New Feed; No more MBL Recent Visitors

I’ve been pondering about a way to offer a single feed that will take into account all the different feeds that I publish.

Planet Ajay

I’ve been searching for services that offer this but will confess I’ve been largely unsuccessful. I ran across Feedblendr which aims at establishing just that.

I’ve combined the following feeds:

The new feed is served by Feedburner as usual and I’ve chosen to call it Planet Ajay. It’s also set to auto-discovery, so you’re browser or feed reader can pick it up.

Planet Ajay is perfect for readers who are subscribed to all my feeds. This eliminates the need for you to track several feeds.

I’m still looking for a better option than Feedblendr, because its refresh rate is slow. Do you have any suggestions for a better service?

Bye Bye MBL widget

I’ve also knocked off the MyBlogLog recent visitors widget for my community. I really like the widget, but MBL has become a lot slower than the early days and the widget has been really slowing down the loading of the page.

I may add the widget back in the future, but as of now it is knocked off. I’ve still maintained the code that will display the MBL Avatar next to your comment as that wasn’t too much of a problem (yet).

Suggest

I’m still looking for suggestions to improve visitor experience on the site. I’ve cut down on images to speed up the site, made more feeds available and have also ensured your comments count!

What is it that you find missing out here?
Do you have any suggestions for improvement? What can I do to make your visit here more memorable (in the good way) and what do I do to keep you coming back?

Waiting to hear your comments.

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Post Details

Post Date :: Saturday, Mar 10th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
Category :: Feeds and Site Activity
Tags :: ajaydsouza.com, feed, feedback, Feedblendr, Feedburner, Feeds, MyBlogLog, widget
Do More :: Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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19 Total Responses to “ New Feed; No more MBL Recent Visitors ”

Comments:

Andy Beard says:
March 10th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
Purely my own opinion, but if you are looking to maximise monetization you should make sure you have as many readers all in the one feed.

A lot of your content is really good, so in some way you might need to make changes to encourage more subscriptions.
Ajay says:
March 10th, 2007 at 6:26 pm
Any suggestions on increasing subscription?

Do you suggest I knock off the auto-discovery of the other feeds, and just let it remain on the subscribe page?
Binny V A says:
March 10th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
Yahoo pipes is a good option for mixing feeds.
Ajay says:
March 10th, 2007 at 8:40 pm
I considered this as first option, but must confess it is still above my head!

Any idea how to go about it?
Dean says:
March 10th, 2007 at 8:44 pm
Too bad you removed the MBL widget, now all of your visitors won’t see me face every time they visit!
Ajay says:
March 10th, 2007 at 8:51 pm
Couldn’t help it Dean, the pages took ages to load only because of the images.

Well, as long as you are commenting, my visitors will still see your face … if the avatars display…
Thilak says:
March 10th, 2007 at 11:39 pm
Test Test
Ajay says:
March 10th, 2007 at 11:43 pm
It’s showing 1+9 for me and I can see your comment?

What error were you getting?
Dan Baritchi says:
March 11th, 2007 at 4:08 am
test post… last one just disappeared, which is weird after Thilak’s test…
Dan and Jennifer says:
March 11th, 2007 at 4:53 am
Hey Ajay,

To get more RSS subcribers faster, have you considered a larger RSS subscribe button at the top of your site, in place of the tiny one there now?

We made that change on our site a few weeks ago and our RSS subscription rate has gone up.

While you do have large ones elsewhere, that location is above-the-fold, it’s what everyone sees first when they come to your site.

Also I think the Feedburner/Feedblitz chicklets may be distracting visitors away from the RSS subscribe button.

Don’t know if the one we’re using will work for your site, but it well might.

Just a thought.

Have an awesome day!
Dan
Arnim Leuschner says:
March 11th, 2007 at 5:18 am
dear ajay,

i like your site, but i really dont’t know why
may because of your personal style?!

yeh, maybe i enjoy the way you are acting here, but you asked for improvements:

so, i’m missing a little bit of let’s say “uniqueness”. What stands this site for, who are you and what are you interested in?
so, i would love to read about something what is special for you.

greetings from germany

a foreign visitor is
Ajay says:
March 11th, 2007 at 8:52 am
@Dan, That is a great suggestion, I’m going to give that a shot.
You’re comment came through infact thrice, I’ve knocked off two of them. Can you tell me what error you got when sending you’re comment?

I think SK2 and WP-Cache are playing tricks, I’ll have to reduce some of the checks of SK2.

@Arnim, the purpose of this site is to write about my experiences be it personal or technical. If you want to know more about me and what I do, take a look at my About page and it’s subpages.
Dan and Jennifer says:
March 11th, 2007 at 9:41 am
Hey Ajay,

Hmmmm… my computer has been having some issues today, so it COULD have been on my end.

But I hit submit and after a brief stall I got a wordpress error saying this was a duplicate comment. Kinda weird.

I was just thinking how safe WP-Cache would be… we’ve been getting some big traffic spurts lately (a very good thing BTW). We’ve had a couple of our articles get to the top of the Netscape homepage several times in the last couple of wks and stay there for the better part of a day - quite a nice traffic spike.

Anyway, we held up fine with everything dynamic as is. I was concerned we’d have odd sporadic issues with WP-Cache which is why we’re not using it.

Have you had any weird quirks with it? More importantly, was would you say it’s really worth running it?

Glad it got through in the end.

Have a great weekend!
Dan
Ajay says:
March 11th, 2007 at 11:18 am
I don’t think it is your computer giving you problems. There is some “bug” I can’t place my finger on.

If you ask me honestly, I don’t know if WP-Cache will actually make the difference or not. People have run tests to check and have found that a difference is made.

However, on the downside, it is quite a bit of a problem when you’re running spam checks. I’ve turned down the settings of certain checks. Lets see how they work out…
Dan and Jennifer says:
March 11th, 2007 at 11:25 pm
Thanks Ajay, so I think we’ll steer clear of it for now.

Jennifer and I ran on online dating site for a few years, and we implemented some different caching mechanisms there, and we often ran into similar flakiness on occasion… you know, the little buts that happen “sometimes” but you can’t quite put your finger on them.

Have an awesome day!
Dan
Dan and Jennifer says:
March 11th, 2007 at 11:28 pm
Damn! That’s a big RSS subscribe button at the top, AND it’s animated. No WAY to miss that for anyone landing anywhere on your site.

I’ll be curious to see how that fares…

Have an awesome day!
Dan
Ajay says:
March 12th, 2007 at 7:57 pm
I’m going to test the RSS Button for a week or so and see how it fairs… will accordingly, remove the animation, drop size and test it for the winning combination.

I’ve knocked of WP-Cache. I’m going to see how the blog performs without it.
Law Vibe says:
March 16th, 2007 at 1:03 am
I was wondering about the MyBlogLog thing too - good to hear your point of view on that

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