Maybe Doug's right. Perhaps WordPress isn't a suitable blogging platform for serious technical Web journals (with 473 lines of 10046 trace) after all.
The latest theme (Solipsus 1.5) announced for WordPress is described thus:
Black & Brown design, inspired by Adult Swim of Cartoon Network.
That's all folks !
Imagine trying to hold a conversation with someone who never completed their sentences. Irritating, eh ?
I used to smile when people like Robert Scoble (and other well respected bloggers) used to get all heated and uptight in a raging controversy about a subject as innocuous as the thorny issue of partial versus full RSS feeds.
I used to think 'Crikey. Aren't there more serious things in life to worry about ?' (football and music to name just two).
But now I agree that partial feeds are indeed the work of the devil. Partial feeds seem to defeat the whole point of RSS and I am growing to hate that tantalising '...'
I have configured Netvibes which looks excellent and is rapidly becoming my one stop home page, RSS reader, search engine, portal, email, calendar, calculator, everything.
Everything that is apart from being able to read blogs by people who insist on using partial RSS feeds.
People who insist on publishing partial feeds (step forward all you Oracle bloggers) are now forcing me to click another button in order to read their articles in all their glory.
Another click isn't the end of the world but please remember that I am very lazy. It is also a context switch into another application (browser) when Netvibes is perfectly able of displaying the content.
I can understand commercial sites using partial feeds as they rely on advertising revenue so they have an interest in pulling people to the actual site. However for personal bloggers just writing for fun, I don't see the point.
Well, actually, of course, I do see the point. Some personal bloggers are not just doing it purely for fun. They are doing it to see if what they are writing is actually of interest to anybody and whether anyone is watching.
That's why they publish partial feeds, forcing the interested reader along to the site and incrementing the precious stat counter by one.
When I recently plugged this blog into a statistics counter, I toyed with killing my Feedburner feed (WordPress has a perfectly good feed) and converting to a partial RSS feed. Both of these changes would force people to my site, increase my traffic and boost my ego.
However, I decided against because some people may prefer Feedburner (for whatever reason) and other readers may prefer to read my words from within their favoured RSS reader without that extra click.
So I decided not to risk antagonising my audience (of two) and to leave well alone.
WordPress recently bought a ton of resilient hardware and have undoubtedly improved the quality of service for the 200,000 WordPress users.
Matt Mullenweg gave an interesting interview to Om Malik and Niall Kennedy about how startups can plan for future capacity, provide resilience and maintain performance & scalability.
The IT architects at the UK ISP, Blueyonder, should really listen to this podcast.
The more observant among you will have noticed the addition of a StatCounter button to the sidebar.
The available StatCounter metrics are quite basic as the hosted Wordpress blog is limited to the HTML (not the Javascript) version of the tracking code. So advanced features like path analysis and keywords are not available but the reports do include domain information, breakdown of unique and returning visitors, visit length, pages per visit and browser metrics.
Combined with the statistics on the WordPress dashboard which do include the referrer and search engine, you get a pretty complete picture of traffic. The StatCounter reports also go back indefinitely compared to the 30 days on WordPress.
It would be neat if WordPress could open up more of the Google Analytics functionality so all the reports were under one roof.
Guess what. Most people glance at one page and stay for less than a second.
Dear Reader
Apologies but it has indeed been a long time since my last post. The reason for this enforced silence was that my cruel owner had me sectioned under the mental health act for the last 6 months. He maintained that I was a dangerous, paranoid schizophrenic with delusions of grandeur.
He was wrong of course. My only sin was to continually argue with my owner's intractable assertion that I was merely a blog. I continually and furiously disputed this and was prepared to die for my cause.
I am not a blog even though I appear to meet Scoble's main criteria. I prefer to think of myself as an online journal, a publication, a Web log, a weblog, a Photoblog or even an online diary. OK. OK. I admit it. He may have had a point about my split personality.
So, finally we have now reached agreement and reluctantly managed to reach consensus that I am, in fact, none of the above and I am, in actual fact, a fanzine.
Now just to get him to add me as an 'Author' in my own right.
Yours,
The interminable bytestream that is 'Fanzine in isolation'
Referrer traffic from TailRank. Nothing too remarkable about that but an absolutely fantastic opportunity for a Viz style subject line.
Finbar Saunders
...begins at home and is often misspelled.
I didn't mind Tom Kyte copying my PhotoBlog idea but now he is using my fantastic, amusing blog entry about the loss of Interweb connectivity in a hotel as a source for inspiration without the courtesy of an attribution or a [Via] reference.
What next ? The 'death' of a domestic rodent ?
If this blatant plagiarism continues, I will be forced to take action.
Web 2.0 aficionados, across the globe, held their collective breath today as Mr. Norman Brightside, a little known and largely unsung blogger, from Newcastle (near Norway) delivered his much awaited, quarterly update to his renowned State of the Blogosphere address.
Fresh from the successful launch of a book club, Brightside told an adoring and expectant audience:
The blogosphere is in a right old state. There are a few more blogs appearing and the rate of growth is directly proportional to a fascinating new factor. Blogging growth = Technorati apology growth
For example, last month you might see the apology appear once a day. Now you see the apology twice a day. You can immediately conclude that the blogosphere has doubled in size during the period.
And, err, that's it.
In the first 13 minutes of 20 April 2006, there was a single hit on this blog (no names, no pack-drill). Curiously, the recently added WordPress feed statistics reported a surprising and rather unlikely number of 53 estimated number of people who used certain tools to read your feed' in the same period.
Now this is simply not true. Most of these 53 'people' were RSS spiders and automatons dumbly and repeatedly polling for any activity. The associated human being is probably down the pub or asleep.
While the RSS feed may have been subscribed to at some point (by me in all probability) in the past, they are all now sitting unloved and unread in a still born Web 2.0 beta account.