Archive for January, 2007

Twitter

Friday, January 26th, 2007

I know, I know, Twitter is last week’s news, so I’m late. Sue me. :)

Twitter is a system where you can tell, easily and quickly (for instance, by instant messaging, or cell phone), what you’re doing. You can also “follow” other users.

Anyway, I just joined. My username is “Dehumanizer”; feel free to add me (I like to convince myself that people are actually interested :) ).

Twitter, at first glance, looks a little fun (it’s a new thing, after all), but completely useless, and even a bit self-masturbatory. However, looking at how other people use it, I’ve found that it’s not just for telling the world about useless stuff like “I’m going to the toilet”. People are using it as a mini-blog of sorts – with quick 1-2 line posts. Unlike a “normal” blog post, a Twitter post is so short that you can simply write something you’ve just thought or done, without interrupting your normal flow.

It’s also a way to, in a way, keep in touch with people, even if you don’t usually talk to each other, such as former co-workers.

Anyway, we’ll see if I keep using it or not. I probably will, but not “religiously”. :)

WordPress 2.1

Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007

It’s out. It’s got some very interesting new features.

Upgrading my blogs was, again, a piece of cake. I just checked whether the plugins I use have been tested as working; luckily, all of them were. :) I also used this excuse to update a couple of them to the most recent version (which is almost always a good idea).

WordPress is really a great piece of software. I know it’s “unfashionable” to say that some software is good or bad, as it looks like you’re somehow biased, but I’ve used other alternatives before, and WP is nowadays really, really good. I’d choose Drupal for a more “serious” site, but, for a blog, WP simply can’t be beaten, nowadays.

Does belonging to a ‘Planet’ site increase or decrease traffic?

Monday, January 15th, 2007

A question that arose among members and possible members of my new Planet Atheism is this: won’t people start reading my writings through the Planet, and never visit my blog again? In other words, won’t it reduce traffic?

Traffic is important to many kinds of blogs (and sites in general). Maybe you are supported by ads, either as a main source of income, or just as a little extra cash every month. Maybe your blog is more about the comments than the posts themselves. Maybe it has other interactive features, which won’t be seen by anyone reading it through the “Planet”.

So, the question makes sense.

My own experience of being a part of a Planet — in this case, Planeta Asterisco, which aggregates this very blog — has always been positive. It hasn’t made me “famous” :) , but I notice that I get readers from the aggregator, that other members themselves sometimes comment on my posts, and so on.

But you can consider the following factors:

  1. losing any traffic should be incredibly rare, if it happens at all. Any regular readers you already have will probably keep reading your blog the way they’re used to.
  2. belonging to a Planet will increase your readership; depending on the Planet’s success, it may increase it a lot. An increased readership, even if many of them don’t actually visit your blog frequently, has many advantages; among others, they are likely to link to any posts of yours they find interesting. And comment on them (which, incidentally, means they visit your blog after all). You also begin to slowly build a “name” for yourself.
  3. you can gain a lot in terms of search engine optimization (SEO). The aggregator includes permanent links to your blog, and to each individual post. Since many of the Planet’s members will also link to the Planet itself, it will probably soon be very well positioned in terms of SEO, making links from it valuable. As a result, you get more visitors from search engines.
  4. you get other members of the Planet as regular readers (since most tend to read the Planet themselves). They all have blogs about (mostly) the same subject as yours, which increases the likeliness of they expanding on your posts in their own blogs, linking to yours. Again, more readers (coming from their blogs), and SEO gains (because of the links).
  5. if you’re afraid of being part of an aggregator, then you should be afraid of having an RSS feed at all, shouldn’t you? :)

Tip: give your blog’s readers a way to contact you

Sunday, January 14th, 2007

A few days ago, I created a “planet” site, Planet Atheism, aggregating (guess what) atheism-related blogs. Since everyone uses Planet (or “planetplanet”, a much cooler name IMO), I decided to be different just for the heck of it, and use moonmoon (also a great name! :) ). It’s still early in development, but it does exactly what I want, and couldn’t be simpler to configure.

From the start, I made it my policy not to add any blog’s feed to PA without express permission from the blogger, even though I could — both technically, and legally — do so. Therefore, I posted about it in Way of the Mind, and I’ve also been contacting the owners of other atheist blogs, asking their permission.

Or… trying to. Because it’s amazing how many blogs — especially Blogger ones — don’t have any sort of contact information available. Not an email address, not a contact form. Nothing. The only way to contact them is to post an off-topic comment on the newest post — something that is annoying and can even been seen as rude. Therefore, except in some particular cases, I have been avoiding it. Yet, it’s either that, or nothing.

People, having some form of contact info is important. It avoids having unrelated garbage in your comments. It makes your blog look more “professional” (which is important if you’re trying to establish yourself as an authority in some subject, though I’m sure some Portuguese bloggers will now cry that they don’t want their blogs more “professional”, that they just blog for fun, and that anyone who blogs for any other reason is a dirty money-grubbing bastard. Sigh.) Along with an “about me” page (also important), it “humanizes” you; suddenly, you’re not just some generic blogger, but a real person, in the mind of your readers.

If you’re worried about email spam (a legitimate concern), there are many ways to disguise your address so that spam bots can’t get it. Or use some contact form which doesn’t reveal your address at all. But don’t just “hide” from your readers just because you’re afraid of spam.

WordPress 2.0.6 FeedBurner fix

Monday, January 8th, 2007

WordPress 2.0.6, released a couple of days ago, has a bug that causes FeedBurner, from time to time, to be unable to download the feed correctly.

Mark Jaquith, one of the WP developers, has a fix. It’s a simple patch, though he also provides a fully updated functions.php file.


Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Portugal
This work by Pedro Timóteo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Portugal.