Unintentionally Blank

I’m pretty bad with memes, I’ve been tagged a couple of times and not gone through with it. Then Laura from Writing Thoughts tagged me with the five reasons why I blog meme. This got me thinking about whether I could produce five reasons or if this was all a futile effort on my part! Well, here I go, here are my reasons for blogging.

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Recently I have been considering the very standard feature of Wordpress that is adding rel="nofollow" to all links in comments. I posted recently how I was receiving next to no comment spam in my Akismet spam folder due it’s latest plugin release. This got me thinking about whether nofollow is worthwhile any more.

The History

nofollow was a Google creation from early 2005 that was supported by both MSN and Yahoo. It was designed to stop the search bots from following links that weren’t necessarily endorsed by the owner of the site it was on. It had a mixed welcome, but was incorporated by many of the major players in blogging. I wasn’t blogging back then, but, as far as I can see, there weren’t many alternatives other than picking through all your comments and deleting them.

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Nearly a year ago, MyBlogLog was just another way of tracking your blog’s stats, boosting your ego by checking where your visitors were coming from and where they were going, their original selling point. I don’t know much about their early progress, but after a year they had attracted over 13 thousand users. More recently they posted how 40 thousand sites had signed up and the numbers signing up per day were growing steadily. Then they were bought by Yahoo and continue to pop up all over the blogosphere, but what happened to this little stat tracking site to cause it’s popularity to soar recently?

Continue reading “MyBlogLog: Bringing The Community To The Blog” »

It was bad enough that I have found it difficult to update this blog recently, but when I discovered that I was only giving out a partial feed I felt even worse that I couldn’t fix it. There is plenty of debate over whether feeds are better as full or partial, but I can’t stand only reading part of an article in my feed reader then having to visit the site. I subscribe to a feed so that I don’t have to visit a site, save for commenting. Still, this is a long running issue and my opinion lies on the side that full feeds are king.

Given that my own site was violating my own beliefs, I had to fix it. Since I upgraded to Wordpress 2.1 and found out that this is now intended behaviour when using the <!–more–> quicktag, though is also subject to a debate. Thankfully Ronald Heft came to the rescue and has released Full Text Feed, a plugin that exports the full article, whether you use the quicktag or not. This is now in action, so if you check my feed, you should now find the whole article available (can I take this opportunity to suggest subscribing too? I’ll be writing loads of great stuff soon!)

Continue reading “Save Your Wordpress Feed, Two Fantastic Plugins” »

So, I have been found amongst the last day’s submissions of ProBlogger’s group writing project again. But Internet or no Internet, when a group writing project comes along, who can resist. So, I rigged up my bluetooth dongle, my mobile phone and my laptop and violá, I’m posting again. This month’s theme is reviews and predictions. I haven’t been out of school long enough to write a decent review of this year (I’m still coming across blog posts from 2002 that are news to me) so I thought I would give my predictions for 2007 and the web. Then I read Read/Write Web’s predictions and knew I couldn’t beat that.

So in the end I thought I would comment on and ponder over what I thought was important from other people’s predictions as well as my own, and I would throw in some more personal reviews as well. The Internet and blogging is what you make of it, so I’m not following any rules here

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