While the title is seemingly normal and boring, the reality is this update may change your life as we know it today. Or not... That depends on how important the ANR Blogs are to your sitebuilder site. Previously, anyone with a sitebuilder site could integrate ANR Blog posts into the right column of the home page. Now, this integration includes a choice to pick the center column as well. Part of the change also includes an RSS Feed link at the bottom of the Blog posting section. The RSS Feed lists all the posts that are displayed on your site. So if you have more that one Blog displayed on your site, all the posts come in as a single RSS Feed.
Displaying your blogs in the center column is very easy to do. Here's how to do it:
1. Login to Sitbuilder
2. Go to "Edit Home Page"
3. In the "Blog Options" on the right column, you will now see 3 options for displaying ANR Blogs. You may:
- Display No Blogs
- Display Blogs in the Center Column
- Display Blogs in the Right Column
All the other options work exactly the same for both columns the blogs are displayed. One difference you will see between the right and left columns is the center column displays the posts main picture as a small icon at the beginning of the post.
Example of ANR Blogs in center column:
ANR Blogs in right column:
For more information on how to add ANR Blogs to your Sitebuilder site take a look at my post entitled "New Feature".
It looks like the other features found in the "Blog Options" have never been explained. So here's what the other features do... (see the "Blog Options" example above)
Section Title
This is the title to display above the Blog posts.
Number of Posts to display on main page
Displays the number of posts you enter here. This can be any number from 1 to 255 and it only applies to the main or home page of your site.
Number of Characters to display on main page
This tells the system how many characters to display for each post. This can be anywhere from 20-1000 characters.
Blogs shown on Site
Here's is where you pick which blogs to display. You may select as many or as few blogs as you like.
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Two new Portal-related items were released this morning to deafening applause. First, we now have a "Portal Options" page allowing you to make some modifications to what you see on your Portal. Second, there is a new ANR Quick Access menu!
The Portal Options page controls the following four options right now:
- Module Activation - You can now remove modules from your portal. Click on a module you want removed, and it will disappear from your Portal after you reload the page! Of course, certain modules cannot be turned off, but most can. The list shows all modules, even ones that you may not be using, so you might see some things you didn't know existed in the Portal.
- Search Preference - This option was on the main portal page, but many people missed it. It allows you to search only for people, or search in both people and ANR sites.
- Portal Styles - Changing portal styles also was on the main page. More portal styles are being added regularly, so check back often to see what's new.
- ANR Quick Access Menu - Don't like the new Quick Access menu? You can turn it off here.
The Quick Access Menu is a little tab on Collaborative Tools and the blog system that invites users to "open" it. When opened, this tab pulls down a menu containing links normally found on your Portal. This will allow you to jump quickly to other systems. Also, there is a search box on the menu that will search in the ANR directory.
The Quick Access Menu will be rolled out on other systems as soon as possible.
***UPDATE***
I just added it to Site Builder. Seems to be working just dandy.
A few minor improvements have been made to the Blogs RSS feed and Podcast feed. The changes relate to keeping up with RSS technology and providing a way to tracking RSS feed usage. You may never see any of these changes. However if you like statistics, then you will probably be looking for your blogs RSS feed usage.
Let's take a closer look at how to see your RSS feed's usage. First, your Blog must be gathering statistics using Google Analytics. To find out more about that read my previous Blog Post on Blog Statistics. Once your Blog is gathering statistics it may not be gathering stats on your RSS feed. If you post regularly then you can skip this next part. If your not sure it doesn't hurt anything so... Go to the Blog Administration and click on the link "Rebuild RSS". This refreshes your RSS feed and simply makes sure the tracking mechanism is in the RSS feed.
Now is where you need to wait for the data to come in or you can go to your RSS feed and view a post or two to make sure data is available. After this you need to wait at least a day to see the results.
In Google Analytics you will find your RSS feed usage in the Traffic Sources section. A Traffic Source from an RSS feed will look something like "RSS / RSS". You can also find the RSS feed usage in the "Campaigns" section of Traffic Sources. The RSS Feed campaign is called "RSS Feed". So this should be easy to find. Take a look at the example below:
You can see above that the RSS Feed campaign has one visit. It's as easy as that! Now you can measure how effective your RSS feed really is.
The magic word of the day is "Statistics", more specifically Blog Statistics. Yes you heard me right. Blog Statistics! Now your asking me what is this picture of Google Analytics for? I'm glad you asked! Typically we have a program called Smarter Stats for statistics. Unfortunately, for this program will not work properly for the ANR Blogs. So we decided that it would be better to use Google Analytics for gathering stats. Google Analytics is a free, easy, and very powerful website statistics package. The only drawback is you need to go to Google to see your stats. Which really is not that hard at all. So with this in mind we wired the ANR Blogs to work harmoniously with Google Analytics.
