5 Things to do between coding your blog and publishing your first post
Not technically news, but we encountered these “D’oh!” moments and I’m sure you have too. They’re a real pest if you have to chance these once you have traffic coming into your site.
- Analytics Google Analytics are your friend, it skews all your figures and sources if you dont know where your visitors are coming from right away.
- Feedburner RSS Same as above, don’t miss out who is reading your RSS stream - get statistics and added publicity for free.
- Social Bookmarking Buttons Add This offers handy buttons that allow users to quickly bookmark and submit your site to social news sites. You want it to be as easy as possible for your readers to come back to your site.
- Disqus Comments We forgot these initially, we were going to rely on YC news for comments, but decided we loved Disqus too much. Lovely installation guide means there is no excuse not to use them!
- CSS Max-Width Property Hate having to resize images before you post them? Don’t want to break the width of your site? Simply use this handy CSS property and all your problems vanish.
+1 Use tr.im or other services to shrinken your outgoing URLs for additional analytics!, this way you can see how many users click thru to other sites from you. We don’t usually do this as Google Analytics does it, but we love the services so we thought we’d big them up.
