You may have noticed on Saturday (3rd November) that you FeedBurner feed counter was reporting a much lower level of subscribers to your blog. Here at Newsniche the counter dropped by nearly a hundred subscribers.
FeedBurner blame Google for the glitch as the Google feedfetcher bot had gone out on Friday night and was up late Saturday. This was probably due to drinking too much GoogleJuice the night before, those bots can't hold their drink. As a result none of the Google Reader subscribers were reported in the stats for Saturday.
Google Feedfetcher drops ball
At the time like me you may have worried even panicked when you saw a massive drop in subscriber numbers. If you have more than one blog then you would have figured out the drop was across the board and due to some glitch.
These sorts of glitches although usually temporary can cause a webmaster a lot of unnecessary stress. These things happen, my advice is don't hit the panic button, do a little investigating then report it if needed. More often than not these things are temporary. I have learned by experience if you do too much tinkering thinking it's something you have done you end up making things worse. All you need to do now is explain to your advertisers why your stats dropped.
This post is from the Newsniche website and should not be reproduced elsewhere. Why not subscribe to the RSS feed and get this information delivered straight to your News reader.
With football season fast approaching, now is the best time to put the spotlight on our Sports Scoreboard widget and the NFL Gametrax widget. These two widgets are quite possibly the best sports focused widgets ever built. At least that's what our moms say ;-)
The Gametrax widget pulls in all the currently playing games for the NFL and displays them complete with play by play action and game leaders! (can you say fantasy?)
That's a live Gametrax widget to the left, clicking on the "game" tab will show you the play by play action if there is a game currently being played.
Our Scoreboard widget pulls in a complete list of all games playing complete with live scores for the NFL (excluding preseason), MLB, NBA, NHL, College Football and College Basketball leagues.
The great thing about the Scoreboard widget is that it can be dynamically sized. It will drop down as small as 160 pixels wide so that it will fit on most blog sidebars. If you have a sports blog, this is really the best way to share scores with your readers.
The scoreboard widget set to 160 pixels wide for blog sidebar placement. You can also set the default league shown to be MLB, NFL, NHL, NBA, CBK or CFB
Each league in the scoreboard gets yesterday's, tomorrow's and today's games in a tabbed format and you can set the initial display of the widget to default to any of those tabs for any league when the widget first loads.
In the yesterday tab, the final game scores along with a win/loss indicator on each team shows you quickly who was on top. Tomorrow's tab shows the game time and teams playing so that you can better plan which sports bar to visit to watch the most games at once, and the today tab shows off live in game scores on all games in the list complete with some in game leader information.
Now for the really cool info... For those of you who have our desktop application installed, the scoreboard widget really begins to shine after you download it.
Flip to the preference panel in the desktop sports Scoreboard widget and enable "docking" and you'll be able to drag the widget to the sidebar for all day sports tracking ability even when your work apps are open.
Take a few minutes and play with the widgets and feel free to use them for your desktop, blog or social network profile. If you think our moms are right and these are the best sports widgets that have ever been built, let us know.
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While I was looking through the widget analytics data the other day, I noticed just how many bands are using our RSS reader to deliver news to their fans into social networks like Myspace and Facebook and start pages like iGoogle, Netvibes and Pageflakes.
Admittedly, Timbaland may get a bit more play these days, but I spent so much time listening to my Zeppelin albums and tapes that I wore them out. And the Beastie boys Licensed to Ill was awesome and played non-stop while cruising in my 66 Mustang in the 80's. (I really am old)
If you have a band, take a look at how some of the other artists I mentioned above implemented the widgets on their Myspace pages and feel free to use our widgets or our platform to promote your own news or events to your fans.
We don't charge for bands to use our RSS reaader, so it's probably the lowest cost investment that you'll make in your popularity. If you are feeling generous, we'll take concert tickets, CD's and backstage passes if you have any to spare ;-)
If you are a band and add a SpringWidgets express RSS reader to your page to promote your website or blog, please add a comment below and let us know where to find it.
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Please help find Madeline British 3 year old Madeleine McCann was abducted from her apartment bedroom in Praia da Luz holiday village(Algarve, Portugal) on Thursday 3rd of May 2007. There is currently a £100,000 reward for the safe return of Madeleine.
If you have any information please call the police on (00 351) 218 641 000.
For more information, downloadable posters, and to donate to the cause, visit the official website set up by Madeleine's parents: www.bringmadeleinehome.com
If you have information on Madeleine please use the phone numbers above and do not try and make contact through SpringWidgets.
This post is independent of any media or law enforcement agencies and has no connections to the McCann family and is here to promote awareness only.
Have you ever wondered how much each subscriber to your RSS feed is worth. Well according to Mark over at 45n5 that magic number is currently $30. Mark arrived at this figure by dividing the price blogs have recently sold for by the number of subscribers to the blog.
I have previously made predictions about RSS playing a more important role back in October 2006. It looks like RSS is now an important metric to measure the success of a site and it is also starting to play a larger role in deciding the monetary value of a blog.
RSS subscribers and their value
Although Mark's use of RSS as a measurement of value was just a bit of fun it does show that RSS is a valued metric. A year ago most webmasters and readers would not have placed much if any value in the number of subscribers you have.
As RSS becomes a more valued metric the value of the RSS feed itself will grow. There are going to be more advertisers willing to buy advertising in an RSS feed and the value of RSS will grow. This is because many RSS subscribers do not click through to the website itself but use the feed to consume the content.
This post is from the Newsniche website and should not be reproduced elsewhere. Why not subscribe to the RSS feed and get this information delivered straight to your News reader.
