Journal - Audio Book Heaven

Well, I see I’m overdue for an update. Where does the time go? May is almost over already.

At Audio Book Heaven, I finally figured out that RSS feed business. I can’t remember if I mentioned that before. An RSS feed allows people to subscribe to your blog or website. A feed is nothing more than the content of your website. Everytime you publish new content on your site, it goes out on your feed. Subscribers can view your feed in a feed reader. By subscribing to the feeds of all your favorite websites, you can get updates on their new material all in one place rather than travelling all over the internet for it. It’s kind of like having pizza delivered to your home instead of going out to eat. You might have noticed the new widget on the right-hand side of this screen that says "Recently at Audio Book Heaven." That is my feed and it updates every time I post something new over there.

Anyway, blogs automatically produce a feed without you doing anything at all. If you choose to, you can sign up with a feed service to activate your feed and make it available to subscribers. That can all be done for free and doesn’t require much work at all, once you know how to do it. I had to do a bit of research on that because it’s fairly recent technology and I knew nothing about it. I activated my feed through Feedburner. I chose Feedburner because it is a Google product, just like Blogspot, and I like to stick with one brand as much as possible. Through Feedburner, you can also set up email subscriptions that allow subscribers to receive your feed directly to their email inbox. So if you want to get my book reviews sent right to your email, use the subscription form at Audio Book Heaven.

For several weeks now, I’ve been trying to figure out a way to link my blog to my Facebook account so that every time I posted something new it would automatically notify all my friends at Facebook. I was unsuccessful at that until I started learning more about feeds. Using my feed, I was able to do exactly that. Every time I post something new, it now automatically puts up a message on my Facebook wall. Pretty slick. Now all I need is some friends.

As far as the book review revisions, I am almost done. Actually the revisions have been done for about a week now, but I still have a few that need to be re-published. I'll probably do the last ones tomorrow.

At the end of April, I set myself the goal of publishing a new book review on every odd numbered day of May. I messed up once, publishing at 11:59 pm on May 4. Other than that I haven't missed a day, and I have enough reviews on hand now to finish out the month. It was a bit of a scramble doing all those reviews, so next month I'm going to slow up a bit and relax with some longer books. Actually, I’m not going to slow up just yet. I'm overdue for listening to Harry Potter. I usually listen to Harry about every four months, but I haven't done it because I wanted to keep posting new reviews, and I already reviewed Harry back in January. So I need to save up some reviews so I can keep posting while I listen to Harry Potter.

Umm, what else? I guess that’s about it. With my revisions done, I’ll probably start spending a lot more time researching. I want to see what else I can do with my feed and also find more ways to increase traffic to my site. I'm seeing some positive results in my stats at Stat Counter, but I'll talk about that later.

Jeremiah 32:27 "I am the LORD, the God of all mankind. Is anything too hard for me?

Psalms 16:8 I have set the LORD always before me. Because he is at my right hand, I will not be shaken.

Journal - Customer Service

Busy, busy, busy! "Audio Book Heaven" is all ready to go as far as the settings and layout are concerned. That table of contents I created is proving to be very handy. As part of my book reviews, I’ve begun adding a section called "Related Books" where I list other books from the series, etcetera. The books in the list are linked to other reviews if I’ve already done one. The table of contents makes it much easier for me to make the links. I hope my readers find it useful too, assuming I ever get any. ~smile~



On the Audible program, I’ve finally been approved as an affiliate. They had previously denied my application because I had put the wrong URL on it. That’s been fixed and I’m all set to go. I started looking through the different links they have that you can put on your website. I sort of want to modify the wording a little bit to fit my blog a little better, but I thought I should ask them first. So I sent an email to ask about that and I’m waiting for their response.



I also have an account set up with Amazon. They have some different things you can do, you can link to individual products or to product categories. I just got done emailing them some questions about that. I think it would be better to link to a category, namely books, but I asked them what would happen if someone clicked my link and then bought something in a different category. Also, it seemed like all they had were banners, so I asked if they had text links available. We’ll see what they say.



I also heard about another affiliate program with ABE Books. They sell new and used books, although I’m not sure if they handle audio books. I’ll give that a look sometime, my reviews are written from and for audio books but they would still apply to text books for the most part.



I’m still kind of playing around with the stat counter thing. Not having much luck though. I’ve heard of people having trouble not being able to see their own counters, although people on other computers can see them. So if you go to "Audio Book Heaven", let me know if you see a counter at the bottom of the page. I think it’s at the bottom anyway.



That’s it for now. See ya later!



Update! I just got an email back from Audible where I had asked if I could modify the link. The rep asked for an example of what I wanted it to say so I showed her what I wanted. I must say, the various people I’ve been contacting at Audible, Amazon, WordPress, and Stat-Counter have all been very good about getting back to me quickly. They've also been very friendly and helpful. It's nice to know that there are still friendly customer service reps somewhere out there.



Ephesians 4:32 Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.



2 Peter 1:7 and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, love.