The Tlog - a technology blog

A new post in Performancing, called Tell a Good Story, talks about how to make personal blogs more interesting.

Usually, by “personal blog”, people tend to imagine a nihilistic teenager who whines about the absurdity of existence, while writing about what he ate yesterday. And, certainly, many blogs are no more than that.

But even a personal, non-thematic blog can be much more interesting than the above example. Even if not of “general” interest (but then, even a thematic blog isn’t of general interest - it’s only meant for those who’re interested in the theme), at least to those who, even though they don’t know the author, have similar tastes and personality. Or simply enjoy reading interesting stories and opinions.

The author’s suggestion is, basically, to tell a good story (which you may already have deduced from the title :)) When talking about your life, for instance, you can be original, create mysteries which are only solved at the end (thus causing the reader to read the entire post), have a sense of humor, create a pleasant read. In short, be interesting. Or, alternatively, you can simply say “I did this, then I did that, and then I did that“. Obviously, the former version is much better… but also much rarer.

Really, read the article, it’s a very good one.

I like FeedBurner a lot; it gives me great stats for my feeds, and adds some nice features to them.

However, one of those features can actually be a problem: it silently fixes some errors in feeds. Sounds good, doesn’t it? The problem with silent corrections, however, is akin to the way Internet Explorer displays HTML with errors: because of that, people may not notice them for a while, and unsolved errors tend to accumulate.

However, FeedBurner does complain of problems in feeds when adding a new one, and that’s how I spotted this yesterday; I was adding a new blog’s feed to it (no, I’m not that crazy, this one isn’t mine, it’s just on my server :)), and it complained. The feed didn’t start with the <xml> tag, as it should, but with 2 blank lines; XML feeds must begin with that tag. I checked my other blogs’ feeds, and they all had the same problem.

But it was a simple WordPress 2.0.2 installation, with the default theme, and just a “hello world” post… what was happening? I had, however, enabled 3 plugins first. Disabling them all corrected the problem, so it was a simple case of re-enabling them one at a time and find the culprit. It was one I had copied & pasted from a web interface to subversion, and it had a couple of blank lines outside the <?php ?>.

The problem was that, due to FeedBurner silently “fixing” this in its versions of the feeds, I never became aware of this. It had been this way for weeks.

It’s stuff like this that teaches us that, unlike what would appear at first, it’s better to stop at an error than to silently “fix” it and proceed anyway.