I've added some new hacks to my "Blogger Hacks" post. These include a how-to for totally manual categories, a different "clickable post titles" hack, and a hack for adding a .png favicon if you can't make an .ico work for you. I'm also taking a long, hard look at Ecmanaut, where there are some hacks that'll make your hair curl.... incl. the long sought after and mythical calendar for blogger, which many hackologists had presumed extinct!! Check it out!!

No trophy, medal, financial incentive, or prize of any description, but maximum Freshblog kudos for URLTrends, the folks who run MultiRSS. Having switched to using their service for easy-subscribing by readers, I blogged yesterday (a Sunday, let's remember, and less than 24 hours ago) about how cool it would be if Google Reader was on their list of supported services.

Opened my inbox this afternoon to find the following msg:

"Dear John, I am glad to hear that you enjoy MultiRSS. I have added Google Reader to our list of supported readers. If you have any other feed readers that you would like to see let us know. Sincerely, Joel Strellner, Owner http://www.urltrends.com"

Joel... A tip of the hat to you, Sir. Much appreciated. I am greatly impressed by your turn-around time and responsiveness. Many thanks.

Filed in: feeds, readers, rss, webtech

Julie Meloni encourages us to maintain an even strain: "My point is simply this: it is naive to think that everything is always on, even if you are. Blogger sucks because it went down for twenty minutes and I couldn't post about what I did today, or the world is going to end because for several hours no one could leave comments to my post, for the love of god who cares. Who cares? So we're inconvenienced because our blogging service burped. TypePad burps too. So does Yahoo. So does Amazon, and eBay, and every other entity online. Every single one.... It's one of the most [...] stressful feelings ever to watch your app crash to a halt and the collective hate of ten people, let alone 10 million people, focuses itself squarely between your eyes....And Haloscan? Currently the recipient of the hate of 316,168 people? It's one guy. One guy."

A good call, well made, and something that we lose sight of when we're wrapped up in the stats, rankings, and rants, the interactivity of the experience, that make this so much fun. I spent the day at work yesterday without a couple of the crucial tools that make my job possible. So for a change, work was work. Whaddaya know? Maybe we're all a bit too comfy being one click away from the answer.....

Filed in: blogging, blogtech, webtech

Have gone the route of the 3rd party subscription manager to clean up my sidebar and allow subscribers a much wider choice of one-click reader options. Selected MultiRSS because they have a wide range of readers on offer without using javascript in my template. Never liked (or used) the graphic buttons that clutter so many sidebars these days, but did amass a selection of text links that served the same purpose.

My text links had started to look cluttered, and when I logged in to feedburner and saw that my subscribers are using 20+ readers to read my syndicated content, & I was only offering a half-dozen one-click links, I decided to change things up.

Downside.... They don't offer a link to Google Reader yet. I e-mailed to suggest that.

On a related issue: RSS Buttons.

Read about the proposed feed icons for MSIE7 yesterday (only a month late...heh!!) & wonder "How many RSS buttons do we need?" How many different proprietary copyrighted logos for the same thing are there going to be? RSS is hard to comprehend as it is, and a bit of graphic consistency between sites and browsers would be most welcome. I'm as guilty as the next blogger, because I like my subscriber chicklet, but I'm thinking about this & considering burying the chicklet & using standard icons instead.

Filed in: reader, feeds, feedburner, syndication, rss

A question for you, Freshblog readers, re: the etiquette of the trackback.

Let's say blog A writes about christmas, & blog B does the same without either a reference or a link to blog A. Is it still OK for blog B to trackback ping blog A?

Is that legitimate traffic-driving? (same topic, after all)
Is it spam? (you're getting a link without giving one?)

I think I know what I think....

Filed in: trackback, blogging,

Better scraping of del.icio.us. More display options & functions. Awesome!! See the comments on Friday's post, & please respond to Greg's user needs survey. A summary of his upgrades and his feedback request follows!!

* If you click again on an "expanded" category/tag, it will take you to the delicious page - it has some nice features (related tags, clouds, other people's tags etc)

* My post-titles in delicious have the blog name in front of them - the tidy function removes this by dropping all text before the first semi-colon.

* If you click on a post title, the "expanded" tag is persistent (ie carried through in the URL) so that it will be "expanded" at the new page too.

I'll be implementing this for the drop-down list (like at Vent) in the next couple of days.

Lastly, some open questions for the forum:

* Should the drop-down list display posts in a drop down list as well (ie some categories have dozens of posts in them - too long, really)?

* Should the in-post tags take you to the homepage instead of staying on the current page (like at present)?

* Should you be able to select multiple tags? Ie "politics" and "sex"? If so, should this list posts that are tagged with politics AND sex, or posts that are tagged with politics OR sex?

