A lot of people have reported huge drops in their AdSense income lately.  And not being able to use AdSense on WordPress.com has been a thorn in many a wordpress.com blogger’s side (and a reason why some chose the inferior Blogger over WordPress.com when searching for a free, hosted blogging solution).  A new free report entitled “The Death of AdSense” exposes some of the reasons why adsense earnings are down and provides his alternative method for generating income online (with purported monthly earnings in the 50k range).  An interesting read for sure, especially for professional bloggers.
You can check out the free report here.

WordPress.com finally offers the ability for users to export their blog entries to an xml formatted document. This gives wordpress.com users the flexability of moving their blog to, say, their own webserver where they have the full version of WordPress installed.

I had previously posted about how great it is that WordPress.com has an import feature, but where was the export feature — well now we have it.

While WordPress.com is truly an amazing blogging environment/platform/community, and certainly the best way for new users to start blogging, some may outgrow it, finding they want the full functionality offered by installed wordpress on their own server. The main differences between wordpress.com and running wordpress 2.0.2 on your own server include your choice of plugins, themes (there are over 875 free wordpress themes available for download or you can create your own), the ability to serve up google adsense ads and utilize javascript within your blog, etc.

For those who want to get a glimpse at what using wordpress is like, but are too intimidated to deal with installing it themselves, etc, wordpress.com just may be the perfect solution. Without question they will grow to love it. The only question is whether it will spark the desire to take the plunge and go with WordPress 2.0.2 — and now, if they want to do that, they can easily bring their blog with them by using the new export feature!

Thanks wordpress! Been waiting for this one!

CompUSA.com has the Xbox 360 consoles in stock right now, available to ship by tomorrow!

I don't know about you, but I've been long awaiting the actual availability of the much lusted after Xbox 360 — it's been out of stock EVERYWHERE since the darn thing came out.  But (at least at the moment), it is in stock right now at compusa.com (online, anyway - don't know about the local stores).  Just thought I'd give people a heads-up in case they, too, were seeking to buy the impossible to get xbox 360 consoles.

It's nice that WordPress.com provides us with the ability to view some vital items from our blog's statistics in the Dashboard|Blog Stats area. And I love the graph that shows the traffic over the past 30 days (although I wish you could click on any of the points in the graph and have it show you detailed stats for that particular day, rather than just the number of visitors).

However, it's disappointing that wordpress.com is setup by default to just show you your detailed stats for the previous seven days. But while there isn't a link for it on your stats page, you CAN actually see stats for as many days as you'd like - you just need to modify the URL.

For example, when you click on Referrers from your Blog Stats, it shows you all of the referrers for the past 7 days. But what if you want a more detailed history of referrers to your blog? No worries! Simply change the url from the default one of:

https://YOURSUBDOMAINGOESHERE.wordpress.com/wp-admin/index.php?page=stats&view=referrers&numdays=7

to replace the 7 at the end to the actual number of days you want stats for - 30, 60, 90, 100, the choice is yours to make!

The same logic holds true for viewing Search Engine Terms - just change the 7 in the below URL to whatever number of days you'd like:

https://YOURSUBDOMAIN.wordpress.com/wp-admin/index.php?page=stats&view=searchterms&numdays=7

And, of course, the same is also true for Top Posts - replace the 7 below with the number of days you want to see Top Posts for:
https://YOURSUBDOMAIN.wordpress.com/wp-admin/index.php?page=stats&view=postviews&numdays=7 

You can even change it for Summarized Stats of Top Posts - change the 30 below to your chosen count and presto:

https://YOURSUBDOMAIN.wordpress.com/wp-admin/index.php?page=stats&view=postviews&numdays=30&summarize 

 Hope that helps some of you access some of the stats for your blog that you may have thought were buried

And thanks, wordpress.com, for keeping our stats for so long and making them accessible - now if only we could have a user interface from the dashboard to get at them instead of tweaking the URLs (hint hint - and while I'm at it, how bout offering summary reports for Referrers and Search Engine Terms, as well?) 

I asked for help on this in WordPress Support, but got no response from anyone in the community:
One of my posts has disappeared and I can't reimport it from TypePad, either!!
On friday I noticed that two of the posts that I had originally created while still hosting How to Blog
at blogging.typepad.com but which I'd since ported over to WordPress had up and disappeared. I had exported all of my
posts/comments/trackbacks from TypePad and then imported them into WordPress 2.0.1 on March 7th (and then later upgraded to
2.0.2).

The posts *did* originally get imported, comments
and all, and were reachable at:

http://www.emilyrobbins.com/how-to-blog/starting-a-new-blog-get-your-own-domain-name-do-not-use-a-subdomain-of-typepadcom-wordpresscom-blogspotcom-etc-334.htm

http://www.emilyrobbins.com/how-to-blog/trackback-spam-a-nightmare-for-typepad-users-while-wordpress-anti-spam-filters-and-plugins-make-for-smooth-sailing-291.htm

Now when one clicks on either link, it generates a 404 error.

The first post is entitled, "Starting a new blog? Get your own domain
name! Do NOT use a subdomain of typepad.com, wordpress.com,
blogspot.com (etc)", and the second one, "Trackback spam a nightmare for TypePad users, while WordPress anti-spam filters and plugins make for smooth sailing".

I have NO idea how and when these posts all of a sudden disappeared but I can guarantee you I sure as **** didn't delete them.

I figured - don't panic - I can just reimport the posts with all of their comments and trackbacks. So I logged back into my old typepad
account and exported my posts and then found the posts in question and
created a txt file that just contained those posts, and their corresponding comments and
trackbacks. I then went to wordpress's IMPORT feature, and chose to
import from movabletype. When I browsed to the file and told it to
import it, I get the following error message:

1. Post Starting a new blog? Get your own domain name!
Do NOT use a subdomain of typepad.com, wordpress.com, blogspot.com
(etc) already exists.

