Blogging

Look At All That Spam

The Akismet blog has posted some statistics involving the amount of spam being blocked. The figures are as follows:

Notice the last stat compared with the previous stat. Indeed, spam is growing. Akismet has put together a detailed chart which highlights the increase in spam from 2006-04 to 2007-07. As you would expect, the graph looks like the side of Mt. Everest. I don’t think we will ever see the graph enter a downward state. How has Akismet worked out for you?

Click on the image to see the full version

Feed Your Blog To Twits

http://www.twitterfeed.com

 

 

If you are familiar with Jaiku, Twitters competing micro blogging service, then you’ll know that you can add content into your Jaiku account from RSS feeds across the web. For now, you can’t accomplish this with Twitter but Twitterfeed at least allows you to feed your blog and other RSS feeds to Twitter.

Twitterfeeds site design leaves a lot to be desired, but the concept behind the service is clear. Before you begin using Twitterfeed, make sure you have a registered Twitter account. This Twitter account, or one of your choosing, will be the one that posts your feed entries onto Twitter. Once you create your account, make sure you click on the CREATE NEW TWITTER FEED link. One of the cool things about Twitterfeed is that it has support for OpenID logins. There are too many sites and services on the net that require users to create a username and password. We need more of these sites to support OpenID so that we can use one unified login for multiple sites.

Type in your Twitter username and password, your blogs RSS feed, choose your update frequency which is usually 30 minutes, maximum amount of updates to post each time and if you desire you can type in a description which will be attached as the prefix to each Twitter post. If this option is disabled, only the posts title and link will be posted. The last option you have available to use is whether or not the feed is active.

Once configured, Twitterfeed will check your feeds based on the update frequency you choose during the setup process. If Twitterfeed detects new content, it will automatically post the new content to Twitter via your account.

This service is fairly straightforward to use but I have to question it’s meaningfulness. For instance, if you maintain a blog and you publish a piece of content, you can immediately come up with your own prefix with the associated post link and post it to Twitter and it will show up instantly as compared to waiting 30 minutes from the time it was published. The manual method described above actually offers more flexibility but it is also a little more time consuming. Twitterfeed does allow you to have more than one feed attached to an account, so if you don’t want to be bothered with creating Tweets featuring your new content, then this service should do the trick.

WordPress Releases 2.2.1

WordPress 2.2.1 is now available. 2.2.1 is a bug fix release for the 2.2 series. Since 2.2 was released a month ago, the WordPress community has been improving fit-and-finish by identifying and fixing those little bugs that can be so annoying and by fine-tuning some small details. The result is a nicely polished 2.2.1 release. The full list of bugs fixed in 2.2.1 is available here. Here are some highlights.

Unfortunately, 2.2.1 is not just a bug fix release. Some security issues came to light during 2.2.1 development, making 2.2.1 a required upgrade. 2.2.1 addresses the following vulnerabilities:

Jeffro2pt0.com has successfully been upgraded to version 2.2.1

Jaiku Launches Channels Feature

Jaiku LogoAs reported by Mashable Jaiku has finally added the ability for users to create their own channels. Users are limited to creating only three channels, with each channel being publicly viewable upon creation.

 

Channel administrators will be able to give their channel a unique avatar, short description, add feeds to the channel, and will also be able to slightly change the presentation of the channel. In the future, Jaiku users will be able to create private channels, allowing you to communicate with only those people you have invited into your group.

I’m still bummed out by the fact that Jaiku has failed to fix the problem of too many users being displayed on the right hand sidebar when your inside a channel. For instance, try going into the Twit channel and making a quick post, it becomes anything but quick. The sidebar should be handles in a way so that only a maximum of 20-30 people are displayed at one time with the option of seeing more friends. Hopefully this will be in Jaiku’s next update.

Jeffro2pt0 Channel Now On Jaiku

At any rate, I have created a channel on Jaiku called Jeffro2pt0 which will be the focus of discussions related to anything dealing with Web 2.0 If you are a Jaiku user and are interested in Web2.0 please be sure to stop by and join the channel http://jaiku.com/channel/Jeffro2pt0

New Fan Of Tumblr

After listening to the Net@Nite podcast with Leo Laporte where Leo interviews the founders of Jaiku and Tumblr, I have decided to take the plunge and give the Tumblr service a try. I must say that I am very impressed with how easy it is to publish content. Using the bookmarklet feature that you can use directly from FireFox, you can add content that you discover on the net straight to your Tumblr site to share with the rest of the world. The bookmarklet does an excellent job in creating the link to the source of the content allowing you to just copy the content, and add it to your Tumblr blog. The bookmarklet seamlessly does the rest.

Using Tumblr is also fun. They have a really cool feature which I feel Efx2.com could benefit from called Reblogging. ReBlogging let’s you quickly share content you discover on other tumblelogs, and even add or change the commentary. Imagine coming across a cool post on someones Efx2 blog such as one of those meme types of posts. You could simply click a Reblog link for that post and it would automatically put the same post into your blog, allowing you to change the content of the post and publish it on your own blog.

One of the downsides to Tumblr right now is the ability to discover other Tumblelogs. There is no central repository of Tumblrs nor are their any ways to browse amongst the active Tumblr blogs. However, it does appear as though they will be addressing this issue sometime in the near future.


“More ways to find friends – It seems like a no-brainer to show friends of your friends, but we have some interesting tools for this that aren’t quite ready uncover. More ways to discover tumblelogs are right around the corner. “

The reason I love Tumblr is because I can quickly add content that would otherwise take me quite a bit of time to publish on my very own blog. I also listened very closely to Leo Laporte when he described the three different types of blogging going on across the web. Those are:

Micro Blogging: This is where Twitter and Jaiku come in handy. With just 140 characters to create a post, this is used to quickly share thoughts random ideas. Something short.

MidRange Blogging: This is where Tumblr excels as it allows you to easily share content you deem interesting on the web. There is no need to write an extensive post about the particular piece of content. Simply post and move on. Continue reading →