All credit for this goes to hongkiat.com, I’m simply re-posting because I find this to be extremely useful, and like to note stuff like this on my own blog.

Although recognizable, the Feedburner chicklet that displays the number of subscribers is ehh.  I’d much rather be able to stylize the number itself and fit it into my own design.  Wouldn’t it be nice if you can pull the number out of the chicklet and do whatever you want?  You can, and it’s extremely easy!  You can see I just implemented this on the sidebar on Carbon Fiber Gear:

Of course that number can be styled however you want it using CSS.  So how do you get it?  Simply put this code somewhere in your Wordpress template (Mine is in sidebar.php), and make sure to replace the “feedburnerid” with your ID in the $whaturl line:

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<?
	//get cool feedburner count
	$whaturl="http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=feedburnerid";
 
	//Initialize the Curl session
	$ch = curl_init();
 
	//Set curl to return the data instead of printing it to the browser.
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
 
	//Set the URL
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $whaturl);
 
	//Execute the fetch
	$data = curl_exec($ch);
 
	//Close the connection
	curl_close($ch);
	$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($data);
	$fb = $xml->feed->entry['circulation'];
	//end get cool feedburner count
 
	// Use $fb to print out the number of subscribers
	echo 'Join the <i>' . $fb . '</i> subscribers';
?>

You’ll need to make sure the feed count service is activated. To do that, login to your Feedburner account, hit the “Publicize” tab, and then go to to Feed Count. On this page you’ll need to activate the service. There you have it!

Today I’m officially launching the new design for this site. I’ve done all the work on my own this time, including the design and integration into Wordpress from the ground up. I feel more comfortable about the code, and was able to get rid of some major issues the old design was having. I spent a lot of time on making this new design look extremely clean, and hopefully be more efficient and faster. If you’re reading this from our RSS feed, stop by and see the new look.

I still have a laundry list of things to do, so you’ll see parts of the site tweaked a little bit over the next few days…but the majority is done. If you do happen to see any issues or bugs, please let me know. The biggest issue that has been resolved is where pages were just showing up as 404 not found. I’m sure I was losing a ton of pageviews and visitors because of it…either way, it’s a thing of the past.

The other important aspect of this redesign is a re-branding of this site and what it’s about. This is something that you’ll see more of over the next couple weeks. Previously the slogan for the site had been “Topics for entrepreneurs, and my miscellaneous ramblings”. This has now been changed to “Cars, business, ramblings, and the rest of my life”. Previously I was really trying to target the site towards entrepreneurs, with the mindset that I was writing more specifically about topics that young entrepreneurs would like. That won’t change much in a sense, but the topics will be shifted somewhat.

The topics I discuss will still be targeted towards bright, young, ambitious people. There will be a larger footprint in the automotive category. Cars, technology, and business have always been my true passion, and I hope to convey that on this blog. You’ll soon see a revamp in the categories on the site which help convey this shift. On top of that, posts now utilize tags, so you’ll be able to find similar content with that so you don’t have to necessarily rely on something as high level as categories if you don’t want.

The other thing you’ll notice over the next couple weeks is a re-branding name change on the site. I previously used my entire name, DavidPitlyuk.com to reference the site. Unfortunately, my last name isn’t so easy to spell, and a while back I mirrored the domain DavePit.com to this site. Now I will officially be re-branding the site to be named DavePit.com. It’s easy to remember, shorter, and flows better. DavidPitlyuk.com will continue to work, but will soon redirect to DavePit.com.

One of the other cool things that I’ve added to the sidebar is a “Top Commentators” box which shows up on all pages of the site. This will show the people with the highest comments over a period of time. If that user has a link to their website, their name will link to it, and I will not be putting any sort of nofollow on it. I hope this encourages some of you to voice your opinions and comment on posts more often.

As always, I welcome all comments, suggestions, praises, and criticism. Here’s to an entirely new chapter!

