We need YOU!

Technology Bloggers needs more guest bloggers. I have been writing loads of late, and I have been really pleased with the three other bloggers who have posted so far.

But.

I know that I am going to be very busy soon. This means I won’t be posting as much. What do I want from you? Your writing.

Technology Bloggers needs you to write for us!Need to be persuaded? Check out the write for us page.

Please help write for our community blog 🙂

Bloggers needed!

Look what WE have achieved!

Wow… two weeks ago today, Technology Bloggers didn’t exist. The blog was in the final stages of preparation, I was tweaking the last few settings, and checking the wording of articles.

Two weeks ago, the blog looked like this

Technology Bloggers Launch

Technology Bloggers hours before it's launch

Basically, 14 day’s ago, this blog didn’t exist. Two weeks on, I have been blown away by what we have managed to achieve.

When most blogs start up, it usually takes a good few months to get the ball fully rolling, establish a good base of commenters and to fully populate the archives with posts from many different authors.

Technology Bloggers, my blog, your blog, our blog has done it in just two weeks.

So what has been achieved?

  • 14 unique, quality articles have been written, by 4 fantastic authors
  • Over 85 comments from 22 different commenters
  • 2 pingback from 2 different blogs
  • 15 user accounts created, many of which are now getting to work on new content for the blog
  • An Alexa traffic rank of 1,400,516516, meaning that it is in the top 1,400,516516 of websites on the internet, just 2 weeks after its launch!

How on earth have we achieved this?

As a member of the admin team, I have done a few things which I believe have massively increased the traffic, encouraged people to comment, and attracted guest authors.

What are those things? Well, that’s another post! I hope to ‘reveal all’ in the very near future, so stay tuned!

How to add an email subscription form to your blog

Earlier in the week, Wayne John from Southern California Web Development commented on how it would be great if you could subscribe via email to Technology Bloggers. This way you could read the latest and greatest content as an email, and then just visit the stuff that interests you to comment etc.

After a little puzzling I managed to enable FeedBurner’s email setting and add a subscribe widget to the sidebar.

Google FeedBurner LogoTo subscribe via email like many already have, please enter your email in the box on the sidebar, or even in the box below 🙂

Enter your email address to get free updates about new articles!

As this blog talks about WordPress, RSS feeds and stuff like that, I thought I might as well help other bloggers set up a similar system 🙂

What do I need for people to be able to subscribe via email?

Well first of all you need a feed. WordPress handles this nicely so that shouldn’t be too difficult! Second you need a feed manager. I use FeedBurner. It’s simple and easy to use. The problem with it at the moment is that it is really slow at updating, meaning that when I post an article at 2 in the afternoon, only 8 o’clock next morning does the feed update – for example. This isn’t a major issue for email subscription at the moment though.

How do I enable FeedBurner email subscriptions?

Click on the profile of the blog you want to enable emails for, then go to the ‘Publicize‘ tab. From here look down the sidebar and find ‘Email Subscriptions‘ – click that. You should then get a page looking a bit like the one in this picture.

Enable/Activate FeedBurner Email SubscriptionsThen click Activate!

You will then be taken to a page called ‘Subscription Management‘. Here is where you get your code! Now you can ether get the box code or get the code which links to the subscription page. I chose to have a box, but you take your pick. Add the code to your site/blog and hey presto! Test it out yourself if you like, but the code should work and your readers should now be able to subscribe to your blog via email.

Can I customise the FeedBurner code?

Yes – to a degree. I am not 100% sure what Google’s policy is on modifying the code, but I imagine they are okay with it. My default code would make Technology Bloggers ‘subscribe box’ look like this

Enter your email address: 

Delivered by FeedBurner

but my modifications make a much smother (I think so anyway) this

Enter your email address to get free updates about new articles!

Happy subscribing and happy creating readers and bloggers 🙂