Blog

Site updates and anything else related to the technology of blogging and my site(s).

Reconsidering

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I did something this morning that I’ve only done a couple times in the past, and have removed a post that had been published a few hours before. The conversation is still progressing (or, that is, it will be when I get home to check my e-mail again), I just came to think that it was a conversation better held less publicly.

So if you saw a post pop up and then disappear on this page or in your newsreader, that’s why. No glitch, just a reconsideration.

Keeping New Readers

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Problogger has a short series of posts with tips on how to keep readers who have stumbled across your site via a search engine hit or some other method. Interesting stuff, though nothing groundbreaking, and as it turns out, I do most of what he recommends already.

In Part One:

(Anybody surprised by those last two? I know I’m not…)

In Part Two:

  • Good individual page design: I think I’m pretty solid here. My individual pages match my main page, with some slight tweaks here and there to better fit their status as more focused pages than the main page is.
  • Make your message clear: I’m not so strong here, but then, I don’t really have a single focus for the site.
  • Provide pathways into your blog: Suggestions here include obvious links to the home page, an about page, and archives, all of which I have prominently displayed at the top of each page.

In Part Three:

  • Links to other relevant entries: Another one I think I’m pretty solid with, thanks to the category links beneath the title and the ‘Related Entries’ section of the sidebar.
  • E-mail this entry to a friend: This one I don’t have set up. I’ve seen it other places, but never figured it would have that much use. Maybe I should re-think that one.
  • Promote via newsletter: This one I’m not even interested in trying to maintain. I’m bad enough about keeping up with things (including, at times, this site), trying to maintain a newsletter of any sort would die a quick death. Again, though, as I don’t have a specific focus for the site, that’s probably less of a concern for me.

In Part Four:

  • Promote your RSS feed: Sometimes I wonder if I should do more here — while I have the ‘Feeds’ link in the site menubar, there may be people who don’t recognize the significance of that. Perhaps renaming that to (the dull but obvious term) RSS would be a good idea. I’m not sure if there’s much need or demand for me to start enabling RSS feeds for every post on my site, though I consider it from time to time.
  • Search this site: Again, we’re good here — the search box is nice, obvious, and ‘above the fold’ on every page.
  • Break up longer posts into multiple posts: My only difficulty with this one is that I never plan long posts, they just sort of happen…and then they tend to be stream-of-consciousness enough that it would be difficult to break them apart. I don’t think I’ll concern myself with this one too much.
  • Be interactive: While I don’t always respond to every comment left, I do keep track of any comments left here, and do my best to respond as much as possible (time, energy, and available brainpower dependent, of course).

Not a bad set of tips, all in all. Maybe I’ll tinker with a couple more things here and there.

(via Neuvo)

iTunes “Acperiance 1” by Hardfloor from the album Harthouse: The Point of No Return Chapter 1 (1993, 8:58).

MT-Blogroll

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I’ve just updated and revised my blogroll over to the right. Instead of relying on an external service to manage my blogroll, I’m now using a new plugin from Arvind Satyanarayan called MT-Blogroll that implements blogroll management directly into the Movable Type interface.

So far, I’m definitely liking it — it allows for categorization of links, descriptions, and XFN data (though I’m not currently using the latter two items), has a bookmarklet for quickly adding links, and seems to work just like it should. The one downside is that I’ll no longer be able to display recently-updated weblogs in bold, but I can live with losing that for being able to manage everything centrally on my own server.

I’ve also updated my list of currently running Movable Type tweaks to include MT Blogroll (and one other tweak that I’d forgotten in the initial post).

iTunes “Twisted Secrets Vol. 2 (full mix)” by Various Artists from the album Twisted Secrets Vol. 2 (full mix) (1997, 1:04:33).

My Movable Type tweaks

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I got an e-mail from a friend who’s in the process of switching over to Movable Type, and he asked if I had any recommendations for plugins or tweaks to the core system. Here’s a look at what I’m currently using:

C-List Blogging

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According to Dave Pollard’s breakdown, I’m a ‘C-List Blogger’.

