Blue Chi’s

I’ve been experimenting with Disqus for a couple of weeks now and I’m so in love with. This is a free blog comments service that helps in connecting posts by a single commentator through a stream so that you can follow what a person is saying across a number of posts or even blogs as long as they all use Disqus.

For example, because I now have Disqus installed on my blog, whenever someone hovers over a username, he can see the list of comments that person made on my blog for other posts, and because I have Disqus installed on my other blogs as well (Omani Cuisine and myITLawyer), it is possible to track the comments of a user across other blogs as well. In the example below, if you hover over the username of Kishor, you will see that he posted 5 days ago on a post on myITLawyer.com, as well as on two other posts on this blog!

It is still possible to click on the username of the person to go to his website if he has specified it. You should also note that Kishor did not actually have to register on this website or even provide any sort of identification for himself, Disqus links usernames with the emails attached to them and figures out who is who.

Now imagine how awesome if all of our blogs were connected this way? If a blogger has this installed Disqus on his blog then comments he makes on his blog would also be visible to those who check his “profile” from any other blog that has Disqus as well.

Disqus is available for WordPress, Blogger and Typepad. 

It is totally free, syncs your comments on your blog database as well as the Disqus server, has tight spam filters, provides the feature to respond to a comment by email! and also provides you with a centralized panel to manage all your blogs and participations.

I advice ALL bloggers to install Disqus so that we can all enjoy the blogging ‘community’. It is TOTALLY FREE, so why don’t you just try it?

(I forgot to mention that Disqus now also offers Facebook connect functionality, so people can comment using their facebook username and password, this currently only links the comments that individual, but soon it will also have the feature to make wall notifications whenever a user chooses to comment using Facebook Connect. DISQUS IS THE COOLEST!)

If you are reading this message through your RSS reader this means that you are subscribed to my feedburner and you can continue to follow my updates without making any changes! 

The address of my blog is http://www.blue-chi.com/, my previous address at blogspot will remain for several months and then I will delete it. 

I moved to WordPress because Blogger is extremely buggy, very slow, and never ever shows the most updated version of my homepage. WordPress has many more features, is fully customizable and much faster to use. 

I ported my previous theme to WordPress but it is still a bit rough of the edges, I’ll try to fix it bit by bit with time.

You can’t be serious about making a blog if you have no intention of tracking the readership of your blog. You cannot measure your blog success solely on the number of comments you get because the majority of people are too shy to comment. Page views and site visits are the most essential metrics for assessing your blogs success.

My favourite tracking tool, and probably the best one out there currently, is the free Google Analytics. Unlike the dodgey SiteMeter used by many in the Omani blogosphere, Google Analytics does not require you to put a graphic on your blog and does not publish those statistics to the public. For example, you can Muscati’s traffic summary here.

Unlike the messy and confusing SiteMeter, Google Analytics is a fine tracking solution that provides many detailed tracking metrics – Those are divided into the following categories:

1. Visitor Metrics (number of visits, pages views, geographical location, etc.)
2. Traffic Sources Metrics (what websites link to you, what keywords were people searching for when they found you, etc.)
3. Content Metrics (what is your most popular content, traffic pathway, etc.)

All of these are displayed in an easy to use rich interface powered by Flash and Ajax, which is easy to use and very interactive. My favourite feature of Analytics is the comparison tools for comparing progress over a month or any other period of time which shows numbers and percentages of growth.

Installing Analytics is dead easy, you simply copy the code and paste it at the bottom or you template, I think that you can even just paste it as a code widget in the Blogger and place it in the bottom of the page.

Analytics is totally free, there is no reason for you not to try it.