K-Squared Ramblings

Tweet Cleanup in Progress

Following through on my thoughts on blogging with Twitter, I’ve started going through and cleaning up the imported Twitter digests made over the past 10 months. Some of the things I’m doing:

• Rewriting titles to be more meaningful than “Line Items for YYYY-MM-DD”
• Rewriting post slugs for the same reason. (WordPress will remember the old URL and redirect it, so it won’t break incoming links.)
• Adding tags and categories
• Reformatting single-item lists as very short posts.
• Reformatting links and expanding shortened URLs (which I’ve been doing for a while now).
• Pulling the “Powered by Twitter Tools” link from the shortest posts, generally those with only one or two items, so that it doesn’t end up dominating the related-posts data.
• Removing redundant items. No need to keep, for instance, a link to an article when it’s followed by a post with detailed commentary on the same article. Or a link to a phone photo that’s followed by a post embedding the same photo, or one of the same subject taken with a better camera.
• Removing really trivial items. Though I’m not always sure where to draw the line.
• Fixing, replacing, or just dropping dead links.
• Update: Uploading photos to show them inline instead of linked. Especially when the original link is dead.

I’ll be updating a few posts at a time for the next week or so, but it should be manageable once I’m caught up.

Meanwhile, I’ve separated my LiveJournal from my Twitter account. There’s no sense in maintaining two archives of ephemera, so I’ve decluttered my LJ: Any “Line Items” that didn’t have comments are gone, and the few that did now have proper titles, tags, userpics, etc.

Rethinking the Twitter/Blog Connection

For most of a year I’ve been using Twitter Tools to link my blogs to Twitter, both announcing new blog posts on Twitter and creating digests of Twitter posts on the blog. The benefit of announcing blog updates on Twitter is obvious. Some of the reasons to pull things the other way include:

• It reminds your blog readers that you are on Twitter.
• You still have something new even when you can’t write a new post.
• You have your own archive, in case Twitter goes out of business, loses its data, or just won’t let you search old posts.

In cleaning up old digests, though, I’ve come to realize that some tweets just don’t offer much value as blog entries. Sometimes it’s redundancy, and sometimes it’s just that what’s posted just doesn’t stand up by itself.

Not Worth Blogging

Some examples:

Blog post announcements. – The actual content is already on your blog, so you don’t need an extra post linking back. Twitter Tools already filters out the ones it generates itself, but every once in a while I’ll make an “in case you missed it” tweet.

Conversation fragments. This is sort of like preserving half a phone call.

Pre-blog posts. – Sometimes I’ll post a brief thought on Twitter, then later that day (or week) I’ll expand on it. There’s not much point in keeping both the rough draft and the final.

Dead Links. – I’m really not sure what to do with these. The worst ones are the photo posts, since Phodroid seems to have either taken down or moved all its old content. When I post links to the blog I can usually add some commentary that’s worth preserving, but with Twitter you often don’t have room for both description and commentary, and you have to pick one. “This looks interesting” followed by a 404…isn’t interesting. Update: I realized I have the photos on my computer. So I just tracked the photos down by date, looked to see what fit the description, and uploaded the photo to the blog post.

Decisions

At first I figured I’d switch this blog from a daily digest to a weekly one (like I do at Speed Force) so that the Twitter posts don’t clutter up the blog too badly. Then I realized that a daily digest does have an advantage: at the rate I usually post to Twitter, a daily post is more likely to consist of posts on a single theme.

I briefly considered adopting the weekly link round-up format used by Great White Snark: manually-selected highlights. It requires a little more work, but in the end it’s probably more valuable to blog readers than a full record of everything I’ve posted on another service.

For now, I think I’ll keep things the way they are both here and at Speed Force, but be a bit more aggressive on cleaning up the auto-generated digests. Here, that’ll probably include deleting the occasional post.

Flash 500

Over at Speed Force: 500th post and a Flash drink #

3 Tips for Using Twitter With a Blog

One good way to cross-promote your blog is to link it to a Twitter account. Twitter posts may be short, but they’re instant. Plus, people who don’t use RSS readers may be on Twitter, so it serves as an additional way of notifying people.

