Dave

Performancing’s Blog Improvements

Performancing: Quick and Easy Blog Improvements

  1. Put up a “Post not found” error 404 page – if someone tries to visit a broken link on your blog does the visitor get a nice friendly message or “error 404 file not found”? Even better for you, do you provide handy links to your top content, a search form and some adsense ads? It is surprising the difference just this small thing can make to your blogs usefulness and bottom line!
  2. Offer more feed choices and a dummies guide for RSS novices – many of your visitors will not have a clue what RSS is or why it might be useful to them. If you give them a helping hand they will not only subscribe in greater numbers they might remember you favourably because of the nice thing you did for them.
  3. Take off nofollow link condoms – I have never believed that nofollow did any good any way, blog spammers told the search engine reps it wouldn’t do any good and they were true to their word, but now it seems search engines index nofollow links and ignore the very solution they came up with. Thankfully the message is getting out that link condoms are bad, just say no to nofollow!
  4. Show your most popular or best posts – a new visitor to your blog needs help in deciding if this is going to be a blog they want to return to. Show them your best and brightest content. There is code available for WordPress and it is really easy to do on Drupal using the statistics module, others will have plugins or you can hard code it into your template.
  5. Provide comment feeds or email subscriptions – if you want really great discussion on a only semi-loyal trafficked blog you need to attract visitors who comment back. Many blog platforms have comment RSS which is a partial solution (see above) but I much prefer to use email subscriptions. There are solutions for WordPress and Drupal in the form of plugins.

The Global Id

Great article on Google by John Lanchester in the London Review of Books:

Google is the only multi-billion-dollar company in the world that is also a spelling mistake. Back in the palaeolithic era (that’s the palaeolithic era in the internet sense, i.e. autumn 1997) its co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were graduate computer science students at Stanford. They were working on an insanely cool new search engine, wanted to incorporate it as a company, and needed to find a name. David Vise, in his breezy book The Google Story, tells how they came up with one. A fellow graduate student suggested to Page and Brin that they use the name given to what is sometimes, erroneously or metaphorically, called the largest number, 10100: google. They looked up the name on the internet, found that it wasn’t taken, and registered their brand-new brand, google.com. The next morning they found that the reason the name hadn’t been taken was because it should be spelled googol – and that googol.com had, of course, already been bagged. (It belonged, and still belongs, to a Silicon Valley software engineer and home-brewed beer enthusiast called Tim Beauchamp: ‘The links on this page are a mishmash of eclectic destinations that may be of interest to you. Actually, they may only be of interest to Tim but what the heck. It is his site!’) Lesser men might have considered that a bad omen, but Larry and Sergey are not bad-omen kind of guys. Just over eight years later, Google is the fastest-growing company in the history of the world – with, at the time of writing, a market capitalisation of $138 billion. Larry and Sergey, the Wallace and Gromit of the information age, are worth more than $10 billion each.

AVG Free / Spybot S&D

A quick note for anyone who uses the Grisoft AVG Free anti-virus package. I tried to run an update this evening which kept failing. I then downloaded the programme and installed it again, and it now works fine. There was a new build released on 10 Jan and this must be the root of the problem.

I have also been having trouble downloading updates for the Spybot Search and Destroy malware scanner. It turns out you can select different mirrors for the download, which stops you getting the “bad checksum” error.

Quietness

Things have been pretty quiet over here recently. I guess I have just been concentrating on other things.

First up, I have started to host the Impnet forums – a site for fans of Lincoln City Football Club. This has involved me redesigning the phpBB board and making a few changes to see if it can help increase participation. At the moment the site is stored at http://davebriggs.net/impnet but this will change to http://impnet.co.uk – the traditional domain for the site – just as soon as the registrar geeks have sorted it out.

Otherwise, Palimpsest has been pretty busy – see the Fetish Detectives thread for some amusement – and I have been helping one member set up a blog of their own to join Chilli and Rick. I don’t think the blog is for public consumption just yet so I won’t mention anything for now.

I’ve been playing with the new beta of version 2.0 of FeedDemon, which is excellent so far. The integration with Newsgator is very useful – meaning that blogs I read at work using NG on the web are marked as such at home on FD. Fab. I also got to have a copy of the NG plug-in for MS Outlook, which I had a little play with even though I don’t use Outlook for my email (for obvious reasons…). It seems to work pretty well and integrates nicely – a good choice if you must use Outlook. I haven’t been making any link blog posts recently because things have been pretty quiet since Xmas and the New Year. Maybe things will start picking up now. Having the FD/NG sync will help me sort the wheat from the chaff anyway.

