One of the biggest advantages of using self-hosted WordPress for your blog is its extensibility with plugins. There’s hundreds (if not thousands) of different plugins you can install into your WordPress installation to provide additional features ranging from social media integration to post ratings to weather-forecast widgets. It’s easy to go overboard with plugins (which can be a bad idea for performance reasons as well as possible security implications), so how do you determine which plugins should be installed? Here’s a list of 5 plugins that I consider “must-have” for any WordPress blog.

The Fabulous Five

FeedBurner Feedsmith

The amount of people who read blogs using a feed reader such as Bloglines or Google Reader is always on the rise. The problem is, your analytics tools won’t tell you anything about those users. Enter FeedBurner – a free service from Google. By redirecting your blog’s feed through FeedBurner, you’ll get all kinds of handy statistics about people who read your blog in a reader, as well as the ability to embed additional features and content in your feed (such as ads, or social media clicky-click buttons). This plugin automagically converts your embedded feed url (usual http://yourblog.com/feed) to the FeedBurner URL, so the transition is seamless for your visitors.
[Plugin homepage]

Google XML Sitemaps

We all want Google to know about our new content as soon as possible. One tip is to submit a sitemap to the search engine. A sitemap is basically a file that lists all the links on your blog, to make it easier for Google to dig in and find the goodness. This plugin automatically publishes an updated sitemap to Google whenever you add a new post.
[Plugin homepage]

Wordpress Firewall

Security is (or should be) job one when you’re hosting your own blog. The Internet is full of bad boys and girls who are just dying to hack into your blog and use it to post a bunch of spam links, or just delete the whole thing for no other reason than to be a jerk. WordPress is such a popular platform for blogging that the evildoers are very good at finding exploits in it, and then sending their nefarious scripts after any blog running the software. With this plugin, you’ll be insulated against some of the common attacks – any request to your blog that is fishy is just redirected to your home page, stopping the script kiddies in their tracks.
[Plugin homepage]

WP-DBManager

At the end of the day, your WordPress blog is just a giant database. Your database is the heart and soul of your blog, and if anything happens to it, you’ll be sunk. Use this plugin to schedule automatic backups (and optimizations) of your database to occur on a weekly, daily, or even hourly schedule. You can also configure it to email you the backups – which is important, in case your entire server gets wiped out. I have mine configured to email me daily backups of all my blogs to my Gmail address, and then have set up an automatic filter to put those messages directly in my email archive with a specific label (so they don’t clutter up my inbox).
[Plugin homepage]

WPtouch iPhone Theme

WPTouch iPhone Theme

Most mobile browsers don’t handle the beauty of your blog’s full design well. This plugin creates a custom experience for users of touch browsers (such as the iPhone, Android, or BlackBerry touch devices) which makes the experience a whole lot better. If you want to really expand your range to ALL mobile browsers, there are additional themes and plugins to consider, but from an ease of use perspective, you can’t beat this plugin.
[Plugin homepage]

One more thing…

Akismet

I didn’t include this plugin in the list, since it is installed (but not activated) by default when you first install WordPress, but it bears mentioning anyway. This is the standard “anti-spam” plugin for WordPress. Any comments that look spam-tastic are automatically quarantined for your perusal (and possible deletion) later. Spammers love them some WordPress, and the last thing you want is for your blog’s comment areas to become a haven for posts about buying prescription medicine over the Internet. Don’t make the mistake of skipping the configuration on this plugin – you’ll definitely regret it later if you do!
[Plugin homepage]

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Today represents the end of the first week of the 28 Day Blog Challenge. I think I originally planned on doing my recaps on Mondays, but since Sunday is a slow blog day anyway, it seems like a fine day to look back at the week prior and see how I’m doing.

Post Recaps

Monday – Playing catchup

I started off with a post detailing the latest updates in my life, including taking care of newborn twin boys, writing for an iPhone blog, and attempting to  take control of my time management. This was also the post where I officially kicked off the 28 Day Blog Challenge.

Total Pageviews – 42

Tuesday – The 28 Day Blogging Challenge

When you’re trying to post to your blog every day, I think it’s perfectly excuseable to use that fact as fodder for one of your posts. On Tuesday I detailed the specifics of the challenge, as well as some of my metrics for success.

