MapQuest is trying to catch back up

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It’ll be a hard road (if not impossible) for MapQuest to try to catch up to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft in the maps race, but they’re doing their best.

I guess I should say what I mean by “catch up”.  In terms of usage, they still have a remarkable lead.  In January they still had just over 50% of US visits, with Google in second place at 22%.  Given how crappy their system has been when compared to the others, those are some staggering numbers.  Branding goes a long way…

Despite the great numbers, Google is quickly gaining ground.  MapQuest knows they have to do something or they’ll be dead before too long.  As part of that, they’ve just released “MapQuest Platform

“.  It sounds pretty slick:

  • Support for a wide variety of programming languages including Java, C++, .NET, JavaScript, Adobe ActionScript.
  • Aerial/hybrid views
  • Smart rollovers, that move and resize as necessary based on the content in the window.
  • Smooth zoom
  • Flickable maps that continue to pan, similar to Google Earth
  • Shape ovelays
  • Geocoding
  • A variety of other things

All in all, it’s a very nice upgrade.  However, it still falls far short of the power of any other other three platforms.  As a developer, I have absolutely no interest in using them for building a mashup, as Google already handles it far better and I’m already more familiar with their tools.

That being said, MapQuest has to do something

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, and this is certainly a move in the right direction.

A bunch of other great uses for WordPress

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Lloyd Budd of the WordPress Publisher Blog points us to a handful of creative uses for WordPress

.  The one I like best is actually just a link to Raj Dash’s article on “48 Unique Ways to Use WordPress“.

Among the 48 ideas:

  • Use it as a normal CMS.  I’ve somewhat done that on sites before.
  • Voting/polling site.  There are some good polling plugins, such as WP-Polls.
  • Intranet.  Use the normal blog/page set-up of WordPress, but use it for internal use only.  Very simple idea, but could be very useful for a lot of organizations.
  • Fark Clone. Show the best user-submitted links.
  • Job Listings

I’m sure there are more good ideas out there beyond the 48 listed in the article.  What are some creative ways that you’ve used WordPress?

WordPress Plug-ins that I use

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Wordpress LogoI’ve had a number of people ask which WordPress plug-ins I use on my blogs. Not every blog uses the exact same set of plug-ins, but they’re all pretty similar. If I find a plug-in that I like, I tend to use it on most of my sites. Here is what I have running on this one:

Akismet — It comes with WordPress. Use it. Love it.

All in One SEO Pack — It has some nice features to help with the SEO of the blog.

Enhanced WP-ContactForm — An easy way to build the form on the contact page.

Fancy Zoom — Adds a nice effect to embedded images. Click the WordPress logo at the top of this post to see what I mean.

FeedBurner FeedSmith — I use FeedBurner to handle all of my RSS feeds, and this plug-in redirects your normal feed over to your FeedBurner feed so that there is no confusion.

Google XML Sitemaps — Creates a sitemap of your posts and pages, which can then be uploaded to the various webmaster tools.

Highlight Author Comments — If I leave a comment to one of my own posts, it shows up in yellow to help it stand out from the others and show that it’s more of an official reply.

Show Top Commentators — The users with the most comments show up in the sidebar, along with a link to their site. This can be a good way to attract more comments.

Sociable — Adds popular social bookmarking links to the end of each post.

Subscribe to Comments — This adds “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail” below the comments on each post. I hate when a site doesn’t have that, and it usually reduces the chances of me leaving a comment there.

Twitter Tools — A variety of tools to link the blog to my twitter account (follow me and I’ll follow you).

WordPress.com Stats — I use Google Analytics as well, but this plug-in gives me a different look at the stats and they’re presented very well.

That’s about it. I’m always on the lookout for other useful plug-ins, so what do you use?

Some good AdSense color tips from Jennifer Slegg

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Jennifer Slegg (often known as “JenSense”) has posted a nice piece about choosing the right “ad title” color for your AdSense ads.  She primarily gives two tips:

  • Use “hyperlink blue” (described below), or…
  • Use the main link color on your site

She doesn’t mention suggestions for the other parts of the ad, but I’ve found the following works best:

  • Background and border color the same as the site background color at that location, so the ads blend in.
  • Black text for the text
  • Gray text for the URL at the bottom

Jennifer didn’t say exactly what “hyperlink blue” is, but I’ve found that #000080 and #0000CC work quite well.  Again, if every other link on your site is a different color (such as the greenish links on here), then you’re probably better off making the ad titles use that color instead.  Be sure to use channels to track the CTR on the different colors and see what works best.

Should you use the webmaster tools provided by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft?

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Logos for all three toolsSearch Engine Journal posed the question “Should You Use Google Webmaster Tools?” and got some pretty good reponses. I think when talking about this, you need to consider the three big ones: Google Webmaster Tools

, Yahoo Site Explorer and Live.com Webmaster Central.

Some of the questions posted by SEJ (paraphrased):

  • Is listing your sitemap in your robots.txt enough?
  • If you own multiple sites, should you set up separate Google accounts?
  • Do these services give too much insight to the companies providing them?
  • Or are they the best things ever?

Overall, the responses were very positive. A few people were neutral, but almost no one was negative.

