Posts in category "blogging"

Some professional (but impecunious) bloggers feel it is very important that there should be a regular, repeating cycle to the frequency of your blog articles to capture the hearts and minds of your tens of readers.

Thankfully, I am a mere amateur so I will post when I feel like it and have prolonged periods of radio silence when I feel like it.

The Akismet spam filter included with WordPress.com means I am not troubled by comment spam on my blog at all, ever.

However, I recently reviewed the spam sitting there all alone in quarantine. Most was inviting me to sample all sorts of delights describing all manner of different and very imaginative ways that a man and (wo)man can be joined together.

One spam comment stood out head and shoulders above all others though with a blissfully simple but effective, marketing message.

GREAT VACUUM CLEANERS

So Typepad had plans to implement resilient disk storage but had an outage before the work was complete, which meant that users lost access to their treasured blogs as a consequence.

Elsewhere del.ico.us celebrated the Yahoo! takeover by having an outage that also meant that users lost access to their bookmarks.

I also noticed that the transaction log on the database used by Newsgator filled up over the weekend and the forums were also unavailable this morning.

My UK ISP appears to have suddenly been taken by surprise by a slight increase in users which has broken their email infrastructure causing sporadic access to email for a period close to seven days. Isn't anyone at Blueyonder responsible for capacity planning ?

I just downloaded an interesting, wide ranging interview (sorry podcast) by Tom Raftery with Matt Mullenweg and Donncha OCaoimh, the two leading developers behind WordPress. Matt and Donncha talk about their backgrounds, hosted WordPress.com, features in 2.0, blogging, spam, plugins and future WordPress developments.

Tom also happened to ask a specific question about my concerns for the WordPress business model and Matt provided some reassurance that there is a revenue stream through partnerships (hosting companies) so both guys do have enough money to eat, drink Murphys and wear clothes.

Those nice people at bloglines have responded to my recent review of RSS readers and my scathing comments about the sluggish performance. > We feel your pain

Or maybe it is just coincidence.

In a previous article, I wanted to add a trackback to properly cite an article on Ben Gillbanks blog about his Regulus theme.

I couldn't find the trackback URL but, as ever, WordPress is doing all the donkey work for me and now I see my posting does indeed appear as a comment in Ben's original article.

No manual intervention, head scratching or wasted time. Exactly as it should be.

I quite enjoy the idea of BlogShares.com which a fantasy stock market for blogs. BlogShares places a notional value on your blog based on the number (and value) of inbound and outbound links. Shares in blogs can then be traded.

BlogShares is also useful for identifying blogs by people with similar interests. For example, most Oracle technically minded people usually link to Tom Kyte's excellent blog and their blogs are also worth reading.

However, I am little perplexed as to why BlogShares thinks I have an outbound link to a Spanish blog I have never heard of, let alone referenced.

I also enjoyed this intriguing disclaimer on BlogShares about the outbound links.

This is a list of all recognised outgoing links from this blog. It may not be accurate or complete.

That's a great basis to make investment decisions albeit fantasy ones.

Dont bother. Focus on content. If people care, they will comment.

Things I like about Wordpress after a couple of days...

• The dashboard summary which includes Incoming Links, recent posts and comments at a glance. Wordpress also provides? basic statistics (hits, entry page, referrer). It looks like the data? is automatically cleaned of spiders and bots so the figures you get are more likely to relate to actual human beings. You can also remove hits incurred as part of administration.
• Being able to easily and quickly define a hierarchy of categories and tag your posts. I thought that the RSS feed for an individual category is really good as it means that Oracle types can choose to only subscribe to that element of the blog (and ignore football, music and gadgets).
• Categories also helps navigation. If someone wrote a gem of an article two years ago about Linux, you are more likely to be able to find it using categories rather than trawling through the complete blog.
• RSS feed for comments.
• Clean, quick, intuitive, well designed interface.
• The post editor which includes a WYSIWYG preview. I used to dislike the? fact that the Blogger Preview used a larger font so? sub-consciously I didn't view it? as the finished article. The Blogger Preview, Close, Edit, Preview? cycle required a lot of key clicks and wasted time. The Wordpress preview is precisely that.
• Automatic pings to ping-o-matic (and on to 15 services including Technorati).
• The fact that pasting in text from Blogger preserved the hyperlinks. I am still perplexed as to how that worked.
• Posting seems much quicker compared to Blogger. No more waiting and nervously watching 'This may take a while if you have a large blog'.
• Indenting quoted text correctly uses the 'blockquote' tag.
• Support for trackbacks and pingbacks as opposed to Blogger's backlinks.
• Support for breaking long posts using 'More'.
• The price.

Minor things I don't like so much

• The lack of template editing isn't a big issue for me. If I was that fussed, I would use wordpress.org and host it myself. Manually tweaking HTML templates isn't exactly my idea of fun. What I would really like though is a Template Editor so you can select which elements (RSS feed, Comments feed, individual Category feeds) appear on the main page. My Yahoo! provide something similar to select and arrange content on the home page.
• The fact the tagline 'Blog in Isolation' does not appear in the Pool theme.
• No automated tool to import from Blogger. I think one exists but is currently in for repair. My blog was only 30 articles so I laboriously cut and pasted all my blogger articles (and lost the two comments).
• No support for Technorati tags in the post editor but I think I prefer using Wordpress categories anyway.

I was investigating the bewildering world of trackbacks, pingbacks and blog comments and found that my existing provider, blogger.com, supports backlinks (inbound links to a specific article from a Google search) but not trackbacks.

Then I discovered Wordpress.org which is a blogging tool that supports proper trackbacks, pingbacks (and a whole lot more besides). Although Wordpress is a freely available OpenSource PHP based application, I would need to upgrade my current web hosting to include PHP (for the massive sum of an additional 4GBP per month).

Then I discovered the hosted service Wordpress.com which offers the same functionality so I registered for an invitation email. A little more research unearthed the useful fact that the recently released Flock browser also includes a free Wordpress.com account. I immediately downloaded Flock and got myself this new, shiny Wordpress blog.

I like the blog editing facilities (you can tag each post in multiple categories) which may render that tedious task of manually adding Technorati tags obsolete.

Pros: trackbacks, pingbacks, categories, builtin referrer tracking, immediate WSIWYG preview, automatic Technorati pings

Cons: no direct access to Web server logs and statistics, need to manually import existing blog from blogger, centred formatting, need to burn new feed, lose thousands of readers