Note From The Editor, Site Updates | featured news

Look to the right of the homepage and you’ll see a new module called “Most Fed Articles.” They’re AP articles ranked by the number of times they’re being used in the top newspapers in the US within the last six hours. It’s a quick and easy way to see which AP news stories are most popular across the U.S. It’s one of the methods that I’ve been using to gauge which articles to feature as the top story, and now I’m making it available to you.

I've integrated Facebook's Like Button and Like Box to Wopular's homepage and subpages. I don't think they're effective traffic drivers, but did it just to cover my bases; I think, in general, that's true for most small to medium sized sites. They're pretty easy to integrate.

I did some house cleaning over the last couple days with some feeds on the site.

I removed Bloglines from Search because the site's closing down in November. Ask.com, which owns it, thinks that RSS readers are going the way of the dinosaurs. That's not good news for me, but I'm just gonna chug along.

Digg v4 reshuffled some of its categories, so some feeds no longer work and had to be removed - Digg Travel, for instance. Same deal with Yahoo Buzz.

In my continued efforts to make the site run faster, I’ve set my sights on query caching on MySQL. I think query caching is turned on by default when you install MySQL. At least for me, I didn’t have to do anything. I notice it’s been working because whenever I run a query a second time, it’s always significantly faster.

I just installed Pressflow and simultaneously updated Drupal late last week. Pressflow is a modified version of Drupal that allows it to scale more easily. For sites with huge traffic and databases, it's essential. It supports database replication, Squid and Varnish reverse-proxy caching, and is optimized for MySQL and PHP 5.

As you could probably tell by my latest entries, I've been spending the last couple weeks finding different ways to monetize the site. Wopular has about 400k-500k unique visitors per month, according to Google Analytics. That's a decent amount of users. It's about time I stopped coding new features and started earning. There's a certain challenge with monetizing an aggregation site, but I'm not gonna talk in depth about it here. I'll save that for another article. Mainly, it's that the average user only views a couple pages, compare to several with the average content site.

In my attempt to diversify revenue on Wopular, I'm throwing in another kind of ads -- in-text advertising. These are ads you see when you hover over keywords that are double-underlined. They're great because you can use them along with display advertising, thus providing an additional source of revenue without cannibalizing your existing ad inventory. Currently, the two most popular in-text advertising networks are Kontera and Infolinks.

AdBrite's full page ads overlays your website with an advertiser's until you click on a button at the header to skip the ad. A while back I disabled AdBrite's Full-Page Ads because shortly after enabling it, I saw a significant traffic drop. Although it could have just been the natural order of things, I didn't want to take any chances. Traffic came back shortly after I disabled it, but again, it could have just been be the normal ups-and-downs of the the traffic cycle. I've read that since it's just javascript, it shouldn't affect search engine referrals which makes sense.

Like I mentioned in the Ebert article, I've been testing out ad networks on subpages of Wopular for the past couple months. I don't want to put any ads on the main channel pages until I've settled into something; also, I want to reserve those pages for premium sponsorships.

On most websites nowadays, you'll see somewhere on the page, usually at the top right corner, links to the site's RSS feed, Twitter account, and Facebook fanpage. I've always wondered why MySpace, being the second largest social networking site by far, isn't on that list.