Posts in category "blogging"

My name is Norman and I am a blogoholic.

Two years ago, I started this blog purely as an experiment to see what all the fuss was about.

Two years ago, I didn't even know what blogging was. I certainly didn't expect that I would still be doing it two years later.

I didn't anticipate that I would subsequently play with themes, plug-ins, spend money on a domain, migrate to my own WordPress blog and eventually add Adsense.

During the first year (honeymoon period), I enjoyed monitoring the traffic statistics for my hosted WordPress blog.

Much to my surprise, I discovered that I actually enjoyed writing. Initially, I thought I might be capable of creating a technical blog about Siebel and/or Oracle but I soon discovered that I preferred to post anecdotes from my tedious life as a IT consultant.

As a consequence of creating the blog, I learned about various blogging platforms (Blogger, WordPress, Movable Type, Drupal, Typepad, Habari and Google Pages)

I also learned about RSS, various Web 2.0 tools (Bloglines, Reader, Netvibes, Blinklist, Feedburner) and signed up for various social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn).

Most importantly, I made a handful of new friends that I am still in regular contact with.

Then one night, I sat in a Dublin hotel room, staring at a pint of Guiness and mindlessly pressed 'Publish'. Seconds later, I then immediately stared at this particular vacuous post and thought 'What am I doing ? Why am I doing this ? What is the point ?'

After two years, I was blogging purely because of the self-imposed pressure to create content. Content that was valueless, worthless and pointless.

So, suddenly and spontaneously, I decided to take a break because I simply couldn't be bothered any more. Blogging just wasn't fun any more.

After one day, I still checked for comments, scanned the Web server logs and reviewed my precious Adsense revenue.

After two days, I read my RSS feeds for blog comments and examined my pretty Google Analytics charts.

After three days, I strongly resisted the urge to check anything.

After five days, I didn't do anything. I didn't feel obliged to write a blog article. I didn't feel obliged to comment. I didn't feel obliged to scan any of my 167 feeds.

After seven days, I forgot I had a blog. I actually talked to friends and family. The feeling of liberation was surprising.

After nineteen days, I realised blogging was an addiction. An addiction that didn't fit well with my obsessive personality.

After twenty eight days, I realised my blog was now two years old (I started my blog the day after WordPress launched). An interesting experiment which had now naturally drawn to a close.

So I was sorely tempted to close the blog down.

But then Doug said he liked 'Prince' so I had to start all over again.

Create tables, resize, add rows and columns, preview the output and add the finishing touches in Google Docs.

Then simply paste the HTML into the WordPress WYSIYG editor.

Less than two minutes to index a new article. Impressive.

A minor irritant with uninteresting email cluttering up my Inbox has resulted in some minor changes to my Web 2.0 first-team squad.

Akismet, the popular and widely used anti-spam solution, was letting an increasing trickle of irritating comment and trackback spam through. As I had configured email notification for all blog comments, this was generating pointless, tedious, worthless emails that simply had to be deleted. A complete waste of time and energy.

Initially, I toyed with the option to simply disable comments on articles older than 90 days which accounted for 95% of the spam but would block authors with valid contributions.

A little research revealed a possible alternative - Spam Karma. I was loosely aware of Spam Karma from the footer in Tim Hall's excellent blog

This blog is protected by dr Dave's Spam Karma 2: 23182 Spams eaten and counting...

as well as Andy Beard's positive review and useful tutorial on configuring Spam Karma. Initially, the Spam Karma interface was a little confusing. With Akismet, you literally set and forget whereas Spam Karma has a configuration page with a plethora of different options. Anyway, after deciding to start out with the default, out of the box settings, I just activated Spam Karma and waited.

Sure enough, the never ending barrage of spam trickled in and the vast majority were correctly marked as such, valid comments were allowed through and I couldn't detect any false positives.

The moderation mechanism wasn't quite as obvious as Akismet which emailed me whenever a comment was held for moderation. However, Spam Karma was actually better as moderated comments are held in the Spam list and can be quickly moderated from there. In addition, Spam Karma can email a daily/weekly digest summarising recent activity.

I have been running Spam Karma for almost a week now and not a single comment/trackback spam has got past the barriers yet. A truly impressive and valuable piece of software.

A few features in Spam Karma I really like:

• All comments are assigned a score depending on various criteria.
• Comments on older articles get penalised...
• ...but older articles with recent (valid) comment activity score higher.
• Instant comments within seconds of viewing get penalised.
• First-time commenters are presented with a captcha.
• Established commenters are recognised and scored accordingly.
• Trackbacks without a valid reference URL are penalised.
• My comments score higher than anyone elses :-)
• A detailed breakdown of the score assigned to any comment is available.

-12.5
0: Encrypted payload valid: IP matching.
-2: Browser doesn't support Javascript
0.5: Comment has no URL in content (but one author URL)
-2: Flash Gordon was here (comment posted 8 seconds after page load)
-9: Entry posted 7 months, 3 weeks ago. 0 comments in the past 15 days
Current Karma: -3

I was so impressed I donated $20 to the author and that doesn't happen very often. Another source of unnecessary email was valid blog comments (albeit much fewer). The solution for this was obvious. Subscribe to my own comments feed and read them in Google Reader.

Another source of Web 2.0 irritation was that the Firefox extension for coComment broke some of the drilldowns in the revamped Google Analytics reports so I reluctantly stopped using it. This was a real shame as coComment was one of these Web 2.0 applications, I actually used on a daily basis.