Filed In: categories, tags, del.icio.us

Sweet, sweet Mozilla hack from the blog of Thiti V. Sintopchai:

To have multiple tabs loaded each time you start Firefox or when you press the home button, you can simply pipe delimit them in the options...if you wanted to open both Google and Digg when you open your browser, simply enter

http://www.google.com/ig | http://www.digg.com

It's magnificent!! It's genius!! (er.... I quite like it & I'm going to do it right away!!)

Has been a while since I've listed folks who are categorising with del.icio.us. Here's this month's list... Note that in a couple of cases the method has been taken, customised and greatly improved by other, more savvy bloggers.

• Blue Tenshi
  
• Pappmaskin Diare - Internal category results using .js
• Marc Morales - Internal category results using .js
• Digital Material
• Dimly Lit
• PFHyperBlog
• Greg's Cool [?] of the Day
• Totally Confused
• Thitiv
• BitterSweetBlue
• Atrocious Calamities
  

If I am correct in my counting (& remember I ran out of fingers & toeses long ago) , that's 43 blogs that tag for categories. Cool!! I'm sure there are more that I can't find with a link search, or that came up with the same idea independently. All good stuff.

I'm especially excited to see Marc Morales & M at Pappmaskin move this forward so that it is still functional but also starts to look integrated. Excellent.

or just doesn't get them. The latest vitriolic / bizarre / downright plum-crazy MSM rant is at Forbes magazine, (free reg. required)

Blogs started a few years ago as a simple way for people to keep online diaries. Suddenly they are the ultimate vehicle for brand-bashing, personal attacks, political extremism and smear campaigns. It's not easy to fight back: Often a bashing victim can't even figure out who his attacker is. No target is too mighty, or too obscure, for this new and virulent strain of oratory. Microsoft has been hammered by bloggers; so have CBS, CNN and ABC News, two research boutiques that criticized IBM's Notes software, the maker of Kryptonite bike locks, a Virginia congressman outed as a homosexual and dozens of other victims--even a right-wing blogger who dared defend a blog-mob scapegoat.

"Bloggers are more of a threat than people realize, and they are only going to get more toxic. This is the new reality," says Peter Blackshaw, chief marketing officer at Intelliseek, a Cincinnati firm that sifts through millions of blogs to provide watch-your-back service to 75 clients, including Procter & Gamble and Ford. "The potential for brand damage is really high,"says Frank Shaw, executive vice president at Microsoft's main public relations firm, Waggener Edstrom. "There is bad information out there in the blog space, and you have only hours to get ahead of it and cut it off, especially if it's juicy."

That's one way to look at it, I guess, but buried down there at the end of the first page is the admission (squeak!) that "Attack blogs are but a sliver of the rapidly expanding blogosphere." A more reasoned & less sensational take on this is that there are axes being ground in every sphere of human expression. People have opinions and articulate them. Sure... the blogosphere gives an established author the potential to reach a large audience quickly, and occasionally siezes on a story & swarms it to prominence, but that's the exception, not the norm. A half-dozen cases that the article refers to do not a media trend make. Try again, Forbes!!

Update: I'm with Jim at SerotoninRain: "Perhaps you should consider cancelling your Forbes subscription and read some of the titles in the sidebar." Now that's a good thought!!

via CGM & Micropersuasion.

Now you can space-bar through all the posts on your list... If only the monitor would dispense candy.... ReaderBlog via the RSSBlog, where Randy remains an advocate of the first generation page-down solution, the 'j' key...

Update: After a bit of "testing", I have to say that I agree heartily. "J" is a "next post" hotkey, whereas the spacebar leaves you seasick with page down then next post...

Now that you're all set with Blummy, maybe some of those bookmarklets that didn't fit before can be rethunk & added to your smart & organised toolbar? There's one floating around to drop stuff into MyYahoo!. See Search Engine Watch & ThreadWatch.

MarshallK explores the downside of bookmarklet overload, and finds a solution in Blummy:

The concept is simple and brilliant. You create an account (free, I think just a user name and password if I remember correctly) and then with relative ease you can create a Super Bookmarklet. You can drag and drop from a menu of the most interesting bookmarklets other people have contributed, into a box that you size yourself. Then, you drag your Blummy bookmarklet link to your toolbar.

There's apparently some cosmetic issues, but all-in-all this sounds pretty darn good, esp. for those of us who are tagging & categorising w/ del.icio.us. I have 2 different tag tools on my links bar, a "post to del.icio.us" link, the not-always-functional "add to kinja" bookmarklet, "blogroll it", 2 versions of "blogthis!," Splogreporter, and links to a couple of sites that I visit so often that even the bookmarks dropdown is too much effort. Blummy sounds like it might be the solution. Thanks, Marshall!!

ps. Anyone looking to get into bookmarklets, mess with them and feel their power, should check out Micropersuasion's "14 bookmarklets every blogger should have."

