Blogcast update: Switchable play counter.
Here's a quick update on our prior post as well as news of an additional option we've provided for users of Quick Blogcast.
Podcast counts
The site counter is now hidden by default and an option to turn this on is available within the Manage Blog settings. Click on Manage blog settings > Podcasts and change the show times played to yes. This will restore the counter for each entry. The majority of people requested this, about 3:1 ratio, remain off as a default.
Titles
The titles have been restored to the main blog and the entry pages: These take the form your blog name: your entry title. If these are missing from your Blog Cast site, republish from Design Blog / Customize and they should appear within five minutes.
ExplicitWe've restored the explicit image tag to each entry that is set as such. It precedes the play count/ download link underneath the in line player. This tag only appears when you mark your podcast as explicit.
I'd also like to explain how the stats are gathered, collated and displayed since many of you have inquired about this topic. Every time your audio or video file is requested, we count that as a hit. This includes playing it directly on your site, downloading it, a client requesting it from the RSS feed or someone directly linking to the media file's location. This doesn't mean in all cases that someone has listened to the file, just that they've requested it. All requests through are media servers are tallied once every twenty four hours (around Midnight AZ time) and the main site / podcast stats are updated.
I have to say, I love the Titles addition. This is brilliant! I would love to see the possibility to use the excerpt as the meta tag for description. This would be very cool.
I also love the 'big player' for podcasts. A few small improvement suggestions. In that sidebar component, allow left align not just centre. It would also be nice if I could write some basic instructions into the block containing the player (small beer though).
One other thing I think would be great, would be the option to turn on excerpt display on monthly archive pages. It's just really articlel links currently, and I think the excerpts to show the user more of the content would be good.
Some really excellent additions in the past month - keep it up...
Greetings,
Thanks for the kind words in relation to Blogcast. I hadn't considered using an automatic meta tag for that role, though have planned to allow people to put in their own fixed ones , so will add this to the list of possible items though the same info is essentially in the page being searched anyway so I just want to check that it's not redundant prior to doing so. The player and excerpt issue I'll take a look into including these in a future edition.
Regards
John
Quick Blogast team
John, I was a little puzzled with your response on meta tags. The benefit of an auto-generated tag is this would apply to historical pages en masse. Excerpt seems like a good candidate to go in the description meta tag. It could be quite a job to apply this to 'many' old pages if it was a manual process.
Perhaps there is a scope to allow for excerpt to be one option, or user defined (this would be needed anyway, as people don't always 'excerpt'). I'm presuming you mean you would support user defined descriptions on a per page (i.e. per entry basis). This would be quite useful, for example if the 'write new entry' screen allowed for keywords and description which were then applied through the template into meta tags in the html head.
On a 'totally' unrelated topic...I use a right hand side bar, and moved it there to try and get the page build order to be top logo, followed by main article, followed by navigation. The logic was top left to bottom right rendering. I've noticed in the page html source, the rendering is always article content last. I have pretty heavy weight navigation and side bar content, and I would like it to render last. Is there any way to 'tweak' the order? My thinking is that a spider / robot has to read very deep into the page to detect the unique content. Every page at the minute looks very similar until it hits the unique article below navigation (but that's 3/4 of the way through the page). This is a SEO issue really, and unique description meta tags would also help this scenario.
The product has really gone places in the past 4 to 6 months, and I really look forward to get my hands on new features and functions. Keep it up, and best regards...
Greetings John,
Firstly the answer was my personal bias re the information already being present within a post which should itself be addressed by the search engine though I have been doing more research into the effectiveness of doing so and there's certainly enough changes we could make to improve this. So my case of wishing things could be that way over the reality wasn't the best comment I've made
I can see a manual option appearing first in a future release and then looking at addingthe feature in the way you requested it work shortly after. I'm also looking at keywords being easily added to the images, links etc
I had inquired previously with the creators of our SEO program about the rendering order and the implication for ranking/ placement .I am aware there's quite a debate on the issue but am evaluating the relative importance in relation to the above changes and request.
Thanks for the kind words at the end and I hope we can suprise you even more in the coming months.
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast team
John, if I could venture an opinion...
If I use the site: command to check google's cache, I see pages indexed with all same title and all same description. This leads to the supplemental index and potential duplicate content penalties. We've nailed the first issue by making all page titles unique (this is very good, as page title is very important in SEO). I'm not 100% sure, but I think a desc meta tag would give the robot more of a clue that pages were different. If I look at my own pages in the google index it returns the first text it finds in the navigation block for every single page. This is clearly not good, as it has indexed a short description of every page as the same thing (and it is pretty unrelated to anything, as it's in the navigation block). The desc meta on its own 'might' fix this. I think that would be worth a go, and would be interesting to try.
I would advocate setting desc and keyword meta in the head, as well as making the page render order so that the actual blog entry div rendered immediately after the page header (i.e. the top page logo). This moves the unique content further to the top of the rendered html code. I think that would be the ideal solution. If we went that direction, I'd also advocate moving the first line (i.e. "Posted by x at time Y and filed under a b c categories") below the actual blog entry article. This would prevent the spider indexing that line first. It would be much nicer if it could get its teeth straight into the first sentence of the blog article. In the render order, that's really what you're after. I'm not 100% sure if the description meta (if set) would over-ride this behaviour - as I say this would be an interesting experiment.
I usually go on the principle that spiders/robots are lazy, and you need to help them as much as possible.