Total Pageviews – 64

Wednesday – Wednesday Web Wanderings – Pimp Your Blog Edition

One of the areas I was hoping to improve on was posting specific topic areas on specific days. In the past I’d had great success with doing link-lists every Wednesday. This post represented a return to that particular strategy. It also gave me a chance to post a shout-out of congratulations to my friend Doni for her new job at Lijit, and inclusion of unicorn-related content – and since my blog boasts about having “unicorn conspiracy theories” as a major subject area, that’s pretty important.

Total Pageviews – 38

Thursday – Facebook Fan Pages vs. Networked Blogs

Earlier in the week, I had done a little internal soul-searching on the usefulness of NetworkedBlogs as a promotional tool on Facebook. I posted a tweet about it, wondering what people thought about NetworkedBlogs as opposed to a Fan page, and got some interesting responses. This served as a catalyst for the Thursday post, where I emailed a few of my favorite blogger folks to get their two cents on the subject. One cool thing that happened with this post was that in the comments, I learned a bit more about how to tie the two approaches together – and the result was me completely changing how I promote my blog on Facebook.

Total Pageviews – 202

Friday – The Unicorns Know About Facebook Now Too

I like to post “fun” or silly things on Fridays – because who wants to think on a Friday? This week my post connected unicorns with the silly “Urban Dictionary” Facebook meme that had been making the rounds that week.

Total Pageviews – 21

Saturday – Sleepy Joey

Weekends are a VERY slow time for my blog. I imagine that most of my readers come by when they should be working (sorry about that, Corporate America!) That observation, combined with the fact that weekends are pretty busy in the Stratton household these days, resulted in a “lazy “post which was simply a very cute photo of my son, Joey.

Total Pageviews – 15

Action Status

How am I doing on each of the methods I’d targeted to improve my metrics?

Organized and scheduled posting - I did pretty well here, I think. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday all fit my usual schedule (Web Wanderings, Tech Tips, and Fun Posts, respectively) and I’ve set a precedent that Saturdays will be “cute pictures of my sons or my dog”.

Improve “calls to action” in my posts – This area is doing okay. I’m trying a little harder to not be quite so “tell me about it in the comments!” with these calls to action, and let them develop slightly more organically. Still haven’t really generated any kind of true conversation in my comments, though – a lot of “fire and forget” from the folks who do comment.

Include images in each and every post -I succeeded with this one. Every post this week has had an image in it. Except for this one. I couldn’t think of a great image for it, so it will go without. But given the subject (it’s really meta), I think it’s okay. Or am I just rationalizing? Tell me what you think in the comments! (heh)

Just post more – Check it. I did post every day this week, so this was a gold star.

Metrics

Here are the metrics for this week. The number in parentheses is the same metric for Feb 1-7 of 2009. As you can see, I improved in every area. Yay me!

Visits: 822 (787)

Bounce Rate: 77.98% (88.69%)

Pages Per Visit: 1.43 (1.35)

Returning Visitors: 247 (159)

(I’m going to cop out on Feedburner subscribers for my weekly updates, since it’s a real bear to puzzle that out for the individual weeks of 2/2009)

I’m kind of okay with cheating on the weekends and just posting pictures of either my sons or my dog.

This Saturday, we feature my son Joey, all curled up and napping. Technically, this was from last Sunday, but I’m posting it today.

My blog, my rules.

Since Christina has been complaining about a lack of unicorn content on this blog, it seemed only appropriate to share this little tidbit with all of you. For those who are not on Facebook, there’s a meme making the rounds that requires the user to look up their first name on Urbandictionary.com and then then post the first result or something. It’s pretty dumb, in my opinion, but my good pall EmmySue posted this on my Wall, which pretty much made my week:

I also really enjoyed my friend Amy’s response to this meme in general:

Why bother with Urban Dictionary? Just own it. Post some ridiculous braggy thing and be honest about it, rather than a ridiculous status like: “Oh, it says Amy is defined as a ‘hilarious, charismatic, intelligent, goodlooking and modest woman of the perfect age, weight and height — oh and she’s superfantastic in the sack’! OMG, how crazy and funny! I’m so surprised! :-/ “

In a nutshell, the lesson we can learn here is that any silly internet/Facebook meme can be made 300x more awesome by the inclusion of unicorns. And the use of the phrase “…in the sack”.