As you may know, I’ve been pretty busy on a few new designs (This blog, Carbon Fiber Gear, and dpitMedia). All of these designs were custom created from the ground up by yours truly. Many many hours of work is spent on these designs, so it’s always nice to get any sort of recognition for the work. All three sites were just featured on a couple of design showcases:

We Love WP

We Love WP is a showcase site that features the best Wordpress powered sites on the net. They recently featured both this blog and Carbon Fiber Gear!

One Page Love

One Page Love is another showcase site, but specifically features sites that are only one page. dpitMedia was a perfect site to fit that need.

A buddy of mine owns FullSingle, which is the same idea other than the fact that they only feature one site at a time (although you can see the archive of sites)…except he hasn’t added yet

For a long, long, long, long time I’ve been talking about doing a new custom design for this blog. It was one of my 2008 goals to finish and launch this design, and I’m happy to say that it’s finally here!? If you’re reading this from the RSS feed, come on by and check it out.

This new design was built entirely from the ground up, so there was no modifying a theme, and there is nothing else like it out there. I’m still using Wordpress as the software that runs everything in the background. I was the one that designed the site, and had a developer code up the site and integrate it into Wordpress (Thanks Mubs!). Let me give you a complete walkthrough:

Featured And Standard Blog Mode

You’ll see on the homepage that there are two blogging modes, featured and standard. By default you come to the site seeing featured blog mode. This is simply the headline for the post, and a quick little intro paragraph about it. At the top of the page the most recent post is featured.

If you go to standard blog mode, you’ll see that it’s just like a regular blog, and shows the full versions of the last 10 posts.

I think the featured mode is more unique and looks cleaner, but I know that some people will still prefer your standard blog, which is why I decided to offer both.

Single Post Page

I spent a lot of time making a regular post page look good and work effectively. At the top of each post page you’ll find the “featured” box which just shows you the headline, a big featured image related to the post, a quick intro, the author, how many comments, what categories it falls in, and the ability to promote the post through a variety of social media sites like Digg and StumbleUpon.

At the bottom of each post is where I really spent most of my time. The first box you’ll find under a post is the “Save/Promote This Post” box. This is simply a box with some social media buttons, as well as a Digg button on the right which shows how many Diggs the post has.

Below that box you’ll find the “Related Posts/Subscribe” box. This is a clean format which provides up to 5 related posts to the one you’re reading, as well as a few links to subscribe to the sites RSS feed. I hope this helps out with increasing the number of RSS subscribers. If you haven’t already subscribed to my feed, make sure to do so.

Below that box you’ll find the comments section. I really cleaned this up a lot. FIrst of all, comments and trackbacks are now separated (you’ll find trackbacks at the bottom of the page). Each comment is now in a separate alternating color comment box to make things much more readable. Each post also cleanly shows the name of the commenter (linked to their website), the date, and their avatar. The avatar information is being pulled in from Gravatar, which is a site that allows you to create an account and show your avatar at many sites, linked by your e-mail address. Wordpress 2.5+ has Gravatar functionality built into it, and I think we’ll see more and more sites supporting it, as well as more and more commenters using it. If you haven’t added your Gravatar yet, head over there and open a free account.

Another cool thing I can do is utilize a “promote” feature. If I’m writing a post in Wordpress, I can add a custom field called promote, which will automatically add some code next to the headline of a post. Right now it will make a StumbleUpon badge appear, but that can be changed to whatever I want. This will hopefully increase social media submissions on posts that are really worth it.

Sidebar

On the sidebar I’ve cleanly made sections to show the categories of the site, a few my recent posts, as well as 5 of my most recent Twitter updates. I’m hoping the usage of the Twitter updates will increase my followers. Feel free to follow me on Twitter if you aren’t doing so already.

Advertising

This is something that will most likely be tweaked over time, but I’ve built in advertising in a pretty effective way. First off I want to note that all my ad serving is being done by Google Ad Manager. Ad Manager is a pretty powerful FREE ad server, it’s still in beta, so you’ll need an invite to use it. I come from a background using Doubleclick as an ad server, as well as having used OpenAds, so it may be a little complex to use for some at first, but I felt right at home.

