automaticable

Even though I work in an advertising agency, personally I do everything I can to keep unwanted advertising out of my life. I have Adblock Plus for Firefox, I subscribe to the National Do Not Call registry, and I filter out as much unwanted junk mail as I can. Because of this, I have only seen a handful of the ads we have created at work out in the wild.

Because of this, I was quite surprised to see one of our ads for the March for Babies, a non-profit affiliated with the March of Dimes that was previously called WalkAmerica, show up in multiple Google Reader feeds today. I forgot that as part of our campaign we had decided to host RSS feed ads through Pheedo, meaning all of my traditional ad-blocking techniques would not filter out this message. This made me realize just how powerful RSS feed ads can really be; they are targeted to a specific audience, can be served in many banner sizes, and will reach people who generally block those types of ads. I’m sure there are RSS readers that block these ads, but Google Reader, as one of the most popular available, does not.

I guess more than anything I am happy to see one of our non-profits being hosted successfully through Pheedo and reaching a large, captive audience. I am glad I haven’t taken steps to completely cut advertising out of my personal life, as I wouldn’t have been able to see the results of what I work so hard on while on the job!

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We are very excited about our new look and feel here at automaticable and hope you are too. Along with a new URL, theme, and author (welcome Brian!), we have also started spreading the message of automaticable throughout different web sources in hopes of driving traffic to the site. Many of you are coming in through facebook feeds (and I’d guess some of you are just reading the posts within facebook), people have found us through technorati, and there is also a ton of random traffic being shot our way. Welcome everyone!

As much as we love you all reading what we have to say here on automaticable, we would really love to hear what YOU have to say! To let us know what you are thinking, start participating in the comments. Tell us what you like, how you’ve used some of our tips, or what you suggest instead. Let’s make this a conversation that we can all have fun with.

Hope to hear from you all soon!

So we recently made the switch from Blogger, and it’s been quite the trip. It feels good to break free from the proprietary grips of Blogger, and into a clean, polished interface that is Wordpress. But with every new Wordpress installation, it becomes necessary to choose: which plugins will make the cut?

With such an active community that supports the Wordpress project, there are literally hundreds of plugins to choose from. It’s simple to customize every aspect of your blog, without writing any of your own code. So without further adieu, here are the ones that I’ve chosen to stick with:

Akismet

This one is pre-installed on every fresh Wordpress blog, and thank goodness for it. Akismet has become the de facto standard for catching comment spam in blogs. From their website, they say that 91% of all blog comments are spam. It works quietly behind the scenes so you never have to worry about it.

Overall Rating: 9.1 / 10

wp-cache

This is one of those plugins that you don’t realize you’ll need until it’s too late. Essentially it’s an extra layer of server-side caching, which saves bandwidth and speeds loading time under heavy traffic. It’s gotten some recent hype with sites like Digg and slashdot that bring in lots of traffic all at once. I haven’t noticed any difference yet, but this is another plugin that you can simply setup and forget about, and sleep a little easier at night.

Overall Rating: 8.5 / 10

All In One SEO Pack

Everyone knows that with having a blog now-a-days, it’s all about SEO. Although Wordpress already does a fairly good job of organizing your content, this plugin promises to optimize even further by automatically setting title tags and optimizing other meta data. This is a good start to get your page noticed by search engines like Google, but it’s by no means an end-all solution either. One of the other little features I enjoy about this plugin is its “One Click Upgrade” option– no more fussing with FTP every time there’s a new version out.

Overall Rating: 6.7 / 10

Google XML Sitemaps

This is another little charm that will help with getting your blog listed, and keeping those listing up-to-date. A sitemap is a file that lives in the top directory of your blog (generally “sitemap.xml”) that Google’s crawler uses as a cheat-sheet for indexing your page. Using a sitemap is highly stressed in Google’s Webmaster Tools. Not only will this plugin keep your sitemap prioritized and up-to-date automatically, but it’ll also notify Google and other search engines every time you post new content.

Overall Rating: 7.1 / 10

Flexible Upload

One aspect of Wordpress’ interface that I feel is lacking is their options for upload images for posts. They do have a simple box that will let you upload and insert, but your options from there are limited at best. With this plugin, you also have the ability to automatically create a smaller thumbnail image and resize the original while you upload. This is better than simply specifying a smaller size in the HTML, because it can reduce load times. Also, if you have an image-viewer plugin installed, such as LightBox, it integrates with those as well. The scope of this plugin is pretty narrow, but I feel it patches an important whole in the Wordpress editor.

Overall Rating: 7.6 / 10

Yes, we’ve come a long way since the old Blogger days, but we’ve finally got our own domain! Please excuse our dust while we get settled.