Tag Archives: blogging

Is *Now* Better?

Posted on August 4, 2011 by Kelson

I spotted something interesting while walking to lunch, took a photo with my camera, and then took a photo with my phone so that I could post it to Twitter immediately.

Then I thought: why?

  • Is it breaking news?
  • Is it going to be any less interesting if I wait?
  • Would it add to an in-progress conversation?
  • Really, is there any reason that posting it now would be better than posting it later?

And on the flip side:

  • Does the photo quality matter?
  • Does it need more explanation than I can provide at this time?

I decided that in this case, it was self-explanatory, and neither the timing nor the quality made much difference. But since I had the better photo, I might as well wait until I could upload it. (Sometimes the photo quality really matters, though: my phone’s photos of that rainbow cloud just weren’t worth the effort, so it’s a good thing I rushed back to the office for a better camera.)

There was a time when if I wanted to post a photo online, I had to finish a roll of film, send it to a photo lab, wait for them to develop it, and then scan the print. I really like not being limited by that, whether it’s because I’m posting about a current event like Comic-Con or an election, or just because I think something’s fantastic (or hilarious) and really want to share it.

Sometimes it’s really useful to be able to post photos online instantly. Other times, it’s worth asking: Is now better?

A bit of craziness: I wrote this post in June 2010, about this sign. Then I decided it needed a bit of work before I posted it…and forgot about it. Interestingly enough, the post is still just as valid as it would have been a year ago, and it demonstrates that sometimes, now isn’t better, even if it’s not worse.

Of course, it also demonstrates an advantage of posting immediately. There’s no chance of forgetting about it that way!

Posted in Computers/Internet | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Hey, Look! Comics!

Posted on August 29, 2010 by Kelson

Cool! I’ve been named in The Comics Reporter’s reader poll on Name Five Writers About Comics You Like That Aren’t On CR’s Home Team Of Tom Spurgeon And Bart Beaty. It’s an impressive list, and with some of the big names on it, almost intimidating to be included.

If you’re visiting here for the first time, let me make a bit of an introduction. This is my sort of general-purpose blog, where I write about anything from comics and science-fiction to photos, life observations and technology. If you’ve dropped in from The Comics Reporter, you’ll probably be most interested in:

Thanks to Richard Pachter for recommending me!

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Promoting Old Posts

Posted on August 21, 2010 by Kelson

Weblog Tools Collection recently spotlighted a WordPress plugin to automatically tweet old posts. It seems like a good way to bring attention to a site’s archives, as long as it’s used sparingly. The frequency can be as high as once an hour, which IMO is a good way to lose all your followers, but one post every few days seems like it might be reasonable and even interesting.

I’ve already got a setup in place to show a “flashback” post on the front page, but most of the blog’s traffic seems to come from searches these days. Every once in a while I’ll happen to look at the front myself and say, “Oh, yeah, that was a good one!” and post a link on Twitter or Facebook.

This new plugin posts automatically, and picks an article at random. That’s helpful, because it can find old posts that I’ve forgotten. On the downside, because it’s random, there’s no quality control. It could just as easily pull out something completely inane that was funny for about a week five years ago as it could dredge up a forgotten gem. And there’s always the risk of promoting “Happy New Year!” in August — which is exactly what happened when I tested it on Speed Force.

You can filter out categories, but I think it might be more useful to filter on tags. Sure, it can take a while to go through the archives tagging posts that you feel are worth a second look, but it would certainly improve the signal/noise ratio with this scheme. Even better, there’s a lot more you can do once you’ve tagged your “classics.” Highlight them on archive pages, list some of them in the sidebar, build an index, etc.

Hmm, this might be an interesting project at some point.

Update (August 23): Well, I’ve disabled this for now — on both blogs — because of the lack of control. I’d rather forget to post “Hey, remember this?” than have it clutter up people’s accounts with old linkblogging digests or something similarly pointless. When I have time, I should work on that classics project, both tagging posts and hacking on the plugin.

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Do You Fix Old Online Typos?

Posted on May 27, 2010 by Kelson

I always feel somewhat embarrassed when I find a typo in one of my old blog posts, and try to fix it. I’m a little less concerned with forum posts, since they tend to be more ephemeral anyway, and I should probably treat Twitter updates and Facebook status the same way, but I’ve made my share of “Oops, I mean to say ____” posts.

How about you? If you stumble on one of your own online posts and find a typo, what do you do about it?


The poll is open through June 8. And yes, I know there’s a typo in the question. I didn’t notice until after several votes had been cast, which meant that Twtpoll won’t let me fix it. :-(

Posted in Computers/Internet, Writing | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Death Knell for BlogExplosion? – UPDATED

Posted on February 23, 2010 by Kelson

I’m not sure how long BlogExplosion has been around, but I joined back in 2004, so it’s been a while. The idea is pretty simple: bloggers want people to read their sites. So, convince them to read other people’s blogs. It’s built around a system that lets you surf from member site to member site, earning credits for each visit that will bring other people to your site. There are also various games that either generate credits for you or get you to visit member’s sites.

It’s an effective way to get traffic. I’m not so sure it’s an effective way to get readers, but I’ve kept up a modest participation because it doesn’t take much effort. And who knows, maybe some of those people will stick around longer than 30 seconds.

