I think that the page load issues this site has been experiencing for the last 24 hours have been resolved.

It turns out the issues were server side and had nothing to do with WordPress or my code.

If you are still experiencing problems please drop me an e-mail at 'admin' at this domain name.  I will have a follow up to this post coming shortly, I'm just waiting to hear back from my hosting provider's customer support.

Awhile back I noticed a strange referral in my traffic report and, as a curious cat, I investigating a bit and discovered an intriguing service called coComment.

For awhile now I've been bookmarking a lot of the posts that I comment on. Drive by comments, despite being necessary at times, are something I try to avoid. I love following up on comments and checking how conversations are developing on topics that interest me. The problem with bookmarking posts you've commented on, though, is that sometimes it can get tedious trying to followup on them.

Here's where coComment comes in. After installing the coComment ad-on for Firefox (or setting up the bookmarklet) comment tracking is integrated into your browser.

Once installed you'll see the above bar under the comment textarea in most sites you visit.  Simply comment on the post and coComment grabs the url and keeps an eye on it.

By visiting the coComment page and checking your "conversations" you'll get a look at which were recently updated and get the chance to click directly to the page so you can read up on what's being said.

If you're commenting on a lot of posts (and if not why?) be sure to check out coComment and share your thoughts.  As I said, I've been using it for a little while now and I'm impressed with it.  Hopefully you are too.

In the past couple of days I've been reading a lot about SEO and other design considerations that can drive traffic and increase AdSense earnings.

Along the way I've made some changes to my site structure, mostly notably by moving around certain advertisments. This morning as I was checking out the Inside AdSense blog provided by Google something struck me - here's a blog, written by the folks who control SEO.

What do they do that I can learn from?

Here are a couple of quick things I noticed about the Google Blog that should prove interesting to anyone interested in Site Design.

1. Their permalink structure is based on year/month/title. This pretty much confirms a lot of SEO tipsters who recommend using 'friendly permalinks.' In WordPress you can accomplish this by visiting the 'permalinks' section of your Options menu.
2. Site titles are broken up in a couple of different ways. The index page displays only the site title, "Inside AdSense." Single pages and "label" pages contain the site title followed by the post title. One example is "Inside AdSense: Must-read policy Thursdays." I've seen a lot of SEO folks recommend either moving your site title to the end of your post title, or removing it completely. In this case Inside AdSense is kind of opting against that idea.
3. This one is a bit of a surprise to me - there's no Meta Keywords tag setup. This could be related to some sort of shortcoming in the Blogger software or it could be a conscious decision by Google. Usually SEO folks will recommend putting your posts tags, categories, keywords or even a post excerpt in a meta tag... Inside AdSense is kind of rocking the boat again.
4. Another interesting part about the code involves how the site is setup. Many bloggers make the mistake of putting their Sidebar code before they're main content in when building a page. If you view a page, with CSS turned off, and you see the sidebar first it's generally considered a bad thing.
5. Another thing I found interesting was the way they're sidebar was setup. First is a search bar, then the feed buttons and then archives, labels (basically categories), email subscription signup and finally a blogroll. Clearly useability is what's kept in mind - they want you to be able to find everything quickly and also to be able to sign up with ease.

Definitely some interesting stuff. I'm starting to work on a new template and these are all things I'm going to keep in mind as I start blogging things out. Anyone else notice anything interesting about the design?

If you're a Text Link Ads publisher you're probably familiar with their Feedvertising service. I've written about Feedvertising a couple of times including an announcement of the service and some tips for monetizing your feed by placing affiliate links in your feedvertising slots.

While monetizing your feeds is one of the best uses of Feedvertising I thought I'd share another potential use today.

When you're building a blog early on you may want to include links to some of your better posts in your feedvertising slots. By linking to your better posts (and even to your landing pages or advertising pages) you can easily draw your RSS readers back to your content and get them reading more of your content.

I've been reviewing and writing for most of this week. I'm really interested in posting on WordPress Theme Design but the problem is that there really are an infinite number of paths that I could travel down.

As I've said in the past WordPress theme design isn't so difficult that you need to be intimidated by it. It's certainly challenging but it can also be a relatively fun endeavor to set out on. So, as I continue working on a few posts about WordPress I thought I could start out by offering up some shorter posts for interested readers.

If you have any specific questions about WordPress Theme Design, including any questions about WordPress tags you might be struggling with, leave them in the comments here. I'll answer them as best I can OR I'll be set out to find the resources to answer your questions.

This is kind of an experiment for now but feel free to jump in,

thanks.