Introduction

THE iNFINITY is owned and authored by a 23 year old Indian student named Aseem Sood. Aseem is a studying Bio informatics and blogs about a wide range of topics.

First Impressions

My very first thought was ‘cluttered’. After a couple of visits and a thorough look at all the parts of the blog, this thought persisted but I did manage to find numerous other plus-points on the site.

Compliments

• The entire area at the top of the sidebar to subscribe to the RSS feed is very well done. The EMail portion is well blended into the RSS bit.



• The 3 widgetized areas just above the footer is a nice touch. This piece takes a bit of the load off the sidebar.
• The thing that struck me the most about this blog is the well written articles. The writing style is free, easy going but somehow it still comes across as very professional. The writing style used makes reading the articles a pleasure.
• New articles are published very regularly. This is a sign of a dedicated blogger.

Criticisms

• The XHTML and CSS used on the blog does not validate. Upon closer investigation it became apparent that most of the blame for this can be laid at the door of the blogging platform used. Large chunks of in-page styling is added to the markup and this stuff will never validate.
• As for the rest I actually only have two criticisms. The one is the area on the blog above the fold and the other is the sidebar.
• As far as I am concerned the area above the fold is the most valuable portion of any blog. On this specific blog a big portion of this valuable area is simply wasted.
• The header graphic itself is huge and serves only as a link to the home page, no other purpose at all.
• The whole pencil thingy up the top is something I do not quite get. The same with the Reader counts. It is debatable if these things are needed at all but they should definitely not use up most of the valuable space mentioned.
• ‘Wassup wid me’ - good question. Maybe it is just me but I do find animated objects on a blog distracting and in fact a bit irritating.
• All these things together mean that one has to use up a full ‘page down’ before you even see any real content.
• The sidebar itself is definitely ‘cluttered’ and maybe even a bit over-monetized.
• I do not know if I missed it but I cannot find a search bar.
• What’s with the clock? This to me is superfluous information.
• The ‘archives’ are too long. This would look better if the info was contained in a drop-down. Having this stuff on a separate page might also be an option.
• There are things on the sidebar that do not make sense to the casual visitor e.g. the Entrecard credit generator and the Butterfly award. These things do not look bad but they do not link to anything and therefore one cannot find out what they are doing there.

Final Impressions

This is definitely a blogger that will really come into his own even more fully than he already has, if he had his own domain and was not tied down to the restrictions of the blogging platform used.

To quote Aseem’s own words: “I want to make my name in the fields of Journalism and Literature some day, but then, that, is a dream that feels good to be dreamt, every now and then.”

This in my opinion is more than a dream, it is a reality that is just waiting to happen. If I look at the writing skills displayed on the blog this is exactly what is going to happen. Thanks for inviting me around, it was good fun. Lots of luck with your blog and those ‘dreams’.

What about you? Have you submitted your site for a review?

Till next time.

1. Trustworthy and knowledgeable admins, mods and members.

One of the reasons for joining a forum is to have a place where one can go and get your queries and/or questions answered. You can only trust any support you receive if you have faith in the person(s) giving the advice.

2. FUN, Fun and fun

Forums are supposed to be more than just another task one needs to get through every day. They are supposed to be fun.

3. Easy to register

If the entire process of registration for membership is too complicated or takes too long, I normally would not even bother to register.

4. Forum bullies not tolerated

You all know the type I am referring to. Many forums in the past have fallen flat because they have allowed those bad mannered types to hijack the forum.

5. Not over-moderated

Forums should be well controlled but this does mean that they have to be moderated in such a way that anyone is scared to say anything.

6. Wide variety of topics

On a good forum I expect to find a number of different boards covering a wide selection of topics.

7. Not only WordPress

Obviously I am interested in WordPress but I do not want to register for a WordPress only forum. This will quickly become very boring.

8. Adequate support provided

I need a forum where I know I can go to if I have any blogging queries albeit it, Wordpress related or not.

9. Opportunity to assist others

A good forum will also offer its members an opportunity to try and help others. One cannot just always ask for assistance, there are times when it is nice to offer assistance as well.

10. Members from across the time zones

This might seem like a strange requirement but it is quite an important one. A good forum will have members from across the spectrum of time zones. If all the members come from the same time zone a forum quickly develops ‘dead’ times when nothing really happens.

Phew, that was a mouthful. Does a forum that meets these criteria actually exist. For sure it does. By now most of you (especially the Entrecarders) has recognized the face. Ben Barden has got a forum going that goes far beyond all these specifications. I registered as a member a while ago and I can truly say that here we have a good one. Just check out the different topics catered for on the forum:

Just follow this link to register and come and enjoy the experience.

