Social media.

As has been pointed out to me by a few people already, this blog didn’t have a follow by email option. RSS exists for wordpress, though I haven’t done anything to highlight how to subscribe, but the drawback of using plain RSS is that you don’t get any stats on who is following you.

There are, obviously, ways around this. The biggest and best known way is probably feedburner, which is now owned by google. The drawback to that is that google has deprecated the api, which is a technical way of saying that they aren’t developing it any more, may well cease to support it and eventually it just won’t work. Given that moving subscribers between services can be rather a pain, and the feedburner stats have been flakey to say the best, that means it’s no longer top of my recommendations list.

If you discuss this on twitter at any point, you will very quickly hear from one @phollows. He is the founder of FeedBlitz, a feedburner alternative. He has a tutorial on how you migrate from Feedburner to Feedblitz, and I suspect it’s a good alternative for businesses, but it may be just too pricey for bloggers as you are charged by email subscriber.

Another option is Mailchimp, which until you’ve got 2000 subscribers, is free. Free is a word I’m fond of. This isn’t a system I’ve tried though, so I’ve now run out of things to tell you about it 😉

When I asked on twitter for other suggestions, there was only one person who spoke up, Mummy Barrow. She uses subscribe2 from within wordpress – it’s a plugin. I took a look at it, and it’s what I would call option lite until you start paying, and as I’m trying to avoid paying, I’m moving on again.

Plugins within wordpress did look like a good option though, and so I started to investigate Jetpack. As I mentioned previously, it’s now possible to migrate at least some of your followers from wordpress.com to a self hosted wordpress blog if you’re using Jetpack, so that looks like a good starting position. It does far more than manage email subscription, but as this is a ten minute post, I won’t explore more than following and sharing at this point. Configuring the following options for email was as simple as ticking a couple of tickboxes in a settings page, and I now offer email subscriptions.

I had installed Addthis to manage my sharing buttons, but somewhere between me using them on my personal blog and setting them up on here, the layout appears to have gone seriously askew. So I am uninstalling them, and will explore the Jetpack features for sharing as well.

Configuring the Jetpack sharing buttons is just a case of dragging the buttons you want to display into a box. It doesn’t look like I can configure the tweet that will be sent out, but I may be missing something – I’m running out of my ten minutes though, so I’ll come back to that later.

The blog is now set up to be followed and shared – I hope that you’ll do both 🙂

At the end of this month, May 2012, an awful lot of website owners (including bloggers) are about to find themselves breaking the law. It’s not even a new law – it was passed last year, but with a year’s grace so we could all prepare. Instead most people haven’t even heard of it, let alone done anything to comply.

It’s this: Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) (Amendment) Regulations 2011 (UK Regulations) which provides that certain information must be given to a site’s visitors and they must give informed consent to the placing of the cookies.

Right about now it’s entirely possible various of you are wondering what a website has to do with biscuits. A cookie in this case is a text file, downloaded via the browser, and stored on your computer. It’s the sort of thing that allows Amazon to suggest products dependent on what you’ve viewed before, that means Google can personalize your search results, and lets shopping carts actually function.

So what does the law mean, and how do you comply? You might think if you aren’t selling anything you aren’t setting cookies. But if you’re using google analytics, social buttons or anything of that sort the odds are you are. The first thing to do is run an audit – there are a number of ways to do this. In firefox you can install the web developer extension, then right click in a page and look for web developer>cookies. When you’ve worked out what they all are, decide which of those cookies you want to keep – get rid of the rest of them, your website will probably thank you. (Further instructions coming on how to make all this make sense as I work through it myself.)

You also need to write up a privacy policy that explains what cookies you are using and what for – cookies that are essential for your website to function are exempted, but probably worth putting them in your policy anyway. Here’s one I’m working on for my main blog: liveotherwise privacy policy.

Then you need to decide what disclosure method you prefer. You can go for a popup on first page that also prevents cookies from being set until the user agrees. Or you can disclose in a header or footer message – the jury has not yet been convened as to which of these methods will be deemed sufficient, but we’re going with popups. (No, you won’t see it on here today, I haven’t finished working on it. It’s on liveotherwise though.)

Don’t think that just because you’re a little website you’ll get away with it. The ICO doesn’t have a lot of money to prosecute people – my best guess is that they will go after the small fry first, not the big companies who can just throw lawyers at the problem. Get your house in order, and if you can’t do it yourself, call on your local geek – I recommend this chap at colneis technology. 😉

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