While there are other competing closed services out there like pownce and jaiku today I discovered a new federated open source alternative called identi.ca that looks like a pretty promising alternative. The software that powers identi.ca is called Laconica and anyone can download the source, tweak it and run it on a server of their own choosing. This is incredibly important because it moves microblogging from the closed, centralized, company dominated realm into the decentralized internet service realm of email, irc, rss and dns.

I only have a couple add-ons installed at the moment, but Firefox 3 definitely seems speedy out of the box.  We’ll see how it does once I start adding in some more plugins.

At any rate, if you haven’t downloaded Firefox 3 yet go download it and check it out (and help break the world download record if it’s still June 17/18, 2008).  Official Firefox 3 Download Counter (1.8 million and counting as I write this).

Feedapalooza didn’t end up being much of a success for me as far as adding RSS subscribers go (as of today I’m down 7 from where I was at the beginning of the month), but I got good practice writing an eBook (Open Office has great PDF export support by the) and learned quite a bit going through the whole process.

Although I don’t feel like I’ve been as productive as I wanted to be, I’ve still been able to do a lot of reading and learning this month. I still want to try to get one niche project launched before May is over too. It’s time to stop thinking about taking action and actually taking some action. More to come.

I was reading Mark Mason’s blog today and discovered this cool RSS feed promotion being run by fulltiltblogging.com called FeedaPALOOZA 2008 and figured I’d better jump on board as a good way to generate traffic and RSS subscriptions to axodys.com.

Here’s what FeedaPALOOZA is all about in Aaron Abber’s own words:

What is FeedaPALOOZA?

Everyday beginning Thursday, May 1st and continuing until Thursday, May 15th, you will give an email from us.

Each email will have a description of the participating blogs for that day. Every blog will be giving away a free gift to readers who subscribe to the RSS feed.

You view the description of the blog as well as the free gift for subscribing to their RSS or email and if you like what you see, you sign up and receive the gift. No muss, no fuss.

The funny thing is that I was actually already working on a blog post directly related to RSS feed subscriptions, but hadn’t finished it yet. Now it makes more sense to use it for this promotion and I’m in the process of turning that post idea into a free ebook I can give away to get people to sign up for my RSS feed.

I worked on the ebook for a few hours early this morning, but it’s not quite ready for primetime yet. It’s important to get this right though so I’m going to give myself a couple more days to get it set up properly before going live.

In the meantime head on over to FeedaPALOOZA 2008 to sign up if it sounds interesting to you.

Basic WordPress Redirection Plugins

There are several WordPress plugins that will do the job and eliminate the need to set up hand coded php redirect files. While there are commercial plugins out there that cost $50-$70 to incorporate this functionality into WordPress, rest assured that you can save your money and still get excellent results.

The simplest plugin out there is called GoCodes and it allows you to create redirect links from your blog in the form <http://blog.com/go/yourlink>. GoCodes works fine, but requires a modification to your .htaccess file and is not very flexible.

Link-Cloaking plugin for WordPress is similar to GoCodes, but offers a few more features and the ability to substitute a different word like “recommends”. Using recommends to preface a redirect is pretty common practice among internet marketing bloggers and yields urls like: <http://blog.com/recommends/someproduct>. This plugin is also dependent on Apache and a customized .htaccess file to work properly.

The Hot New Redirect Plugin

While the above two plugins make creating static redirects easy, there’s a relatively new plugin currently in development called the WP-Affiliate plugin that it is even more powerful. It requires WordPress 2.5 or later, but it allows for multiple categories of links and provides simple link tracking as well. Since I’m running this blog on an nginx server rather than apache, I was especially impressed that it worked fine with my existing configuration and didn’t depend on a custom .htaccess file (nginx doesn’t use them) to function properly.

Initially, I was confused as to where you create the new links and categories, but it turns out that the plugin incorporates the link creation functionality directly into the post writing interface. This is incredibly handy since you can quickly create URL redirects while working on a single post.

The built in link tracking statistics information was pretty thorough as well.

Conclusion

While there are a variety of free plugins that can make web redirection in WordPress pretty simple, if you’re running WordPress 2.5 or later, the WP-Affiliate plugin is definitely the way to go in terms of power and functionality. Furthermore as powerful as the plugin is right now, it’s still being developed and things like built in Clickbank support are being incorporated. I fully expect this plugin to make a big splash in the Wordpress IM world in the coming months and become the free defacto standard.

I’ve been monitoring axodys.com with Google Analytics since the big move to slicehost at the beginning of the month and so far the initial data isn’t too surprising. I’m averaging roughly 36 unique visitors and 57 page views per day. I have a few pages that get multiple hits from the search engines on a daily basis, but they’re fairly random niche posts from a long time ago that don’t really contribute to the direction I’m taking Axodys these days.

The big issue I’m currently facing as I reboot this blog is that I don’t have any significant topical pillar articles to attract the kind of traffic that generates a regular readership. That’s something I definitely need to focus on more now that I’m trying to move Axodys into more of the blogging, web development, social media and internet marketing niches. There’s plenty of opportunity to find things to write about in any one of those areas let alone all four.

