How To Use Your Cloud Links

Yes, it is true that one of Userland's key Radio developers lived in Seattle. No, this has nothing to do with 'cloud' links. The 'cloud' is hacker-ese for all that stuff that takes place on the Internet beyond your desktop.

Mysterious bolts of lightning, hail(storms) and other strange meterological phenomena need be no concern to us so long as we can get where we want and say 'hello' in a weblog post.

The Cloud Links in your weblog's home page help you orient yourself in that otherwise murky cloud:

Home:      You can always click here to get to your own home page. There is no automatic way to send this link to your friends, but you can copy-and-paste it into an email once you have navigated to it on the Internet. 

(I also keep a link to my home page in Internet Explorer's favorites. To do that, go to your home page, select 'Favorites' in Internet Explorer, then 'Add to Favorites' and OK. This way, you don't have to have Radio open to find your own weblog conveniently).

Referers:     This is most cool. Referers are sites who have linked back to your site and are delivering (at least one) hit(s) on your content. No, not a mob hit. A visitor. A reader. Maybe even an admirer. Clicking this link displays the referer list for the current 24-hour period. I show a sample here:

Clicking on the live link takes you to the referring page where you are cross-linked by them. The referer list is sorted in descending order by the number of hits each referer has provided.

Ranking By Page-Reads:    Self-explanatory. The most popular weblogs of all time - or, at least, the most popular ones that are registered with weblogs.com. In fairness, this is a tiny slice of the world's universe of weblogs. Gosh, who is that up there today at number nine?

You can inspect the referer lists for these weblogs by clicking on the name of their site. If you click on mine for that day (Russ Lipton Documents Radio), you will see the same referer list I displayed above.

You can navigate directly to a website by clicking the globe icon .

The hits log and record the number of unique visits that have been made to each weblog.

(Note: your weblog must be published to Userland's Community Server in order to be included in the page-read list.)

Updates:     Click to display a vast array (okay, I exaggerate slightly) of weblogs that have updated within the past three hours.

You can navigate to any of these weblogs by clicking on their active link. This can be a pleasant (or, perhaps weird) way to while away your time. Who knows what lurks in the minds of another weblogger?

(Note: you can ask Userland to list your weblog in the recently updated list even if you don't use their Community Server. Go to the 'Participate in the Weblogs.Com community?' page which is available from the Weblog section of the Prefs menu.)

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