So how can you add Google Analytics to your Blog? let me explain how in several easy steps...
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Create an account with Google Analytics
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Add your Blog to Google Analytics
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Put your Tracking Code into the Blog settings.
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Start receiving data!
In more depth here's how you do each step.
Creating an account with Google Analytics
Go to: http://www.google.com/analytics/
Then click on the link: Sign Up Now
When creating your account you may use your current e-mail address. even better would be to use the same e-mail address use use for the ANR Blogs.
Add your Blog to Google Analytics
Once you've created an account and logged in. You will see a section in the middle of the screen like this...
To Add your Blog click the "+Add new profile" link on the top-right corner of the site list box.
On this page you need to enter the site Timezone, URL, and Website Profile Type.
The Website Profile Type should be "Add a Profile for a new domain".
The URL is the web address to your blog's home page. If you don't know this, in a new window go to your blog's home page and copy the URL from the address bar. Back on the Google Analytics form, paste the URL in the form next to the "http://". (The "index.cfm" part at the end is not needed.)
URL example for the Web Action Team Blog...
Url: "http://ucanr.org/blogs/wat"
Select your Time zone and Country, then click finish. On the next screen copy the tracking code from the page. The tracking code will be a random set of numbers that looks similar to: UA-1234567-1
Put your Tracking Code into the Blog settings
Google uses your Tracking code to track the data that belongs to your website. So we need to put this tracking code inside your Blog. Fortunately we've made this easy for you.
First get your tracking code. It is found in the site listing just after you login to Google Analytics (if you've defined a site profile), or just after defining a site profile the tracking code is displayed in a tan box with your website information. The tracking code is some random numbers and looks similar to this: UA-1234567-1
Once you have the tracking code, login to your Blog. Click on the "Administration" link, then click on "Edit Blog Information". At the bottom of this page you will see a place to enter your Google Analytics Code". Paste your code in the box and update the blog.
Congradulations! You are now completely setup for gathering statistics for your ANR Blog! All you need to do now is wait for the data to come rolling in.
It will take Google Analytics roughly 24 hours to start showing data, and unfortuantely Google does not have past data.
Using Google Analytics
Google Analytics is full of amazing features! I know very little about how to use Google Analytics much less to it's full potential. However there is alot of help on the Internet and on the Google Analytics website. For convenience here are a few links if you want to learn more about Google Analytics:
http://www.google.com/analytics/features.html
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/?hl=en
http://groups.google.com/group/analytics-help
Attached is a default report that was e-mailed to me by Google Analytics for the Web Action Team Blog.
Analytics Sample
It seems the ANR Blogs are making a big splash. With much interest in blogging, I finally had some time to make some finishing touches (for now) on the Blog system which some have been asking about. I've pulled out all the stops and put into the system a nice Archive list and the ability to add tags to posts. Right away I discovered that the "Post Archive" is great for seeing how active a blog may be. For some it is painful to see last updated over a year ago! Ouch! For others it is nice to see a long list of posts each month. For the most Posted to Blog check out, Jeannette Warnert's ANR News Blog. With 200 posts since April 2007. That roughly 15.38 posts a month or one every 2 days! No this is not an award of any kind, though if it helped people to post more maybe we could start having awards. Most creative Blog, most innovative use of a Blog, most reliable Blog; are just a few ideas. Along the same lines I've also added a fun reminder system to the Blogs. After a blog has been "idle" with no posts for 3 months, it is automatically deleted... Just kidding!!! I wonder if I scared a few of you out there? Actually I wonder who reads this Blog... You know you can leave comments to these innovative posts... Ok, back to the subject... After 3 months of no Posts the Blog owner gets sent a fun e-mail asking them to post and keep their blog up. These get sent out once a week. For those too busy to post they will notice not all the e-mail's are the same. Some may want to collect them, but I doubt they will be worth anything one day.
Something that is much more valuable is tagging your posts! A tag is like a category, label, or term that can be used to help describe what a post is about. So when making a post you can add as many tags as you like to help categorize the posts. Say I'm writing a story about growing grapes in the winter (unlikely I know but I'm a programmer not a grower) you can add the tags "grapes,winter,viticulture" and so on... Separate each one with a comma and that's it! Well there's more but that's all for adding the tags. Once the tags are added the "Tag List" link will show you all the tags listed in both alphabetical order and in the order of most used to least used. Also at the bottom of each post you will see the tags for the post if there are any available. Each tag may be clicked on to see all the posts in the Blog using that tag. So Tags are the to help you organize your posts and to help others find information in your blog faster. Don't forget to look at the tags I've added to this post.
That's it for today. Until next time... Blog Away!