Extrapolating some work I did last year, only about 20,000 blogs (a mere 0.4% of all active blogs) have a sizeable audience (more than 10 regular visitors and more than 150 hits per average day), and readership in a typical day is only a little more than three million people, each spending an average of about 20 minutes flitting among 15 blog pages.

Using Shirky’s Power Law, and adding in RSS subscriptions to the hit count totals, that would break today’s blogosphere audience down roughly as follows:

Total
Hits/Day		 Average
Hits/Day
per Blog		 Minimum
Hits/Day
per Blog		 Average
Aggregate
Reader
Attention/Day
per Blog
100 A-list bloggers 15 million 150,000 15,000 1700 hrs
2,000 B-list bloggers 5 million 2,500 1,000 62 hrs
18,000 C-list bloggers 9 million 500 150 13
hrs
80,000 up-and-coming bloggers 8
million		 100 50 2.5 hrs
5 million remaining active bloggers 15 million 3 0 –

According to StatCounter, right now I get an average of 968 unique visitors per day — but according to FeedBurner, I have another 319 people watching my site through one of my available RSS feeds (8 subscribed to my comments-only feed, 30 to my excerpts-only feed, 225 to my full-post feed, and 59 to my full-posts-plus-comments feed), which puts me at 1,287 readers per day, placing me on the low end of the ‘B-List’ category.

Of course, the one major caveat to this is that many of those 968 daily visitors are just hits from Google searches, and in order to keep my ego in check, StatCounter is only registering an average of 70 returning visitors per day. Refiguring my numbers that way, that gives me 389 regular daily readers, just under the average in the ‘C-List’ category.

However you want to break it down, though, I think it’s pretty damn cool that I’ve got in the neighborhood of 400 people keeping an eye on my ramblings from time to time.

Now, who are all of you people? ;)

(via Jacqueline)

iTunes “Medina” by Outback from the album Dance the Devil Away (1991, 6:26).

Now with Markdown

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I’ve just added John Gruber‘s excellent text-processing plugin Markdown to the site, and enabled it for comments as well as for my own use when writing posts.

In short, this means that any of you that are familiar with Markdown’s syntax can now use that when entering your comments, and they will appear on the site properly formatted.

Those of you unfamiliar with Markdown can just type normally, using HTML if you want.

Those of you unfamiliar with HTML can just type your little hearts out. :)

A very brief summary of Markdown’s most common syntax patterns follows behind the cut…

Read more

Kubrickr

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Here’s a nifty toy for all you WordPress users that have recently updated to v1.5 and are using the default ‘Kubrick‘ theme: Kubrickr. Given a tag, it will search Flickr for all licensed photos with that tag and then allow you to crop the photo down to create a replacement header graphic that drops right into the Kubrick layout.

Quite nifty, and given that there’s something of a glut of Kubrick-themed sites right now (don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice template…I should know, I’ve seen it often enough), this should help ease the monotony a bit.

(via Matt)

iTunes “Dead Souls (Live)” by Nine Inch Nails from the album Familiar Sting (1994, 6:15).

Full-time blogging

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I’ve got to admit, I wish I could ‘pull a kottke’ and move to blogging as a ‘job’. The idea has a lot of appeal. Unfortunately, I’m in no shape financially to do such a thing, and I don’t have the wide readership that he has that would allow me to request donations (which, I’ll admit, I’d likely have a few reservations about, though not as strongly as Greg does).

Still…a guy can dream, right? ;)

Comment Spam Update

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This is so nice to see.

Since Feb. 8th (the last time I reset the logfile), the only entries in MT-Blacklist’s log for Eclecticism are automatic updates of the master blacklist.

Over on the family weblog, since Feb. 10th (when the site got reset), there have been all of 77 spam attempts, all of which have been blocked. Two comments have required moderation, both of which were me poking around during the rebuild.

I’m a happy sysadmin right now.

iTunes “Firepile” by Throwing Muses from the album Alterno-Daze: 90’s Natural Selection (1992, 3:14).