Adding Blog Features - Digg, Addthis and Related Content

If you’re reading these posts in order, you should know by now what modules are and how to upload them to Drupal. If you’re using Wordpress, or another CMS, hopefully you have found another site to help you out.

I added a few more features to the site which are worth mentioning:

Digg it Button
This posts the button at the bottom of the page, you can see below this post and on every other entry on the site. www.digg.com is a site you can register at, and it allows you to trawl a huge amount of content, suggest interesting pages to be added to their content, and interact with people interested in similar subjects. If you see a button with a number and the word “Diggs” on it, that means someone has already Dugg the content and sent it to Digg. If you like it you can click it and the system will add your Digg to that content and give you an opportunity to add a comment. If it hasn’t been Dugg yet, you can submit the content, but clicking the button. Digg will then compare the entry to make sure it’s not a duplicate of someone else’s work, and if not, they will upload it to the site.

Digg is fabulous on two levels – for a blogger it provides fabulous links to your content on a huge site, which can bring you many new readers. Indeed, getting onto Digg’s frontpage is almost certain to crash your server with the traffic it will bring you! On an other level, it’s a great site to “meet” people and to find fascinating new information about so many subjects you perhaps would never find any other way.

Add This
This module adds the “Share” button to every past, and enables readers to quickly add the site to their favourite RSS feed, bookmark the site, Digg it, email it to a friend, or carry out a whole host of other stuff.

Related Content Module
This provides an easy way to add related content links to a new post. Once you’ve added your post, by clicking a related content tab, you can select any other posts to be added to the bottom of the page, using your teaser and title. This again offers a double bonus, not only does it help to keep people on the site as they’re likely to read articles related to the one they came to see, but it also adds links within your site, which is always a good thing.

The other bit of site administration I did was to add a block to the home page showing the most popular posts, which are changed in real time as people read them and is always up to date. I added this feature because I’ve used it whenever I’ve visited other sites as a way to check out the best content quickly, so if I like that facility, I’m guessing other people do too.

In my next post in this section, I’m going to cover the Google Adsense advertising and my thoughts on where they went and what they look like, something I’m sure will develop over time, and I’m also going to talk about the “Donate” button.

How did we do for statistics yesterday? 37 visitors and 257 page views. I’m quite pleased with the former and disappointed with the latter, but not surprised as I simply don’t have enough content on here yet. I really hope I’m not losing potential regular visitors, who pop in for a look and, disappointed, never come back. Earnings were less than 10 cents, so they’ve dropped back again. I was pleased that my link saturation is pretty good at 260, and the site is starting to appear in search engines, although it’s still page ranked zero with Google. I do wonder if I will end up regretting not going for a .com There is a www.mikeslife.com so I wonder if he’ll end up getting some of my traffic!