by Who doesn’t love a badge or an award or fun visual feedback? Boles Blogs is hosted on WordPress.com as a Business blog, and we are loving, and appreciating, the cool badges WordPress gives us for new milestones in our online life as a young, WordPress blog. Here are the current badges we’ve earned: Over 200 “New Followers” and our “Best Day” and “100 Likes!”
These badges pop up in the notification window while logged into WordPress.com and, if you have a WordPress blog, you may login to WP.com and see the badges you’ve won by going here:
https://wordpress.com/#!/notifications/
I would love to have some kind of WordPress.com promotional widget for the sidebar that dynamically updates all these fun badges. We have widgets for Akismet and Readership — why not have an image-centered one based on how well your blog is doing? I love the “Freshly Pressed” widget we won for our Black Cat Bone story. Here’s my previous analysis for that Boles Blues blog honor:
Before Freshly Pressed exposure, Boles Blues had around 100 articles and, let’s say, 500 comments. That averages out to around five comments per post and that isn’t bad for a new blog.
In my experience, a new blog takes three years of writing every single day — hitting around 1,000 high-quality entries total — to really take hold and gain mindshare in an ever-growing internet. A “high quality” entry is an article with outside links, images, quotes, and at least 500 words.
At our current publication rate, Boles Blues will take around five years to fully mature to the 1,000 high-quality articles mark. I’m fine with that slow progression to greatness, and if we pick up speed on our author and editorial end, we might hit that millennium milestone faster.
Boles Blues is now Boles Blogs — and we’ve folded all that musical goodness into this new space. I’ve seen some of those award badges on other WordPress.com blogs — but I’m not sure if they’re being displayed by an official widget, or if people are just making up their own image badges and displaying them?
If we don’t get an official WordPress widget for award badges, I will be sure to update you on our current badges count — because we only earn these awards because of your ongoing interest and interaction with our blog — and we want to thank you every single day for that friendship and loyalty!
Professor Google has found no such widget for me — maybe we can use the official chat to ask for help getting one?
That is interesting how the official chat widget is available to all blog authors on this blog. That’s pretty neat.
I am currently in the process of, perhaps, wearing out my chat welcome — with the followers issue, and billing, and condensing everything, and my request for sitemaps to be made to reflect more than 1,000 articles and so on… we might let them cool down a bit and then ask! SMILE!