Category: blogging

I noticed a blip in my blog traffic on August 2nd, and I’m never sure what causes that although I did post 4 times that day about subjects as varied as the TED talks videos and how Ventana shouldn’t really be talking about BPM. Today, I caught up on some of my podcast listening and discovered that James Governer mentioned me in the Redmonk Radio podcast that day, too.

So far, my scientific analysis proves that if I blog four times per day and Redmonk mentions me in a podcast, my traffic goes up. 😉

I use del.icio.us for bookmarking sites that I want to remember, and I use a cool feature to post each day’s links as a blog post. A while back, I learned about the “for” tag in del.icio.us, where if you tag an item with “for:username“, that item appears in the “links for you” section for that user on del.icio.us, which they can also subscribe to in their RSS reader. In other words, you can tag a site using del.icio.us specifically for another person to look at.

Today, when I was tagging something, I noticed a new section in the tagging screen: usually there’s just “recommended tags” (how most other people have tagged this link), “your tags” and “popular tags”, but now there’s also “your network”, which lists the for: tag for each of the people who are listed as being in your del.icio.us network.

Last month, I tried out the Flock browser beta for a few days, but ended up abandoning it because their “cool” features weren’t things that I could use, and it was just too much of a memory hog. This week, I’m trying out the Firefox 2.0 beta. Aside from being able to make it crash within 5 minutes (I have a talent for that, as many developers who have worked with me in the past can attest to) by copying and pasting some HTML around between sites, it seems to be pretty stable. Four things that I’ve noticed so far:

• The close buttons for the tabs are situated on the tabs themselves (like Flock), rather than a single close button at the right-hand side. I’ve had a few mistakes with that by closing the right-most tab rather than the one that I’m viewing, but I can get used to that. The nice thing about it is that you can close a tab without viewing the tab.
• When the browser crashes, it has the decency to ask on restart if I want to reopen all the same windows, which it does — including any text that I had keyed into text fields before the crash. Handy, although wouldn’t be necessary if it didn’t crash. 😉
• I can subscribe to a site directly in Bloglines and other feed readers by clicking on the feed icon that appears in the right side of the address bar (the feed icon was there before, but wasn’t an active control). Sweet.
• As I type in any text field in the browser, such as the one that I’m typing in now to create this blog entry, it spell-checks my text, underlines unknown words with a dotted red line, and allows me to add them to the dictionary or replace them with a known word from a (right-click) context menu. I’m totally in love, just for this feature alone.

Definitely enough good stuff to make it worth the upgrade, although you may want to wait until the final release if you’re not into the occasional crash.

Heads down on a couple of client projects, plus a home project to completely disassemble a Compaq Armada M700 in order to resolder the power connector, which is conveniently located on the underside of the motherboard where you can’t get at it without at least 45 minutes of disassembly. This is just one of the reasons that I keep an electrical engineer around the house — my degree in systems design engineering qualifies me to correctly identify a soldering gun, but not actually do anything with it. However, since I’m the software guru of the household, I’ll be installing SQL Server later this week as payback.

I also went out yesterday for my first sail of the season with my friend Ingrid, who owns a 25′ C&C and is completely tolerant of my inability to learn much about sailing except how not to fall off the boat. She started a blog several months ago on my urging, and is now at the “so what now?” stage of business blogging. We talked about a number of issues with regards to getting customers — especially somewhat technology-challenged ones — to read her blog, and it’s given me some great ideas for topics for BlogHerNorth when we get it kicked off.

Back to work…

My corporate website is pretty minimalist, since I’m a one-person consulting shop and most of my good stuff is here on my blog. However, I’d like to redesign the site to be a bit more dynamic, and I’m thinking of using a blogging tool to do the entire site, although I intend to leave my blog here on ebizQ where I’m part of an integration community.

My site is hosted with Yahoo! small business services, which offers me WordPress or Movable Type preinstalled, and I’m looking for any advice on which makes a better website creation tool. Any comments?

I have a bit more experience with Movable Type since I ended up rewriting most of the templates when I moved my blog over to ebizQ; I’ve used WordPress for blogging but never had to change templates or any other administrative tasks. However, as an old coder, I don’t think that I’m going to have a problem learning enough about either one to do something interesting.

I’ve been doing a lot of commenting on other people’s blogs lately, and using co.mments to track the conversations. It’s easy, just setup an account, install the bookmarklet in your browser, then when you’re on a page where you want to track the changes, just click on the bookmarklet and co.mments will pop up to tell you that it is tracking the conversation. Works even if the blog doesn’t have a comments feed, and also works even if you forget until after you’ve posted your comment (which was a problem with CoComment). In fact, you can go back to the post at any time and invoke co.mments. You can, of course, get the results as an RSS feed too.

There’s been a bit of a backlash lately about saying that some new technology is “easy enough for my mom to use” as if it denigrates women. However, when I use that phrase, I mean it quite literally: my mom turned 83 today, and for the past 15 years or so, I’ve been introducing her (and my dad) to more technology than they ever imagined possible, to the point where email and the internet are a daily part of their lives. At Christmas, she overheard me talking about my blog, and she asked what a blog was. I sent her a link to Steve Garfield‘s 80-year-old mother’s blog as an example, and two weeks later she sent me the inevitable email:

As you know my computer skills are not too good but thought that learning how to blog might be fun. Can you send something about how to do this?

Today, she blogged about turning 83, the problems with their local hospital’s IVR system, and a variety of other topics. If you have a minute, pop over there and add a “Happy Birthday” comment; just say that you know me and heard that it was her birthday, so that she’s not wondering why strangers are sending her email — her comments are auto-emailed to her, and she’s still a bit confused about that particular piece of the technology.

Update: tell her where you’re commenting from, she still can’t believe that anyone outside her neighbourhood reads her blog.

I used to ignore blog posts that just contained lists of links, until recently when it finally hit me that if I value that person’s opinions when they write a regular blog post, why wouldn’t I value their opinion about what links that they find valuable? Of course, a list of links is really only valuable if the person adds their opinion for each link, which is exactly what del.icio.us allows you to do.

Thanks to Stephen O’Grady’s post about an experimental feature on del.icio.us, my new links (with my notes about them) will be posted once each day, as you see in the post immediately before this one. I like this much better than the Link Splicer functionality on FeedBurner, since everyone reading the blog can see it (not just those subscribing to my FeedBurner feed), and it’s a regular post so that you can add comments to it if you wish. You can also see what tags that I’ve used for each of the links, and click through to my collection of links with the same tags.

I’ll use this method instead of the “link only” type of posts that I have used to refer to another site with very little of my own commentary. There will likely be lots of links in the next couple of days while I sort out all of the things that I’ve tagged in Bloglines and turn them into del.icio.us links.