If you are not already a member of this forum, allow me just one little question. Why not?

Till next time.

Enough chit chat, let me attempt to show you what Woopra offers. The following graphic shows the different menus that are available right there in your WordPress admin area.

I have managed to gather the following info about this blog:

• 52% of the visitors to the blog are from the USA. My own country, South Africa only comes in at 7% of the traffic. Maybe this justifies my decision to keep the spelling used on the blog to the ‘American English’ way.
• The bounce rate on the blog needs to be improved. 80% of visitors are only viewing a single page. This goes hand in hand with the fact that 84% of visitors are spending less than 5 minutes on the blog.
• 76% of the visitors are using Firefox 3. Chrome, Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 each come in at 5%. Interestingly enough, Internet Explorer 8 does not feature at all.
• 60% of the visitors here are using Windows XP. Vista is listed at 27% with Mac a distant 8%. Linux only comes in at 1%.
• Most of the visitors are using big screen resolutions. By big I mean 1024 X 768 or bigger. The number of visitors using 800 X 600 or less only makes up 1% of the visitors. This should tell the developer in me something.
• The languages used most often came as no surprise. English makes up 97% of the total.
• The referrers sending the most traffic to this blog (in order of referrals) are Entrecard, WordPress Codex and StumbleUpon. CMF Ads is busy making inroads on this list.
• With regards to search engines sending traffic this way, it is Google and nothing else. The rest do not even feature.
• An interesting bit of trivia that I picked up on the analytics is the keywords used in searches which brought visitors to this blog. Virtually every search term used has spelling mistakes in them. Here is a lesson for you SEO guys. Make sure you have included the misspelt versions of your keywords in your efforts.

Now that I have joined ranks with the ’statisticians’, is this going to change my way of doing things around here. No, all this is very interesting but it does become so boring after a while. The only stats that I am really interested in is that I am on this side, you are on that side and hopefully, together, we all learn something from one another.

What about you, are you into this whole statistics thing? Are these things really important or are they just ‘nice to know’?

Till next time.

PS. I have just noticed that this was officially the 100th post on this blog. I know the ‘quick stats’ on the sidebar shows 105 but that figure includes the pages added to the blog. The English is improving, so hopefully the next hundred will be a bit easier.

I personally think that a lot of blogs (especially WordPress blogs) have this problem because the available themes sort of force this on the theme users.

Let me try and explain my way of thinking.

Why must I show a list of Recent Posts on the sidebar, if on my main page, I already have excerpts of the last eight articles on the site. Even on the single pages I add further navigation for a user through the Related Posts shown beneath each article. This last is of course only true if the relevant article does have related posts.

Recent Comments - does anyone still read this stuff.

Tag Clouds - why did I go to all the trouble to create an archives page?

Calendars - last I looked we had left the 90s behind us.

All of this sort of led me to changing the sidebar on this site. I am still very much in the dark and I know I have not yet reached my objectives but this is where you come in. You might just have the idea that could add that sparkle to an otherwise dull sidebar.

Allow me to explain the thinking behind the present sidebar to your right:

• I have added an EMail subscription block. This is not what I really wanted. I actually would like a single block containing both the subscription details for both RSS and EMail. At present I cannot do this as I have promised to run an ad on my blog until mid-December. This is the blue one next to the RSS button on the main page. Until this period has passed I cannot really make the changes I would like regarding the whole feed issue.
• I used to have a Skribet suggestions widget on the sidebar but I have removed this. The widget kept on reverting to its default state every time I edited any of the other widgets. The version I was using was a beta version, so maybe I will just wait for a full version to be released.
• The block entitle ‘About’ is just a little information about myself with a link to the About page.
• The Blog Reviews and Archives blocks are similar. They just contain a bit of information with links to the relevant pages.
• All three blocks mentioned above are of course another way of getting links pointing to inner pages of the blog.
• The Top Commenters is still very much an experiment. Some love it, some hate it. I personally have not quite made up my mind yet. There does appear to be a type of friendly rivalry amongst the commenters on the list. When the one overtakes another the other is normally pretty quick to reciprocate. This is not a bad thing and I find it quite interesting.
• Another word on the Top Commenters list. At present the list is very similar to the blogroll shown on the main page just above the footer. This is just co-incidence and this is definitely not the measure I use to add or remove blogs from my blogroll.
• The Quick Links at the bottom of the sidebar is nothing else than one of those ‘just in case you are interested’ things.

