Blogging Sueblimely

The impetus to blog gradually disapppeared and I posted less frequently. I stopped keeping up with current happenings in the blogging world, which would normally have fuelled me with ideas for topics to write about.  The longer I left it the harder it became to start up again.  The blog came to a halt.

It seems now that it is tentatively raising up from its sick bed to say a weak hello. Why now? I just had an email from CMF Ads who informed me that apart from not blogging since last June I had masses of spam comments.  On checking I was horrified to see how many there were.  Something I had spent much time and effort on was being slowly destroyed through my neglect.

I know this happens to many bloggers and I probably kept going at a reasonable pace for longer than many.  Why the lack of enthusiasm?  There were a number of reasons.  My health was suffering from sitting on my behind on the computer chair for so many hours.  The days when many new social networking sites were starting up are over and it is now a while since I have seen anything new to interest me.  When I started blogging Facebook was for the college crowd, Twitter had not yet uttered its first tweet and Stumbleupon had not yet tripped over anything.  I revelled in trying out new and different appplications and reporting on them.

To begin with it was  exciting being able to connect with so many new people and I  established a small network of bloggers who I now consider close friends and a wider network of blogging acquaintances.  It was the rest that wore me down; those who would take advantage of my public profile on sites to badger me for diggs and  stumbles; the sort of thing I would do gladly for friends whose work I respected but not for all and sundry.

Many of the bloggers who started out at the same time as me have given up and my comments began to come from strangers who strangely enough often had names associated with whatever they were trying to sell. Are we going back to the old days I wonder, when people  were named after their trades; as in Cooper, Gardner, Ward.  Will Usedtires or Seo  become commonplace surnames? Judging by my comments they already are. Will all the sons of the many Real Estates that comment  become MacReals or, given the times, PcReals?  Apologies, I digress.

What have I been doing instead of blogging? The many hours that were freed up have not been as productive as I would have liked mainly because I got sucked in to Facebook and its games – plowing harvesting and seeding my fields, building towns, cooking up a storm in my virtual cafe.  I had avoided these for years, knowing my propensity to get hooked on such things.  My health is back on track though and I proudly purchased a size 8 pair of jeans  last week, for myself. I have continued to build web sites for small businesses and non profits and have  got behind the hood of the Thesis theme and created a CMS site from that. I decided life was too short to keep putting things off and my long planned overseas trip is happening this year – a whole 12 weeks in Asia and Europe, staying in 13 countries.

I will be back here, although not as often as I once was.  I will again be sharing what I have learned about blogs and their building and design.

Comments are switched off for now but only until I remove the spam that got through the net. I would love to hear from  those of you who were regular followers and you can always drop me a line via my contact form.

Advantages of Using Online Bookmarking

Bookmarking services such as delicious came along very early before the surge of services of the social media revolution. They could now even be considered the start of it, although at the beginning bookmarking was probably considered more of an online service than a sharing activity. The popularity of social bookmarking rating sites such as Digg and Stumbleupon and Reddit left ordinary bookmarking in the shadow.

However interesting, popular and up to date the content on the rating sites may be, they are not as useful for reference or research purposes as the bookmarking sites. I see two three main reasons for this.

Because our digging and stumbling is "social" we add sites that our friends favor or those that we want to get noticed, for ourselves or for others. What reaches the top is often more about how many contacts the originator of the bookmark has rather than the quality of the content. I will digg and stumble all sorts of topics which, although they may interest me, I will never look for again. I regularly refer to my diigo bookmarks.

Secondly, despite the availability of tagging, tags are either not totally relevant to the content, or they are tagged inappropriately, on rating sites. Digg’s range of categories reflect its News and Video purpose but not the broad range of topics it is actually used for. Stumbleupon allows more flexibility, but it is unusual to see full advantage being taken of this, meaning a search for a topic of a given tag brings unsatisfactory results. Lately I have noticed an increase in mis-tagged articles either: through mistake or mischief. I have never done a search on these sites, whereas I regularly do so on diigo and delicious. The social features of the latter also allow me to add contacts who bookmark topics I am interested in and whose tags I can refer to.

Finally, although the delicious type bookmarking sites may not be not used to their best advantage, as far as tag applying is concerned, it is still far easier to find relevant information on a given topic and information does not get so easily lost over time. The rating sites are all about what is new. This is fine if you are looking for breaking news or for such things as the latest happenings in the entertainment industry or the latest scientific findings. They are not the place to go for research on factual and non changing information. On the plain old bookmarking sites people add articles that may be years old but still of value. The best of these are bookmarked the most bringing the most valuable information to the fore.

My personal favorite bookmarking site is diigo because it has more advanced features than others and it also automatically posts all my bookmarks to Delicious which, after using for years, I was loath to let go of completely. Today I discovered an excellent reason for using the diigo/delicious combination for duplication. Ma.gnolia, one of the main bookmarking sites, lost all their bookmarks! Their database is unretrievable.