There are a lot of ways you can use Twitter in combination with a blog, but here’s what I’ve found works well for me:

1. Link to new blog entries on Twitter.
2. Use the blog for long posts, and Twitter for short ones.
3. Include your twitter posts on your blog (either in digests or through a widget)

1. Linking to new blog entries is the simplest way to use Twitter with a blog, and there are a lot of ways to automate it. Essentially you’re just adding a new feed that people can follow. However, if this is all you do, it isn’t going to appeal to as many people, because one of the draws of Twitter is that it’s interactive.

2. So the second approach is key. Find something to say on Twitter in addition to what you put on the blog. Jot down ideas that you’re working on, or link to a site or article or video that’s caught your eye. If you have something very brief to say, resist the urge to blog about it and Twitter instead. You can highlight older posts that you’d like people to take another look at. Plus it’s easy to set up Twitter to post from a mobile phone by text message, so you’re not tied to your computer even if you don’t have an iPhone or an Android device. Just make it interesting, and try to keep to the same topic.

3. Finally, you need to point blog readers at your Twitter account. Better than simply posting a link to “Follow me on Twitter!” is to include your actual Twitter posts, or “tweets.” This shows people that yes, there’s actually something there beyond “New blog post here: XYZ.” There are a lot of approaches, with the easiest being to just grab a Twitter widget and stick it on your sidebar to show the most recent posts. Another good way to do it is to include a daily or weekly digest of posts so that your blog readers see what you’ve put on Twitter, just with a time delay. You can automate that too, or you can manually look through your posts and pick out the highlights.

Tools: If you’re using a self-hosted WordPress blog, I can recommend Alex King’s Twitter Tools to automate linking to your new blog posts on Twitter, including your tweets on your sidebar, and building a daily or weekly digest of tweets. It’s flexible, and it will automatically skip the tweets it generates so you don’t end up with “New blog post at XYZ” on your blog. LoudTwitter is an option for blogs where you can’t actually install plugins (TypePad, WordPress.com, LiveJournal, etc.)

If you’re interested, here’s a few other blog posts I’ve written about my experience with Twitter:

• 5 Things I’ve Learned About Twitter
• Friends or Followers: Social Networking from LiveJournal to Twitter
• The Real Problem With Twitter

You can find me on Twitter at KelsonV (for general stuff) or SpeedForceOrg (comics-specific, linked to my Flash blog, Speed Force).

(Originally posted on the BlogExplosion member forums.)

Thoughts on #AmazonFail (or is that #SorryAmazon?)

At this point, the only (useful) official word from Amazon as to why thousands of books with LGBT themes disappeared from search results over the weekend is the “embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error” statement sent to Seattle Post-Intelligencer and other sources, also mentioning a number of other categories impacted. This article also has the unconfirmed word from former Amazon employee Mike Daisey that it was a matter of user error where someone mixed up some tags while working on the site, and the change just propagated globally.

Now, some thoughts:

1. If this was intentional, on anyone’s part, it was both wrong (as discrimination) and stupid (as bad PR and as throwing away potential sales). If it was unintentional, it was still stupid.

2. Amazon really dropped the ball on PR. They should have responded much sooner (yes, it was a holiday weekend), and with something more detailed than “It was a glitch.” Something like, “We’re sorry, it was an unintentional error and we’re trying to fix it” would have gone a long way toward preventing the outrage from spiraling out of control. And we still don’t have anything more detailed than “ham-fisted cataloging error,” or (as has been pointed out) an apology to the authors and communities affected.

2a. And seriously, you’re an internet pioneer: use the Internet. You have email, you have official Twitter accounts, you have a space to put messages on your home page. Use them.

3. Twitter demonstrates that the internet is now fast enough and ubiquitous enough that people can develop a mob mentality without actually being in close proximity to one another. This includes not just people whipping each other into a frenzy, but people taking more permanent actions (deleting accounts) based on incomplete information.

4. No matter how many times something has been debunked (i.e. the “hacker” who claimed to have hacked the site), someone will see it who hasn’t seen the response and repost it as true. (You’d think I would have learned this from comics discussion forums by now.)

