Making osWorld more open
In an attempt to make it easier to interact with the blog, I implemented a couple of new features…
Subscribe by Email
First off, I activated Feedburners "subscribe by email" service, as it's fairly obvious that not everyone uses RSS!
New Subscribe Page
I made a "subscribe" page which shows a few ways for readers to stay in touch with what is going on here. Though most of the page is already available elsewhere on the blog, it's nice to have it all on the one page.
I also made a new graphic and link at the bottom of each post for "subscribe by email". As you can see the graphic nicely matches up with the rss graphic.
Hopefully this is "in your face" enough for casual readers to sign up. We'll see.
First Time Commentors
I found a plugin called "comment relish" which sends an email to every commentor on their first comment. Basically a "thank you" email, which I would have used to direct new commentors to the RSS feed.
I found this after receiving such an email from the blog of Nate Whitehill - and I thought it was an excellent thing to do.
Unfortunately, the plugin errored out because of a foreach error in the PHP. Oh well. I sent email to the plugin creator, and hopefully will be able to use it in the near future!
Conclusion
It remains to be seen whether any of this will lead to more readers or more commentors. But, I guess doing these things can only help in the long run.
So, if you are not already subscribed, now's your chance! You can do it via RSS, Email, Widgets. I also am cooking up a dastardly plan to use a carrier pigeon, but it's not going so well 
Comment by ash — June 22, 2007 @ 5:16 pm
Burt, not a bad idea.
I might add them to my blog tomorrow!
Whats your Digg plugin that you're using?
Comment by Keiron — June 22, 2007 @ 5:39 pm
The biggest thing I did to get some interaction was to join the DoFollow community! Certainly increased my interactions
Comment by Oli — June 23, 2007 @ 12:41 pm
ash: The digg thing is just their standard JS code from http://www.digg.com/tools/integrate
Comment by ash — June 23, 2007 @ 4:54 pm
Cheers Oli.
Burt, install a forum on here so we can all talk a lot of balls without moderation about web, AIS, promotion, general balls etc etc etc.
You can even call it the fanny forum.
Comment by gary — June 24, 2007 @ 12:16 pm
Ash, forums are a complete PITA, as they go stale after a short while. I don't mind setting one up, but I think there would be not a lot of use of it. Does anyone else want a forum on osworld?
Comment by Oli — June 24, 2007 @ 8:39 pm
I'm not sure that a forum would be all that popular here. Maybe something simpler - a page where users could post questions and such and others could reply - without affecting the rest of the site - and without the hassle of a full forum.
Comment by gary — June 25, 2007 @ 1:46 pm
Perhaps a Wiki ?
Comment by ash — June 25, 2007 @ 3:34 pm
Wiki - isnt that more of a way of delivering content, rather than interaction between users?
A page that where people can ask questions? Just install punbb with one single forum ?