This was hilarious. An NBC anchorwoman while live on the air ended up dropping the F bomb then later apologized for her OFFENSIVE language! I wonder if she is still employed?
MyBlogLog Improves Contact Manager
MyBlogLog recently announced that they have improved the way in which users manage their contacts. When you click on the add/manage link that appears below your contacts, you’ll see the new screens. One thing I noticed immediately when checking out my own MyBlogLog profile is the large number of pending contacts. I had no idea that a large number of users added me as a contact. I wonder what the heck happened there. At any rate, you now have the ability to view pending contacts, contacts, and something called followers. Depending on the tab you select, you can add a contact, keep as a follower, block contacts and remove contacts.
As a side note, MBL has also lifted the 15 contact requests/day limit due to the new contact management features.
By the way, this blog and myself are on MyBlogLog and have been for quite a while. I use MBL to create and manage a community of user’s interested in the content of this site. If you would like to be a part of my MyBlogLog community, click on the link that says “Add Me To This Sites Community” within the recent readers section of this website. Or, click here and click on the Join Community link.
My Biggest Traffic Boost
Kevin over at BloggingTips.com has asked the audience the following question, what gave you your biggest traffic burst? To start things off, I’d like to say that this blog has had a number of pages submitted to StumbleUpon as well as Digg.com. I know of one instance where a link to this blog was featured on Techememe as I had posted a conflicting post to something that was published on Techcrunch. While each one of these circumstances provided a big boost in traffic, nothing compares to the traffic I received inadvertently via reformatting my blog.
The graphic up above is from February of 2008. The numbers within the first column are the days of the month. After importing the content of my blog back into a fresh install of WordPress, this gave each post a new ID number. It also gave RSS feed readers a fit as the new post ID numbers made it seem like I had just published 400 new posts. I don’t know if the resurgence in traffic was due to everyone visiting the site from their feed reader or not. I do know that I witnessed a large amount of traffic from stumbleupon for articles that had already been stumbled some time ago. It was as if someone had resubmitted them. Out of everything that has happened to the blog within almost a year of it’s existence, this reimporting of content is what has generated the most traffic for the blog.
I really don’t recommend this method of getting traffic. I really didn’t think this was going to happen and I ended up posting an apology to all of those who had subscribed to my feed. In fact, if you were to reformat and then re import your content, generating new post id numbers to get traffic numerous times a year, you are definitely gaming the system and in my opinion, doing a dis service to yourself and your RSS subscribers.
Relax Its Just Me
If you have visited this blog anytime after May 2nd, 2008 you may have noticed a pop up appear on your screen similar to the one shown on the right. Now, you might think this is a popup, an advertisement, perhaps even a malicious piece of code being executed on your system. The good news is, its none of the above. This notification is an invitation sent from my Woopra client, to you, to try and initiate a conversation between webmaster and blog reader.
Woopra is a sweet new analytics tool that goes a few steps above and beyond the Google Analytic offerings. One of those is the ability to initiate a conversation with the people who are browsing your site. So here is how this works.
If you use the WordPress Woopra Plugin, Woopra will have the ability to automatically tag visitors to your website. In order for visitors to go from being an anonymous IP address to name and email address, visitors need to leave a comment on your blog. When visitors leave a comment on your blog, they have to submit their name, email address and URL. Once this information is submitted to the website, Woopra strips that information and tags it to that IP address. Now you might be wondering if this is a BIG BROTHER snooping over you type of scenario. The truth is, it’s not. When you leave a comment, you are submitting that information voluntarily to the website. This is how Woopra explains it:
Virtually every site on the Web tracks users via cookies. Until now the only sites that had the resources to analyze and act on the data were large companies like Google and Amazon. Woopra brings this power to the masses.
So, if you visit my website and you previously left a comment, the following screenshot shows you what I would see:
My name is Jeffro on my own blog and that is what I have used to write a comment or two on the website. Also within this window of information is the ability to look up my browsing history on the domain, manually tagging the visitor, all of the information related to my browser, ip address ect, email address and you’ll even see my gravatar. That’s right, Woopra has built in Gravatar support which is pretty nifty.