About a year ago, the site was in trouble. There weren’t enough volunteers to approve all the new blogs being submitted (spammers love this sort of place!), and spammers took over the forums. A concerted effort by members managed to get a new admin assigned. The admin cleaned up the forum spam, fixed some site problems, granted approval access to more volunteers, and things started to improve for a while…

Well, things haven’t been that great lately. The lone admin has been gone since October. New blogs are again backlogged, and spammers are returning to the forums. The owners seem to have vanished into the ether. Meanwhile, I’ve noticed traffic from the site has been way down. Burning through credits takes a lot longer than it used to, and not only does it take three times as long to cycle through the “Blog Rocket,” but I get about half as many visits from it as I used to.

Today, I logged in to shuffle things around, and started getting PHP and database errors. Some pages would load, but without data. No blogs available to surf, none on the blog rocket, my credits and banners are gone, etc. The forums are still working, and the few people still around are lamenting the same problems.

Since there’s no administrator, and the owners are MIA, I’d guess that no one’s around to fix it. (Unless it’s purely a hosting issue, in which case they’ll be fine.)

It may be time to let go, and watch BlogExplosion drift off into that great server farm in the sky.

UPDATE (Feb 24): It looks like BlogExplosion is not dead yet. The errors are gone, site functionality seems to be mostly back to normal, and — most amazing — an admin posted on the forums. (Though from the comments, I half-suspect it’s a sysadmin from the hosting company, rather than BlogExplosion themselves.) Needless to say, I won’t be holding my breath for a resolution, but who knows? The site could pull through.

Posted in Computers/Internet | Tagged , | 2 Comments

A Lot of Effort to Disguise Some Spam

Posted on February 8, 2010 by Kelson

I found a comment in the spam folder for Speed Force that, on first glance, looked like an actual, relevant comment…to a different post. It was a coherently-written paragraph about how someone had “considered getting a second Captain Cold” action figure to customize it, but it was posted to an article about stalled miniseries. The author’s name and link were obvious spam, though (seriously, “watch full movies” is the best you can do?).

My first thought: They’d copied the text from another comment on the site. I’ve seen that happen before, but usually it’s comments on the same post. A search through existing comments didn’t turn up any matches, though.

So then I did a search on the rest of the web, and found the original comment on a review of an Atom Smasher toy.

Someone had gone looking for a site with a similar topic (comic books about super-heroes, action figures made from super-heroes), copied text from there, and pasted it onto mine…and yet they hadn’t bothered to match up specifics (like pasting it on a post about action figures or Captain Cold). So it’s not quite as sneaky as the one who followed a link in my post and pasted in text from the other page, but it’s pretty close.

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Simplified Links

Posted on January 28, 2010 by Kelson

I’ve redone the permalink structure on this site. It’s not something I really want to do often — they’re called permalinks for a reason — but it was time to clean it up. Redirects are in place to keep old links working. Continue reading →

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Tweet Cleanup Complete

Posted on January 26, 2010 by Kelson

Okay, so it took a few months more than I expected…but I’ve finished the Twitter digest cleanup on this blog that I started last August.

I’ve deleted redundant or trivial items, split some digests by topic, tagged, categorized and titled the rest, fixed typos and expanded abbreviations, reformatted quotes, links and lists, imported photos, and more…all in an attempt to make the archive a little more useful.

After trying to unify some of the more eclectic mixes of unrelated one-line remarks and links, I’ve decided it’s time to stop automatically importing “tweets” to the blog. Sure, the digests maintain quantity, but I think it’ll be better to keep the quality up instead. What makes a good status update doesn’t always make a good blog entry, and I’d frequently find myself either staying up late to edit that day’s “Line Items” post or rewriting it the following day. (Plus I was always worried about a bug in Twitter Tools that would cause a duplicate post about 30-50% of the time.)

I think the blog will be better off if I copy, expand or skip stuff from Twitter at my own pace and put it in a more suitable format to begin with.

You can follow me on Twitter at @KelsonV.

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Best Way to Label Dead Links

Posted on November 25, 2009 by Kelson

I use the Broken Link Checker plugin on this blog and on Speed Force to find broken or moved links. In addition to helping you manage them in the admin interface, it can also assign formatting (as a CSS class) to mark them in your posts.

Cool! Readers can see that the link is broken before clicking on it!

But what’s the best way to label the links?

The plugin uses strike-through by default. You are marking something that’s gone, but strike-through usually means the text is being crossed out. That’s fine for a link in a list, but something like “Catering was provided by MyNiftyFoodCo” implies that the name of the company is wrong, not that the website is gone.

Just making something italic or changing the color doesn’t work either, because it’s arbitrary. Nothing about an italic link (which could be a title), or a random other color, suggests that something might be missing.

What I’ve come up with is to reduce the contrast on broken links. It combines two familiar schemes:

  • High contrast for new links and low contrast for visited links.
  • “Graying out” inactive items in software.

So here, I’ve got bright blue for new links, darker blue for visited links, and broken links as black (well, very dark gray), the same color as surrounding text. I’m keeping the underline in place so there’s still some indication that it’s a link, but it’s not as strong as the label for one that’s still functional.

It’s still not ideal, since color is the only difference, but it should cause less confusion than the strike-through.

Posted in Web Design | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Tweet Cleanup in Progress

Posted on August 27, 2009 by Kelson

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.

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