Jeffro2pt0.com Wins First Blog Award

Reader Appreciation Project Award The gang over at the Reader Appreciation Project has handed out their first batch of Readers First awards. These awards go to those blog or site authors who display exceptional selflessness and devotion to their readers. Jeffro2pt0.com was one of the sites to receive this award.

First off, I want to thank the guys and gals who head the Readers Appreciation Project website. These guys are always creating thought provoking articles which really make the reader think. It’s nice to know that their is a website around that is discussing the issues of reader appreciation. All too often, blog authors are engulfed in their own ME ME ME bubble. These are the types of people that believe everything they say is the right answer, everything they do is correct, and they only do things that benefit themselves or their site. Frankly, that is a piss poor attitude to have.

I think what every blogger has to realize is that, without readers, you have no audience and without an audience, your blog is essentially a waste of space on the internet. Instead of ignoring those that contribute to your site whether it be in the form of comments, email feedback, or linking to an article, be sure to give thanks. In the type of world we live in today, where the words Thank You are rarely heard, these two words can really make a positive impact in someone’s life or within their thought process.

If someone links to me, I visit their site and leave a comment expressing thanks. Sometimes, I link to them on my own blog. Other times, I email the author and express a bit of gratitude for taking the time out of their day to read what I had to say. Whatever the case may be, I always ensure that someone is thanked. This attitude and the way of handling things has allowed me to build relationships with people I most likely wouldn’t of bothered with had I not put in the extra effort.

I’m not going to repeat what the RAP guys had to say about me, but if you would like to view their reasons for rewarding me and this site the award, be sure to read Readers First Awards September 2007 To the folks over at RAP, keep up the good work. The information, conversations and ideas that can be found on their website are like BLOGGING GOLD.

If you are a blogger or a site owner, what are some of the ways you show appreciation to your audience?

Where The Hell Have I Been?

I’ll tell you where I’ve been, enjoying my vacation, that’s where. This was my final week of vacation this year from my normal 40 hour a week job and because the weather was as perfect as can be, I decided to spend a couple of days away from the computer to get some things cleaned, as well as to spend a day or two out in the wilderness.

If you combine a 40 hour work week, with the normalcies of life, then throw on a few hours each day of browsing through RSS feeds and blogging, sometimes you can get into a creative rut. It’s during those times when one has to take a step back, get away from the routine and reorganize. That’s what I did and now I have a ton of stuff to blog about. Before I begin writing my other posts, I wanted to share a couple of photos from my trip with you. Let me know what you think.

Click on any of the images to see a larger version.

Meebo Celebrates Pirate Day

Considering Meebo was one of the first IM clients to feature a pirate emoticon (type the letter P followed by a right parenthesis “P), it’s only natural that they celebrate International Talk Like a Pirate Day Last year, Meebo enabled Pirate Speak, where if you type “pirateon” your IMs will be translated into pirate lingo. This year, Meebo has enabled users to select a special pirate buddy icon.

we’ve enabled you to show off your pirate pride by choosing a special pirate buddy icon! We’ve added three new buddy icons that are only available for a few days. If you sign in with a meebo account, you’ll be able to select one of these new pirate faces from the buddy icon chooser on the upper left area of your console.

Netscape Finalizes Changes

Netscape is reporting that they have completed their planned changes to the Netscape.com website. According to Tom Drapeau, the Propeller social news experience will not be going away. Instead, within the next few weeks, Propeller content will be seen on both the Netscape.com portal and AOL News. Netscape also goes on to apologize about the recent performance issues, assuring users that they are hard at work trying to figure those out.

Tom did give us a little bit of insight into their new social news platform:

In the near future, we will be able to share information about our new social news platform, which we are extremely excited about. It will bring together the best of all worlds: a world class design team, an advanced website platform, and a host of new and interesting ways to enjoy social news

Keep an eye on Propeller.com It will be interesting to see if this site is successful or not.

Add Google Ajax To Your WP 404 Page

I think I have finally found an easy solution for my WordPress 404 page. The plugin is called AskApache Google 404.

This plugin after being installed, will display an Ajax powered Google search box. This search box will automatically perform a search for Jeffro2pt0 or the text contained within the link that generated the error. The Google search bar contains tabs for finding blog posts, videos, images, and results from across the web.

Now, instead of generating a simple error message with no way of finding what it is the browser was looking for, this plugin gives me a chance to offer the search bar to visitors who can at least ATTEMPT to find what it was they were looking for. I’ve also heard that by using this Google search bar, Google would be more appreciative to my site in terms of SEO, but I have no definitive proof.

If your a WordPress user and you don’t have a helpful 404 page, give the Apache Google 404 Plugin a try. It’s very easy to install and in the end, your visitors will be appreciative that you provided a way for them to try and find what it was they were looking for.