5. Canned responses from customer service are not authoritative statements of company policy. Half the time they’re not even answering the question you asked.

6. There are really two issues: (A) Adults-only books are being hidden from search results. (B) Books were being misclassified as adults-only.

7. Combining #5 and #6, when a CSR monkey answers A, that’s not an official statement of policy on B.

8. Removing adults-only books from sales rankings is a dumb way to hide them from search results. Add a flag and let the user choose whether or not to include them like Google, Flickr, etc.

BlogExplosion Starting to Recover

It looks like the campaign to reclaim BlogExplosion is working! The efforts to bury the forum spam have brought new members into the site, and earlier this week a new administrator appeared on the forums, banning over 55 accounts used by spammers and deleting 13,000 spam posts. This morning, the banner approval I’ve been waiting for since August finally went through.

Things are looking up!

Reclaiming BlogExplosion

I haven’t written much about BlogExplosion in a long time.  I participated a lot for a few months, then kind of left it alone for a while, until I came back to it last year when I launched Speed Force.

Sadly, in the last few months its owners seem to have abandoned the site to let it run on autopilot. Most of it is automated, but there are features that require administration: approving new blogs and banners, moderating the forums, etc. The few volunteers with the ability to approve submissions are swamped, the main page promotes features that no longer exist, and the forums are overrun with spam.

In the past two months the community has attempted to take back the forums by out-posting the spammers, and it seems to be helping, but it’s not enough. The next step is a letter-writing campaign to convince BlogExplosion’s owners to at least delegate some authority to community volunteers who are willing to put in the effort to take care of the site.

Rather than send the form letter, I decided to write my own, and sent the following this morning:

Read the rest of this entry »

Comicbook.com Power-Up Plugin for Wordpress

I’ve put together a simple plugin for self-hosted WordPress blogs that adds a “Power Up” button to your posts for submission to Comicbook.com (a Digg-like site or comics-related news).

No configuration needed – just install it and activate it.

Yeah, I could have just pasted the code into my theme template, but I like to keep functional changes separate in case I ever decide to switch to another theme.

At present it will only show on individual posts. It won’t show on pages, or the front of the site, or any sort of archive page.

You can see it in action on Speed Force.

Download:
ktv_comicbook_powerup-0.1.zip

Please Check This Site on Your Phone!

A quick request, if I may: If you have a web-capable cell phone, would you please try to view this blog in it and let me know how it appears? I’m testing some plugins that should optimize the page for desktop, low-end mobile, and high-end mobile devices.

Please look at the main page and at least one post, then leave a comment below (still on the phone if you can) with the following:

• What phone are you using? (RAZR, iPhone, etc. Specific model if you know it)
• Can you load the site at all? (If not, what error do you get?)
• Does it look like..
  1. The desktop version of the site (photo banner across top, full sidebar, complete posts on front page)
  2. A bare-bones page (plain background, mostly text, headlines only on main page, “Powered by Wordpress. WordPress Mobile Edition” listed at the bottom of the page)
  3. A sleeker-looking list (grayish background, each post headline in a white rectangle, calendar image next to each headline, headlines on main page that expand to excerpts, dark banner across top, “Powered by WordPress with WPtouch” listed in footer)
• Are you using the built-in web browser, or something you installed (Opera Mini, for example)?
• Did anything not work?

If you can’t post a comment, please try one of the following:

• Bring up the site on your computer to leave the comment.
• Send me a Twitter direct message to @KelsonV.
• Email me at kelson - [at] - pobox - [dot] - com.

I’m mainly trying to make sure that the detection code is working right, since I’ve got 3 different plugins (WPTouch, WordPress Mobile Edition and WP Super Cache) working together to manage it.

Thanks in advance!

Tracing the Premio Dardo

The “Premio Dardo” award has been sweeping through comics blogs over the last week or two, and Groovy Superhero bestowed it upon my comics blog, Speed Force. The idea is that someone gives you the award, then you pass it along to other bloggers you appreciate.

It’s basically a chain letter or tagging meme, in the form of an award.

