This week has ushered in some design and content enhancements at Adaptistration that are worth taking a moment to mention although judging by email messages, many readers have already noticed. They include comment feeds, social networking shortcut links, an eleven language translation tool, and refined contextual advertising tools…
Comment Feeds
Each and every post at Adaptistration now offers a dedicated
comment feed. This will allow you to subscribe to any article’s comment
feed via feed reader, like Bloglines or Google Reader.
Comment feeds are especially beneficial to readers who want to be
notified when new comments are added to a post they have already
commented on, a post with comments they’d like to follow, or a post
where they submitted a question. In fact, the service functions retroactively
so you can go back to any Adaptistration article that accepts comments
and subscribe to the comment feed. To sign up for a comment feed, just
click on the link that is displayed on the individual post page above
the listed comments as illustrated in the image to your right (click to
enlarge).
Shortcut Links
The next new feature is the addition of shortcut links at
the foot of each excerpt and full article that allow you to email, tag,
share, and act on the content you find appealing (or appalling – after
all, you can’t please everyone all of the time), as illustrated in the
image to your right (click to enlarge). As of now, you can act on an
article via the most popular social networking apps including Stumble It, Digg This, and Facebook. You can also add an article to your Technorati Favorites, Google Bookmarks,
or forward an article via email (courtesy of Feedburner.com). There are
literally dozens of different shortcut links to include but in an
effort to prevent cluttering up the pages too much, I’ve limited
options to these five. However, if you have a particular favorite that
isn’t listed, let me know and I’ll see if something can be done to
include it.
Translate Adaptistration
Over the past year, the number of incoming links from
countries where English is not the primary language has increased
considerably. Consequently, a few of those readers have requested an
embedded translation tool and I’m pleased to say that such a
translation tool now exists courtesy of Google Translate.
Readers can now translate any page at Adaptistration to one of eleven
different languages with a single click. The Google translator is
located immediately below the Goggle Custom Search in the right hand
column, just click the drop-down tab and select the language you want
to translate to and voila, as illustrated in the image to your right
(click to enlarge).
Revised Adsense Banner
In an effort to cut down on sidebar content I decided to do
away with the vertical Google Adsense banner in the left hand column
and opt for a horizontal banner that is inserted into the bottom of
every third article excerpt. Most of the banners should be text based
and the customized color scheme employed should allow them to pass by
without being too obtrusive, as illustrated in the image to your right
(click to enlarge). Every once in awhile there may be an image based
banner but the ones I’ve noticed so far are pretty low key and in line
with whatever content appears on the page. Keep in mind, one of the
best ways a reader can demonstrate appreciation for a blog is to
clickthrough an Adsense (or Amazon, Typepad, etc.) banner/button. Even
the most popular cultural blogs don’t generate enough traffic to earn
any serious revenue (certainly not enough to compensate for the time
spent creating content) but every click helps defray hosting fees so
thank you in advance for remembering this from time to time.
The blogging world is far from static so if there are any
features missing from Adaptistration you find at other blogs you
frequent, please feel free to point them out.