Top Current Posts

While it’s not especially relevant towards building new traffic, looking at my stats to dtae revealed some interesting trends about which existing posts that are getting most of my traffic. Amusingly enough this Harry Potter Manga Illustrations post that I wrote almost 7 years ago ranks pretty highly on google for the phrase “Harry Potter Manga” and averages around 10 unique pages views per day. My second highest ranking page is for axodys.com itself with an average of 3 uniques per day. This Amazing Flash Site post and a Kubuntu PPC post both get a few unique hits a day to grab the third and fourth positions. Finally, rounding out the Axodys top 5 is a Honda Element Roof Rack post that is currently 10th on Google for that phrase and gets 1 or 2 hits per day. Incidentally, that post strikes me as one that would be interesting to monetize in some fashion.

One odd discovery I made while analyzing my stats was that I seem to have a pillar image in the form of a small widescreen Lebron Witness desktop I created last June after his big game against Detroit. It’s currently number three on google images for the phrase “lebron witness”. My initial reaction is that a pillar image is basically just a bandwidth sink, but I will have to investigate further and see if I can think of any ways to further take advantage of this phenomena.

Establishing A Baseline

The bottom line on of all this traffic analysis is that it’s really all about showing where I’m starting from as I make a concerted effort to improve things. Priority one on the blog improvement front is to focus on creating new pillar articles in useful and relevant areas that will attract and retain readers. As always, good content is still the key, but I think I can also be a little smarter about topics and seo techniques than I have been in the past. I think axodys.com does get a bit of a boost with google because of its longevity though so I’m going to continue to experiment with seo optimized titles and posts.

I don’t know if I will necessarily do axodys.com traffic related posts on a monthly basis, but I think I will continue to do them periodically so that I can show what kind of traffic growth progress (or lack thereof) I’ve made to date. If nothing else it should be a useful learning exercise to see what kinds of activities and strategies pay dividends when trying to grow a blog or web site in general.

At this point in my internet marketing odyssey I need to simplify and work on a few simple bum marketing/article marketing campaigns. In baseball terms I would equate the nba playoff related idea I was think about to trying to hit a home run in my first at bat when I needed to step up to the plate and take a couple swings. Step one for me needs to be writing a few articles and submitting to various directories and seeing what happens. So that will be primary writing goal for the remainder of the week.

It’s been a week now since I put out my first weekly project list. Here’s a quick run down of where I’m at a week later (task complete, some progress, no progress):

• Help my brother Micah move a few of his sites over to our slice on slicehost.
• Pillar content for axodys.com.
• Help Mary launch her new blog.
• Develop a new theme (most likely modifiying an existing one) and install various plugins I’ve been thinking about for axodys.com.
• Install/develop a new theme for 100km.us.
• Look into wordpress plugin development.
• Start one Bum Marketing affiliate campaign.

Needless to say a lot more red than I’d like to see after a week of work.  I think I’m going to continue to use this list as a public exercise in getting more of these projects done.

I’ve been thinking about starting some kind of affiliate campaign this week, but I hadn’t come up with any solid ideas.  Then last night while thinking about the coming NBA playoffs my two interests collided and I had a great idea for a potential niche site domain name.  I checked the domain name and surprisingly enough it was available, so I jumped on it immediately.

Even though the new site isn’t going to be a blog per se, I’m leaning towards managing it with good old Wordpress just for ease of setup and management.  That’s just my initial thought though.  I have a lot of work to do in the next week or so to get things ready.

At any rate, I’ll definitely be covering this new project and the NBA playoffs a lot more as I start to make progress so stay tuned for a lot more in depth discussion.

• Help my brother Micah move a few of his sites over to our slice on slicehost.
• Pillar content for axodys.com.
• Help Mary launch her new blog.
• Develop a new theme (most likely modifiying an existing one) and install various plugins I’ve been thinking about for axodys.com.
• Install/develop a new theme for 100km.us.
• Look into wordpress plugin development.
• Start one Bum Marketing affiliate campaign.

That’s a pretty good list to start with and it actually gives me several different things to write about this week. Putting together a list like this should help me be more productive as well as I work through it.

Becomes of the various projects I have in the works in conjunction with the big axodys reboot/remodel/axodys(heh!) I definitely want to start maximizing my writing efficiency. As such I’ve been looking into different strategies for improving my writing output.

Recently I got an email from Bum Marketing guru, Travis Sago, that included a link to a free ebook that offered various strategies for improving your writing speed. The ebook wasn’t particular long, but the idea that really jumped out at me was the idea of writing in short timed bursts.

There’s something about being up against a clock that has a certain appeal to me so I’m actually giving it a try as I write this. On the one hand I think the quality of my writing could drop, but I don’t think it will drop off that significantly. Mainly I’m curious to see how many words of cogent content I can get down on the screen, before my time is up. Finding a way to compete against myself is usually a pretty effective way for me to find improvement.

To aid me in this task I did a quick search on Google and downloaded the unassuming little widget I found called minutes (runs on MacOS 10.4 or higher). Minutes only takes up about a square inch on your dashboard and can be set for for up to 600 minutes or as few as 1. The downside of using a widget like minutes is that you can’t glance over at it to see a nice to-the-second countdown number unless you specifically pull up the Dashboard. On the other hand, minutes actually calculates what time of day the alarm will go off so you can glance at your menubar clock to see how much time you have before the alarm goes off.

Working against the clock allowed me to write the bulk of this post in a productive 15 minute block of time. I’m excited to further experiment with writing in bursts further because finding 10 to 15 minute chunks of time is very doable even at a place like our house where there are lots of young kids seeking my attention.

Of course writing in bursts is just one strategy and I’m sure that there are a lot of other good ideas for writing quickly and efficiencty. Please leave a note in the comments if you have any good tips or suggestions for increasing writing speeds.