Blogging

Performancing Metrics to go Open Source?

Performancing Metrics, a great free service for bloggers to analyse how people are reading their stuff, is currently too expensive to maintain, and Performancing are considering taking it open source:

The biggest pull on company resources is Metrics. Our pro-grade blog analytics service. It currently has around 16,000 registered blogs using it, and though it’s cool, it’s not producing.

There is no other blog analytics program out there that can scale as Metrics was built to. I remember MeasureMap showing signs of buckling under just a few hundred users but it takes a lot of bandwidth, and 3 very high grade servers to run the current system.

At this stage, and in the current climate of “free” everything, I’m neither prepared to put ads on it nor charge for it — What’d I’d like to do, is to give Metrics to the community by making it Open Source, or sell Metrics to a company with more financial resources that could continue to develop it, and benefit from the usebase.

Good news I guess if it works out, though I like the current set up myself. What other free stats packages, other than Google Analytics, are there – just in case Metrics disappears?

[tags]performancing, metrics, open source[/tags]

FeedDemon Release Candidate 1

Nick Bradbury has announced the new release candidate of FeedDemon 2.1. It certainly feels more robust than the previous beta version.

One of the more noticable changes is that the little bank of button that let you do stuff with a post, like email it to a pal, or bookmark the post in del.icio.us, now appears at the bottom of the post in question. All of this means that when you have read a post you don’t need to scroll to the top again to perform an action on it. Nice one!

Banning Conference Blogging

Steve Rubel and John Naughton both link to a story from Greg Verdino about the Nielsen BuzzMetric conference, which has banned delegates from blogging about the event. There’s more here from David Armano.

The subject covered by the conference? Consumer generated media. Unbelievable.

As many have said, the word-of-blog marketing that having running commentaries on conferences and other events is a real bonus for organisers, and many events have grown in popularity as a result. Banning bloggers from anything is a bad thing, especially when they can so clearly have a beneficial effect.

 

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FeedDemon and Live Writer, etc

Following Neville’s advice, I’ve downloaded the new FeedDemon beta, despite the fact that I’ve recently moved away from it in favour of Google’s Reader, and will give it a go. Sounds like it integrates well with the new Windows Live Writer – Microsoft’s entry into the offline blog editor market. I’ve tried a few editors and will give Live Writer a go too. One feature I love already is the web preview, which shows how your post will look in your template. Excellent stuff.

Talking of templates, I’ve reverted back to my old hacked version of Contempt. I just think it’s more useful, and I miss my rotating headers…

I also downloaded IE7, which has finally been released. Remarkable that it is the first full revision of the browser since 2001. Anyway, as Scoble notes, it’s too slow to replace FireFox in anyone’s estimations, especially v2 of FF, which is considerably quicker than previous versions.

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Aggregating RSS with WordPress

I have been working away recently on a little project to bring together all of the RSS feeds of members of Palimpsest, the discussion forum I maintain. I have used third party arrangements, like KickRSS and Suprglu in the past, neither of which were wholly satisfactory. I’m a regular reader of the WordPress Planet – which pulls together influential WordPress based feeds – and one for the Anglian LUG. So I thought perhaps it would be best to host the aggregated feeds myself, using either the Python based Planet or the PHP MetaPlanet.

An hour’s fiddling last night made it clear that both were beyond my modest abilities. So, I needed another solution. I found it – a WordPress plug-in that aggregates feeds and spews out separate posts for each item. The title of each posts acts as a link back to the originating site. I soon had it up and running, and it seems to work really well for a quick-and-dirty solution. 

A great option for those wanting to create a blogging community.

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