If you’re hoping to make some extra cash from your blog, but all of your monetized links are in your sidebars or headers, etc, then you’re losing out when people view your blog from feed readers. Not so if you use Feedburner – now you can beef up your feed to integrate links to relevant products using your amazon associate ID, as well as further enhance your feed by splicing photos and links into it AND get stats on your traffic. VERY COOL!

Neil Turner has blogged about his experience with experimenting with Feedburner, and while his post doesn’t reference the ability to incorporate amazon links, he does show you how he’s spliced in his Flickr photostream.

Here’s how the service works:

FeedBurner detects your feed categories and then asks you to assign an Amazon store to any category for which you want to include the Amazon Associates program. For example, you might choose to associate the music store with your music category, DVD’s with your Pop Culture category, and nothing at all with your Personal and Family categories. You, the publisher have total control over the frequency with which Amazon Associates links appear, and whether they should appear alongside really short posts or only very detailed posts.

FeedBurner then leverages the latest 4.0 release of Amazon Web Services to match your posts to relevant Amazon content for that store, and FeedBurner transforms that link and content from Amazon Web Services into a simple linked GIF tied to your feed item.

Publishers have total control over which (if any) parts of their feed get amazon links, which amazon stores they want to map to their content, and how frequently they want these associate links to appear.

What if you want to create a blog that wasn’t available to the general public?

I’ve been poking around in MovableType and WordPress, but haven’t yet discovered how to make your blog private on those platforms — I’d imagine you could password protect a directory by modifying the .htaccess files, but I’d like to see ability to make a blog private incorporated into the blog tools interface.

This is where TypePad excels. Simply create a new blog, and 1) mark it as private (which only stops them from listing your blog on the ‘Recently updated blogs’ lists ) and make sure the boxes for notifying third party services when you update your blog are unchecked AND then 2) go into the Control Panel and click the link that says ‘Password Protect a Site’ and then enter the shared username and password that you will provide to only those you want to access your blog — this allows you to limit access to your blog, or part of your blog, so that only you or those you choose can read your posts.

In Blogger, go to Settings | Basic, and make sure to pick ‘No’ from the dropdown box entitled ‘Add your Blog to our listings’. Note that A Public blog appears in your Blogger Profile. If you select ‘No’ they will not show your blog anywhere on Blogger.com, but it will still be available on the Internet. As such, if you host your Blogger blog on their free hosting site, BlogSpot, from what I can tell you will not be able to keep your blog private or prevent it from being spidered and indexed by the search engines. If you’re very careful not to link to it from any external site, theres a chance it will never be found..but you’ve no guarantee of preventing unwanted eyes from reading your private blog. If you host your blog on your own ISP or web hosting provider and FTP your blogger pages to them, it’s conceivable that you could password protect the directory, again by modifying the .htaccess file.

Again, not having yet installed b2evolution or blosxom, I can’t comment on those platforms. However, I checked out blosxom’s website and it appears that they have several Blosxom plugins that you can use to password protect your site.

So, at this point, it would appear that TypePad is the only blogging software I have tested that allows you to make all or part of a blog private from within the TypePad control panel.

Update Ping Services
You can copy and paste these URIs into your blog service ping options screen (in WordPress, you do it by choosing Options > Writing > Update Services) with each URI on its own line. In MovableType you can add these URI’s to the list of where to ping by going to your configuration settings for notifications.

While TypePad doesn’t officially support customizing pings, there is a workaround, albeit a bit tedious – simply paste the list of URI’s into the box entitled ‘Send a TrackBack to these addresses’ in the edit post screen (yes, this means you need to do this for each and every post you create). If you don’t see the field for sending trackbacks, make sure you’re using the advanced or custom post editor by clicking the link on the create/edit post page entitled, ‘Customize the display of this page’ (it’s below the preview and save buttons).

Not surprisingly, Blogger doesn’t support customizing of pings and since they don’t support trackbacks either, I haven’t figured out a way to get this working on Blogger. I don’t yet have b2evolution or Blosxom blogs installed yet, so I’ve no idea whether they support pings or allow you to customize them..

Anyhow, here’s my comprehensive list of ping services to ping to tell them that you’ve updated your blog:

I’ve decided I should create, at it’s most basic level, at least one site with each of the blogging tools. I can then better determine which is easiest to customize, as well as well as which is more feature-rich and easy to use. Then I can provide you folks with a much more informed review of the various blogging tools out there.

Obviously, my TypePad site is my How to Blog weblog that you’re reading right now. Notice how the header is truncated b/c the templates that come with TypePad don’t appear to be rendering correctly in IE6 (update – I decreased the wording in my header so this doesn’t happen because it just looks too unprofessional and I couln’t find another workaround yet). I’m not sure if this is a CSS problem, and since I don’t know much about cascading style sheets yet I haven’t mucked around too much in the TypePad templates to try to fix it. I’ll create a post on how things look in other browsers in the future.

My Movable Type blog is located at Online Travelogues, and is also a work in progress and needs serious modifications to the index page so that it only lists all of the categories and to the individual post pages, so that it doesn’t list the title of all the other posts in the sidebar (which messes up my adsense relevancy).

I’ve been testing out Blogger for my weblog about Red Eared Slider Turtles.

My 1st WordPress blog is going on my Tool Reviews site.

Blosxom and b2evolution blogs are soon to come.

Once I’ve got one of each, I can work more on the tweaking of the templates, etc, to see which will eventually be my blogging tool of choice – and also so I can better understand which features I consider to be most crucial (as mentioned many times already, we already know I can’t go with Blogger because it doesn’t currently support TrackBacks, nor is there any indication that they intend to do so anytime soon).

I’ve already figured out that I don’t want to use TypePad or Blogger (the two easiest tools to use) for my blogs as they’re not as robust and customizable as other options such as Movable Type, b2evolution, WordPress, and blosxom for example.

The problem is that all of these other tools have a decent sized learning curve, particularly if you are interested in customizing your templates, which I very much am. So if I’m going to invest all this time in creating my perfect blog, which means learning the software which powers it, I want to make sure I don’t waste too much of my time on a platform that doesn’t have as much community support or won’t necessarily keep up with new technologies as they emerge (like the way Blogger doesn’t support TrackBacks, for example)

It occurred to me to just do a google search for each of the tools in question to get an idea of how many pages reference those tools. Now, Movable Type has been around for a LONG time, so it’s likely that that will be the most popular of searches – yet, as mentioned in a previous post, there is concern in the Movable Type community that it’s creators might not put as much effort in keeping it up to date now that they have their new baby, TypePad.

In any case, here are the number of results that turn up when you search for the following terms in Google (the most popular search engine out there):

Movable Type = 1,610,000 results

blosxom = 13,700 results

b2evolution = 104,000 results

WordPress = 1,450,000

While I’m at it, might as well check Google PR (Page Rank) for each of the above mentioned sites to gain another sense of it’s popularity (or, as Google puts it, to gain a measure of the importance of a page):

WordPress has PR 7
b2evolution has PR 6
bloxsom has PR 8
Movable Type has PR 8
TypePad has PR 8
Blogger has PR 10

Hmm. Blogger has PR 10. Man, I wish they would implement the latest technology into Blogger so one can use it, because I really suspect google gives some level of priority in ranking to blogs created using the software THEY own and hosted on their server (blogspot). Anyone else ever wondered about this?