I like the idea of being able to set alt and title tags on the images and title tags on the links. That will be useful. Perhaps on that I would say though that it is more 'fune tuning' and if the actual pages aren't optimised then having optimised images inside them isn't fully efficient. The spider is likely to ignore the page or stick it in supplemental index, and then the imagebot just wont bother indexing the pictures in that page(s).
If it were me, I'd apply description and keyword tags first, change the block rendering order to render the blog article much higher up, and finally I'd tweak the img and title tags to give the imagebots more to go on in terms of image content.
John
Thanks for your great suggestions we'll certainly consider them as we move towards implementing more SEO friendly features.Adding alts to images is useful for more than SEO too for people accessing the web through readers for the visually impaired and we should be making that an easy option to.
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast
John,
Yes that's a very good point. Alt tags are very useful to screen readers and also providing full compliance with web accessibility standards. In terms of a robot/spider, it sees the world in terms of text based browsing and any clues to what it is indexing are all good. So these tags are useful in many regards.
Many of your new features are quite lovely but when will the posted statistics once again be meaningful? Blog support reps told me they change daily based on a 90-day cycle but mine go up and down like a roller coaster during the same day. Any info?
Thanx
Greetings Ali,
The stats as you have noticed are still not the bedrock of accuracy that we'd be proud to put out there. The good news is that all the data was gathered / stored and it's being refactored to provide faster more relevant stats over the entire range. Yes we've said that before but getting this one right is really important to us. I'm intrigued by the see sawing nature over the day though and will follow up on that. Thanks for taking the time to provide us with the feedback.
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast Team
Hi there!
I hit "yes" for the counter being shown on this one and still don't see it. I like having the choice of having it shown or not. So, is it me or is it the site having more difficulties?
Greetings,
The counter only appears on posts with media files , e.g audio or video and only the new templates which would have required publishing since our re launch in early August. Changes to the visitor site can often take 5 minutes to show up due to the caching system we have in place.
Regards
John
Quick BlogCast
Hiya, I was wondering if someone could help me upload a picture, and have that picture be my iTunes Logo in the store. Every podcast seems to have a sort of picture/logo with their podcast, can Blogcast have this feature also?
Greetings,
We currently have this feature within our program and it occurs in more than one place.
Firstly there's the image that ( you can set that under manage blog/ settings/ podcast) is displayed within the Itunes store when submitted , aka the channel item) And there's also a per podcast image which is located within the mp3 file only at this time. We are meant to include your default image in the file where non exists but that's currently not functioning and will be added back in soon. Meanwhile the easy workaround is open the file in iTunes, click on properties , then artwork and upload the picture, save this and upload it to the podcast ( e.g do this step first)
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast.
We are checking the product out for several of our clients and we dont see anyway to submit media aka videos or audio via FTP. We do the heavy lifting for them in processing there media files and we want to be able to upload their media via FTP is this something your going to add?
Greetings Todd,
Currently we do not have FTP access but it's on Blogcast's development roadmap for a future release and may take the form of modifying our existing sound recorder / uploader to place the files in the podcast account or resemble a conventional FTP service.
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast Team
John
I would love to see this soon and I hope that you would support the Blog API as well so that utilities like BlogJet could post to the site without having to login.
The FTP stuff is critical combined with the Blog API we could push the media and post the blog content automatically and never have to login to the service.
But with Libsyns model of Unlimited Bandwidth for Podcast hosting the model you have here is still very difficult to sell.
Todd,
We do support metaweblog api ,which can be activated under manage blog / services , as well as offering direct posts by email.
Libsyn's an interesting model though one I'm unable to reconcile the infrastructure required to sustain it versus the price point. It's been considered how to make such a system viable and will continue to consider this option. While we overlap a lot of their users I really want to make sure that if such an option , unlimited or unmetered bandwidth appears that it's going to work well for all the users.
Regards
John
Hey John,
What are the odds of getting some level of customization so we can integrate promotional services such as Digg or Stumble in our posts? We have great traffic success when a visitor is able to Digg an article.
Also, has anybody else asked for a possible tool to update the Meta tags? Google's spiders do not reach all of our articles which greatly impacts traffic.
Thank you,
Vic Wettner
blogsnroses.com
Greetings Vic,
Ok the chances on us improving the meta tags I think is 1:1 on my roadmap but the timing for such I'm hoping is sooner rather than later. If google didn't get all the articles I'm not sure the metatags being there would help, them being unread at that point then again the more I research SEO the greater my ignorance on that matter
Thanks for letting us know these would be useful to you.
Regards
John
Quick Blogcast.
Vic, good ideas. I mentioned the digg / stumble thing in a reply comment in May/07. I would like the ability to choose a set of bookmarklets to add to the bottom of each post. These should ideally cover; digg, reddit, stumble, delicious et. al. I also have a problem with page optimisation, for me rendering order is a problem, as are lack of description tags. I know from other conversations here that these things are being looked at and are moving forward.
the podcast is very nice but really need way more space 10 gigs just dont get it cant keep more then about 200 archives thats bites other then that its a great podcast
Greetings,
Thanks for taking the time to give us feedback on the plan options . I'm taking a look at this as you are correct 200 shows could come quickly for many. I've got a few questions on what people expect in the form of archiving that I'm working on. E.g planning to not bite by restricting your bytes.
Regards
John
QBC Team