Click Here To Test The Plugin

And by the way, Hello to all of you who have STUMBLED across this page. By all means, take your shoes off and make yourself at home.

FireFox Has Its Own Sports Car

Check out this decked out sports car which is littered with all sorts of FireFox references. This thing has a very slick paint job. How many chicks do you think you’d be able to pick up with this baby?

Click on the image to see a larger version. Taken by nobihaya

On a side note, I was reading the comments on Digg and I finally read a comment which had me laughing my ass off.

by oneoverzero 4 hours ago The IE car must have crashed.

FireFox 2.0.0.7 Released

Mozilla has finally released FireFox version 2.0.0.7 to the public. This release is nothing more than a security fix which squashes the recently discovered Quicktime bug. To download the latest version, visit the official FireFox home page.

Bill Maher Explains Early Adopters

I thought this video was pretty funny. How many of you agree with what Bill says? By the way, the nerd tax bit was hilarious.

Why Reddit And Digg Are Crap

Gamma4Xray has put together a video which provides visuals explaining how we think web 2.0 works vs how web 2.0 actually works in regards to sites such as Reddit and Digg. The video does include some nice theatrical music to go along with the graphics and at the very end, Gamma asks the question, How Can We Make Web 2.0 Give Us What We Want? I was surprised that an answer to that question wasn’t given as it’s an easy answer. The answer is RSS. At any rate, watch the video and let me know what you think.

BlogRush What Is This New BuzzWord

Theres a new buzzword in town that is sweeping across the blogosphere like wildfire, but what is it? That word is, BlogRush. A new way of generating traffic to your site or blog.

As I was monitoring my RSS feeds on a very early Saturday morning, I read a post that discussed BlogRush and what it was suppose to do. I saved it in my news bin as I was interested and wanted to give it a try. Here we are, two days later and this BlogRush widget is appearing on just about every site that can be considered a blog.

Background Info:

BlogRush in it’s simplest form is a content syndication network. If you add the widget to your blog, your own site will appear on other blogs with the widget installed. I know it may sound like one of those other blog advertising deals but this service dives into the equation a bit deeper.

BlogRush works like this. Users signup and install the widget and display it somewhere on their site. If your site receives 100pageviews a day, your blog links will appear 100 times on other BlogRush widgets across the network. That’s great and all, but here comes the juicy part. If a user who is browsing your site clicks on the tab underneath the widget that reads ADD YOUR BLOG POSTS FOR FREE and they signup for an account, that user is added to your own BlogRush account as a referal. Now, when that user installs the widget to their site, your blog content will appear on that users widget 100 times in addition to the 100 times your site would appear across the network. As you add more referrals to your account and gain more traffic to your site, your traffic grows exponentially.

What I’ve Noticed:

Throughout the day on Saturday, I noticed that the same links would appear on my BlogRush widget, no matter how many times I refreshed the page. I think this was due to the lack of websites that were added to the same category as mine. However, the links have changed each time I have loaded my front page today, so that problem appears to be fixed. I also want to let you know that I myself, have clicked on a few of the links that appear on the widget that is published on this blog because they have been relevant and interesting. So in a sense, I have demonstrated to myself how this syndication network works.

Since displaying the widget, I can attest to seeing at least 5 people who were visiting this site who were referred by a BlogRush widget. The reason for this varies. Either the headlines to my articles suck or, it was early in the adoption phase. Considering this widget is gaining in popularity extremely fast, I expect to see the referral links increasing as time goes by.

Improvements Needed:

I’d like the ability to edit the width of the widget. The one on this site is just a pixel or 2 too big and it’s crunching the left sidebar. Right now, there is no way to edit the size of the widget. There are also no reports or stats as of yet. Apparently, that part of the service is still under construction. At first, I wanted to suggest a way for us to customize which sites appear on the widgets based on tags, but I have to admit, the BlogRush algorithm seems to be doing a pretty good job displaying related content.

At times, there are blog headlines that appear in my widget which seem screwed up. The headlines appear as all question marks as if I don’t have the language pack the headline was written in. It could also be the case that the blog entry was spam. Speaking of blog spam, it will be interesting to see if BlogRush actually syndicates blogspam which in my opinion would send this service back to where it came from.

Conclusion:

This service has come out of no where and is really taking the blogging world by storm. John Reese hit the nail on the head with this service although, I’m not sure what the revenue model is just yet. If you own a blog or a website and you need traffic, definitely give this service a try. It’s free, it’s easy to install, and so far, it seems to be working. If you would like to take part in this blogging phenomenon, be sure to visit BlogRush.com and sign up for your own free account.

If you are currently using BlogRush, I’d be very interested in hearing your experience with it thus far.

Thoughts and Insanity From Jeff

The Musings Of Jeff Chandler

Author: Jeffro