Update: So now have a blummy bookmarklet. Easy to sign up. Less easy to replicate bookmarklets within the service, esp. custom ones. Lots of cutting & pasting where I expected to be able to drag off my toolbar & into their window.... (Don't know why I expected that, but I did.) Anyway... Have recreated my bookmarklet collection and am very satisfied indeed. Thanks, Blummy!!

Marc Morales Dot Com: "In the end, it works similarly to the category list on Greg's AFL Spectator site. I saved the text above into a file called 'speccy.js' (I kept the name because Greg rulz).... In the body of the blogger template, I call the function list_side_tags() to execute the function, which takes the del.icio.us data and builds the category list. The links in the category list pass arguments to my category.asp page the same way the category links in the posts do."

Spec_freakin_tacular!! So now the whole thing is integrated in-blog!! Categories, and a sidebar menu, all without leaving the site. This is a significant milestone for the system. Great work Marc!!!

Filed In: categories, tags, del.icio.us

Stephen at Singpolyma has an idea about an equitable share of the profits for services that post & host content from other places. Singpolyma:

So what's the solution? Well, instead of charging content creators to host their content (or running ads, or both), the idea is that we should go back to paying content creators. The Web 2.0 companies are making money, and they deserve their fair cut. 100%, however, is not a fair cut. How's this for the switch: I make it, We get paid for it. The first site to do it will beat out the competition, and fast.

Share, share-alike, and attract a larger number of users with payments as an incentive.... Cool.... Where's my digital camera?

Filed in: web2.0, blogtech, webtech, business

If you're being prompted for captcha & you're not a splogger, & your blog will stand a manual review to prove it, you can request a review / get in line for the "whitelist" as follows: Blogger Help:

Click the "?" (question mark) icon next to the word verification on your posting form. That will take you to a page where you can request a review for your blog. We'll have someone look at it, verify that it isn't spam, and then whitelist your blog so it no longer has the word verification requirement.

Apparently if you've been asked for captcha & trying to publish remotely (e-mail, 'phone, whatever) then the stuff you submitted from there is being held as drafts until you log in & beat the captcha to make them public. Interesting, & seemingly ongoing / evolving to keep up with the problem.

Update: AdsonBlogs is a false positive, & discusses the phenomenon.

Filed in: blogger, webtech, spam, splogs

LibraryClips comes through with a search application that is specific to our purposes:

"If you don’t have blog categories, save all your posts in a del.icio.us account under various tags. del.icio.us is good to browse posts filed in tags, but what if you can’t find what you are looking for just from browsing the title of your posts, even though you know what tag the post is in. Sounds like you need to be able to search full-text of all the bookmarks saved under that tag, well in comes minisearch, the full-text engine for your del.icio.us account, or even for your blog if you use a del.icio.us account as a mirror for your blog."

Pretty cool, and perhaps an interesting comparison with the new del.icio.us search service? I will be checking this out forthwith!! Maybe there's potential here for refinement of the search within categories... for instance posts tagged "categories" that contain the words "sidebar menu"

Filed In: tags, categories, search, del.icio.us

Missing some subscribers? Have a Feedburner Feed? Your MyYahoo readers aren't reporting accurately. They're reading your blog from behind trees, or in dark alleys, or something. Maybe from a long way away through telescopes & high-powered binoculars?

(forgive me... 'tis the caffeine....)

See the RSS blog & the feedburner forums for a slightly more cogent & less conspiratorial / caffeinated take on what's going on.

Filed In: feedburner, myyahoo, feeds, readers

No problem, but for some reason when I went back in to tag my new posts tonight, I had to beat a captcha to republish them. Interesting. You may note that I am also trying to be more selective and less generous with my tags, so that I don't appear sploggy on del.icio.us.

Filed In: google, splog, spam, captcha

So what's it for? The chance to add your own content & tag it to make it searchable.

• Is it Geocities for the Millennium?
• Is it G-Bay?
• Is it Craigslist?
• Is it an online diary / planner / schedule?
• Is it a virtual "jacket pocket" for stuff that you find on the web, write on bits of paper, & lose in the laundry?

Is it all of the above? Tech Memeorandum has a digest of all the action. I'll be interested to see what this turns into.... I guess if it is really "all of the above" there's the potential to capture a huge audience for multiple purposes.

See John Battelle for the philosophical shift that this might represent:

It marks a significant departure for the company: It will become a publisher, a competitor in the content creation and management game, which places it in direct competition with the multitudes who feed and feed off the main Google search engine. Watch. This. Space.

I couldn't agree more.... There's plenty to watch.....