So when a user browses jeffro2pt0.com and I initiate a conversation with you, this is what it is supposed to look like:
Two way conversation between web master/visitor. Now, I’ve gotten many reports that when user’s have clicked on the popup to initiate the chat, it doesn’t work. I have no idea why this is. It could be related to firewall settings on your computer or could be that, it doesn’t work. The good news is, the Woopra team is going to be reworking the chatting feature of Woopra. They plan on redesigning the Woopra popup as someone mentioned it looked like spam and they also plan on implementing a feature where site visitors can initiate a chat session with the web master instead of vice versa only. I think that would be pretty darn cool if that became a reality. That would eliminate the need for the shoutbox and it would give you one more way of getting in direct contact with me.
I hope that this information doesn’t affect your mindset in terms of commenting on this blog. If you don’t want this information to be available to me, you can always delete your cookies from your PC which will make you anonymous to Woopra. The personal identifiable information presented to me within Woopra is for my eyes only. So rest assured, your user data won’t be strewn across the net.
This Is One Mad Co-Worker
To be honest, I really can’t blame the guy for what he did. It reminds me of when I was in high school and as I’m trying to get my work done, some idiot is throwing things at me or flicking my error. Eventually, You Can’t Stands No More!
Un Authorized Syndication
A post over at ProBlogger.net is asking the following question: “Is syndicating content kosher or not…ie running someone elses content through rss into ones own blog?” And the answer to that varies depending on the circumstances. For starters, I feel that no website should be able to syndicate my full RSS feed while at the same time, displaying some sort of advertising on the page/site. This makes me think the webmaster of the site in question is trying to profit from my work. There is an exception to the rule however.
So you may ask then, what about blog scrapers who simply use an excerpt of the post but usually have the name of the post author switched around. Well, they actually link back to the original post most of the time and I’m not hard pressed to go after those that use an excerpt. Using excerpts is fine, using the full feed is not. I don’t syndicate anyone’s content without permission and it’s very unlikely I’d do so anyways. However, I am completely fine with sites who syndicate my content, only after they have received my permission to do so. An excellent example of this would be Planet WordPress managed my Ozh. Before syndicating my WordPress related content, Ozh got in touch with me and asked if he could syndicate the WordPress category on my blog in which I gave him permission to do so.
So how do you feel about those who syndicate your full RSS feed without permission? Do you syndicate content from other people on your own site?
The L33t News Podcast
For you tech bloggers out their who consider themselves to be on the “B-List” or maybe even the “Z-List” you’ll appreciate this podcast. Hosted by Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins who is a writer for Mashable.com, the Elite Tech News podcast serves up the best in tech news collected throughout the week by Mark and his panel of guests which include but are not limited to, Steven Hodson of WinExtra.com, Adam Ostrow and Sean P. Aune also of Mashable.com, Art Lindsey of ArtLindsey.com, Louis Gray of LouisGray.com, Frederic of the Lastpodcast.com and Jason Kaneshiro of Webomatica.com
So far, the show has been a blast to listen to, especially once Steven gets on a topic he can rant about. Hearing the *BEEP* when he is on a rant is priceless and downright hilarious. Probably not as funny for Art who acts as the producer of the show and ends up having to edit those parts out.
I’ve really enjoyed their conversation in regards to making money blogging, how Twitter can become a profitable company, and how all of these guys express their independent opinions on various subject matter. I only wish I could call in and participate but my work schedule won’t allow it.
The Elite Tech News podcast has varied on start times but for the past few weeks, the show has aired live at 8:30 PM EST on Sundays. So if you’re looking for an intelligent group of guys that don’t mind having fun while speaking their mind, tune in live to the Elite Tech News podcast. If at all else, I highly suggest subscribing via Itunes as I have done.
If you would like to sample the show, click on the play button to hear their episode from last week.
Where We Do What We Do
I don’t know what it is about work spaces that intrigue me so much but I find them to be visually entertaining. Every work space that I have seen is unique in it’s own right. It’s where people end up creating, working, communicating ect. I strongly believe that the workspace can be a good indication into the makeup of a person. Then again, I might be crazy. I have an idea as to what my ideal work space would be like, but because of the constraints of not owning my own home, I really can’t create my ideal workspace and have to deal with the cards that have been dealt.
