Written on Monday, November 26th, 2007 by Jeremy Steele
Most Digg features are helpful and have seen great improvements over the years, however, there is one feature that is just about as useless and as horrible as a feature can get: blog this. In its current state “blog this” has very little practical use - and based on what I see it causes more harm than good.
The main problem is many of the blogs in the blog this section are basically splogs. They are usually loaded with ads, and they use this semi-auto-blogging feature to automatically post to their blog. It isn’t uncommon to see them do 30-100 posts per day - and I’d imagine they get quite a bit of traffic from Digg. Depending on how popular a post is - using “blog this” can get you anywhere from one to a couple dozen visitors - at least in my experience. Your results may vary.
This little problem can be solved very easily - allow trackbacks or remove the feature all together. By allowing trackbacks Digg would be letting more legit blogs, who do not use their lame “blog this” feature, get something in return for linking to and mentioning a Digg story. A good alternative to trackbacks would be to display Technorati or Google Blog Search links. The only other good alternative would be to completely remove the “blog this” section.
What do you think - should they try to fix it or remove it?
Written on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 by Jeremy Steele
During my little week long break from blogging I made a few changes to help boost my moral and increase my productivity at least 1000%. Here they are:
Dumped Google Reader
I completely switched over to a desktop client for OS X called Vienna. While it does some things that tick me off, it is very nice not having to open up Safari or Firefox, goto Google reader, hope it doesn’t randomly delete my feeds (a problem I’ve been having), wait for its damn AJAX calls to go through, reload the page because the AJAX calls failed, and then finally read the new articles. I’ve just been having too many problems with G Reader lately and I got tired of fixing them all the time.
Now the only Google services I care about anymore are Gmail and Feedburner. If their other stuff went offline I really wouldn’t care. Even those two services I could dump in a nanosecond if I had to.
Cleaned Up My Desktop
My main computer is a 3.7ish year old iBook G4 - and it simply isn’t fast. When my desktop has a bunch of icons it really slows down. I have to stop letting it get so crowded… oh well.
Cleaned Out My Keyboard
My keyboards get dirty fairly quickly because I’m always eating near them and my cat is always hopping up on my desk. Needless to say - some keys don’t always work as well as others and I’ve learned that can really throw off your concentration. I’m not sure if there is a proper way to clean them - but usually I’ll just pick up the keyboard and shake it upside down outside or over a trash can.
It’s pretty surprising what can come popping out of those things - once I found a penny - but usually all I find is bunches of my cat’s hair, old chunks of potato chips, and other gross oddities.
Cleaned Off My Desk
Although I did this a few weeks before my vacation - I figured it should be mentioned. My desk was cluttered with papers - some even had important information on them. I cleaned them up and separated them into “save,” “recycle,” “shred,” and “burn” piles. I’ve always tried to be a very secure person - so I burn papers that have things like SSNs on them. Don’t ever shred things like that - burn them. It’s not too difficult to reconstruct shredded documents (even if put through shredders that cut them in a diamond shape), but it is impossible to reconstruct burnt papers. Just a quick safety tip
Stopped Watching TV
Long story short - I haven’t really watched TV in weeks. In fact, I really haven’t watched much TV since I was 13 or so, but even then I would still watch the occasional Simpsons episode. The only things I watch now are financial and political news, weather, Simpsons/Family Guy style shows, and Survivorman/Man Vs Wild. I might only watch it for an hour, and I’ll be doing other things at the same time.
Started Exercising
During the winter I like doing weight lifting - and this winter will be no different. I exercised once during my vacation, helped someone move, and helped someone else push around 50 pound displays for an expo. I really don’t find things like that to be fun - but I do feel much better and more energetic afterwards.
Switched Desktop Wallpaper
Believe it or not simply switching my wallpaper gave me a little boost. I suppose it gets a bit boring looking at the same old thing day after day. I use Mac Desktops for a lot of my wallpaper, but sometimes I just make my own. Ah, and let’s not forget about the lovely bikini wallpaper… just kidding
Got Rid Of Old/Crappy RSS Feeds
For some reason I kept a lot of old and crappy RSS feeds on Google Reader. When I switched to Vienna I got rid of some of those feeds, so now it takes much less time to get interesting news articles and blog posts. Plus I got rid of repetitive feeds - for example I was registered to a lot of tech blogs as well as Digg tech section - which was stupid. Most of the articles that were interesting made it onto Digg - so I removed all of the other blogs. In addition, I was subscribed to Engadget and Gizmodo - which makes no sense at all. They both cover the same things.
