Archive for the “Blogging” Category

Is anyone here using Google Reader?

I tried using a syndication reader years ago, but I found it too cumbersome to add sites and understand it. Well, it’s a new day, BABY! Google Reader seems perfect for idiots like me. You just have to be sure to keep all of the blogs you read associated with one gmail account, I guess (I have more than one email address).

So I started adding blogs and I am not nearly done. I’m hoping to be able to keep up with my blog reading a lot better.

Now that I see “the other side” of it, here are some things I wish:

1) I wish every blog had a feed link (RSS, Atom, whatever) that is easy to find (or just one ANYWHERE). I was surprised at how many blogs don’t have this. Luckily, with Google Reader, if the blog that is missing a feed link but is on a common free site like blogspot.com or wordpress.com, all you have to do is enter the user name (which is part of the URL) and it can find the feed location for you. However, being able to just click on a link or the feed icon would have saved me plenty of time.

2) I wish blogs would set their syndication feeds to display the entire post. If you have a Wordpress blog, here is how you do it: From your dashboard, go to Settings > Reading. In the “For each article in a feed, show…” select FULL TEXT. Now you may note that I changed my “show the most recent” to 15 for feeds, because some days I make more than one post and I don’t want anyone who checks their feeds only once every few weeks to miss anything. But I wonder if this is too many?

I don’t even PRETEND to know anything about feeds/syndication, any of that stuff. But I have Google Reader working for all but two of the blogs I’ve tried so far.’

I also shirked from feed readers for so long because I’m a layout whore and I love the graphics element of going to web pages individually. But that is time consuming, half the time a page loads and they haven’t made a new post, so the feed reader is more efficient.

Any thoughts?

My friend Monica, who I’ve known since 5th grade, has started her own blog and I have to say that she is a natural born blogger!

Please support our new baby bloggers like Monica! Stop by and check her out!

I used to have a blogger blog. Many blogs I really like are on blogger. I’m not anti-blogger.

But the effort required to leave a comment when you don’t want to link to a blogger blog of your own… holy crap!

I still have blogger blogs on my blogroll but it’s no fun going to blogs where you avoid leaving comments becuase of the 12-step pain in the ass process required to do so. So they’re not nearly as enjoyable to visit as other blogs. And that stupid word verification! Do we really need someone to enter nine letters just for the honor of leaving a comment? Wordpress has an amazing comment spam filter, making the word verification completely unnecessary.

Blogger is about 3 years behind technically, and with free blogs available at wordpress.com that have much better functionality and are much friendlier to your site visitors, I don’t understand why more people aren’t dropping blogger.

Oh, did I mention that you can import your Blogger blog and comments into wordpress blogs very easily?

So I upgraded to Wordpress 2.5, and to the latest version of the Mandigo theme I’m using, and I didn’t break anything!

Well, that’s not true.  Using WS_FTP (free FTP software I find less confusing than the file manager in Cpanel), I tried to make a backup on my local computer of just the Wordpress files of my site.  Little did I know that downloading multiple folders at once opens over 70 connections to my server, which my server interprets as an attack.  My IP address blocked, it seems that everyone in the world could see my site but me.  It only took a few hours to get the host to take me off the blocked list.

I have no idea how to keep my FTP client from opening so many connections at once, except to manually download backup files just 20 or so documents at a time, so that’s what I did to finish backing up the Wordpress portion of my site.

The only thing that I cannot seem to get working are the Gravatars.  I’ve tried putting every code snippet imaginable within my comments.php file, turned on the permissions for them in the dashboard, even tried plugins.  I can’t get it to work. 

The way the layout changes randomly (out of eight possible color choices, each with a different header)…

Annoying, or cool?

And if annoying, which is the one you’d pick as the “keeper”?

(art by nataliedee.com)

So I’ve been out of the blogging world for over a year.  Now I have no idea what’s going on.  What are all these new-fangled services such as Stumbleupon and Digg?  Damn, last time I was around I couldn’t even understand RSS feeds and now you want me to learn all this?  It’s like studying for the SAT’s!

When I had Rant-O-Rama going, at the peak of its popularity the blog was getting almost 500 unique hits a day.  Even The Drunken Lagomorph had over 100 unique hits a day.  I really didn’t try to publicize either blog much; I might have joined a few blog rings (remember those?) or whatever.  But readers weren’t hard to get.

And I’m certainly not in this for the readers.  Focusing on others is when you start censoring yourself, and then your blog becomes uninteresting to read.  But I made some good blog friends with Beermary.com, Rantorama.com and drunkbunny.org.  Fun times man, fun times.  It would be cool to have that back again.

Am I trying to recapture a golden age of blogging that is gone?

Or am I just not knowledgable enough on how to use all of these new Open ID/Technorati/WhatTheHellDoesThisDo services?

COOL PEOPLE, FIND ME AGAIN PLEASE!

If I spent half the time writing content for this blog, that I do tinkering with the layout, I just might get some visitors.

But how much do you love the lime header? Mitch Hedberg fans will recognize the “buoyancy of citrus” line. We miss you Mitch! 

“(Remarking about his drink while onstage) Look at all the limes in this god-damn thing! This fuckin’ thing is tropical! Look at the limes, how they float. That’s good news man. Next time I’m on a boat and it capsizes, I’ll reach for a lime… I’ll be water skiing without a life preserver and people’ll say ‘What the hell?’ and I’ll pull out a lime…and a lemon too. I’m saved by the buoyancy of citrus.” - M. Hedberg