As I was monitoring my Twitter stream the other day, Steve Rubel passed along a link to WhereWeDoWhatWeDo.com This is a site dedicated to workspaces that have been submitted by user’s across the globe. WWDWWD is a project created by the Subata Corporation which is worked on within their spare time. Honestly, I really like the site’s design as I feel it places plenty of emphasis on the photos located on the front page. Upon clicking on one of the photos, the left hand sidebar gives you photo information with a link to digg the article. Below the photo information box is the comment section, followed by the comment form.
I thought it was a bit goofy that you have to approve an email that is sent to you before your comment can be displayed on the website, but I suppose that is a good way to deal with spam, considering if the emails are not confirmed, the comment will never make it to the site.
I love checking out every one else’s workspaces. I posted mine back in an archived article entitield What Is Your Blogging WorkSpace? My layout has slightly changed as I now have a new tower for my desktop PC as well as a black HP all in one printer, that sits in the bottom drawer of the notebook desk. Other than that, the workspace has remained the same.
Personally, I think the best workspace showcased on WWDWWD is THIS ONE. What work spaces have you come across that you wish you had? Link to them in the comments section and let’s talk it over.
The Ultimate URL Tester
This perhaps might be the ultimate online URL tester I’ve seen yet. The online project which was created by Jonas John and is aptly named Test Everything gives end users a myriad of tools they can use to test various aspects of their URL. Everything from CSS and HTML validators to, Network tools to Web Proxies, just about everything seems to be covered in this group of tests.
To start things off, the website presents a text field where you can either type in your domain name, or an IP address.
Before you can initiate a test, you first have to select what it is you will be testing from the test browser below the text field. For starters, I’ve decided to use the CSS and HTML validators and selected the HTML/XHTML validator through validome.org.
As you can see from the screenshot above, there are actually two pages worth of validators for this category. After selecting the appropriate validator, click on the Test website button. This will send the URL to test to the appropiate validator and will redirect your browser to the results page. I don’t want to publish my results here as they are pretty embarassing.
I noticed a strange anomaly while using FireFox 2.0.14 and this website. After I would choose the validator and click on the Test Website button, nothing would happen. However, in IE7 the site performed as expected. In fact, none of the buttons work in FireFox which is a disappointment as it’s usually the other way around. While writing this review, FireFox and this website are playing nicely with each other. I have no idea what is going on between the two, but it appears to be a hit and miss problem.
The project is based on the Yahoo! UI Library otherwise known as YUI as well as the Highslide JS and the silk icon pack by Mark James. If you notice a test that is missing but you would like to see added, Jonas has provided a suggest page that you can use to request that the service be added. If that weren’t enough, there is a Test Everything bookmarklet available which honestly seems to me to be pretty useless as the domain that is automatically inserted into the test everything box is Jonas’s domain. I would of rather seen my domain inserted into the box automatically or perhaps, a bookmarlet which gives me access to all of the testers from within my bookmark bar.
When everything is said and done, this is a pretty good idea of a website to harness the power of all of the various validation/testing services on the net into one central location. I think the testing interface could use a little bit of work, along with the bookmarklet but I believe I can see this site becomes an excellent resource for webmasters of all types. Perhaps someone can take the ideas of Jonas website and put them into a FireFox extension, unless that already exists which I would kindly appreciate a link to.
Not So Severe Storms
On Saturday May 3rd, 2008, a line of convection moved through my area. After receiving some drenching rains in the morning hours, this gave way to sunny skies as a dry slot had formed. The sun came out in full force, but the temperature didn’t rise that much as it mostly stayed within the mid 50s. However, this sunshine was enough to destabilize the atmosphere just before the actual cold front arrived. A line of quick moving thunderstorms developed on top of the cold front and moved through the area. These storms brought pea sized hail with mild gusty winds. I only witnessed one lightning strike during the entire event which is a shame, since I enjoy watching lightning but enjoy the sound of thunder more. Out of all of the cars that have driven down my street playing their loud thumping rap music, none of their sound systems have been able to compare to the bass that thunder produces. It’s just the beginning of May, but I hope this thunderstorm season is a little more active than last years.
Without further ado, here are some images along with a video of the storms as they were moving through the area.
And here is the video.
Thoughts and Insanity From Jeff 