why Reddit is useless for bloggers

Yesterday was 1 December and an innocuous post on identi.ca about an Advent calendar immediately reminded me of an amusing (and completely true) blog post I wrote two years ago.

This, in turn, prompted me to write this short note on identi.ca and the post on identi.ca subsequently appeared on my FriendFeed stream.

Normally, when I post a new blog entry, the post gets visited by a handful of people - presumably a subset of those subscribed to this blog. In this case, this wasn’t a new post so regular RSS readers wouldn’t see this content so any visitors had to come from identi.ca or FriendFeed.

evangelism - Habari style

Dear Prudence

That’s excellent news. I am glad to hear you have managed to get PDO installed and now have Habari up and running on your site.

As for how I happened to stumble across your site, well….

There’s an army of committed, passionate Habari enthusiasts who routinely conduct Twitter, Web and blog searches for every single mention of the word ‘Habari’.

In addition, one of the primary responsibilities of the mysterious organisation - the Cabal - is to infiltrate Government intelligence agencies worldwide (GCHQ, NSA, Mossad, KGB) and access transcripts of all mobile phone conversations and SMS text messages. Sophisticated AI algorithms (grep with regular expressions) are then used to mine that data, searching for Habari related terms.

more fun with keyword searches

The gift that simply keeps on giving.

• ‘914 scam’ - if you don’t know the correct name, you may already be doomed to failure.
• ‘reasons for isolation’ - spending too much time on the Internet searching for ‘reasons for isolation’.
• “craig gordon” “ian curtis” - odd combination of a dead pop star and a living Sunderland goalkeeper.
• ‘my wife’s shapely legs’ - yeah right. Take those stockings off. Now.
• “(“current vacancy” or vacancies or opportunity or careers or “working with” or “working for”) and (“oracle dba” or oracle dba )and london” - with such a superlative grasp of search term syntax and semantics, you would simply be wasted as an Oracle DBA.
• ‘dead bodies in the floor boards’ - stop it. You are worrying me with the use of ‘in’ as opposed to ‘under’.
• ‘how to become a virgin again’ - Please sit down. Have a drink. I have some bad news for you.
• ‘ian curtis hanged ice block’ - Look I’ve already told you twice This is an urban myth.
• ‘make friends under 14 to 16’ - try Facebook or Beebo. Just don’t get caught.
• ‘oracle killed siebel’ - Mr. Ellison with the lead piping in the library.
• ‘selling strategy of siebel system anatomy’ - yet another reason I don’t work in sales.
• ’the most important decision of my entire life’ - undoubtedly left disappointed at my lack of insight.
• ‘urinal pulled his zipper down’ - yet another reason I always favour a private cubicle.
• ‘why durex gossamer withdrawn’ - apparently on the advice of the Pope.

review of Habari 0.5

Introduction

Habari is a blogging platform, created back in January 2007 and in the subsequent 18 months, the software has matured and version 0.5.1 was recently released.

Originally, I downloaded and experimented with Habari late in 2007 but it wasn’t until February 2008 that I finally took the plunge and migrated my blog from WordPress.

Installation

Habari requires PHP 5.2 (or higher) and PHP Data Objects (PDO). If your hosting company can’t meet these requirements, think about switching to one that can. Habari also supports multiple database types:

Web 2.0 relationship scorecard

• +1 for a ‘friend’
• +5 for a ‘follower’
• +10 for a blog comment
• +25 for a blog contact
• +50 for an email
• +100 for a photo
• +250 for a NSFW photo
• +400 for an audio conversation
• +99,999 for a hot steamy IM session
• +1,000,000 for sharing a pint

twitter killed the blogging star

I have tried many times, in many different places, to articluate the idea that micro-blogging reduces ones blogging output but Russell Beattie completely expresses my thoughts on the subject in this brilliant article.

‘Tweeting totally takes away that blogging urge from me… Once I tweet about something, it’s like it disappears from my mind completely.’

I can completely identify with this statement and another sentence also struck a resounding chord with me:

knowing me, knowing you

[ This post also had working titles of ‘Friends, bloggers and countrymen’ and ‘anti-social networking’. ]

A few weeks ago, a gentleman called WaveyDavey001 was kind enough to invite me to participate in a Fantasy Football League.

Rather rudely, I attempted to invite several of my friends into the same League so I only needed to manage one team. WaveyDavey001 politely agreed with the caveat; ‘I’d like to vaguely know most (of them)’.

in praise of Disqus

Disqus recently released a update which includes the ability to export comments on a WordPress blog so I have just exported all historic comments left on this blog (when it was running WordPress) into Disqus.

This operation was slightly complicated because this blog now uses Habari but the necessary steps were:

1. Download and install the new Disqus 2.0 plugin for Wordpress.
2. Delete all obvious spam so the export only processes genuine comments and runs faster.
3. Switch the archived WordPress copy of the blog back to the original location.
4. Export all comments from WordPress into Disqus.
5. Claim comments left by myself using an alternative email address before I had even heard about Disqus.
6. Wrap the WordPress blog in cling-film, label and place back into cryogenic storage.
7. Reinstate the Habari blog.

However, because I am pretty stupid and overly hasty, inevitably I omitted step 3. This meant that while all comments appeared on the Disqus site, the permalinks to the individual blog articles were incorrect and referenced ‘/wordpress/’ instead of ‘/blog/’.

reader fragmentation

I suspect I have different audiences reading my blog, Tumblr, Friendfeed, Jaiku, GR Shared Items. I call this ‘reader fragmentation’ but haven’t applied for copyright yet. Should I ?

pocket Web 2.0 dictionary

Define your favourite Web 2.0 service in two words (or less)

• Blogging: ‘Dear diary’
• Flickr: ‘Cat photos’
• FriendFeed: ‘Friend’s Feeds’
• Tumblr: ‘Disposable blogging’
• Wikipedia: ‘Online encyclopedia’
• Twitter: ‘Inane drivel’
• del.icio.us: ‘Period overload’
• Disqus: ‘Modern flamewars’
• Digg: ‘Technical narcissism’
• Last.fm: ‘Dire Straits’
• YouTube: ‘Cat videos’
• LinkedIn: ‘Gizza job’