Only Check RSS At Night
Before switching to a new reader I was one of those news addicts. I couldn’t get enough of it. Because Vienna has to connect to a bunch of servers when it launches it takes a bit longer to open up than Google Reader, so I only read it once per day, at night usually. It’s amazing how much extra time I have thanks to that.
Posting Less Often
Just in case you haven’t noticed - I’ve finally switched over to a new posting schedule (once every two days instead of every day). Doing so has helped me get other projects done but will also hopefully give me more time for editing and promotion.
Written on Friday, November 2nd, 2007 by Jeremy Steele
How much content does your blog have? Chances are it has far too much. While that may not be a problem for personal and news blogs - it can be a huge issue for article blogs like this one.
The main problem with writing too much content is nobody can find the stuff. One of the flaws with blog design is that it is impossible to navigate through archives. I suppose that is a blessing if you often write posts you wish everyone would forget about - but for most of us it is a huge problem. Spending hours upon hours writing excellent content only to find out nobody can find it is both depressing and tiresome. Sure, you can use categories, have a monthly archive list, and/or have a search field - but all of those things are fairly minimal solutions to an ever-growing problem.
There’s really only two ways to fix it - delete the old content or reuse the it. The first choice is only applicable if the content is completely unrelated to your blog, never took off, and/or isn’t linked to. But most of the time the second choice is the better one.
By reusing your old content I am of course talking about expanding on previous thoughts and linking to old posts (I’m horrible at that!). Repeating the same thing over and over is sure to get boring and result in a loss of readers (let alone - a loss of time which can be better spent doing something else), but by simply mentioning a previous topic and expanding on it you can re-ignite a hot discussion and possibly pick up more readers. Why spend hours and hours working on posts only to have them be lost with time?
This is one of those things I’ve been meaning to do around here more often. It seems as though even something as simple as a monthly recap helps make your old posts more visable.
WebProNews asks the question, should ISPs forward all e-mails if your account gets closed? With phone numbers and snail-mail that can happen - but no regulation forces ISPs do to the same with e-mail. Forcing it would further increase the government’s hold on corporations - a big no no in a capitalistic society.
Written on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 by Jeremy Steele
Everyone knows you can use tags to help separate your posts and make it easier for your users to find exactly what they are looking for without creating a million categories. That is probably what tags were originally intended for, but they can be useful for other reasons as well:
Feeds For Software/Plugin Updates
WordPress automatically generates a feed for your categories. The URL is /categoryname/feed. It also does the same exact thing for tags. This can be useful for many reasons, but I tend to think it is especially helpful if you distribute software through your blog. You can use this built-in feature to create a feed that people can subscribe to so they get notified of updates immediately. You can even go as far as setting up a FeedBurner feed and e-mail subscription as well.
Heck, you could even use this to make a feed for a blog series.
Temporary Categories
A few days ago I did a bit of spring (well.. autumn) cleaning and got rid of categories that had few posts and/or were not updated for a while. Before I deleted them I went through each post in the category and set a tag for the post to the old category’s name. The reason I did that is so if I feel like writing a bunch of posts on the topic again I can quickly and easily get each post and add them back to the category, and there won’t be a bunch of categories with one or two posts on the sidebar. Although chances are I won’t be writing stuff for the categories again - it’s better to be prepared for the future, wouldn’t you agree? And it certainly didn’t take a while to do this either - only a few minutes.
“Best Of”/Hot Articles Lists
This is a relatively new feature here - and it was definitely needed. The reason to keep a “best of” or hot articles list is to showcase the best articles on your blog to new visitors. Doing so will hopefully coax them into subscribing, submitting stuff to social networks, etc. While there are plugins that automatically do this based on criteria like the number of comments and page views - I like keeping a bit of control over what appears. The way I implemented this is by creating a tag for the best posts and adding a quick theme hack to the sidebar:
<li><h2>Best Of Nusuni Dot Com</h2><ul>
<?php
query_posts('tag=best-of-nusuni-dot-com');
if (have_posts()) {
while (have_posts()) { the_post();
echo("<li><a href='" . get_permalink() . "'>". the_title('','',false) . "</a>\n</li>");
}
}
?>
</ul></li>
The ‘tag’ for query_posts() is in the same format as all other slugs. If you don’t feel like having to figure out what the slug is for a particular tag, just make your tag one word like “bestofposts”.
