Posts in category "blogging"

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.

I am worried about those developers at WordPress. They have to eat food, drink coffee and wear clothes but how are they ever going to make any money ? There isn't even a Donate button anywhere on the site.

WordPress.com provide me with a hosted blogging platform which I think it is very good; better than Blogger, better than Bloglines, better than Yahoo 360', better than most of the competition.

The service provided by WordPress costs me absolutely nothing so represents excellent value for money and I would recommend the service to any of my blogging friends (if I had any).

WordPress have to provide servers, manage those machines, implement resilience, scalability and high availability, develop code, do boring things like backups, testing, fix bugs, worry about the business plan, buy laptops, S & M (sales & marketing, not the other one) and what do I give them in return ? A load of feedback (mainly negative) about minor, trivial things that don't work and waste their time whenever I have made an idiotic mistake (quite frequently).

Now, WordPress are planning to add extra features and functionality (customised CSS and templates, more themes and plug-ins, hosting on your server, statistics) which will cost money but they have also pledged that the current functionality will remain free. The sad fact is I am very unlikely to pay them anything for additional add-on features, ever.

This main reason is because I am quite happy with the existing product. Secondly, any additional contribution would have to be minimal as I could pay my ISP an extra £4 per month to add PHP and then would be able to run WordPress.org with total control over everything. This would be more work for me but would probably be fun and an interesting experiment anyway.

Maybe I am not typical, maybe there are hundreds of frustrated WordPress bloggers out there with cheque books poised waiting for the two tier service to be announced. For the sake of the freeloaders like me, let's jolly well hope so.

In a previous article, I wanted to add a trackback to properly cite an article on Ben Gillbank's 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.

Those nice people at WordPress have opened up WordPress.com to the masses and added a couple of new themes. I really like the Regulus theme from Ben Gillbanks because it looks clear and uncluttered, the tag line is displayed and the RSS feeds for the blog and comments are obvious.

The only polite suggestions for improvement would be to relocate 'Blog Roll' under the 'Archive' and 'Categories' to let the main body text occupy more of the screen and for 'Message ssage' to be fixed in the 'Comments' section.

Please don't tell me that bulleted lists appear in bold. They are not. Apparently, they are just in a different colour. :-) The author is kindly going to fix this issue in the next release.

So now my blog has a pretty picture of the vast, infinite emptiness of the universe and 'Blog in Isolation' is reinstated. Very apt.

Don't 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 £4 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

Dear Reader

We had some great times on blogger together but all good things must come to an end.

I just feel we need a break from each another. I need some time to think and some personal space (on Wordpress) and there is no other ISP involved. Please - believe me.

The Web site hits were bubbling up nicely, the feedburner circulation peaked at 14 and we even had a couple of people referring to and commenting on this blog.

However, unfortunately my owner's head has been turned by the use of 'categories', an RSS feed for 'Comments', trackback links which he still doesn't understand and a new, trendy beta version of a blogging platform used by the Scobleizer (and Eddie Awad) so he has dumped me in favour of http://andyc.wordpress.com/

Wordpress automatically provides a feed for the new blog from http://andyc.wordpress.com/feed/ and a separate feed for comments (which is a nice idea) - http://andyc.wordpress.com/comments/feed/

My owner also deleted and recreated the Feedburner feed despite the dire warnings (he was too stupid to fathom out the fancy auto-redirection) so http://feeds.feedburner.com/AndyC may or may not still work or you might have to remove and recreate it.

After all we have been through, you still mean a lot to me and I hope that we can still be good friends.

All my love

The Blogger bytestream that was 'Blog in isolation'

Dear Cathy & Claire

I have just started going out with a boy much older than me...

No - sorry. I have just started blogging and find myself increasingly worrying about blogging etiquette. For example, I just read an interesting article about Oracle by Jeff Moss and wrote a followup on my blog. I felt my article was too long to be posted as a comment on Jeff's blog.

So what do I do ? I want to acknowledge Jeff's original article. Do I post a comment on Jeff's blog saying 'Nice article Jeff. This inspired me to write my own followup here' (with a link to my blog).

Or would that be considered rude and close to spam or trawling for traffic by the blogging community ?

Should my thoughts truly been a lengthy comment on Jeff's blog ?

Also, people occasionally comment on my blog but don't leave an email address so I am unable to followup directly with the individual. Again, I don't think it merits a comment from me on my own blog to say 'Thanks for popping by. I found your blog on the Palm PDA very useful'.

Alternatively, if I visit their blog and add a comment, it would be totally out of context.

Thanks for any advice

Norman