Blogging

On RSS Aggregators

I have just been playing with Bloglines this morning – it has been a while since I looked at it, as I have been doing all on online RSSing in Newsgator of late, because the sync with FeedDemon is so handy.

Anyway, I won’t be using FeedDemon so much when I get the new PC, so I thought it might be an opportunity to try out Bloglines again. There aren’t many changes, really, some of the graphics are a little sharper and nicer, and there are some AJAXy touches to the management of feeds, which makes it much easier to manage than Newsgator. Generally, though, it is a lot friendlier than Newsgator.

One thing I would like to see in an aggregator is some sort of a cleanup/purging tool, where one could find feeds that haven’t been updated in a while, so you could choose whether or not to be bothered with them. I have around 150 feeds in Bloglines and I am certain that some of those are deceased. But can I be faffed to hunt them down myself? No.

Performancing: 10 Tips for More Blog Traffic

The Performancing blog is a useful resource for bloggers, often with some good advice. This selection of tips includes some interesting stuff. Here’s the first 5 as a taster:

    1. Claim your blog at services like Technorati. Fill in all keywords for every single blog!
    2. Use Ping services like PinGoat (important changes announced!) or Ping-O-Matic. These two and more are optional services are integrated in the publishing workflow of Performancing for Firefox (PFF).
    3. Use FeedBurner for your RSS publishing. They offer nice optimization, publishing and statistical features.
    4. Bookmark every article at del.icio.us (and other appropriate bookmarking services). That service is also integrated in the publishing workflow of Performancing for Firefox (PFF). As PFF is not giving the option to fill out the del.icio.us ‘notes’ field it is a good idea to edit that bookmark manually and add some excerpt to it! The question came up if linking every article to del.icio.us would be aggressive? Remember that you post your article link to your personal del.icio.us profile. What can be wrong about that?
    5. Use extensive tagging and keywording inside your articles and on services like del.icio.us. Del.icio.us bookmarking and Technorati tagging is also integrated in the publishing workflow of Performancing for Firefox (PFF). I get pretty much of my traffic through people who are subscribing or
      clicking on certain tags and also some traffic from certain tags in my personal profile.

Akismet

I just activated the Akismet anti-blog comment spam plug-in. Let’s see how well it works – I am not being flooded with spam right at the moment because this blog is so new. We’ll see how it goes.

I am pretty sure I read something on MJR slating this plug-in, but couldn’t find it on a quick trawl of his site. Maybe I misremembered and got it confused with Spam Karma 2.

The Changes

So, what made me want to change things round? Well, there have been, or are going to be, several changes to the way I am doing things generally, IT-wise.

One thing is that I really wanted to move away from using things that I don’t really consider ethical. The obvious one there is Microsoft, so, when I get my new PC delivered (hopefully) next week, I will be immediatley over-writing the default Windows installation with Ubuntu Linux. Expect to read a lot about my trials and tribulations in getting used to things over the next couple of months.

The other one was Google. Their actions over the latst few months have become ever more disturbing – or maybe, they are just starting to act like every other propriatory IT company out there. Anyway, stuff like the China thing, the plans to archive people’s entire hard drive on their servers and the rest of it have really put me off them. I still think that some of their products are pretty good – Gmail is a great, great interface, but attached to a very creepy system, for example – but generally I felt less and less comfortable relying on them in any way.

How do these things affect my blog? They don’t, really, except that I wanted a new URL to start up a new email address on, and that this change in my attitudes could be used as an excuse for a wider change in my blogging. The split between Tech and non-Tech is a good one, for I really can’t believe that people who like looking at some of my links and stuff to current IT stories really want to see photos of the snowman I built today.

Anyway, this is a bit of a rambly start to the new blog. But this is where I am starting from, and it will be interesting to see where I end up.

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