Taking Google as an example, I look at it like this: They already know everything about my sites. I use AdSense and I use Analytics, so every detail is at their disposal. I figure it can’t hurt to make sure they have an up-to-date sitemap for each of my sites, which can only help to get content in their index more quickly.

As a general rule, I create a sitemap and add it to all three services for every new site I create.

What do you think?

Discover more great blogs in Google Reader

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Google Reader is the primary source of information for most of my blogs.  I track nearly 400 blogs in Reader, which help supply links and content for my various sites and also allow me to keep up with my own sites

.

A while back, Google Reader added a “Discover >>” link to their site, which provides recommendations to add to your reading list.  I didn’t use it much for a while, but now it’s become a daily stop for me.

The recommendations page lists about 15 blogs that it thinks you might like, based on your current reading habits.  Each blog shows the number of current subscribers (in Google Reader and iGoogle only), the title, a short blurb and the average number of posts/week.

At first I was disappointed that I couldn’t view more than a single page of recommendations, but I’ve developed a nice workaround.  Each day, I pull up the recommendations to see what’s in there (see the image on the left).   Then I simply deal with all of them.  If a blog sounds useful to one of my niches, I’ll subscribe.  If not, I’ll click the “no thanks” link to make it go away.  Once the list is empty, it’ll stay empty for the rest of the day.  The next morning, though, it’s back with new items!

The thing I need to get better about is cleaning out blogs that don’t post information that is useful to me.  I do my best to unsubscribe, but I’m usually trying to dig through a lot of items so I just plan to “get back to it later”.

If I see an item that is blog-worthy, I either blog about it right then (if it’s time sensitive) or give it a star.  When things cool down in the evenings, I pull up my starred items list and work through it.  As I blog about each item, I remove the star and it goes away.

Any other tips for dealing with a large number of feeds?

Internet Explorer 8 is now available

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Internet Explorer 8 logoIn a surprise move at the MIX08 Conference, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 8 is now available for download

The list of enhancements include:

  • Facebook Integration — Get status updates directly from your browser
  • eBay Integration — You can use their new “webslices” to subscribe to individual portions of a page.
  • Live Maps Integration — Highlight text on a page, like an address, then right-click and choose “Live Maps” to see a preview map in a small pop-up window.
  • Better support for AJAX pages

I haven’t downloaded yet, but I’m just about to. Once you get it, leave a comment and let us know what you think!

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/Install.htm

Google Analytics is adding Industry Benchmarking

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Google Analytics Industry BenchmarkingGoogle Analytics is something that I use on every site of mine.  A few of them employ other analytics beyond that, but they all use Google Analytics for a baseline.

Today, Analytics is adding “industry benchmarking” to their site.  If you choose to opt-in, this will do two things:

  1. Share your site statistics with other sites (anonymized, of course).
  2. Allow you to compare your data with other sites in your industry.

Why should you care?  It makes it easier to determine whether your stats are up/down because of an industry-wide trend of if it’s something unique to you.

For example, suppose your traffic yesterday was much lower than normal.  You could open analytics and then see that all of the traffic in your industry was lower.  From there, you could figure out why (holiday, etc) and not stress out about it so much. 🙂

This feature will require you to opt-in — it won’t

be enabled automatically (which is a good thing, privacy-wise).  I’m still not seeing this option available in my Analytics, so please post in the comments when you see it in yours.

Keeping up with new users on your message boards

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I’ve built a few large forums over the past 6-8 years.  I took one forum from scratch up a little past two million posts with about 125,000 users, and I have another one that’s getting close to the 100,000 user mark.  However, I also have about a half-dozen small forums that are just getting off the ground.  I thought I’d share a few tips on how to effectively manage small forums without spending too much time on each one.

The key to building a successful forum is to treat every new member like gold.  In particular, if they post something you need to reply.  In addition, you need to quickly moderate any spam that comes your way.  As a forum gets larger, these problems become easier to manage because you have a lot of users to welcome newbies and a lot of moderators.  Early on, though, it can be tough.

I employ two simple techniques to help me out:

  • RSS Feeds. Almost every forum package available will push an RSS feed of new threads.  In vBulletin, for example, you just append “external.php?type=RSS2” to your URL and it becomes an RSS feed!  Here is an example. I put all of my forum RSS feeds into Google Reader so I can keep up with them.  That way, I can quickly respond to new threads and clean out any spam without having to visit each site all the time.
  • E-mail Notification. This is even easier.  When I respond to a thread in one of my forums, I almost always enable e-mail notification for that topic.  This sends new information to me, instead of making me go out there and find it.

Again, as your forum grows you’ll probably need to scale back on these activities and focus more on finding quality moderators to assist you.  In the meantime, though, those two simple tips can help save you a lot of time.

Website to make good-looking charts

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I was looking for a way to make a good-looking chart for one of my sites.  I made one in Excel, but it was pretty bland.  Then I discovered the NCES Create A Graph website.  It’s actually a kid’s site, but has some slick tools to make some good-looking charts and graphs.

Combined with the WordPress FancyZoom plug-in I showed a few days ago, this can make for a great way to show charts on your website.  Here is the page I used it on, showing the diminishing level of a lake near Atlanta.

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