What am I trying to do here? I want my sidebar to be different from most others. I have not quite managed it yet, but I am trying.

I had the new sidebar reviewed by the folks on the only forum I subscribe to and received a bit of positive feedback A spelling mistake on the sidebar was even picked up - oops.

I need more feedback, I need your opinion. Remember that on this blog I experiment, whatever I learn here will eventually find its way into the themes developed around here. What else could be added? What should be removed? Maybe I am just taking this ‘being different’ thing too far?

Love to hear from you.

Till next time.

Twitter, through their API makes a file called followers.xml available. The number of followers for the relevant Twitter account is contained in this file. Getting at this information can be done in numerous ways but I want to mention three of these.

PHP

This is not my code. I discovered this little script written by Steve Nurse.

Please view the original article for the code itself as it does not display properly in the feed.

As mentioned in the script you will need cURL and SimpleXML to make this work. The actual script does more than just this as it loops to show the gravatars of all your followers. I left this bit out as it falls outsdie the scope of the suggestion received.

What with the need for a XML Parser and all, this is IMO far too much effort for far too little reward.

Javascript

Scripting this in Javascript is not too difficult but again a lot of overhead will be necessary just to get at a single number.

One can get away from the overhead by making use of Javascript that is hosted on someone else’s server. The following Javascript does the job:

Please view the original article for the code itself as it does not display properly in the feed.

Again, this is not my code. I found this at TwitterCounter. I have tested this method and it works well.

For both of the mentioned methods you will have to add your own Twitter login details to the script.

Widgets

There are quite a few widgets available that do this job for you but all those I found show the number of followers within a graphic. There are also some nifty WordPress plugins available.

One of the nicer ones I managed to find also comes from TwitterCounter. These guys offer a choice of 4 graphics that you can use. You can either upload a plugin or grab their code and put it straight into your sidebar or wherever you want it. The code without a graphic (shown above) comes off this same page.

I am sure that if one Googles a bit more there are most probably other options available as well. Immaterial of which way you choose to show this information, the biggest problem I see is the fact that Twitter is notorious for being off-line. You will have to keep this in mind.

As a non-Twitter member trying to answer a non-WordPress question, I hope I have provided enough to get you headed in the correct direction if you are interested in something like this.

What about you, do you have a suggestion for future content on this blog. Check out the fancy widget on the sidebar placed there for this very purpose. You would be more than welcome to contact me with any suggestion(s) you might have.

Till next time.

Introduction

This blog is owned and authored by Michael Reza Aulia. The blog is just over a year old and contains a wide range of articles to pick and choose from. Michael says he blogs about tech news, reviews and a geek’s ramblings. This does leave one with a wide choice. Michael has not tied himself down to a single narrow niche.

First Impressions

My very first impression was that the site was a bit cluttered but I quickly changed my mind when I found that everything on the blog is there for a very specific reason. This is actually a well thought-out blog.

Compliments

• The fact that there is such a wide range of articles to choose from is something I find very interesting. On this blog you never know what to expect around the next corner. There are people who will argue that this is in fact something to be avoided. IMO, if the author knows a lot about a lot of things - why not?
• New articles are published on a regular basis.
• Michael appears to enjoy helping others. The separate page dedicated to an Intro to Blogging and another to an Entrecarder’s Guide is testament to this. I think both of these adds to the quality of the blog.
• This is my kind of blogger, he is not afraid to take chances. The blog is running the latest beta 2 version of WordPress with all the new features turned on. Well done Michael. The more people that test these beta versions on a live site the better the final version should be.
• Real page navigation is used to replace the very ordinary ‘next’ and ‘previous’ links used by default in WordPress.
• For a blog that is just over a year old, the stats are impressive. Michael must be doing something right.

Criticisms

• Personally I feel the clickable area on the RSS bit at the top of the sidebar is too small. I think it will help if the graphic to the left of the Feedburner icon is also made clickable.

• The validity of the XHTML was checked only on the main page. The markup is not valid. Many of the problems here appear to be caused by the fact that in quite a few instances the Alt attribute has not been set for the images used. If an image is used purely for decorative purposes an empty Alt attribute can be used.
• The CSS markup is also invalid. The main problem seems to be the fact that the same foreground and background colors are used together on a few of the elements in the stylesheet.
• The author’s comments are styled to appear differently from the other comments. This is something I like and it could not have been easy to implement alongside the threaded comments and all. The problem I have here is that the difference between the author’s comments and the others is a bit too much. Maybe a slightly lighter color on the author’s comments.

