Hi, I'm David Langer. Welcome to my blog Freed from The Matrix, a collection of insights, interviews, hacks and other stuff that's relevant to young entrepreneurs. I'm the co-founder & CEO of GroupSpaces, Entrepreneurship Columnist for The Gateway newspaper and an aspiring triathlete. Thanks for reading!

New Blog Format for 2010, powered by awe.sm

Posted: January 3rd, 2010 | View Comments

Over the Christmas break I spent a couple of days giving my blog a makeover. Previously I’d been using a pretty generic theme hosted on Wordpress.com but had been getting frustrated by its lack of flexibility. So I signed up for my own hosting account with DreamHost who offer a 1-click install of Wordpress’s self-hosted software. This now gives me far more flexibility as I can use whatever themes, plugins and widgets I like, as well as customise any of these. Below you can see the old vs new blog layout:

Here is a summary of the key changes I made:

Template

I wanted something clean and simple, so decided to customise Clean Home by Missouri Web Design.

Sharing

  • I purchased the short URL langer.ly to make links shared about my content more distinct and registered it with awe.sm (for $99/yr) to track clicks and integrate with the places where my content will most frequently be shared. (I’ll be interested to see how bit.ly Pro compares with awe.sm when it launches.)
  • For a retweet button, I looked at TweetMeme and Topsy but ended up choosing BackType’s TweetCount plugin as TweetMeme wasn’t picking up all the previous tweets that had linked to my posts and Topsy didn’t yet have awe.sm integration.
  • For Facebook, I used awe.sm’s Sharecount Button for Facebook as it offered automatic integration with awe.sm (surprisingly!) and Google Analytics, whereas Facebook’s own Share widget didn’t integrate with either.
  • A couple of other bonuses with awe.sm are that it offers customised integration with Twitterfeed (what I use to send my Google Reader shares to Twitter) and Tweetie 2 for iPhone so URLs I share on those will also be langer.ly from now on :)

    • Widgets

    Other than the usual widgets for feed subscriptions, Twitter, LinkedIn, categories, search, archive etc. I incorporated:

    • A widget of my 5 most popular blog posts of all-time to give new and existing readers quick access to what is probably my best content.
    • A Facebook Fan Box and Skyscraper for GroupSpaces to promote what I’m working on.

    Comments

    I implemented Disqus because, well, what else is there that comes close and can be done in 2 minutes? :)

    I’d love to hear what you think of the new setup and also what you’d like to see me write about in 2010. Please let me know in the comments below or via Twitter.

    This year I’m aiming to blog much more frequently, my target is 2 posts/month — a significant increase from my 2 posts in the second half of 2009!

    Wishing you a successful Twenty Ten!

    P.S. If you’re not already subscribed to this blog, you can subscribe via RSS here and email here.

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    • doer82
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