Tool Used: WordPress
Ease Factor: :-0
Efficiency Factor: :-0
Effectiveness Factor:
Grade: Passed(Barely)
Comments: This time I uploaded the JPEG image directly in WordPress and sized the image to 500×750. You can now right click on the image and select view image and then you can magify the page to actual size. The problem is that a reader my hover her mouse over the image and if she doesn’t think to right click on it she won’t be know how to see the full page view either. There has to be a better way!

Summary: WordPress worked. Performancing and LiveWriter didn’t for a image this big. While WordPress won, it wasn’t the easied thing to do. Three clicks or less is best. If LiveWriter can be enhanced to allow full in-post or one click full views it would win hands down. LiveWriter has all categories in full view so it’s easier to remember and select categories. With WordPress you’ve got to scroll within a frame. I’ll put some comparison shots up sometime so you can see what I mean. This H2H Round goes to WordPress.

[TO VIEW FULL PAGE: Put your curser over the screenshot above>right click on your mouse>select view image. You should then be able to magnify the image to full size - I'm using Firefox.] 

I’ve spent way too much time figuring out how to use Performancing blog traffic stats reporting for my Marketing Superhero blog which uses Blogger.

WordPress includes blog and feed stats and below is a screen shot from today’s results.

We need to remember that ease of use is critical. WordPress may not report as much as I will want one day, but they’ve wet my appetite for blog analytics. It may make sense for them to offer an enhanced service for a small fee.

Web2.0 Experience has ascended the Technorati rankings and now sits at 296 thousandth place!

When my blog launched it was ranked at around 1,500,000th place and I remember seeing the traffic history box below and saying to myself “what’s the likelyhoold that I would reach the top 100,000?”.

Over the past month my ranking has climbed to 296, 578th place. This is faster and higher then I’d imagined. Will it take just a month to crack the top 100,000?Time will tell, how much is yet to be determined.

I’ll let you know!

Here’s a screenshot of my blog stats (a cool feature WordPress offers bloggers) which shows you the huge amount of folks that are viewing my blog! =)

Hey this is fun and to the 37 or 38 of you who invest your precious time to view my blog thank you very much. I hope to break forty some day but I’m in no hurry. Ironically, over the past few days my blog has moved up the Technorati rankings. I went from a ranking of 640,000 ish to 540,000 ish! Woh, I may take down WordPress’ servers yet.

For those of you interesting in how I posted this screenshot it’s pretty simple. I used FastStone Editor (yup, it’s free for home users) took a snapshot and then copied and pasted right into this post using Windows Live Writer. Simole and easy.

Well, SPAM is reaching the the land of blogs! The benefits of blogging far outweigh the pain of spamming but it’s a fact that new bloggers should know. I’ve had SPAM comments posted on my blog. This has been happening over the past few weeks and WordPress allows me to report SPAM.

So here’s the good news! WordPress is doing a great job capturing SPAM comments. To date, for my blog, it has on record 208 SPAM comments. In most cases this has been done automatically. There were four SPAM comments posted (that WordPress missed). In this case, I can report the comments as SPAM and I believe WordPress then records the IP address of the source of the comment as a SPAM producer.

A couple of things for us newbie bloggers! WordPress allows you to track your blog traffic statistics. It tells you how many unique visitors you’ve had, what search terms were used that resulted in someone going to your blog and what sites referred people to you. Pretty cool!

For example, Mack Collier mentioned my blog (among others) in this post on Beyond Madison Avenue’s blog. The reason I know this is WordPress has a referrers section on its Blog Stats page. It tells me that people clicked links from this referring blog to get to mine.

The result?

• Well, while the visitor who was referred will judge whether my blog is of value and worth their time, I received a pretty good “endorsement” from a popular blog in Marketing and Advertising.
• I also, have the opportunity to reach out to Mack to thank him for the post and to perhaps keep in touch on matters of mutual interest.

I’ve asked Mack how he heard about my blog as I’m interested to know this.

[UPDATE AUG 28: Mack found my blog by searching Technorati (a blog search engine/directory) using the search term "marketing"]

WordPress, the blogging service I use, provides me with an update on my blogs activity. Here’s an inside look for you to see what information it collects and reports. Pretty cool. Click here to see what I mean.

This is the primary interface or dashboard that shows you what the most popular blogs are and what activity is taking place within your blog (on the right hand side). I’ll provide you with more inside looks as the days go by.

Here is a screenshot that shows how much traffic my blog has received over the past 30 days. WordPress tracks number of views (not including my own views). If you are wondering whether your site is going the answer is no! I had to size the image and it got fuzzy.