Tag: blogging

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Since joining BlogExplosion, I’ve noticed something interesting about surfing it. First, I tend to see many of the same blogs over and over. Second, when I’m actually reading these blogs, by the time I log out all my new credits have been used up by people looking at mine. This leads me to this conclusion:

The only people who see this site through BlogExplosion are the people who are logged in at the same time I am.

If you have a routine where you spend a half hour on BE every evening, or 1 hour every Tuesday, or whatever, chances are the same people are seeing your blog over and over again.

Just to experiment, a few days ago I took 10 minutes late in the day and logged in from work. I don’t think I saw a single familiar blog.

So what’s the answer? Vary your BE routine as much as possible. Don’t assign your spare points when you surf, pick a random time, log in for 1 minute and just assign them. Make a banner and assign points to it the same way. Talk someone into signing up with you as a referrer, and get a share of their points.

Otherwise, you’ll get the same audience every time… and chances are they’re either regular readers by now or they’re tired of seeing you.

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In hopes of bringing in some more readers, I signed up with BlogExplosion yesterday. I’ve spent some time last night and tonight surfing through their system, and I’ve seen some interesting blogs, some boring blogs, and some infuriating blogs. (Politics… why did it have to be politics…)

If you’re coming here through BlogExplosion, feel free to skim for 30 seconds or explore as much as you want. This is the group-blog of a twentysomething married couple in California who enjoy computers, sci-fi and fantasy, and comics (OK, one of us likes comics). Each of us has other, non-blog stuff online as well.

Enjoy your visit!

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Finally updated to WordPress 1.2, mainly to take advantage of plugins (first new feature: related posts) and hierarchical categories.

Overall less painful than the upgrade to 1.0, but there are character encoding problems (moved from Latin-1 to UTF-8 — which is ultimately a better choice) and some odd issues with comments. Every apostrophe and quotation mark in a comment has a backslash in front of it (presumably something went wrong in the conversion and it double-escaped them), messing up both words and links. Edit 11:30 pm: I think I’ve got them all fixed now.

Edit 1:30 am: It seems the backslashes were added to posts too, it’s just that the template removed them when it displayed the page. That wasn’t the case with the RSS and Atom feeds, so I’ve gone through the last 20 posts fixing that. (It’s relatively easy: just edit the post and save it without making any changes. It’s just tedious.) I’ll work through the backlog when I have time.

I’ve also fixed a problem with the next/previous page links (supposedly a fix is available in the development version, but at this point I’d prefer to stick with full releases.)

The new tie-in to Ping-o-Matic is very nice, but I can’t get WordPress to add the trailing slash to the RSS feeds, so every site pingomatic supports now has two almost-identical URLs for this weblog. Some of them (Blogstreet and Technorati) figured out it’s the same site, but some — including Blo.gs and Blogshares, now list multiple profiles that will take some manual adjusting.

There’s always something.

Well, if you spot any more problems, please comment here!

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For a while now I’ve been thinking of setting up something where I can just post random thoughts or opinion pieces without taking the time to write an HTML page and update bunches of links. Some sort of blogging software seemed ideal, so I looked at a few, noticed they all seemed to use MySQL, and left it for a while.

Well, I moved the site to a Linux server a few weeks ago, and so I started looking again. And since Katie’s site is currently under the same domain name, we both figured it would be cool to have something we could both post to.

I settled on b2 (shortly before the site ran out of bandwidth), mainly because it was simple, it used PHP, and it allowed me to set up more than one user.

Welcome to Ramblings!