Posted March 27th, 2009 |
Published in blogging
Twitter is getting a lot of column inches in the mainstream press at the moment. Today’s Guardian has an article about the number of times Twitter is mentioned in newspaper articles and it’s apparently on the up in a big way. The Sun had it on the front page the other day.
There’s same famous tweeting going on. Stephen Fry, the gentleman’s gentleman and tweet addict, kept everyone informed when he got stuck in a lift. Aston Kutcher recently posted a pic of Demi’s backside. There was the guy who wrote posts during a plane crash. And, most recently, someone live-tweeted the Josef Fritzl trial.
So that’s all great but one question remains: What’s the frigging point? Remember 10 years ago when everyone had a one-page website with a picture of them holding their cat on it? Twitter is that minus the cat photo.
Tweeting from a high-profile trial like Fritzl’s is certainly people journalism in action and is an interesting read but couldn’t they have just blogged it or written it on the Sky.com site itself rather than go via Twitter? What the point in limiting the live test to 120 character snippets?
So there’s some interesting stuff being tweeted, no doubt about that, but the majority is utter garbage that is wasting disk space somewhere on a server in TweetHQ. Just as everyone used to feel that the world wanted to see pictures of them holding their cat, they now think we want to know when they are clipping their toenails or watching the neighbours through a curtain crack. Why? Why would anyone give two fucks about what you had for breakfast?
Take a peek at Andy Murray’s Tweet stream:
- bit windy again 2day. hit with miles and ross earlier. me & jamie off to watch dani ‘the fat’ play 4 UM vs Virginia. Play 2nd after 1pm tmrwabout 3 hours ago from web
- …hit again with miles then done. Steak dinner l8r.2:08 PM Mar 26th from TwitterBerry
- Hit with keifer this morning. Windy and dull – the weather that is
. Did launch for Head rackets with Novak after lunch…2:07 PM Mar 26th from TwitterBerry
- Hey. Finished press, just sat in car driving back to the hotel. Played well today. Gonna chill and get a massage from AI later.3:55 PM Mar 21st from TwitterBerry
- forgot…forfeit for ross at dinner…cycling shorts..sunscreen on his face..had to do plank for 1 min in a restaurant with some players in!3:22 PM Mar 20th from web
- whats up? hit some balls this morning, tennis football getting heated.3:19 PM Mar 20th from web
- hey. finished press, so just gonna take it pretty easy the rest of the day in some air-con. catch you later!3:30 PM Mar 18th from web
- hey. good to get the win. played well. unreal weather here at the moment. finished my press so gonna chill for a bit. catch you later!1:05 PM Mar 16th from web
- whats happening? sat in player lounge getting some food with the guys. me and ross got the win.
WTF? Seriously, who is going to want to read that? Maybe a tennis stalker, I guess.
Someone described Twitter as “This year’s Facebook” and they are bang on. Just like Facebook, Twitter is a complete waste of time. But at least Facebook allows people to connect and offers many pointless diversion like sending virtual sheep to each other to distract from the banality of people’s postings about leaving the house to get a coffee.
Looking at it from a business point of view there is also little to praise. It’s not making any money. God knows how much they are paying out for servers and bandwidth because they have a lot of traffic. But, right now, there’s no monetisation of that traffic: no adverts, no sponsors. Their only real asset is their user base and will they sell that out to marketers? Who knows. Maybe they’ll go the way of Facebook and offer out the ability for third-parties to create applications that can monetise the traffic, but in doing that they are moving away from their original brand idea and heading straight into Facebook-land.
Gonna be interesting to see how Twitter evolves.
Posted September 25th, 2008 |
Published in blogging
Smashing magazine release yet another top quality icon set for free.
If you run Google Analytics on your site then make sure you have the latest version of their Javascript code running.
The old code produces errors when running in IE6. I’m not sure if it’s all the time or only in certain situations but I have now seen several sites throwing errors dialogs in IE6 when using the old GA JS.
Somewhat ironically, this page about Google Analytics tips and tricks suffers from the problem.
Posted September 18th, 2008 |
Published in blogging
So, I’m blogging a bit more often on here and traffic is picking up a bit. There’s a few posts that get most of it – mainly the linux and PDF ones.
So that’s more posts and more traffic but no comments.
C’MON PEOPLE! LEAVE A COMMENT. YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO.
I am giving you something in return – all comments have dofollow enabled so any comments back to your blog count as a link. See, it’s like soooo worth it, dewd!
Posted July 30th, 2008 |
Published in blogging
The quest for a blogging client continues and the next option on the block is Scribefire.
It’s a bit different to the two I’ve tried already, BloGTK and BlogDesk, in that it’s a Firefox plugin. I like to use my browser as a browser and I don’t particularly like plug-ins that try to extend a browser to do something it wasn’t designed to do. But we’ll see.
Installation was a breeze.
- Went to Scribefire site. Installed plugin and restarted FF.
- Scribefire setup wizard was excellent. I put in my blog’s URL and it came back and told me that it’s a Wordpress blog and offered some default options. Next I just put in my user/pass and that’s that. That’s how a setup should be – nice and easy.
- Get taken to a welcome page and then I hit F8 to bring up Scribefire’s window. And I’m writing this after about 2 mins setup tine.
Editor is nice. Has all the expected options plus a few nice extras.
There’s a quote button.
There’s buttons to increase and decrease font size. That’s useful – save’s having to remeber which header tag you are supposed to be using.