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Love it or hate it, Facebook is here to stay. Despite challenges around user privacy and an ever-changing interface, Facebook is rapidly becoming THE gateway to content for many users. As a blogger, Facebook can be a great tool to promote and share your content to potential readers. But the real question is…what’s the best way to do that?

Facebook Fan Pages

Facebook allows organizations and business to create what they call “Fan” pages. In reality, these are Facebook accounts that are not tied to one individual, but represent a larger group or business. Of course, as any Facebook user knows, Fan pages can be used for more than just music groups, companies, or clubs – as the ever-popular “When I was your age we had to blow on video games to make them work” Fan page proves.

It’s quite simple to create a Fan page for your blog. But what value does it provide? One feature of Fan pages is the ability to import content to the page via an RSS feed. This allows you to easily populate the page with your blog posts just by pointing it to your blog’s feed. These posts are imported to the page as Facebook Notes.

Honestly, I’m not quite sure of the value of this. It takes the content from your blog and re-publishes it to Facebook. If all you care about is getting your words in front of more eyes, and don’t really mind the mechanism for doing so, this is a pretty good solution. What it WON’T do is provide more traffic to your blog. Users will interact with your content on the Fan page alone (sure, there’s a tiny little link at the bottom of each post that goes back to the original, but it’s unlikely that most users will click on that).

If you are trying to build community in your comments, this creates a divergence between the conversation on the Fan page and the conversation occurring in the comments on your blog. The value of this re-publishing will, therefore, vary wildly depending on what you are trying to accomplish. In a way, this is similar to users who read your content via their feed reader (they don’t add traffic to your blog when they read the posts), but the devil is in the commenting details – someone who reads a post in their RSS reader but want to comment has to come to your site to do so. A Fan page user can comment right inside Facebook and never hit your site at all. Again, to some people this will be considered a major weakness, and other bloggers won’t see it as a problem at all.

NetworkedBlogs

Before Facebook opened up the Fan pages to everyone (there was a time that only “celebrities” or “actual companies” could create them), NetworkedBlogs was THE way to push your blog content to your Facebook friends. It requires your readers to “install” a separate app in their Facebook page, but this app allows them to “follow” blogs inside Facebook. Frankly, I haven’t found a great advantage to using this app as a Facebook user – unless I actually go INTO the app, the information from it doesn’t show up in my News Feed.

However, as a blog publisher, you can configure NetworkedBlogs to automatically publish new posts from your blog to YOUR Wall, which will end up in all of your friends News Feeds…not just the ones who have subscribed to you via the Networked Blogs app. This removes the need to manually “share” your posts on your Wall, which can certainly make your promotion easier, but the net result is no different.

So which is best?

From the perspective of the blog publisher

Since both tools are free, there’s no real good reason to not do both. There’s a risk in using a Fan page that you might be taking traffic away from your actual site if you publish your posts via the Notes feed (although those don’t end up in the News Feed stream anyway, so the only way people will see them is if they go to your Fan page directly), but other than that, it’s not a negative thing to participate in both methods.

Fan pages have the benefit of being able to promote your blog to Facebook users without actually haven’t to friend them on Facebook – if people Fan your page, and then you share the post link via the Fan page, all the people who have Fanned you will see it in their feed. So that’s a real advantage over simply sharing the link via your personal Facebook account.

For example, one blogger who I talked to for this post said to me “I don’t broadcast to the world that I’m a blogger.  My husband knows, a small group of close friends know… but for the most part, I keep it to myself.  I don’t want to feel like I have to censor what I write because a family member, random friend or someone I don’t like very much reads my blog.” In that case, a Fan page makes great sense. That blogger could create her Fan page, promote that out to her non-”real life” friends, and then could push her blog content via the Wall of the Fan page. That’s what Fan pages excel at – abstracting your blog away from your personal Facebook identity.

