Wednesday, 22 March, 2006

Things to do when starting a blog

Well, starting up a new blog has certainly made it clear to me the steps that are needed to try and get things settled and moving quickly.

1. Install WordPress. Ok, so I am a WordPress guy, and most of this will be WP specific. If you don’t have your own server or hosting, use WordPress.com.

2. Get a theme. I think settling on a theme early is a good idea. Too much messing and switching about can make you think more about style than content. Actually – work out which theme you are going to use before you set up the blog. Then the decision’s made.

3. Set up a FeedBurner account. Using these guys to handle your feed makes life loads easier – and provides heaps of useful info on how people are accessing your site, and how many are reading your feed. Oh, and to make life even easier, install and activate Steve Smith’s FeedBurner plug-in.

4. Install and activate the Akismet, Simple Tags and Email Subscriptions plug-ins. Each will either make your readers’ lives, or yours, simpler.

5. Start reading, quoting and commenting on blogs. Find an aggregator you like, subscribe to any feed you find that might be interesting. Link back to articles, quote people, comment on blogs. make sure it’s all relevant and traffic may be increased to your site.

6. Claim your blog on Technorati. This will increase the liklihood of your posts popping up in searches. Using tags will help here too.

No doubt more things will occur to me later. Check the comments for those.

[tags]blogging, wordpress[/tags]

Tagging

One of the recommended actions for any blogger to take is to tag their posts, inserting appropriate links at the end of the post to a service like Technorati, say, which might be of use to a reader and will help increase the numbers of those visiting your blog. Hopefully.

I’ve been looking at a few ways of doing this. Some of the offline blogging tools allow you to do it – Qumana does, as indeed does Ecto. Most of my posts are made when I am away from my PC at home, and are therefore through the WordPress admin panel on the web. I had a crack, as Lorelle suggests, with Ultimate Tag Warrior, and found it a total pain in the arse – far too complicated for my liking.

Then Neville Hobson, who is clearly the King of WordPress plug-in recommendations, put forward the suggestion of Simple Tags – the title of which was music to my ears. It works beautifully – simply by adding the tags at the end of the post surrounded by the word tags in square brackets – like those you’d use on most forum systems these days.

Mega!

[tags]tags, wordpress, technorati[/tags]

Tuesday, 21 March, 2006

Kiko

Kiko is another online calendar service. It’s filled with lots of lovely little AJAXy tricks and generally looks lovely.

Kiko

One of the cool features include having a text box which allows you to quickly add appointments using a human readable syntax, which is nice.

The problem with the site at the moment is that it is soooo sloooooow. Until they get that sorted, I will still be a HipCal user. But I shall be keeping a close eye on Kiko.

The question that everyone is asking, of course, is whether Kiko is named after the footballer:

Kiko

I think we should be told.

Monday, 20 March, 2006

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.

YouOS

YouOS, an online “operating system” looks really interesting. You register, then load it up in your browser. It’s best to maximise the browser window as much as you can. I’m at work, so am stuck with IE.

They describe the system as being “Still wayyyy alpha”, so I guess we shouldn’t expect too much. Still, they are blogging and have a forum, so are obviously interested in the thoughts of early users. They write a bit about what they are trying to do in their “manifesto”:

There is a glaring weakness to all traditional operating systems, however. They are, at the root, designed to run on one computer. Extensions like NFS and remote desktop alleviate this weakness to some extent, but they do nothing to enable collaboration on a larger scale between users on different computers. Imagine what you could do if every one in the world could work and play on the same “virtual computer”.

So, le’s give it a go. At first, you are presented with what appears to be a blank screen. I really wasn’t sure what to do at first, still I notice a small button in the top left of the screen:

Stuff Button

Which revealed the stuff menu:

Stuff Menu

So there are a few apps on there already. Some of them are a little specialised, however, like FlickRSS. You load it up, and a window with a text box pops up, which you fill in and hit the ‘Get Feed’ button, like I did with ‘Cats’. You then get a list of flickr photos tagged with the word cats.

Anyway, Chat I couldn’t get to work; RichTextEditor works fairly well, if a little slowly, though is obviously nowhere near to, say, Writely:

Text editor

TubeRSS, I hoped, was going to be some sort of RSS aggregator, but actually does for YouTube what FlickRSS does for Flickr – woo, and indeed, hoo; YouBuddy is, I guess, some sort of YouOS internal IM system, though as I don’t have any buddies I couldn’t check; YouFiles is a rudimentary manager for the files you have stored on YouOS; YouMail lets you email other YouOS types; YouShell lets you type in Javascript commands (!); YouSticky does the obvious sticky notes on the online desktop.

One of the issues with YouOS is that it looks so ugly. Gmail’s interface has shown that a largely text based service can still look good, and friendly. YouOS is very, very unfriendly looking. Also, being in alpha, it crashes an awful lot. I wouldn’t bother with it much at the moment except for the novelty value.

The notion of the online desktop is an interesting one, that conjures the image of computer boxes doing nothing other than handling the keyboard, mouse, display and internet connection; and where you can log in with any machine anywhere in the world and get your own desktop. I suspect, though, that the route that YouOS is taking is the wrong one. What the online OS needs to do is not provide the applications, just the means of accessing the applications, which can be developed by other people on other sites, and the means of storing data to be used and shared between those applications.

Friday, 17 March, 2006