Unintentionally Blank

Recently there has been a meme floating around as part of an experiment in getting into the Technorati most favourited list. This was started by Dosh Dosh who is interested in seeing the effects of breaking into the top 100. It is a fair experiment with that respect, I actually added Dosh Dosh to my feed reader because of a couple of other traffic experiments carried out on the site.

While an experiment seems like a reasonable excuse behind the idea, and Dosh Dosh seems to be doing well out of it, lying 13th in the top 100 right now, I am a bit tentative to be drawn in. It sounds like a good idea, get noticed by being lots of other bloggers favourite, but you aren’t really their favourite and it is meaningless. It devalues the Technorati favourites system because bloggers are now adding anyone to their own favourites, even respected bloggers are picking up lists of blogs they haven’t even read and adding them in.

Continue reading “Playing The Technorati Favourites Field” »

Back in February I posted about the growing redundancy of rel="nofollow" and how I had removed it from comments on this blog. This means that when you comment, search engines will recognise your link and give you credit for it in their algorithms.

Recently this trend has been growing and growing and more and more bloggers are installing the plugins to remove this useless bit of code. I don’t know who started this ball rolling, but there is a growing list of people that are joining in. All the bloggers below have removed nofollow from their comments to give you a bonus for your comments and trackbacks:

Continue reading “Removing nofollow Is Now A Movement” »

I have had a busy week. It started last Thursday with a meal and more than a few with my work colleagues. Friday morning wasn’t too pretty, but I struggled through the day in order to attend a stag do I had been organising for my friend. Saturday was spent paintballing, watching the agonising end of the six nations and continuing to drink our stag into the ground. Sunday was a day for rest, relaxation and, mainly, rehydration. I’ve been back to work this week and spending my evenings looking after a sick girlfriend and babysitting next door’s, also ill, children.

So what do you do when you run out of time to blog? It’s taken me until today to catch up with all the articles in my feed reader and I am exhausted (I’ll be in bed merely seconds after hitting the publish button, I promise). Do you always make sure you have a post or two saved up? Do you concentrate more on quick links or news stories if you don’t have much time? I need to learn how to keep up when everything else seems to take over, if you can help I’d love to hear from you.

There was a time when I thought blogging was only about angsty teenagers venting their frustrations over their “miserable” lives. Blogging was the last thing I wanted to do, there was nothing wrong in my life (nothing as terrible as the trials that affected every blog owner that I had ever seen anyway) and there was no way I wanted to moan at everyone and no-one because that’s what teenagers did. Blogging is so much more than that, there is a whole other world hundreds of times more interesting than moans and rant and most importantly, I’m glad that I found that out too.

Continue reading “I Used To Say I Would Never Blog” »

Gack Ink, the “bring your own blog” network, is having it’s second round of submissions. You have until 8am EST (whatever that is compared to your time, I certainly don’t know) Monday morning (or afternoon/Sunday evening depending on your time zone). So head on over, check out how to apply and have a go!

Speaking of which, I have finally added the Gack Ink button to my sidebar. I’m not sure how well it fits with the rest of the site though. I wonder if I’ll be able to design my own button/link? The main point is, click through and check out the other members of the network, I have found a ton of new stuff to read and I am more than looking forward to discovering the new round admissions. Will you be among them?

Wordpress 2.1.1 is Dangerous

It was quite a surprise to see that the Wordpress development blog were declaring that their latest release was dangerous. Turns out someone was messing with the original code of our beloved blogging software. Thank goodness for the swift work and dedication of the Wordpress team in providing a newer version. If you installed version 2.1.1 (unlike me, I’m just too lazy) then download 2.1.2 now!