From the perspective of the Facebook user

Jenn of You’ll Grow To Love Me points out that while she has NetworkedBlogs installed on her Facebook page, and follows some blogs there, she doesn’t actually use it for reading the blogs. “I follow my friends with my Google Reader and since that’s pretty ubiquitous, I don’t feel like I should pay attention elsewhere,” she says. ” I don’t see the purpose of [Fan pages], other than for them to be more legitimate if they have a visible following.”

Another major issue with Fan pages revolves around recent Facebook privacy changes. “I’ve had some people say that they would like to ‘be a fan’ of my blog on Facebook,” says Ari of Curious Illusion. “but due to Facebook changing the privacy stuff around, they don’t feel comfortable being fans of pages, since everyone can see what they are fans of now. Stupid Facebook.”

Finally, Free and Flawed’s Jenn brings up the over-saturation point. “fan pages just seem over-done at this point. There’s a fan page for everything and I hate being that person fanning a ridiculous amount of stuff,” she says. “However, I will follow a blog on NetworkedBlogs because it seems less spammy than fan pages.”

To sum up

By no means is this comparison comprehensive. Clearly there are benefits for promoting your blog via Facebook, and Fan pages and NetworkedBlogs are two easy ways to do this. Like almost everything else, the devil is in the details - just creating Fan pages, or configuring NetworkedBlogs, is not going to be enough in itself. The manner in which you use these tools will be the recipe for your success. My suggestion is to evaluate the capabilities of both options, and take into account your targeted audience and their perceptions, before jumping in with both feet.

What do you think? If you promote your blog on Facebook, how do you do it? As a Facebook user, which of these methods seems most useful for you for blogs you find interesting?

When it comes to blogging, it should be all about the content. Write great posts and the rest will take care of itself, right? Generally speaking, that’s true. But that shouldn’t keep you from wanting to make your blog even more awesome with the use of some totally sweet tools and utilities to take your blogging to the next level and maybe, you know, engage your readers and synergize the new media or something like that.

Zemanta – I’ve talked about Zemanta before, but having used it for a while now I need to recommend it again. Working as either an extension in your web browser or a plugin to your blogging software, Zemanta looks for relevent content (both media and links) in both your own sources (Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, etc) and the internet at large. Add in tag recommendations and auto-linking features within your content, and you’ve got a great tool to bolster up your content and make it sing. Not literally, of course, but you never know what future versions will bring.

Clicky - If you spend any time in the blogosphere, you’re going to become traffic-obsessed. What’s the point of writing if nobody is going to read it? (Don’t answer that.) But the fact is, most bloggers would love to expand their readership. And to do so, you need metrics on WHO is reading your blog and WHERE they are coming from. Clicky is a great tool for real-time web analytics. Add a couple lines of code to your blog (or install a blog plugin), and Clicky will instantly start tracking all user activity. The paid version adds some additional features (like the ability to track multiple websites), but even without spending a dime, you can get some great use from Clicky.

Google Analytics – If you’re ready to move up to more robust activity logging and analysis, this free tool from Google is for you. It’s not real-time like Clicky, but it’s reporting capabilities are way more advanced…plus, if you use AdWords to promote your blog (or AdSense to monetize it), Google Analytics will put all those statistics in one nice package. Be advised – it can look VERY intimidating at first (Clicky is way more new user friendly), but if you’re serious about analyzing user behavior and your traffic, GA is a must. I personally use both Clicky AND GA.

Cornify - Chances are that unless you are Action-Squad, your blog is VERY light on unicorn-related content. In fact, it might not have any at all. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to rectify this gross oversight, which is to run all of your pages through Cornify. A simple snippet of HTML code will instantly add wonderful unicorn rainbowosity to your entire blog, which will result in a guaranteed five percent increase in conversion.

Lijit – This is one of my new favorites. Wordpress has a pretty decent search engine built into it, but I found it just wasn’t as awesome as I’d like to it be. Given that my blog has over 2,500 posts, search is REALLY important. Enter Lijit. It’s a free service that enables a powerful search engine for your blog, but even more than that, gives you super cool statistics on the searches your users are performing – both ON your blog, and to GET to your blog. If you know what people are looking for, you can focus like a laser on the topics that your readers are interested in. Plus, my friend Doniree just announced that she is the newest member of the Lijit team, so I kind of had to toss out a shout-out today.

Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/lessdoh/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

Yesterday I made mention of the fact that I’d jumped on board with Scott Bishop’s 28 Day Blogging Challenge. One of the main precepts of this challenge is to look for measurable improvement and change in this blog.

What am I looking for?

During these 28 days, I have some specific goals I would like to achieve. They are related to traffic, content, and methodology. Here are the items I would like to improve for the 28 Day Blogging Challenge:

Traffic to the blog - This is an easily measurable goal, but determining success is a little more difficult. I could compare the 28 days to the previous 28 days, although that’s not necessarily a perfect comparison (February is a different month with different types of user behavior). Another metric would be comparing Feb 2010 to Feb 2009. I think I will publish both comparisons, as it’s not an “either/or” type of goal. I will be using Google Analytics for these measurements, and I think I will also do a weekly “touchpoint” every Monday to see how I’m doing so far. The number for this goal will be Visits (as opposed to Pageviews, etc).

“Stickiness” of visitors – I get a fair amount of traffic via organic search results, mostly from Google (last month, organic search results from Google accounted for 39% of my traffic and search engines in general were almost 50% of it). But just getting hits from a search engine does me no good if the users bounce out right away – since I don’t generate income from ad impressions, page views in general aren’t useful. I want to create repeat visitors (more on that later), and one way to do that is to ensure that users “stick around” after they’ve come in the front door, so to speak. I’m still debating on which metric to use to measure success for this – bounce rate, or pages per visit. Thoughts?

Repeat visitors – Once people come here, I want them coming back again and again. Like they say – it’s way harder to get a new customer than keep an existing one, and I think the same thing applies to website visitors. Metric-wise, I’m going to look at two different numbers to calculate this. One will be the “returning visitor” number from Analytics, and the other will be the Feedburner subscribers. I think it’s important to look at the specific number of returning visitors, vs. the percentage, as I’m not necessarily against a high percentage of new vs. old, but rather, I want a larger number of return visitors. Feedburner stats have become fairly useless after the inclusion of FriendFeed data (in my opinion), but since I don’t add a lot of new FriendFeed users all at once, I think that looking at the delta will still be a useful metric. It’s going to be really hard to compare Feedburner against the previous year, as the stats only go back 30 days on the website, but I can export all of my stats to Excel, which I will use in my final review. Ongoing, I’ll just compare the Feedburner subscribers each Monday to the number from Feb 1, the day I started.

Comments on posts – I’ll be honest, I measure my worth as a blogger by this metric more than any other. And frankly, my comments have gone WAY down in the past year or so. I really do want to improve this one, although I believe that the areas listed above will do their part to help with this. I’m not sure exactly what metric to use to measure this, though, and I will take any suggestions you might have.

Taking action

These goals are well and good…but they don’t do anything without actually making some changes. Action is the word of the day, so here are the new actions I will be taking to accomplish these goals:

Organized and schedule posting - I was REALLY good about this early in 2009. I had specific types of posts I did on certain days of the week. For example, Monday was “RSS Recommendations”, Wednesday was “Web Wanderings”, Thursday was “Tech Tips”, etc. I found that with this type of schedule it helped me figure out what I wanted to post ABOUT…but the issue was when I couldn’t think of a “Web Wandering”, for example. My goal now is to use the content schedule as a guide, but I will allow myself to post outside of that schedule if the content requires it.

Improve “calls to action” in my posts – Nobody does this better than Matt at Life Without Pants. His posts ALWAYS engage his user base, and the dude not only gets a LOT of comments, he sparks really interesting DISCUSSIONS in them. One of the main recipes for his success is the concept of “call to action”. He doesn’t just post stuff…his posts are springboards for conversation. I am going to try to make a point of including at least one “call to action” in each post. Actually, I should do one better – I should include ONE, and only ONE, “call to action” in each post…and put it at the end.

Include images in each and every post – Everyone loves pretty pictures. I’m also going to make a concerted effort to ensure that every post has an associated thumbnail graphic for Thesis to use in archive type pages. My hope is that not only will pictures make my posts “stand out” in an RSS reader, but the thumbnails will help when people are poking around on my category pages, etc.

Just post more – The challenge itself will help with this, but more content is always better, right?

