Roundup – Plugins, Milestones and Storms

This is the first update / roundup style post on More Than Scratch The Surface. I originally thought I’d stick to articles, but I can now see the need to write about things that aren’t worth a full post. Expect to see these occasionally.

Plugins

I spent most of last week on the IFrameWidgets plugin. There were quite a few issues, but now there’s only one left: the site who makes the widget won’t know which page the widget was called from. This is fully explained on the plugin’s home page. I’m waiting a little while to see what the fallout of this is (if any) before I start to actively push it. I learnt a few HTML / Javascript tricks while sorting out the issues, so expect some posts on these soon.

The new version of the DualFeeds plugin should have been released six weeks ago, but I just haven’t gotten around to finishing the documentation yet. I’ve been busy, but that’s terrible! I did fix an obscure bug (only present when switching feeds and for some versions of php) over the weekend. Thanks to Dmitry from www.sportreport.ru for helping me sort this out. Anyway, expect this to be released towards the end of next week.

Alexa Milestone

A couple of stumbles from K-IntheHouse and Andy Beard helped push this site through the 150K barrier at Alexa recently. I’ve been surprised how easily I’ve moved up the rankings, but I’m anticipating that it will be harder from now on, as I’m in the same area as a lot of other great blogs.

Stormy Weather

Google storms, Blogrush storms. There’s a lot going on in the blogosphere. I’m an interested reader of it all, but there’s been no impact on me personally.

My blog is newish, so I don’t have any toolbar PR yet to lose. As Josh points out it seems that only toolbar PR is affected, not the SERPs. Let hope that’s true. I suspect it’s all part of Google‘s bigger plans for PR, whatever they are (and we’d all love to know). It would be good to see Google being more open about what’s going on, but I’m not holding my breath!

I haven’t signed up to Blogrush yet, so this is just based on what I’ve read. I will say in Blogrush’s defence that it is a public-beta, so people have to expect issues. However, it’s got to be said that the recent episode of making 10,000 blogs inactive has been handled very poorly. It would have been better to warn people that didn’t match the criteria and given them time to address it, rather than just pulling the plug on them.

I’ve worked in the software industry for 13 years and been responsible for releasing product and managing client communication. You can’t keep everyone happy, but right now Blogrush have way too many people unhappy with them. I think long-term they’ll probably sort out their issues, but they have alienated a lot of people which will make their job more difficult.

Guest Post

Something else I’ve been doing this week is writing a guest post for Snoskred’s Get Out Of Your Niche series. We’ll be moving back to Australia in six months, so I’ve written about what I’ll miss about China and what I’m looking forward to back in Australia. It should be appearing tomorrow on Snoskred’s site, so check it out if you’re interested.

Tags: alexa, DualFeeds, google, IFrameWidgets, pagerank, widgets, Wordpress Plugins