Google Chrome is quickly gaining popularity as the perfect alternative to other heavyweights like Internet Explorer and Firefox. The browser war has been going on since the mid-1990′s and choosing a ‘side’ has always come down to a few factors: who’s faster, who’s lighter and who’s the most compatible. Google Chrome seems to beat the other two on all three fronts. And with Extensions, functionality just keeps getting better and better.

For those of you with WordPress blogs, you can now offer your readers the ability to install a Chrome Extension right into their browser that allows them to see your latest RSS feeds without even having to go to your site! This is a great tool for people who don’t regularly subscribe to RSS feeds, but want to know when you create new content. Once I create my own extension, I’ll post a guide here, but for now, check out the detailed one over at 9lessons.info.

Viewing WordPress Stats

You can now install a Chrome extension that will show you live stats for your blog! After you install it, all you need to configure it is your blog domain and your API key. To get your API key if you already have it, go to WordPress.com, login and view your profile. If you’re using Akismet for blocking spam comments, you can get that API key by clicking on the Akismet plugin configuration under Plugins in your WordPress admin.

Once this information is entered, Google Chrome will display a number counter in the upper right corner of your browser. This count will update periodically with the latest stats on your site. When you click on this number, you get a drop-down box that displays the following:

• Referrers – These are the website links that have forwarded a visitor onto your site.
• Top Posts – This list shows you the top posts on your site for the day.
• Search Terms – This is a handy list that shows you what search terms brought people to your site.
• Clicks – Now you see the actual clicks that people used to get to your site right from your browser!

Note that this extension only works if you have WordPress Stats enabled on your site. It also only supports one blog at the moment. In time, there may be options to input data from multiple blogs.

Get the WordPress Stats Extension now!

Comment Moderation

Now here’s a extension worth getting if you’re having trouble moderating all those post comments! With this extension, you can moderate blog comments on one or more blogs directly from Chrome. You no longer have to login to your WP admin to filter out the bad from the good.

With it, you can see all comments that are marked as approved, pending or spam. It also shows you the total comments you have and compares them right on screen to your other blog sites.

Get the WordPress Checker extension now!

My two cents

These are just three of the quickest ways to interact with your blog and to allow your readers to stay updated at all time with your site. I hope that in time, multiple blogs will be fully supported by these extensions with the ability to manage all of them through a simple interface. I also like the fact that extensions are less-intrusive than browser toolbars and seem to be more user-friendly.

Google has launched a new feature for search results called the +1 Button. It works like a recommendation button where you can click +1 on a particular website or webpage to help others know that it’s been recommended. If you’ve used sites like Digg.com, you know how this process works. Basically, after you’ve read some content on a website and decided you liked it, you click the +1 Button and it helps other web users by ranking your site/content like a score card. In turn, websites and web pages with higher “votes” can potentially gain higher rankings on Google search results pages (SERPs).

Adding the +1 Button to your site

After logging into my AdSense account, I was greeted with this lovely message:

From there, I clicked on the link that took me to the code page where I had a choice of 4 different sizes for the icon as well as some other advanced settings. I didn’t spend too much time on this page as I wanted to get the button on my site ASAP! I simply chose the standard size and left everything else the same.

The code was easy to implement. In WordPress:

1. Open your theme editor and begin editing header.php
2. Find the </head> tag and place the code: <script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js”></script> right above it.
3. Save header.php
4. Begin editing single.php (if you want the button to appear on each post)
5. Find the area you want the button to show up. On my site, I placed it right before the content starts so it’s at the beginning of every post.
6. Place this code: <g:plusone></g:plusone> before <?php the_content();
7. Save single.php

Now that you have all the code in place, go to one of your blog posts and verify that it’s showing up.

What’s Next?

Well as with any traffic-related feature on your site, all that you really can do now is wait. If the users want to vote up your content, they now have the option to do so within Google directly. If you find that you’re not getting a lot of response from this feature, try moving the button around your site to see where it works best.

The purpose of this feature is to help web users find valuable content as ranked by other web users that have already seen what you have to offer. This helps Google in their never-ending quest to filter out junk sites and sites with little to no content while pushing more valuable sites up to the top of the SERPs. Let’s just hope that this feature doesn’t get abused like so many other Google features have been in the past!

Happy Memorial Day! Consider yourself autoblogged because like you probably are, I’m relaxing and enjoying my day off from work. With that said, today I wanted to write up a simple post regarding my newfound love, Flickr.

I’m fairly sure at this point in time, every single person that has ever searched for an image online has seen one or more Flickr accounts out there! So what’s so special about it? Let me tell you.

The Power of Flickr

If you’re a photographer or just someone who likes to take pictures and video of life, consider Flickr to be the equivalent of Facebook for you. The premise is simple: you upload photos, tag them, describe them, organize them and let the world have them.

There are two types of memberships, free and pro. The pro costs $24.95 per year and gives you some added benefits, which I’ll go over below. Once you setup your account, you’ve just created your Photostream. This is where all of your photos show up in the order they were uploaded, new ones first. It is basically your homepage:

The best part of Flickr is how well it integrates with all of your existing social media sites and/or blogs. You can link it to Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, Tumblr, LiveJournal and any WordPress-enabled site. By linking everything together, you can now take your photos to a worldwide stage and bring the visitors to you. From there, if they like what you have, you will likely start receiving new visitors to your site(s).

A perfect example of this would be if you’re already running a photography website, but you’re not getting many hits. That’s because you have to market that site on its own using all the SEO tricks you can find, but even that might not be enough. Instead, move (or copy) your portfolio(s) over to Flickr and you’re basically dumping your pictures into a digital world full of people searching and browsing for images!

Free vs Pro

As with everything free, there’s always a catch! Free accounts have the following limitations: 300mb upload limit per month for photos, 2 video upload limit per month, only the first 200 images appear on your photostream, limited to posting images in 10 groups and only your smaller size images are shown.

My advice is to get the Pro account. It’s not much money when you break it down per month: only about $2, but so worth it.

Copyrights

Flickr also supports the use of Creative Commons copyright restrictions. You can place these restrictions on one image or all of them. Better yet, each image can have a different copyright than the next one. You are always in full control over how your images can be used online!

My two cents

Since I’m starting to get into photography, I love the idea that I can share my photos with the world. In time, the goal is to continue gaining more and more momentum with the quality that I’m bringing to the table. In turn , I’m hoping this will lead more people to me, which I’m really hoping will turn into actual business. There’s so much more to Flickr—I feel like I just scratched the surface, so go check out the Flickr FAQ page to answer all your questions.