So my concept in advertising right now is when I’m ready to sell an exclusive “package deal” to an advertiser
. What I mean by that is basically a site takeover, one advertiser would get all of the ad spots on the site for a premium price for a set amount of time. This will allow an advertiser to get very effective advertising. There are three set spots for an advertisement on a page right now.

There is a top small banner in the red bar, a 250×250 in the top of the sidebar, and a long thin banner either after the third post on the homepage, or between the save/promote box and related posts box on a single post page. An advertiser would be able to get all three spots, as well as a link in the RSS feed at a flat monthly rate. The spot would be exclusive to that advertiser and no other ads will be run.

I will likely be slightly changing around the sizes and/or positioning of the ads for something for effective (or to meet IAB guidelines). When the blog is generating more traffic, I would change the format to include more ads, and not provide exclusive deals. If you’re interested in doing an exclusive takeover for a month, contact me.

Bugs

There are a few bugs here and there (Mostly IE6 stuff) that I already know about, and will work on fixing over the next couple weeks. If you happen to find something, please make sure and let me know.

Suggestions/Feedback

I really hope you guys like the new design. I put a lot of time and work into launching this, and I hope it will be better overall for the growth of this blog. If you have any suggestions or feedback, I’m all ears. You can either contact me directly or post a comment below.

Last weekend I launched Carbon Fiber Gear, my first site in experimenting with affiliate marketing. For more of a background on the site, check out the post I made earlier this week. I wanted to talk about what processes I went through to get the site launched so quickly.

What First? Domain Name

When I thought of the idea to do a blog about carbon fiber, I started off looking for a domain on GoDaddy (Use coupon code OYH3 for $6.95 domain). I searched for a variety of things like carbonfibeproducts.com, carbonfiberstuff.com, etc. Using thesaurus.com I found the word gear, and gave that a shot…luckily it was available, so I picked it up right away.

I later found out that carbonfibergear.com had previously been registered, but expired back in October. It looks like it was just a placeholder, lucky me

Setup Hosting

The next step was to setup the host in order to get this new .com up and running. We have a dedicated server through my IT company, Tri Megatech, so this made it easy enough for me. I set everything up on the back end, and uploaded a clean install of Wordpress to run the site.

Setup The Site

Here’s where a majority of the time was spent to get the site going. Once I had a clean install of Wordpress on the server, I went out to find a clean looking, well coded theme to work off of. This is just a side project, I didn’t want to spend much money or put too much time into it until I know it will be worth it. I’ve always been a big fan of Chris Pearson’s work. For those of you that don’t know who he is, he did the design for Copyblogger, a popular blog on copywriting. Chris converted Copyblogger’s old design into a theme, which I picked up and slightly modified to look the way I needed.

I popped up Photoshop, and I already had an idea of how the logo should look. A few minutes later and with the help of a couple suggestions from Crystal, I had a nice logo design.

Another important aspect was setting the site up for SEO so that it could get picked up by Google as quickly as possible. There are a few standard things I do when setting a Wordpress site up:

1. Setup a Google Analytics account and implement it on the site in order to track stats
2. Install the all in one SEO pack plugin
3. Install the Google XML sitemaps plugin to automatically build a sitemaps file
4. Install the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin in order to have my feed tracked through Feedburner
5. Install the subscribe to comments plugin so that anybody that leaves a comment can choose to get an e-mail when there are any updates
6. Install the related posts plugin to easily promote content within the site
7. Setup the site through Google Webmaster Tools

Content and Making Money

Luckily I already had some basic accounts setup to monetize the site like I had in mind. I wanted to start off with Amazon, eBay, and AdSense. I found some carbon fiber products that I wanted to write about online, and wrote a few posts so the site wouldn’t be completely blank for new visitors. I also setup a few post ideas for future posts I wanted to make in order to get things rolling.

Once that was done, the site was ready to launch!