The baseline metrics

As I mentioned above, we need to know the targets we are trying to reach. For purposes of comparison, here are the numbers for February 2009 and January 2010 for each metric I’ve called out above. I know it’s not going to be true apples to apples, but for January 2010 I have to use my Clicky numbers, as I didn’t have GA numbers for the whole month (I screwed up my tracking code for about half the month).

Visits:
2/2009: 5,643
1/2010: 3,115

Bounce Rate:
2/2009: 87.08 %
1/2010: 75 %

Pages per Visit:
2/2009: 1.36
1/2010: 1.6

Returning Visitors:
2/2009: 1,377
1/2010: N/A (Clicky doesn’t provide this in an easy to find manner)

Feedburner Subscribers:
2/2009: 206
1/2010: 387

So what do you think? Are my goals realistic? What about my chosen metrics…are there other numbers I should be considering?

“Life moves pretty fast. You don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
- Ferris Bueller, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

An awful lot has been going on in my life lately. You might have noticed a lack of updates here on my blog, and I’m going to blame my crazy life for that. However, I’m no longer going to make excuses for not getting things done. I’m turning over a new content-creation leaf, and you all get to come along for the ride.

Double Down

As you know, my wife and I are now the proud parents of twin boys – Henry and Joey. The boys turned one month old this weekend, and it’s been a great journey so far. Carrie has been staying home with them during the day, and today is the beginning of Week 3 of me being back to work. It was MUCH easier when I was off, but it’s kind of important to be working in order to, you know, buy food and pay the mortgage and stuff, so I’m back at the office.

Expanding my influence

I’ve been asked to contribute to a new useful and cool new Apple mobile device website, Today’s iPhone! TiP focuses on all Apple mobile devices, including the iPhone, iPod Touch, and the new iPad.

TiP is a spin-off of the popular mobile device site PhoneDog. I am a contributor/blogger for the site, and I hope that you enjoy it. If you’re an iPhone/iPhod Touch user, please check it out. The site is geared towards folks from all walks of life – not just phone geeks. In addition to app reviews and news articles, there’s a discussion forum for questions about Apple mobile devices, as well as some awesome videos full of tips and tutorials.

My first article is Matt’s 5 must-have photo apps. It’s iPhone-specific (since the iPod Touch doesn’t have a camera), but if you use your iPhone to take pictures, I highly recommend you check it out for some insight into cool apps that will really improve the quality and creativity of the photos you take with you device.

If you have any ideas for topics you’d like to see me cover on the site, please feel free to comment here or email me. My main “beat” for TiP will be photography-related, but I’m going to be writing about just about everything iPhone related – some examples of posts I’m working on include apps for dog owners, a tutorial on the best methods for organizing your apps, reviews of some fantastic games, as well as reviews of neat iPhone photography accessories.

Getting Things Done

Obviously, finding time to update this blog, as well as the boys’ blog, and write for Today’s iPhone has been a challenge. But I’ve decided to look at this as a challenge, rather than a hinderance.

I’ve been a proponent of the time management system Getting Things Done for a few years now. But I’ve never been able to actually implement it. My expectation is that since my “spare time” is so tight right now, that time management has gone from a “nice to have” to an absolute necessity.

My first item to tackle is going to be managing my professional tasks. I’ve just implemented the Pay It Forward Email Management system. If you are a user of Microsoft Outlook, I highly recommend checking it out. The philosophy of the system is basically “GTD Lite”, but leveraging the abilities of Outlook. I’m going to use it as a “first pass” implementation, and will tweak it from there. I’ll write a longer post on this after I’ve used it for a week or so (I already have a couple of things I know that will need modification for my particular uses) but I’m fairly excited about it.

The money goes where the mouth is

I’m a believer in the concept that we can’t effect change in ourselves until we put some actual repercussions to the change. For example, when I was trying to lose weight, I would follow a system where I publicly posted my progress, with the hope that the exposure would “shame” me into doing better.

To put my virtual money where my mouth is, I’ve committed to Scott Bishop’s 28 Days of Blogging challenge. I will post new content on Good Old Rock every single day in the month of February. I’ve got some ideas for posts, but would love some input from you guys. If there’s something you’d like to see me write about, shout it out in the comments. This is in addition to my regular updates on Stratton Boys, my commitments for Today’s iPhone, as well as the guest posts I promised to some folks back in December.