Yet any searches for any of the text from the title or the body of
those posts (either from w/in the blog search itself OR the admin search)
do not turn up either post. The posts aren't listed in my archives, and as
I mentioned, going to their original link now returns a 404 error.

I'm more than a little bit concerned here, for a number of reasons:

• How did these posts disappear? Why aren't they showing up anymore on my blog (not even as a draft) when I manage my posts?
• As the posts no longer appear to exist on my blog, why won't
  WordPress allow me to reimport them (and it's comments and trackbacks)?
  How can it say that the posts already exists (which they should…) if they aren't accessible anywhere on the site or from within the wordpress
  interface?

Very disturbing - and also troublesome that noone in WP support bothered to even take a stab at addressing my question..

Has anyone else experienced problems with posts disappearing from their WordPress 2.0.2 sites?

Update: I've been able to import the posts themselves by subtly changing the post names — yet WordPress 2.0.2 still refuses to import all of the comments and trackbacks for those posts!  This is so bizarre - and I really don't get it, because when I was still in the phase of deciding whether to move from TypePad to WP, I'd experimented with exporting from typepad and importing into wordpress in the location How to Blog currently resides, although I hadn't announced the move and still left the TypePad site up with comments open.  When an existing post would get new comments or trackbacks, all I had to do was re-export the site from typepad and re-import it into WordPress for it to discover the new comments and trackbacks….so why can't it find them for these 'vanishing posts'??

Update: Export feature now exists!  Access it through Manage|Export menu - thanks wordpress.com!
_______________________________________________

It’s great that wordpress.com offers the easy ability to import posts, comments, and trackbacks from other blogging systems. But I find it very surprising that there is no similar option to export your existing wordpress.com blog so that it can be imported elsewhere. Even TypePad provides users the ability to export any or all of their blogs.

At the very least I’d think that this feature would be available for those who start out blogging on wordpress.com and then realize that they would like to utilize the additional power and customizability of the full version of wordpress (available at wordpress.org) and host their blog on their own domain name. But as it stands now, unless I’m missing something (and if so, please let me know by commenting on this post!) if someone wanted to move from wordpress.com to a wordpress blog that they installed on their own server (so they could use adsense, plugins, additional themes, whatever) - they would have to manually copy and paste each entry and comment to create the new blog. That’s just insane!

I love wordpress.com and the community feel that comes with it. However, I think it is very arrogant and short-sighted to not provide an export option and assume that everyone who starts a wordpress.com blog will find it to be their perfect blogging solution - especially when the company’s own product, WordPress 2.0.2, offers users so much more flexability. (Although it also doesn’t seem to have an export option either…)

Well it’s official! I finally moved my blog on How to Blog from it’s old location at blogging.typepad.com on TypePad to a new WordPress powered site at http://www.emilyrobbins.com/how-to-blog/

Please check it out and update your bookmarks, inbound links, and RSS feeds accordingly

I’m really excited to finally have my main blog powered by WP, but right now am stuck in the awful tedium that accompanies making such a switch (especially since I didn’t use my own domain name for my TypePad site..) — I hope I don’t lose all of my traffic as a result of the switch since TypePad doesn’t support 301 permanent redirects — I’ve gone from PR6 to PR3 and hope it my pagerank and traffic are restored soon…

How cool!  One of the features I requested appears to have been implemented (and I’m sure I was the only one who requested it and am the sole reason it got implemented (not) but it’s still uber-cool to see your ideas come to life

The admin panel at the top of the screen that appears when you are viewing a wordpress.com blog now has a new link on it that says, “Next Blog”.  Clicking it takes you to another wordpress.com hosted blog that’s been (I assume) randomly selected.  If you see something cool you like, you have the option to “Add to Blogroll”.  Not interested?  Click “Next Blog” and surf on over to see what the next blogger has in store for you.

I love this because it emphasizes the community feel of having a wordpress.com blog.

See my WordPress 2.0.1 test blog

OK, so it took me a minute but I figured it out.  If you read my last post, I was trying to figure out how to get the uber-cool FireFox extension Performancing to add technorati tags to my posts, as I’d read it was capable of doing (and since this ‘feature’ is noticeably lacking  on WordPress.com, although Lorelle has a great post about a tagging bookmarklet for wordpress.com users)

Anyway, the mystery wasn’t such a mystery if I’d taken a closer look at the settings dialog box.  In addition to their being a box to check to automatically add the technorati tags to your post, there’s another checkbox (which also is unchecked by default) to ‘Show Extra Publishing Features’.  This needs to be checked in order to add the technorati tags to your post.  Once you’ve checked that, you’ll notice that your editor now has a new button to the right of the post title called “Publishing Options”.  Clicking that opens a sidebar window wherein you can enter your technorati tags in a comma seperated list.  Note that there is also a button there that says, “Add Tags to post” — if you have your settings set to auto-add the tags you do not want to click this button because it will then add the tags twice.

As this will be my first post utilizing this feature, I’m excited to see how it turns out!

UPDATE: Now that I’ve published the post and seen how it works, it is clear that it is a super-easy way to add technorati tagging to your posts, helping you get indexed better for the appropriate keywords on technorati without having to add them all as categories.  However, Lorelle’s version of adding tags to your posts does so in a way that I prefer — making the links for each of the tags search her blog for posts with that tag, rather than taking them to the technorati site.  Much better implementation of it, in my opinion.

Technorati Tags: tags, tagging, wordpress.com, technorati, technoratitags