• Still on the comments, the default gravatar used for the folks not registered with Gravatar, looks a bit bland. Maybe one of the other selections available for this could be used.
• There are a few places where the XHTML includes inline CSS styling. This stuff should be moved to the stylesheet itself.
• The search page (if there are no items found for a search query) could be changed to become a bit more user friendly.
• The contact page could do with a touch more styling. The textboxes could be aligned underneath one another and maybe a small vertical space between the different controls.
• Lastly I noticed a problem that I am not sure on how to fix. The Money Makers portion just above the footer worries me slightly. This area extends across the entire width of the page but contains very little content. This space should be used more fully or maybe the present content should be moved to the sidebar. The area at the bottom could then be removed.

Final Impressions

The BIGGEST problem I have with this blog is the fact that it does not belong to me. The owner has been around the blogosphere for quite a while and definitely knows what he is talking about. This is a blog that should be added to many a ‘must read’ list.

Please check out Michael’s RSS feed.

It was a pleasure to visit this site. Thanks for inviting me Michael.

What about you, are you ready to have your site reviewed.

Till next time.

While I am on the topic of support, allow me to answer two little questions I have had more than once over the last few weeks.

How did you code the number of posts and comments shown in your sidebar?

This one is easy. You need to collect all the required information and then display it wherever you want to. I used the following code:

Please view the original article for the code itself as it does not display properly in the feed.

This piece of code will show the number of posts that have been ‘published’ but it will unfortunately also include the ‘published’ pages. All posts awaiting approval will be excluded. The number of comments displayed will only be those that have been approved.

You do I get the copyright date in my footer to update automatically?

Yet another easy one. I use the following code:

Please view the original article for the code itself as it does not display properly in the feed.

This blog was only started in 2008. At present it shows the copyright notice as © 2008. The moment the year changes to 2009 this notice will automatically change to © 2008 - 2009.

I hope you can find a use for these little snippets.

Till next time.

WordPress blogs are particulary susceptible to this type of thing because of the many plugins that make it easy to make a WP blog ‘do-follow’.

The thing that worries me about all this is that there could be people commenting on my blog simply because of the ‘do-follow’ link they are receiving for their trouble. Doing something like this is nothing else than bad manners and I for one am not going to allow it anymore. On this blog, I would much rather have less comments than have those comments that have been made with greed as the motive.

I have removed the ‘commentluv’ plugin from this blog but the comment links are still ‘do-follow’, if I make them so. From now on I will only provide ‘do-follow’ comment links to those sites that provide the same for their readers. I think this is only fair. No-one can expect anything if they are not prepared to offer the same.

This action of mine does not in any way mean that I want to punish commenters just because their sites are ‘no-follow’. Some bloggers have never even heard of this entire ‘do-follow’ thing, but then they are not commenting here with the aim of getting that link. The guys I plan to stop are those that knowingly come hunting the ‘do-follow’ links without wanting to do the same for their readers.

This greedy attitude is the one thing that spoils the entire blogging experience, or for me anyway.

This same attitude is found all over, allow me to give you a further example. I have been dropping 300 cards every day on Entrecard for about two months now. This has generated quite a bit of traffic for my site (between 250 and 400 per day). I am not getting into the quality of this traffic here, as this is a topic for another article. All this dropping means that this blog is on many a ‘top droppers’ list.

Just yesterday I had lots of work and did not even get to turn on my PC. Guess what happened, my return drops fell away to virtually nothing. I think this proves my case. The one day I am being praised for being a ‘top dropper’ but the very next day I am ignored as if I had some sort of contagious disease. This greed has to be stopped in some way and this blog will try and do its little bit to help rectify the situation.

Till next time.

The only real difference is now every post offers options to edit, quick edit, delete or view the relevant post. This ‘quick edit’ feature is something very new.

If you click this option you are faced with the following choices:

This graphic has been slightly re-arranged to make it fit this page but you will be able to get the idea.

All of this now means that you can change various items related to the post without having to open the post itself. These choices include:

• The title as well as the slug.
• You can change the status of the post (published, pending review, scheduled or un-published). You can also make the relevant post a ’sticky’ post.
• You can change the author.
• You can set or change a password. You can also decide to keep the post private.
• You can select or change the category.
• You can add or edit the tags.
• You can select if you are going to allow comments and/or pings.
• You can change the time stamp.

I am always in favor of every change that makes things a bit quicker and/or easier. This new ‘quick edit’ feature should become one that we all use often. The ‘quick edit’ feature is also available for the pages as well as the comments. The options that you can change in this way do differ of course.