The tagging, relevance and searchability of the bookmarking sites make them a valuable tool for research and for bloggers they can be a useful resource for your readers too. I add bookmarks to sites I believe you will find of use on diigo and therefore also on delicious.

Reading

• Your turn – if you have written or have read something that may interest readers here or come across a new site worth a look at let me know; by leaving a comment here or via my contact page. (The latter may be best if it is your own post so that others do not perceive it as being spammy) I will only publish comments that include links if the links are relevant and useful. (covering myself here in case I get spam!).

  If you are a regular reader you will know I try to feature posts from some of the lesser known blogging blogs and those who write excellent posts about blogging but do not have that as their main topic.

  You likely check out the more popular blogging blogs yourself but I do also include links to these if the content is of particular significance.

News

• I know a lot of my readers are mums so Moms Group Manual may be of interest. – this blog is a "Mom’s Guide to Connecting with Other Moms" both online and in person.
• Google is partnering with newspaper publishers to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online. Millions of pages of news articles will be digitized. These will be searchable by using Google News Archive or by using the timeline feature after searching Google News. This may come in very handy for research purposes for some bloggers. Read more on the Official Google Blog.
• Come On In The Web Is Fine has started a campaign to encourage sites not to play music on loading. I was recently asked by a client to add Christmas music to their site this year and I had to politely say "no way", that is not a good idea. I feel a post coming on about this topic so will say no more for now.

Blogging Tools

• 8 Google Reader Extensions for Firefox 3

Cyclo.psis a stock photo site search engine that "brings the results of the most popular stock sites to one location". Search once. See it all – no binocular vision on this site folks Joking, I think the name clever.

Social Networking

• Sweetcron- I am looking forward to get onboard with Sweetcron, a new lifestreaming application. Similar to Friendfeed in that it collects together your activities on sites such as Twitter, Stumbleupon, Digg. The difference is that you install and run Sweetcron from your own server and in a graphical format. A good example can be found on YongFong’s Sweecron site – not surprising as he is the application’s creator. Cha Cha France gives more details at Sweetcron | The Best Automated Lifestreaming & Blogging Software
• CMS Wire discusses whether Jaiku, which now allows its members unlimited invites, has missed the boat in Microblogging with Jaiku: Too Late to the Party? I must check Jaiku out again. If anyone wants an invite let me know, seems I can now invite anyone I like.
• Dwigger – threaded conversations and voting for Twitter. The idea sounds promising although the content does not show this as yet – No breaking news here. Top voted tweets today being largely about Talk Like a Pirate Day e.g." talk like a pirate day? shit, i forgot."

Blogger

• Antonio Lupetti from Woork has published some excellent tips for tweaking a blogspot template in 7 Tips to design professional blog layout using Blogger.

WordPress

• So you want to create WordPress themes huh? 16 beginner tutorials from wpdesigner – more advanced lessons to come.
• 68 Unique WordPress Themes from CSS Leak
• wordpress plugin : my profiles download page
• Smashing Magazine have written a great post for those interesting in doing some WordPress tweaking and coding, with links to articles and tutorials. WordPress Developer’s Toolbox I wish I had thought of that post!!
• Web Tools Collection takes a First Look At WordPress 2.7
• 2.7 brings the option of adding SSL security to protect your blog from hackers. To activate go to Edit Profile in the My Account menu of your dashboard and then to "Browser Connection". Choose “Always use HTTPS when visiting administration pages.”

Please excuse me if you are not using blogger as this will be of no interest at all to you but I know some other people are keen to make the move over to WordPress and I want to let them know how I am going.

On changing to the ‘new’ Blogger I used a default template because all the alterations, hacks and workrounds I used, to add the features I wanted, broke my original template completely. A quick way round this was for me to copy all the sidebar content and put it in one of the html/javascript page elements. As I will keep this blog going in one form or another for a while, until the new one takes off, I thought I should make at least some effort to make it look reasonable.

Not being satisfied with anything quick and easy, which is quite normal for me, I set about completely altering the template to try and match it to my original. I also added a third column because I thought that the long long sidebar I had meant certain things were not in prominent enough positions. When viewing an individual post the sidebar extended far beyond the post itself and some items were probably never seen by those entering via a post rather than the main page.

I am not so sure about it though. Until I fiddled with the column widths and added the borders, the blog looked far too crowded. It is looking better now but I would appreciate your feedback on this as I have been working on a three column template for the new WordPress blog too.

I could not resist adding another hack too – Recent Comments by Ramani of Hackosphere at Customizable recent comments widget (using JSON feed). It is nowhere near as complex as it sounds – just a matter of copying and pasting a script into the head of your template and adding another to a page element. Ramani also has a good explanation of how to add a third column to an existing 2 column new Blogger template – 3-column templates for new Blogger