It has become quite the blogging trend lately to display your Feedburner subscribers. Some may think it is an ego thing, but really I think most people do this as a strategy to attract new subscribers. I know many people that auto-subscribe to any blog they stumble upon that has 500+ subscribers, so this is often a very good strategy for a blogger than has already built up a following. On the other hand, if you have less than 200 subscribers, it is probably best not to display the chicklet until you have reached the 200 subscriber benchmark. Otherwise it could have the opposite effect on your blog where people don’t subscribe due to your smaller following.

If you are someone that likes to display your subscriber count on your WordPress blog, but you don’t want to use the Feedburner chicklet, WordPress now has a plugin available called FeedCount. This plugin allows you to display your Feedburner count and style it to look they way you want it to look via CSS. Here is a sample of how the plugin can look with the right styling to blend into your theme:

I personally like the Feedburner chicklet just fine, and it is nice and compact, but I have to admit I’ve seen some very nice designs using this plugin.

If you haven’t heard of a sitemap before, now is probably a good time to start learning about them if you run a blog. A sitemap is a XML file originally created by Google for webmasters to use to create a “map” of their website.

A good sitemap is dynamic, keeping the freshest content at the top. This way Google knows to index any new posts or updated posts. Google’s spiders then use your Sitemap.xml file when they index your website to ensure they get everything new or that has changed. A sitemap also helps ensure pages get indexed that use JavaScript or Flash, but do not contain HTML links (without a sitemap, these normally would not be discovered by a search engine).

Eventually the Sitemap.xml file was adopted by Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.com, making it as important for webmasters to use as a Robots.txt file to get their website maximum exposure and control what is indexed.

If you’re reading this blog, I’m going to assume you are a WordPress user. If you’d like to create a sitemap for your WordPress blog, look no further than the Google Sitemap WordPress plugin. This is the WordPress plugin I use for this website. When activated, it will create a sitemap on http://yourdomainname.com/sitemap.xml and do all the maintenance work for you. You’ll want to then log in to your Google Webmaster Tools account and add your sitemap, or make sure your homepage links to your sitemap somewhere (usually the footer) so the search engines can find it.

For those that are curious what they look like, you can see what our sitemap looks like here. Are you using a sitemap for your blog(s)?

If you run a multi-author blog and you want to attract additional authors, one thing you can do is improve how you promote your authors on your website. A lot of WordPress blogs choose to do this by creating an author page for each author or providing a link to the author’s website, but now there is now another option for WordPress blogs.

Color Light Studio recently released a new WordPress plugin called Author Exposed, which will allow readers to view the author’s Gravatar and information from a pop-up box using Javascript.

Here is a sample of how it looks:

In order to use this plugin, all you need to do is activate it and place a small code snippet in your loop where you want the author’s information to display:

<?php if (function_exists('author_exposed')){author_exposed();} ?>

Once you’ve placed the code into your theme, you should be all set!
[via WP Themes Plugin]

One common challenge that often faces domainers is how to easily display their domains that they have for sale. It can often be a lot of work trying to find buyers for your domains if you don’t have high end generic names where buyers come to you. The ideal solution is to display them on some sort of web page where you can send traffic to it to help find buyers.

There are a few good website templates you can get, but I found and even better solution.  That solution is a WordPress plugin called Domain Portfolio. This plugin will actually create a domain page for you, and allows you to easily input your domain information into your dashboard. It will then display it on the page within a table. Information you can include are the domain name, expiration date, registrar, asking price, and of course your contact information. Here is a screen shot of how it looks on the author’s blog:

I’ve actually installed this on one of my blogs and really like the way it is set up (you can see it here). People even have the option of searching your displayed domains to see if you have any available under certain keywords that they might be looking for!

Other features include:

• List all of your domain names for sale in one place.
• A page for each domain where users can send their offers and contact you.
• Have 100s of domains? No problem! Use the Bulk add or XML import tool!
• Visitors can sort lists by anything! Alphabetically, by expiry date, price, status or even registrar!
• Control how many domain names are listed on each page.
• Seamless integration with WordPress.
• Support for IDN domain names, supports most languages and can create punycode automatically. (Punycode feature requires PHP5)
• Now grabs information from Google, Yahoo and MSN.
• Automatic keyword recognition.
• Easily style all aspects of the portfolio and table through CSS. Even change each row and column individually with “id” tags.

The author also lists a few things that are in the works for future releases:

• “Buy Now” button that goes through PayPal IPN.
• Categories.
• Sort and jump to page by letter or extension.
• Automatic expiry date retrieval. (other than .org)
• Warning on a domain’s expiry.
• Some other surprises.

If you have domain names you’d like to display, I recommend you check this out!