The insert image is OK. It lets you specify a local file or a URL. There’s an option to upload the local file using FTP or the WP XML-RPC API.
No option scale or modify the image though – that’d be nice. At the very least a “small, medium, normal or large” selector would do.
There’s a source view too, which is handy to tidy up any loose HTML created by the WYSIWYG.
Wow, just noticed the Preview pane. This rocks. It picks up my blogs theme and shows the preview using that – extremely cool.
The really nice menu options I mentioned earlier are buttons to let you drop in video or image from YouTube and Flickr respectively.
Where’s Scribefire saving my post to before I publish it?
Posted July 30th, 2008 |
Published in blogging
I really liked BlogDesk – really liked it. Used it at lunchtime to write a couple of posts using my XP box at work. Was about to set it up here at home when I realised that it’s for Windows only. Bummer.
I need to find a desktop blogging app for Linux. BloGTK seems to be popular and I’m writing this with it. It’s definitely not in the same class as BlogDesk.
First of all, I went to set up a new connection. There was no Wordpress option. WTF? There was an option for a Metablog API and so I picked that – not a good start.
The editor is not so good either. The link I pasted in above appears in the editor as raw HTML – it doesn’t look like there’s a WYSIWYG editor. There is a Preview Pane that shows you what your post should like when published but it’s view only.
<blockquote>There’s an option on the editor menu to create a blockquote. Again, the raw blockquote markup is shown in the editor. Also, the blockquotes don’t look correct in the Preview Post editor pane.</blockquote>
Spell checker works OK.
I went to add an image to this post but the Insert An Image dialog is not a patch on BlogDesk’s. There’s no way to browse my local disk to pick up an image. There’s a positioning option but not styling and there’s no easy sizing options.
Eh, so, I never actually managed to post this with BloGTK – had to go to WP and post it from there. Seems that my account wasn’t set up properly as I couldn’t publish. No errors, no warnings, no hints – I don’t know what’s wrong with it and it’s not telling me.
As you can see above, the blockquote didn’t work either.
Think I’ll give Bleezer a go. Either that or I’m gonna have to boot XP at home, which I’m reluctant to do.
Posted July 30th, 2008 |
Published in blogging
This post is written using Blogdesk. It’s a desktop application that lets you write blog post and then publish them without having to visit your blog through a browser.
It took roughly 5 minutes to setup, I:
- Created a new blog user with Author rights but not Admin (I’m paranoid)
- Installed BlogDesk
- Went through the “New Blog” wizard. This set the blog user to post with, downloaded the categories and checked that images could be uploaded.
- Wrote this post.
The Blogdesk GUI is nicely laid out, you can start the app up and get straight into writing a post without having to select any menus or other needles UI interactions.
The editor has all the features you expect:
- Change fonts and styles
- Change colours
- Insert lists
- Add links
- Spell checker
- Insert graphics.
The “insert graphic” option is great. It lets add styles such as the shadow on the left, position the graphic and also resize it. Very nice.
The F5 button switches the GUI editor between WYSIWYG and HTML modes so you can tweak your markup if you need to.
This is my first post using BlogDesk but it seems like a quick and easy way to blog – much quicker than using Wordpress’ own method. The image insertion functions make BlogDesk worth using on their own.
Posted July 17th, 2008 |
Published in blogging
I’ve been running my hearing aids blog for a few years now. In that time it has changed theme 3 or 4 times. During the most recent theme update I decided to change it from being a traditional blog type of layout to using a static front page.
Most blogs have the last 10 posts displayed either paritally or in full on the front page. A categories list, some links and some Adsense down the sidebar. This is great for personal blogs that are meant to be read as a diary with sequential posts but what about information-centric blogs? Blogs that people will come to through a search engine looking for a specific piece of information and will most likely then want to find out what else your site has to offer on that subject.
That’s where the traditional blog layout fails. It doesn’t group relevant information together very well. Chrisg.com is a good example of this. He’s a great blogger who writes interesting stuff on blogging and new media – I’ve been reading his RSS forever so it’s not an issue for me but what about someone who comes to the site for the first time looking for, say, information on business blogging? The sitemap page lists all posts under headings of blogging and business but nothing really links a specific post to another.
People need easy navigation on websites to get around and blogs fail on that.
Breadcrumbs would help.
So would a category specific landing page showing popule, all posts for that category with a header describing the category.
Those two would ease navigation but I think a static front page with a welcome message, a descrption of the site and section specific links would be a real winner. I’m getting there on hearnig aids, I’m usnig the Brandford Magazine WP theme and that has a static front page with good navigation. I don’t have a welcome message so people hitting the site don’t know if I’m selling something, a charity or what. I don’t have breadcrumbs either.
The Guardian website is a great example of a site that is easy to navigate around. It’s a design that I can aspire to. You’re never lost on that site. The breadcrumbs are in your face. They have a category specific colour scheme for an easy visual indicator of what you are readnig or are about to click on.
Posted March 28th, 2008 |
Published in blogging
Freerangestock is a stock photo site with tons of free photos – all of which are great quality.
They are enticing photographers to upload photos by sharing ad revenue with them.
WebsiteGrader from Hubspot is an online tool that ranks your website for online marketing effectiveness. It gives you hints about easy, mostly non-technical, things you can do to make sure your blog/site reaches the widest audience possible.
http://www.websitegrader.com/Default.aspx
This site ranks at 77% and needs some work! But I’m lazy…..
Squareleaf
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