had!

Technology Bloggers Google Analytics Graph (13/04/11-13/08/11)

Technology Bloggers traffic stats from the 13th of April 2011 to the 13th of August 2011

How have we achieved all this?

I have written a series on how to be a successful blogger, telling you what I have done that has helped the blog be a success, but I couldn’t have done this on my own.

The real answer is you guys! If you have written for us, commented on our content or even just read some of our stuff, it’s thanks to you that we have achieved what we have.

The best bit!

Great, we have achieved all this, but so what? Well I feel like I have gained a lot from the blog in this short amount of time, so I hope you have to, but remember we are a dofollow blog with great content, so everyone benefits! Read | Contribute | Benefit – it’s there for a reason 🙂

Readers gain knowledge and know-how from our content and others comments comments. Readers who also choose to comment benefit from the fantastic community we have and dofollow links. Writers benefit so much too: experience; exposure to a massive audience; dofollow links to their site; highly valuable, quality comments on their work; potentially AdSense earnings, etc.

The future…

Well done to all, we should be very pleased with our achievements, but I see this as just the beginning.

We have grown at such a rate in such a short space of time, I can’t see any reason why in a year or two we could have the likes of TechCrunch, Engadget and Mashable quaking in their boots!

Keep up the great work everyone 🙂

Christopher.

How to show more screen options in WordPress

I have noticed that most of the other authors on this blog have failed to write a short excerpt for their article. It’s usually really easy and takes seconds to think of a short phrase to sum up, or entice people into reading your article.

When Marc (from the 360 Blog) wrote his most recent article, I emailed him to ask him why he never filled in the excerpt field, as he is now eligible to apply for author status, but that requires each article to have an excerpt.

Marc emailed back and told me

“You mentioned that you would like a short excerpt written, but there wasn’t a place to do that.”

Out came my thinking cap!

I then realised that when I had started Technology Bloggers, when creating a new post, the excerpt field wasn’t showing ether. The trackback field didn’t show, nor did the discussion field etc.


Do you have problems with

  • Excerpt field not showing when creating a new WordPress post
  • Trackback field not showing when creating a new WordPress post
  • Discussion field not showing when creating a new WordPress post
  • As well as other custom fields not showing

well if so I have your solution!

Screen Options.

The 'Screen Options' button in the WordPress admin consoleYou see at the top right of the admin console there is your name, log out etc. well just below that you should see a tab that says help, and next to that a tab that says ‘Screen Options’.

Click ‘Screen Options’ and it will pull the tab down to revile loads of new fields which you can choose to show or not.

The WordPress 'Screen Options' for creating a post in the admin consoleLike to work light? You may just want the publish box and the article writing area. Prefer to go into detail? Tick/check the ‘Categories’, ‘Post Tags’, ‘Custom Fields’, ‘Send Trackbacks’ etc. boxes for a more advanced view!


Under ‘Screen Options’ you also have the option or changing the screen layout. You can decide how many columns your dashboard uses, to display your selected widgets. On the homepage of the dashboard you can split it down in 1,2,3 or even 4 (if you have a very wide screen) columns. On posts pages you can choose to split the view down to two columns, or just the one.

Ever asked yourself ‘how can I show more comments in the WordPress admin console?’, if so, ‘Screen Options’ could help here too. Just click it and you can show as many or as few comments as you like. I have it set so that the WordPress comments page shows 50 comments per page, although I sometimes change it 🙂

Good luck bloggers with using WordPress the way you like it!