I was curious as to where the meme actually came from, and did some digging. I didn’t find much of anything conclusive, but I did find some interesting things:

• “Premio Dardo” means “Dart Award” in Spanish, which fits with the “I Entrega de Premios Dardo 2008″ text. (This means that “Premio Dardo Award” is kind of like “La Brea Tar Pits” in that it literally means “Dart Award Award.”)
• The oldest post I could find in English was October 29, 2008
• Looking up the Spanish phrase from the image, I was able to trace it as far back as February 2008 on Spanish-language blogs.
• There are at least two versions of the image: One large, with text in the empty space at the lower left. The other small, with a black border and text in the border like the much-parodied motivational posters, and labeled as “Premio Dardos.”
• There are at least two different descriptions of the award in English:
  

  This award acknowledges the values that every blogger shows in his or her effort to transmit cultural, ethical, literary, and personal values every day.

  and

  The PREMIO DARDO is designed to recognize unique voices and visions on the Web as well as to promote fraternization amongst bloggers of all sorts.

• The number of blogs you’re expected to pass along the award to is variously given as 5, 10, 12, and 15.
• Blogspot’s search doesn’t seem to work.

The text on the oldest version I could find reads:

La I Entrega de Premios Dardo 2008 se abre paso entre un gran elenco de Premios de reconocido prestigio en el mundo de la literatura, y con el reconoce los valores que cada blogger muestra cada día en su empeño por transmitir valores culturales, éticos, literarios, personal, etc.., que en suma, demuestra su creatividad a través su pensamiento vivo que está y permanece, innato entre sus letras, entre sus palabras rotas”. El premio debe acoger en su interior a un mínimo de 15 bloggers

Roughly translated:

The Dart Awards Ceremony I 2008 appears among a large list of prestigious awards in the world of literature, and recognizes the values that each blogger shows each day in their efforts to convey cultural ethical, literary, personal, etc. values… in short, it demonstrates his creativity through his vibrant thoughts, which remain innate within the letters, torn between his words. ” The prize must encompass at least 15 bloggers

I surmise that:

• Somewhere late last year, the meme jumped from Spanish to English, with only a partial translation of the description.
• Somewhere along the line, the description fell off, and someone wrote a new one.
• Many recipients found it hard to choose 15 blogs, and shortened the list. The shorter number got passed along.

I do have to wonder about the branching factor.  Each recipient passes the meme along to 5–15 new recipients, which means that if they react quickly, the number of Premio Dardo recipients will increase dramatically (think Tribbles).  If it started out more than a year ago, it’s had plenty of time to overrun the blogosphere.  I can only assume that a significant fraction of people who receive it just ignore it, producing dead ends on its path.

Or maybe there are just a lot more blogs out there than I think there are.

AIR on Linux and LJ Shakeup

• Somehow missed that Adobe AIR for Linux is out of beta…which means I can run Twhirl again! #
• Oh, fun. Time to look up a LiveJournal archiver, just in case… LJ layoffs #
• Not Dead Yet: LiveJournal will be run by the US arm w/software devel in Russia. Hmm… LJ Archivers – CNET: LJ Deletes “about a dozen” jobs – LJ Press release #

5 Things I’ve Learned About Twitter

For the longest time, I figured Twitter was little more than a social toy. But after signing up two months ago, I’ve completely changed my view. Here are five lessons I’ve picked up.

1. There are many ways to use it.

Twitter asks the question, “What are you doing?” Some people answer that, and post things like, “eating dinner.” Some people ignore it and post other thoughts. Among the uses I’ve seen:

• Running commentary throughout the day.
• Random thoughts.
• Announcements, particularly bloggers announcing new posts, or news sites announcing new articles.
• Hey, look at this link I found. (The classic linkblogging post.)
• Conversations with other users.
• Even a story told one line at a time.

It can replace a blog, or complement it.  Mine started out just as another feed for updates, but I quickly realized I could post small stuff on Twitter and save the blog for the long posts like this one.

I’ve seen some people who post 20 times a day, and others who post once or twice a month.