Little Bit Of Promotion

Unique carbon fiber parts are very “diggable”, so I’m hoping that works out for me over time. I’d like to use Digg, but I also want to wait a little bit until I have more content on the site so that I can hopefully have a higher retention rate. I figure in about 1-2 weeks I can start trying to utilize Digg (unless the readers Digg themselves :)). I’ve noticed a good amount of traffic already come from StumbleUpon, but this isn’t very valuable traffic…lots of people just going in and out. I think the best traffic will be organic (aka search engines), but it will take some time before I see a buildup of that. I’m also doing some conservative advertising using AdWords to target traffic directly to posts that I can monetize on. We’ll see how that works out over time…I have noticed really high CTR percentages on the ads I do have (8%!).

Conclusion

Setting up a new site is pretty easy, especially once you’ve done it a lot of times!? If there is anything you think I’m missing, please let me know. Are your new site processes pretty similar?? If anybody needs any help or has any questions, I’d be happy to do what I can, just ask.

Not too long ago Wordpress released their 2.3 version of their blogging software. This update brought a few new goodies, including tagging capabilities. I wanted to ensure there were no issues upgrading so I waited it out a little bit. Now, a 2.3.1 version was released that includes over 20 security/bug fixes. That’s just what I wanted, and I felt now was a good time to upgrade finally

You may have noticed the blog down for a few minutes earlier today. Upgrading was being done, and now I’m up on the latest and greatest Wordpress version. Everything migrated over smoothly, and I recommend upgrading yours if you haven’t done so.

Update: As I posted this, I of course got a database error!? A quick search in the community and I found out that my Google Sitemaps Generator plugin (Version 2.7.1) was not compatible, and needed to be upgraded to the 3.0 version. I quickly did that, and everything seems to work great!

I’m looking for somebody to do some custom coding to integrate a couple basic features into Wordpress for my new design. After stumbling with a couple word-of-mouth options, I looked to Google. My obvious first search was “custom wordpress coding“. The only sponsored link here is from eLance! I can’t believe there is nobody else that has sponsored links on this keyword! I’d say that a plethora of new business can be made if it is wanted.

Update: Even “wordpress development” doesn’t have much in it. Sounds like it’s time for a development/design firm to step in and own this niche.

Wordpress is one of the greatest things that happened to the web. It makes blogging so much easier, and so much more powerful. Part of the thing that makes it so powerful is the ability to customize by adding plugins and themes. These are the first 10 plugins (and currently the only plugins) that I’ve used on my blog:

Adsense-Deluxe - Makes it easy to manage your Google AdSense (and Yahoo! PN) placements by using ad administration interface and putting tags where you want the ads to appear.

Akismet - This plugin comes with all Wordpress installations, but you need to register at Wordpress.com to get an activation key. This is a must plugin as it is used to filter out spam comments.

Digg This - This ads a “Digg This” button to your story if it gets Dugg. This can potentially help your story get more Diggs, which would allow it to get a better chance of making onto the Digg homepage.

Enhanced WP-Contact Form - A simple way to add a contact form to your page, rather than using your e-mail address.

Feedburner Feed Replacement - Replace your standard feed and change it to Feedburner. This makes it much better to track subscribers.

Google Sitemaps - This will automatically generate a sitemaps XML file for Google to read. This way if you setup an account through Google Sitemaps, it will hopefully crawl through your pages more efficiently and faster to get pages into search results.

Related Posts - This generates a list of related posts to the post you are reading. It will obviously get readers to browse other parts of your site, especially helpful for new readers. The server to download this plugin has been down, so if you need it, contact me or maybe somebody will post a mirror link in the comments.

Sidebar Widget - Sidebar Widget is a great tool from an administration perspective. It allows you to easily adjust the data and order of information that you put on the sidebar of the site for templates that support it.

Sociable - Sociable is a plugin that puts in the “share” buttons at the bottom of a post so readers can submit something they like to sites such as Digg and Del.icio.us.

Subscribe To Comments - This is a plugin that allows users to subscribe to the comments for each individual post. It’s a great way to keep readers active and coming back to the site.

WP-Cache - This is a caching module which should help on days when traffic spikes, for example if a post is Dugg. One of the worst things that can happen is if you have the potential to have a high traffic day, and your server crashes. This will hopefully be part of the prevention solution.