There you now know a little more about the new version, it is back to play for me.

Till next time.

Introduction

This blog is owned and authored by Andrey Savchenko or as he says in his about page - ‘just call me Rarst - everyone does that’. Rarst blogs about Windows software as well as IT related online resources.

The blog is very new, the first post was published on 8 July 2008, roughly 4 months ago.

The blog runs on the WordPress platform. The theme used is a nifty 3 column design which in fact is a customized version of BlogOhBlog’s ‘Statement’ theme. Great customization though, in my opinion, a better version than the original.

First Impressions

When reviewing a blog the first thing I do is to view the blog with images turned off. This allows me to see just how the blog has been put together.

When I did this I was amazed, not a pixel out of place. All the elements of the blog were exactly where one would expect them to be.

My first impressions were ‘uncluttered’, ‘clean look’, ‘fast loading’ and even at this early stage the word ‘professional’ jumped to mind.

Compliments

I really enjoyed the following about the blog (in no particular order):

• Extremely easy to navigate.
• Fast loading.
• Valid XHTML markup (only checked main page). This most probably contributes to getting the load times down.
• Useful ‘archives’ page. Here the owner lists the blog’s pages, the available feeds, the categories as well as the latest posts. The code used here has been adapted for use on the ’search’ page as well.
• Menus at top of blog are repeated in the footer section - nice touch.
• Proper page navigation used to replace the boring WordPress ‘next’ and ‘previous’ links.
• Only excerpts of articles shown on main page. This allows quite a few articles to be visible without the page being too long.
• ‘Hot Discussions’ (love this term) as well as ‘Recent Posts’ on sidebar.
• The RSS logo on the top right of the blog is somewhat different from those on most other blogs. Every time a new page is opened or the page is refreshed a different RSS logo is shown - spectacular.



• There appears to be at least one post published every day.
• Effective use has been made of all the areas on the blog. ‘Real estate’ is important on this blog and no space is wasted on any non-essential element.
• A separate page dedicated to how a reader can gain access to the available feeds on the blog. Even though the blog is new it already has an impressive number of feed subscribers. This page might just have something to do with this.
• There is al a separate social page where all the relevant ’social’ links are made available.
• The blog is lightly monetized but there is none of those ‘in-your-face’ ads.
• The blog has a ‘Random’ link on the menu. Clicking this takes one to a page which shows the full version of a random previously published article. Marvelous idea. This idea is fairly unique and I am sure this idea will be ’stolen’ by many, myself included.
• I have left the best for last. On the ’single’ pages, just above the comments, one finds the usual reminder to subscribe, social links, related pages etc. This blog does however present these in a nifty way. Check out the graphic.

Criticisms

Again in no particular order:

• There does not appear to be ‘404′ page. The blog appears to be using the relevant page from the default theme for this purpose. The same code used for the ‘archives’ page would work great for a ‘404′ page as well.
• The CSS is currently not valid. There are not many errors but fixing this could improve the load times even further. There a few instances where the same foreground color and background colors are used on the same class. The search engines could take this to mean that something is being hidden away.
• There are some links that do not have the ‘title’ attribute set. This is not essential for XHTML validation but it is good programming practice and of course, invaluable for the visually impaired using screen readers. A blank ‘title’ is acceptable if it is not really necessary.
• There are a few instances where ‘inline’ styling is used within the markup. This defeats the purpose of splitting the content from the styling. These classes should be included in the stylesheet and just the relevant classes called in the XHTML.
• Here I have also left something for last as I am not sure if I should mention it or not. In my opinion, the tag cloud in the sidebar does not quite match the professionalism shown in the rest of the blog. I might be wrong, or I might not be seeing something that the owner does. I would say, lose the tag cloud.

Final Impressions

Here we have a blogger who does not blindly follow the crowd. This guy knows what he is talking about and does not wander off outside his chosen niche. If I could sum this blog up I would have to say - an A-Lister in the making. One day I will be able to tell my kids that I also knew Rarst. Great blog, great job. keep it up.

Rarst has multiple feeds available on his blog. Check out the following:

• www.Rarst.net - Posts
• www.Rarst.net - Software Updates

If anyone else would care to visit Rarst’s blog and leave some constructive criticism in a comment here, I am sure Rarst will appreciate it.

Rarst, thanks for inviting me to review your site, it was good fun and I learnt a lot. If anyone else would like to have their site reviewed in a similar manner, please contact me.

Till next time.