Nick Bradbury has released a beta version of FeedDemon, an RSS aggregation tool. I’l be trying this out.
Category Archives: Weblogs
The Psychology of Blogging
Simon Willison is making a change to his weblog format which de-emphasizes the date posted and instead gives the title of the post prominence.
Simon Willison: Small design tweak, big difference:
By removing the day headers entirely, I hope to shift the focus of this blog from religious daily updates to entries with a little more substance. I think the psychology of a blog’s design is easily under-rated; I’ve already noticed that my blog entries have been getting longer since I started adding entry titles. At any rate, with this latest design tweak I certainly won’t be rushing out poor quality entries before midnight any more.
I believe that some staff at our office are hesitant to blog because it appears to require a rather large time committment to post every day, which the format does encourage. So, ultimately, this might limit adoption rather than encourage those who do write to post every day. Something to think about.
Another thought: if you get rid of the date emphasis, is it still blogging? It always seems that the reverse chronological order of posts has been a big element and removing the dates de-emphasizes this quite a bit. Simon is obviously still blogging but it’s interesting to see if the form is beginning to evolve a bit.
I’m sure this is nothing new and was debated ad nauseam back in ’99. 🙂 Feel free to post pointers to previous discussion if you know of it.
Blog Tipping Points
David Pollard has some interesting ideas about tipping points for blogs.
MTWordStats Analysis of High Context
I’ve set up a basic analysis of High Context using MTWordStats.
I’ve blogged just over 22 thousand words and have been writing at the 10th grade level, which is too high for content targeted at the general public. Luckily, I’m not targeting them. 🙂 No big surprises in the word frequencies. I do wish there were a filter to block articles and common verbs.
Weblog Content Analysis Tools?
Anyone aware of tools or plugins that will do a rudimentary content analysis on weblog posts? A plug-in for MT that calculates simple word frequencies in posts would be very useful in identifying potential categories.
Update: Found WordStats over at MT Plugin Directory. I’ll give this a shot this evening. Note to self, google before posting.
KMPings: How To
I’ve had a few questions lately about how to create a service such as KMPings in MovableType. The basics are pretty simple:
1. Set up a category in MT and enable Trackback pings. Note the Trackback URL that should be used to ping the category.
2. Put the code below into an index template in the MT template library. Edit the category name to match the one you want to use. Only index pages update on ping so you have to do this to show a current listing without manually rebuilding the site.
3. Publish the url that people should use to ping the category.
That’s it!
Weblog Software Specs
Matthew Thomas’ weblog specs. A good list of features although it omits Trackback support. I like the scheme for URI based on dates. (Found via RC3.)
Trackback for Userland
Trackback in the UserLand environment. Glad they are working on this. Sounds like outbound is no problem but inbound will be challenging. (Via Movableblog.)
Oh, What the Hell
I signed up with Blogshares.
More on TrackBack for Meetings
From Doug Fox:
Let’s say that I’m producing an upcoming conference and tradeshow in six months. I could post each educational session as a separate weblog entry in my weblog. This way any interested participants or prospect could 1) subscribe to these feeds of session and updated session information, and 2) comment on any of the educational sessions before the program started.
That would definitely work.
Another option would be to create a trackback category (only MT offers this currently, as far as I know) for each session and allow anyone to ping it and subscribe to an RSS feed of the pings. The conference organizers could ping that same category for any updates to the session. A category for the entire show should be created to keep meta info out of the specific session channels.
Potential down-side: ping spam. Many people have predicted it as a problem and I would imagine that a conference with TB might be high profile enough to gather a fair amount. KMpings, which I host, has not gotten a lot of ping spam but it may be niche enough to not attract it. A conference where exposure = $ could definitely get some.
Perhaps pings could be moderated somehow in a future version of MT?
C. David Gammel, CAE 