Library clips

Clients may not like to view your blog daily to see the latest, they may prefer once a week.

Well use an RSS reader! (as the posts accumulate)

That’s not the point…maybe they like the format and flow of a newsletter rather than micro-content.

So we need to make a weekly or monthly (or even daily - if you post heaps) newsletter version/digest of your blog.

That is, make one long post that contains all the posts from every category.

Here are some options:

One long blog post

• Draft one long post over the week
• In doing this, you are choosing not to use the categories in your blog

  Instead the categories labels will be sub-headings in the long blog post (this will look like a newsletter)

  Eg. ACNM library - what’s new!

• But now your blog is serving one perspective, what about the clients who like to read the entries as they happen

  Our idea was to make a newsletter version in addition to the traditional blog version

• Also not utilising categories makes for less efficient browsing and retrieval
• The benefit is that you can structure the layout in a design that flows well for reading (segway, placement, reader behavioural aspects)

Mirror blog

• On a weekly basis cut n’ paste all your posts from each category into another blog as one long post, using the categories as sub-headings
• Clients can subscribe or read your traditional blog (micro-content as it happens) or they can choose to wait a week and read the newsletter version of your blog
• It may be confusing having 2 blogs for the same content
• What you could do is make the newsletter blog not visible to the public, but display the newsletter blog RSS feed on your traditional blog

  This way you can have two RSS feeds, one standard RSS feed, and a newsletter version RSS feed

Weekly newsletter version within the same blog

• Just make a category called Newsletter version
• Again cut n’ paste all your posts from all the other categories and put them (as sub-headings) into one weekly draft that you can post once a week under the Newsletter version category
• If you have a category feed clients can subscribe to the weekly newsletter version of your blog

  There are other ways to make your own category feeds

• Add an index on the sidebar listing the issues of the newsletter version of your blog
• Although I don’t know how this would pan out as you are duplicating content in the one blog, it may be a bit confusing

Automatic

• The only blog platform I’ve read that does this is 21 publish

  According to a comparative report we are told:

  “…the ability to send out a newsletter integrating recent posts to all users”

• I’m not sure if this is within the blog format itself, or as a separate format such as a word or PDF document

  I know you can use a service where you submit a URL and it is converted into a PDF…but can this be done automatically within the blog software?

Does anyone know of any blogging software that has a newsletter feature?

Or other ways to create a newsletter version of your blog?

UrlTrends :: View Any URLs Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Popular Search Terms and Incoming Links came my way via New Media Picks Of The Week: Sharewood Sunday Picnic 4.

This tool reports your incoming links, amongst other statistics…hopefully some blog/RSS engines will been included soon, although Furl and del.icio.us are part of the set.

So all you do is enter a page URL and it will generate a report…grab the RSS feed for your own blog stats.

I wonder if this tool can tell me who links to any of my del.icio.us pages or, like Durl, does it only do it at the page level.

So to view my statistics I have a stack of tools:

Sitemeter
Durl (incl. RSS for del.icio.us links)
PubSub LinkStats (incl. RSS)
Alexa
UrlTrends (incl. RSS)
Fagan Finder’s URLinfo

My apologies for my last post on the new Technorati tag search RSS…I assumed that the RSS version would return results for del.icio.us, furl, buzznet, flickr along with blog categories.

As it turns out the RSS results (when read in an RSS reader) just return items from blog categories, you have to go to the Technorati page to see results from the other services.