As you know, I have just switched themes on this blog. On another one, which turned one year old today, I changed the default header image. I also completed some back-end optimizing for all my blogs, which took practically all of my spare time yesterday and today. Housekeeping, if you like.
I was pleasantly surprised just now when my Feedburner subscriber count on this blog jumped from 37 to 94! And when I checked Davao Delicious, there was also a modest rise — from 65 to 76. It wouldn’t be far-fetched to surmise that this sudden increase was due to the updates in my blogs’ look and feel.
You see, I believe that attending to your blog’s user experience is very important. I guess, because of the care and attention given to how readers enjoy my blogs, more have decided to take the extra step and subscribe to my feeds. Yay!!
Less than a hundred subscribers per blog isn’t a cause to break out the bubbly, no. But it does show that I’m most probably on the right track. Not to say that you should go and change your blog’s theme right this instant. What I am saying is, do take the time to see how your readers are going through your site. (This is assuming, of course, that your content is still your most important lookout.)
Speaking of subscribers, one very effective way of keep bringing your readers back to your blog is this great little plugin called Subscribe to Comments. It allows your readers to be notified of updates to comment threads in which they participate. Each time a new comment is made, subscribers are notified via email. As blog owner, you are afforded an admin view of all your comments’ subscribers — along with their email addresses and the posts to which they’re subscribed. There’s even a simple statistical overview for your pleasure.
What’s more, subscribers can go back and unsubscribe anytime they want. Which is what makes this WordPress plugin a very indispensable tool. You see, Netizens are sensitive about spam, and if they know there’s no way to unsubscribe from some online service, they get discouraged from jumping in.
OK, to use the Subscribe to Comments (STC) plugin effectively, and to ensure that its management pages integrate properly with your blog’s theme, do the following:
On the plugin settings page (Settings > Subscribe to Comments), check the box that says “Use custom style for Subscription Manager” (see image below).
The “Path to header:” and “Path to footer:” fields should already be filled in upon activation of the plugin, and in most cases, the values should be correct. What it does is to call your theme’s header and footer templates and display them on the STC management pages.
Add this information to the “Path to sidebar:” field, if you want STC to seamlessly integrate with your theme: [theme_path]/sidebar.php. However, please make sure that your theme set does have those three template files (header.php, footer.php and sidebar.php).
Below those fields, you can input the <div> containers that normally hold your blog pages’ content. Check your page.php template to see what those containers are. In my blog, I have <div id="entry">, <div class="post"> and <div class="content">. Don’t forget to add all the requisite </div> tags at the bottom field (or else!).
Check to see how your STC management pages look like. Don’t know where they are? Below each post’s comment entry form, you will find a new link (you can change the words in the STC settings page):
Your readers / commenters will see this:
Clicking on the [Manage subscriptions] link will bring you to the STC management page. You can manipulate the design / layout even more through CSS. Just add CSS calls in your stylesheet.css file to include STC-specific HTML containers.
Blog on!