Filed In: GoogleBase, Google, Search, Webtech

John Battelle speaks for all of us....

" Will...Someone...Please...Tell...Them...To...STOP ROLLING OUT NEW FEATURES!"

Or at least give us a week or two to get our heads around new thing one before clubbing us heavily with new thing two....

Filed In: google, webtech

Back in June, I wrote a couple of posts (linked to a couple of other people's posts) about the real-world sale of virtual real-estate for real-world green. Now pre-played characters that get you past the tedious levels of goat-herding or whatever I can understand, but I am cognitively challenged when it comes to the exploitation of virtual real-estate for real world profit. Imagine, then, my current lack of comprehension. From Collision Detection:

A space station inside the online, multiplayer game Project Entropia has just been sold for $100,000. The buyer was Jon Jacobs, a very popular in-game figured known as "Neverdie". Why spend so much on a piece of virtual property? Because it's just like owning the Mall of America -- it's a place to conduct business and make real-world cash. Indeed, Project Entropia currently has 236,000 registered accounts, and the game allows you to use Earth money to buy in-game currency, which makes it spectacular place for any entrepreneur to set up business, really.

Here's my thing. Does plunking down that much money to buy something make it real? Was it already real? How can it be used for commercial gain, & how long will it take Mr. Jacobs to get his investment back? For some answers, perhaps, I'm off to read the longer piece that Clive Thompson has written on in-game economics. I'll let you know....

Filed in:webtech games retail

Whether in response to the bone-jarring PC Magazine review of earlier this week, or entirely coincidentally, Del.icio.us have added search. They've also added the ability to put del.icio.us in your firefox search box up there in the top right. Cool. A VC discusses the new service, and Randy at the RSS Blog points out that, bizarrely for a tag / bookmarking service, this search seems to recognise post titles and descriptions rather than tags. The tag: operator does work, so long as you don't put a space between the colon and the word you're trying to filter (doh!!). Del.icio.us search is a good start, anyway, and there's time for this to develop....

Filed In: del.icio.us, search, webtech

While we're looking at Google code to see what they're going to do next, Philipp at Google Blogoscoped points out that there's a "browse other people's lists" feature disabled in the application source code. This is pretty cool, and analagous to my Kinja digest being publicly available. I wonder how they'll navigate? A random "next list" / recently accessed / added button would be groovy, but a "people who subscribe to the same blogs as you also read..." would be even cooler, as a way to navigate your micro-sphere and add new content in your area of interest. Clicking over into someone's digest of the latest in Northern European Winter Sports would not be my bag....

Filed In: google, reader, webtech

So, an FYI & a heads-up for myself. Was looking at my categories on del.icio.us, & was interested to see that a recent post has been bookmarked by someone else too.... Now it isn't a mainstream "tags / categories" post that lots of folks would be interested in, so I took a look to see who it was & what else they were interested in. Well, hey, in the notes box Marshall has written

"Is this a tag spammer?"

The answer, of course, is no, but clearly my liberal use of the tags (for maximum exposure, and maximum cross-reference-ability) appears sploggy / spammy / problematic to at least this one reader. There's a difficulty here in that I'm trying to use the same keywords for both tags & categories. Tags are numerous, & designed for visibility. Categories are few & precise, & I guess conventional users of del.icio.us bookmarking material from multiple sites do so more precisely than I do, because they don't have one eye on technorati exposure too....

Anyway, in that "nice things happen when you're feeling insulted" kind of a way, it turns out that Marshall & I are into a lot of the same things. I have blogrolled his blog, MarshallK.com, & subscribed to it, & I would invite you to do the same...

The "Make Poverty History" banner as a blocker for the flag. See Island Dave & comments for a review of the latest in socially despicable splog design. The sploggers are abandoning text links altogether & using image redirects, and as predicted they're "making poverty history" so that they can't be flagged....

Well hey, you can still have your bogus URL's sent to splog reporter, & we can still e-mail Google to point out how sorry you are....

Library Clips points to Swiki, a new Rollyo-type service, & points up some of the differences. Looks like custom micro-searches are here to stay.... Definitely a useful tool for generating content in your chosen area of interest & expertise. Cool.

I will refrain from asking for a beta signup, since I have been less-than-effective as a tester for the couple of services that I signed up to mess with. It's a time thing.

Marc Morales has worked out a system that seems to work along similar lines to the one at Pappmaskin (see previous post). Excellent. You can see Marc musing on categories, developing a system, and then tackling the sidebar menu, all in an astonishingly brief space of time. Others, Marc, have taken months to grapple with what you're addressing in a few days... Herculean efforts!!

I have to say that I am so impressed w/ the look of the category listing in the same style as the blog template that I am sorely tempted to switch. You guys rock!!