2. Writing short posts can be liberating.

You don’t need to think of a catchy title. You don’t need to worry about structure. You don’t need to worry about fully developing an idea. And the rapid-fire nature of the site gives you a sense that you’re only worrying about now. No one expects you to be profound. All you have to do is jot down your thought and fire it off.

3. Writing short posts can be frustrating.

One of my high school teachers used to quote this adage: “If I had had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” It’s easy to ramble. It’s hard to edit. And it’s really easy to run into that 140-character limit, especially if you’re including a link (even if you use a URL shortening service like tr.im).

Sometimes I think what I want to say is short enough to fit, but I find myself spending several minutes trying to rephrase it, use shorter words, cut out unnecessary phrases, and, if I have to, abbreviate words just to cram it into that tiny space.

On the plus side, the result is usually very concise.

Read the rest of this entry »

That Welcome Message (WordPress Greet Box Plugin)

I’ve been trying out something new here and at Speed Force over the last two weeks: a customized welcome message to readers who come in from certain web services, particularly social networks where I’m also set up. Twitter users see a link to my Twitter profile, for instance, and LiveJournal users see a link to the syndication feed for this blog. In theory, it should only show you the welcome box once (or once a week at the most), depending on whether you allow cookies.

I’d actually tried out a similar idea when I first launched Speed Force this summer, but the implementation I used did all the processing on the server, so it wasn’t compatible with caching. (It also only detected two built-in sites and one custom site, and I didn’t feel like hacking it up to add more.)

So when Weblog Tools Collection mentioned a new plugin called Referrer Detector, I figured I’d give it a whirl. It didn’t quite work right with my setup at the time. I fixed the bugs I could, and reported the issues to the author, then tried out a similar plugin — which, as it turned out, had inspired him to write his own — called WP Greet Box. It also had a few hiccups, and again I reported the issues I’d encountered. Both plugins went into a period of heavy development over the next few days.

I’ve settled on WP Greet Box, which seems to be more flexible than Referrer Detector (though the latter seems to be getting more attention). The author has also been very responsive to both problems and suggestions.

Personality “Type”

I tried out the Typealizer, which purports to analyze the text of a blog and determine the author’s personality type. Interestingly enough, it came up with different results depending on which of my blogs I pointed it to.

LiveJournal: ESTP – The Doers
K-Squared Ramblings: ESTJ – The Guardians (technically this one’s a group blog, but it looks like the tool only grabs the front page.)
Speed Force: ENTJ – The Executives
Opera Community blog: ISTP – The Mechanics

I seem to recall coming out as INTJ the last time I took the Myers-Briggs personality profile. The funny thing is that 3 of 4 classified me as extroverted. If you’ve ever met me in person, you know I’m not an extrovert.

(via Laughing at the Pieces)

Twittering

I’ve been using Twitter for a couple of weeks as an additional update channel and sort of an adjunct to my blog, Speed Force (you can follow it at SpeedForceOrg), and I’ve actually realized that yes, there is a point to it. It’s good for the random thought that only takes a sentence or two, but seems like it doesn’t quite warrant a full blog post.

So I’ve added a second account for general stuff, (i.e. not just comics & Flash) as an experiment, at KelsonV, and I’m tying it to this blog using Alex King’s Twitter Tools. Let’s see how this works out…

Update: Okay, so I’ve got K2R announcing posts to Twitter. I’ve got Twitter feeding to Facebook using the Twitter app on Facebook. And I’m building daily digests on K2R using Twitter Tools (which is supposed to handle loops) and to LiveJournal using LoudTwitter (thanks, andrea_wot).

I looked at ping.fm per rialtus’s suggestion, but from what little I can see without signing up, it only does instant updates, and it looks like it’s push only — i.e., I’d post to ping.fm and it would go out to Twitter, LJ, Myspace, Facebook, etc., but I’d still need something else to pull blog headlines.

So, if I’ve got all this set up right:

Twitter → Facebook
Twitter → LJ Daily Digest
Twitter → K2R Daily Digest (except for stuff that came from K2R)
K2R Headlines → Twitter
K2R Headlines → Twitter → Facebook
K2R Headlines → Twitter → LJ Daily Digest