Ryan Adams

Ryan Adams, along with Nick Cave, is just about the only musician whose new releases I bother with these days. I know what I like, alright?!

Anyway, here’s a quick round-up of his solo career. I don’t know a lot about his previous existence in the band Whiskeytown, other than that they were meant to be great.

His first solo effort was Heartbreaker (2000), a gloriously pared-down alt.country masterpiece, detailing the break-up of a relationship with remarkable honesty and great tunes. Still considered by many his best album. Standout tracks: Oh My Sweet Carolina and To Be Young.

Next up was Gold (2001), a rip-roaring Stones inspired rawk record, with some touching quiet bits too. Best heard with the extra CD, with 5 songs on it that Adams wanted on the original cut. This was the start of a continual battle between Adams and his label, Lost Highway, over his prolific-ness. A good introduction for those who aren’t sure whether they like country music. Standout tracks: New York, New York and The Bar is a Beautiful Place.

Adams then recorded four albums, all of which he wanted to release after Gold. Lost Highway wouldn’t let him, but did release a compilation of some of the highlights of these records called Demolition (2002). It’s a bit of a mish mash, as each record was very different in tone. Still, there are some good tracks on here. Standout tracks: Nuclear and Dear Chicago.

Rock ‘N’ Roll was his first album of 2003, and was made because Lost Highway wanted another Gold-alike up tempo record, and Adams had produced the downbeat Love is Hell instead. So, he recorded Rock ‘N’ Roll in very little time, as a loud, brash rock record, which was essentially a pastiche of ’80s rock in general and U2 in particular. Pretty empty, though there are a couple of good stomping songs on there. Standout tracks: So Alive and Hypnotixed.

In the end, Lost Highway did release Love is Hell, as the critical reaction to Rock ‘N’ Roll wasn’t so great. They released it as 2 EPs (2003) within a couple of weeks of each other and subsequently as a single album (2004) – which doesn’t include all of the tracks on the UK edition EPs. As with all of Adams’ records, he likes you to have as many songs as possible, so these are the versions to go for. Includes his remarkable, haunting cover of Wonderwall and is a highly atmospheric, melancholy account of the trials and tribulations of relationships. Cracking stuff. Standout tracks: Wonderwall and English Girls Approximately.

No ‘new’ album during 2004, but that was made up for when Adams released 3 albums in 2005, including the first Cold Roses which was a double album. The first to be recorded with his new backing band, The Cardinals, this album marked a return to the countryfied material of Heartbreaker, where Adams is clearly most comfortable. As with many double albums, this would have been a fantastic album if it had been edited down to (say) 12 songs rather than 21. Still, it’s strong stuff. Standout tracks: Meadowlake Street and Let It Ride.

Second in 2005 was Jacksonville City Nights which was recorded live in the studio, without any overdubs. Again with the Cardinals, it is another strongly country influenced record, even more so than Cold Roses. If you don’t like pedal steel guitar, you won’t like this album much. But for the likes of me, it’s great. The real highlight is a stonkingly good cover of Always On My Mind. Standout tracks: Hard Way to Fall and Always On My Mind.

The last record of 2005 is 29, which I have only played a couple of times and I assume it is a grower. A very introverted record, played without the Cardinals and a return to the darker stuff on Love is Hell, the idea is that there is a song for each year of Adams’ 20s. There are 9 songs on 29. Erm, stick to the music, Ryan, and leave the maths to others. Anyway, haven’t had a chance to formulate a judgement on this yet, but will return with my brilliant opinions at some other point. Standout tracks: Who knows?

So, if you take the two standout songs from each album, you can make your very own Dave’s Best of Ryan Adams Thus Far (Excluding 29) with the following track listing:

1 Oh My Sweet Carolina
2 To Be Young
3 New York, New York
4 The Bar is a Beautiful Place
5 Nuclear
6 Dear Chicago
7 So Alive
8 Hypnotixed
9 Wonderwall
10 English Girls Approximately
11 Meadowlake Street
12 Let It Ride
13 Hard Way to Fall
14 Always On My Mind

Originally posted on Palimpsest.

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