One day down…27 days to go.

The interwebs are a funny place. We make friends we wouldn’t meet otherwise. We learn about things that otherwise would result in our blissful ignorance. And sometimes…those two things can combine and we can use the power of routing TCP packets to make a real difference in someone’s life. Please read on to learn more about how we, the denizens of the webbertubes, can come together and raise up some hope for someone who only wants to love as hard as she can.

Our Plea

Our friend brandy is a brilliant writer, a wonderful teacher, and a generous friend.  And she is in love with a man who has just been diagnosed with multiple myeloma.

We are raising money for the Multiple Myeloma Research Fund in his name.  For the price of a cinnamon dolce latte, half-caf, hold the whip, you can be part of an effort to cure a disease that affects approximately 750,000 people worldwide.

http://www.loveharder.org

Every dollar brings us a dollar closer to a cure.  And every donation brings a sliver of hope to a girl who needs all the hope she can get.

What You Can Do

Give.  Be part of a worldwide effort to cure a disease that affects approximately 750,000 people worldwide.  Every dollar helps.

Pass it on. Forward this story to five people.  Share this blog post.  Become our fan on Facebook.

Love harder. Life is short, love is unbending, and no one knows what could happen next.  Tell someone you love them today.

Where Your Money Goes

• The American Institute of Philanthropy recently named The Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation one of the best organizations to give to in terms of their accountability and use of resources.
• By working closely with researchers, clinicians and partners in the biotech and pharmaceutical industry, the MMRF has helped bring multiple myeloma patients four new treatments that are extending lives around the globe.
• The MMRF has advanced twenty Phase I and Phase II clinical trials. They need your support to advance these clinical research programs and accelerate the development of better, more effective treatments.
• The MMRF’s Multiple Myeloma Genomics Initiative recently became the first to sequence the multiple myeloma whole genome in its entirety.
• A whopping 98% of your donation to the MMRF will be used immediately to support high-priority multiple myeloma research.
• With diminishing funding for early stage drug development and the next myeloma treatments not expected to be approved until 2011, the MMRF desperately needs your help.

Brandy’s story

In case you missed it, brandy shared her story from her point of view right after Christmas.

The video

Without further ado, I bring you this musical number presented from California, DC, Philadelphia, Ontario, Manitoba, Colorado, Chicago, Tennessee, Halifax, and many places in between.  Enjoy!  And sing along :)

DONATE: http://www.loveharder.org
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While poking around a bit today on the Lijit site, I came across a promo for a service/site called Zemanta. Described as a tool to “help you to blog smarter by suggesting related content, in real-time, for what you’re writing,” Zemanta seemed like something I wanted to check out.

Zemanta is a free service. It is enabled on your blog platform either by installing a plugin (if you’re self-hosted; plugins are available for Wordpress, MoveableType, Joomla, and Drupal), or a browser extension. Fundamentally, it modifies the “New Post” screen in your blogging software to provide some additional components, as you can see in this screenshot:

So far, in my composing of this post, it’s figured out that I would want to link to Zemanta and Lijjit. The suggested links show up on the bottom in little buttons, and then I just click them to create the link. Pretty slick.

I’m not quite sure why it suggested the images that it did, however…it pulled this from my Flickr, and I don’t know why:

Another thing I realized just now – if you use Wordpress, it seems best to add the images AFTER you have typed all your content, as the cursor is ending up in weird places after I drop an image in…and then I have to go into HTML mode to get it where it should go.

Oh! I just noticed that Zemanta also suggested some tags for this post, based upon the content. A simple *click* added them. That’s pretty cool.

The final feature I’m going to try is the “related articles” feature. It seems like I can just drag them from the sidebar into my post. Let’s see…

Related articles by Zemanta

• Enrich Your Blog Posts with Zemanta (blogtipz.com)
• Zemanta and the Semantic Web (petervan.wordpress.com)

Overall, I’d say that Zemanta seems pretty cool, and given that it’s free, I would highly recommend checking it out if you’re a blogger and want a new toy to play with. I’ll report back on my use of it in a few weeks after I’ve used it more in my “day to day” blogging.