Category — In the news

I love reading about what’s happening and as a result, have subscribed to a lot of RSS Feeds. Be it about Web Development, or around the World News. Some are focused on SEO, some on marketing. There’s ones that are fun such as Dilbert. Several about one of my passions, cars and photography.

But, I have far too many. I’ve recently swapped over to NewsGator’s tools for both mac and PC, and one of them has a curious feature, and one I’ve found myself using far too much. A “Panic Button“. What does it do? Well, when you have too many unread articles, it offers to go through and mark anything that is more than 48hrs old, and unread as read.

It sounds like a trivial thing, but it made me realise that I’d accumulated so many feeds over the years that I rally needed to do some house cleaning. I think in doing that, I’ve probably removed about half the sites I was subscribed to.

Am I sad about doing that? Not really. I think in the long run, the feeds I have left are much more focused, and given time, I’ll probably thin them out a little more.

If, like me, you find you have too many to read, do this little exercise and I think you’ll feel much better about yourself - and be able to find much more time to read them.

In a future blog I’ll be outlining some of my 10 favourite RSS Feeds and why I think they are som

For the first time this month, my website’s had more than 10,000 visitors in a month. Actually, it passed 12,000 too (If anyone cares for precision, it was 12,478). Ok, so all my friends are now groaning, but to me, that’s a pretty impressive number for a personal website that’s not selling anything.

So why do i think this happened? Partly due to re-writing the code of the site to be more search engine friendly. Partly re-writing the content to be more relevant - and to those who keep pointing it out, one day I will fill in the gaps. Posting articles and comments on forums and news sites around the web. And I’ve been updating the site a lot more regularly. Writing blogs, uploading images, just trying to keep the site fresh and interesting to those that follow, and perhaps a few out there just randomly wandering the web.

So, what’s next for www.gregorybrine.com? Well, when I get time, I’m starting to re-write it in Microsoft’s Asp .NET. As part of that, the galleries are getting an overhaul, and some friends are interested in combining sites - that could be interesting and fun. Oh, and I might move it to new, cheaper hosting… We’ll see. It’s all about having time, and a desire to finish at work, then sit in front of a computer doing more of the same… Hmmm… Let me think about that… I think I just heard the pub calling….

There’s an interesting article on the BBC website today about how advertisers are changing their tactics online to grab your attention. Of particular interest was the mention of the ABC Lost TV show, and the series of sites and games associated with it that have attracted some big names.

I started reading an article on Rohit Bhargava’s Influential Interactive Marketing site about changing our approach to SEO, so that it works better with Social Networks. The original post has since been added to, and the finally summary of the 16 rules can be found on the work the influence these networks will be having in the future, especially as they can really help to build brand awareness and loyalty, and as sites like Wikipedia start to lose their influence within search engines as their algorithms are updated and PageRanks recalculated.

seobook.com have an article called “101 Ways to Build Link Popularity in 2006“, which is an essential read on how to make your site more popular. One of the tips that I’m currently using is to write about and link to other blogs and articles that have helped you and that you think your readers might be interested in. So go and check it out for some tips on improving your site’s popularity.