Web Worker Daily

Google Analytics is a great tool for tracking who’s visiting your site and when, but how do you track things like the number of people discussing your content? PostRank (a company that we’ve covered previously) aims to provide that capability with its new PostRank Analytics service, which launches in public beta today. I was lucky enough to have access to the private beta over that last couple of weeks, and it looks to be a useful service, particularly for bloggers. Read the rest of this entry »

Celine Roque wrote a great article about how to fine tune your RSS subscriptions and prune them down to the feeds that provide you with the most value. I spent some time over the Thanksgiving holiday reviewing my feeds and getting rid of the poor performers, which really helps me get more value while spending less time in my RSS reader. However, pruning is not enough. I also use quite a few filtering techniques to further reduce the clutter.

My favorite filtering techniques involve Yahoo Pipes, which looks and sounds much more complicated than it is. Jackson West described Yahoo Pipes pretty well when he called them “hard to grok, but snazzy“; however, Yahoo Pipes doesn’t have to be quite so difficult for people to understand. The first time I looked at Pipes, the interface scared me away until a friend of mine gave me a very quick demo that showed how easy it was to use. After using Pipes for while, I gave similar demos to help other friends get started and even recorded a 2 minute introduction to Yahoo Pipes that shows how to use Pipes to filter RSS feeds. How complicated could it be if I can explain it in a 2 minute screencast?

Here are a few of my favorite filtering techniques that I use to find the most relevant content. Read the rest of this entry »