Even with tweaking my website to try and improve page load times under the suggestion of IZEA my RealRank plummets as its inaccurate count of my blog traffic skydives into the abyss. Meanwhile Google Analytics shows the same consistent traffic day after day. This is no longer just a cosmetic badge thing, my SocialSpark profile for my blog is taking fast as a result of IzeaRanks not accurately tracking my blogs visits and viewership.

This is hurting my blog standing in SocialSpark and actually is going to end up costing me money in lost opportunities on the IZEA network, I could lose a couple of hundred bucks this month from this glitch in the analytics tracking of IZEARanks.

I am still having some performance issues with the pageload times of my blog, but I was able to tweak my javascript and trim external script calls enough to decrease my pageload time by about 40% which should have been more than sufficient to allow the ITK Tool script to track visitor analytics properly.

At some point in the future I may have to look at hiring Web Developers not only to tweak and tune my blog, but possibly to design me a new blog theme that really fits what I am looking to do with Dragonblogger.com in the future.

For now, I can only tune and tweak trying to optimize my site as much as possible and hope that IZEA can fix this IZEARanks issue as quickly as possible so my blog can skyrocket back up in the rankings to qualify for SocialSpark opportunities.

I wonder if the WP-SuperCache plug-in interferes with the ITK Tools collecting analytics? It shouldn’t since even cached pages should execute the javascript and make the call to report the analytics, and it doesn’t interfere with GA analytics.

-Dragon Blogger

EMAIL

I was looking for several widgets for my Rock Along Productions blog that allowed you to show the most recent posts and had one or two sentence summaries when I came across Wowzio.com.  I liked the widgets so much I decided to share what I found with my fellow bloggers. They are very flexible and customizable to fit into any blog theme and style.

The first thing you do is go to Wowzio.com and you are presented with the main screen, select the type of widget you are looking for:  Gallery Widget, Slide Show Widget, Live Feed Widget…etc

You are then presented with the screen where you enter your blog URL:

Enter your Blog URL and then click on the continue button.

You are then presented with the Create Widget Screen, where you can select one of six widget types (at the time of this post Wowzio offers six widget types).

These include Panoramic Slideshow, Live Activity, Photo Gallery, Feed Content, Slide Show or Tag Cloud.  I am using the Live Activity Widget for 2 of my blogs and the picture below shows the Wanderer Thoughts blog setup for the Live Activity Feed.

After you select your type of feed you are taken to the customization page where you can choose from the following options:

Size & Settings – where you can let the widget autofit into your column, or it can be sized to be a specific size, also you can choose for your widget to be live and update in real time, display image, show border, include referrer…etc

Colors – here you can choose one of the 9 preset color themes, or you can customize the top, background, text, link, header text colors to be whatever you want so it fits in your theme. You can visit my two blogs Justin Germino and Wanderer Thoughts if you want to see the color schemes I crafted.

Wowzio.com obviously competes with Feedjit and other Live Traffic Feed plug-ins for your blog, and the widget is very good. It has more customization than Feedjit, but lacks the “Watch in Real Time” button for you to see a full page view of live traffic. The widget also has a play/pause button at the top where you can stop the scrolling live feed if you want.

I highly recommend checking this widget out or any of the other widgets and see if they will be something useful for your blog.

-Dragon Blogger

EMAIL