Again, I looked for an alternative and installed co.comments (yeah I know - it's a Web 2.0 domain with an embedded period) which works fine. There is a Firefox bookmarklet (not an extension) so the author has to remember to mark any comments posted whereas coComment automatically tracked these 'conversations'.

The other advantage of the coComment extension was automatic notification whenever a comment was added to a tracked conversation.

Again, the solution for this issue was obvious. I simply subscribed to the RSS feed for my tracked conversations and read them in Google Reader.

No one ever asks me: Hey, Norman - why havent you installed Movable Type 4 (beta) yet ?

Well, I just did. The product is pretty impressive but I have invested too much time and effort in WordPress to switch blogging platforms.

After a promising start, the recent introduction of Adsense on this blog is seriously floundering. I am bitterly disappointed with the financial returns in June and my wife is seriously doubting the wisdom of my decision to resign from a highly paid job in IT consultancy in favour of professional blogging on the kitchen table.

Consequently, after an extraordinary board meeting, I have decided that desperate measures are necessary. I have cashed in my £12.50 Adwords vouchers bundled with my Bluehost account and launched a brilliant, inspired, marketing campaign aimed at driving traffic to this site, increasing e-commerce sales and boosting the click through rate.

So, if you see the following Google advertisement on your travels through the InterWeb, please be sure to let me know.

The world's worst blog

Ramblings from a certified madman

The wit and wisdom of Mr Brightside

www.nbrightside.com

Graham started a technical blog and Andy used the Drupal theme on his new WordPress blog.

I felt left out so I decided to start a technical blog on Drupal with a WordPress theme.

Welcome to the long delayed and much anticipated issue 2 of Recycle Pool.

We did have a world famous guest writer lined up for this months edition but, unfortunately, he got cold feet and decided to pull out at the last minute.

Eddie Awad gets ready to tumble by sharing interesting snippets from his feeds and travels on the Web.

Graham decides to start a technical blog focussed on three letter acronyms (CRM and SOA). Brave man, particularly as his wife is expecting a new arrival - imminently.

I wonder if Graham will manage to find the time to mend his RSS feed and upgrade to the recently released Movable Type V4.

Stephen confirms something I have suspected for a long time: 'I was always more of a Buzzcock than a Sex Pistol'.

Douglas Burns conjures up a superlative blog, including photos, summarising the fun and frolics at the Miracle database forum in Edinburgh. Sounds like my sort of conference.

Kevin Burton wonders why the latest release of Emacs was six years in the oven. The answer is simple: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Diamond Geezer (pseudonym alert) is lucky enough to be participating in a trial with access to every BBC program broadcast in the last week.

Andy Campbell makes a welcome return to blogging, migrates from Blogger to Wordpress and adopts the stylish Drupal theme.

Paul Stamatiou designs a new logo for his blog. I bet he would have cost somewhat less than £400,000 and could undoubtedly produce something better than this montrosity.

Adam Ostrow concedes that further resistance is futile and Google now owns his soul.

100 subscribers Who would have thought it ? Certainly not me.

I have had an innate fascination with Google Adsense and the correct spelling of monetization for a while.

Countless times, I was poised to hit the 'Unsubscribe' button while hovering over John Chow's blog. But every single time, I stopped myself. Is this guy for real ? Is he really making thousands of dollars every months from blogging ? Does he really eat in those posh restaurants ?

This decision to place banner ads and a sponsored search box on this site was not taken lightly and sincere apologies to all my principled, minimalist, long-standing, traditionalist readers.

Rest assured, the banner ads will only remain in place until I have raised the sum of £70 to pay for a replacement bathroom door in my Prague hotel room

After a mere 10 minutes, my newly created Adsense account was unbelievably showing an incredible return of $0.34. If this income stream is sustained, I calculate I will have generated $14,000 (£7,300) within one month and £87,000 in my first year !

However, on reflection, I assume this surge in activity was caused by my lengthy trials and tribulations with the WordPress plugin and getting the confounded advertisements to display properly on the footer.

These experiments (767 clicks all by me) probably constituted a breach of the Adsense Terms and Conditions so now I have the mighty Google suing me as well as Amazon. Sigh.

Anyway, back to the original reason for the need to raise some capital quickly. This evening, when I returned to room 516, I was informed by reception that there is a small dent in the bathroom door. I thanked them for letting me know, said it was no problem and they could fix it tomorrow morning.

Unfortunately, events then took a bizarre and sinister twist when the head of housekeeping maintained I must have been responsible as the hole wasn't there prior to me checking in.

However, I am not so sure. Honestly, I can not recall kicking the door in a fit of pique, my feet don't hurt and my toes are not bruised. Still, the evidence is stacked against me.

Unless I can stage a CrimeWatch style reconstruction, tomorrow morning, to prove that a maid's trolley laden with shampoo, lemon scented body wash and fresh flannels was forcefully rammed into the door by a disaffected and underpaid employee, I am in a very weak position.

Worse, I am told that I will have to foot the bill for a replacement door which costs £70.

Now I have occasionally expensed room service, wireless internet, movies, laundry and sundries but submitting an expense report including 'Broken Bathroom Door' might be pushing it.

Still, with my Adsense revenues, I won't be shelling out for a cheap pastel blue door made from MDF, I'll be buying the hotel.