Performancing Metrics was most likely the all time favorite metric system available for bloggers who wanted a statistics service that was tailor-made for blogs and it offered the most features out of all of them at no charge to the user. It came as a bit of a shock to all when it was announced that Performancing Metrics would be taken down due to the fact that it had grown too big to handle for the resources at hand and was sadly missed indeed among those who had depended on this fine statistics engine. Ironically enough, I had just gone over to a self hosted Wordpress install and was ready to sign up myself when the everything hit the fan and Metrics disappeared.

But no longer apparently. I have been a Performancing member for about a year now and although I haven’t written much content to date, I do check in faithfully every few days to see how things are going along and this morning when I banged into the site (much to my surprise) there was a new tab in the header of the main page called pmetrics and believe me, I didn’t waste any time checking it out.

And So…

As of 11:00 am my time (03-25-07) (east coast USA), the new Performancing Metrics has been percolating on my blog compiling all that wonderful data that will show me exactly how many readers I don’t have. That’s okay though since the blog the service is hooked to is my personal blog that rides on no specific road but rather wanders about as it pleases. Still, having the metrics system I thought was gone forever back where it belongs gives me a good feeling that the Performancing group is back on top of things and working hard at getting the job done once again.

Like the new ScribeFire editor, Performancing Metrics apparently was sneaked out with no fanfare or announcement on the site at first or at least none that I could find anyway. I could be wrong here about the lack of fanfare and I’m sure they’ll let me know if I am. Meanwhile, I’m going to thoroughly enjoy being a member and using their metrics system to my advantage (grin). And I won’t hesitate to pony up the highly unreasonable (grin again) amount of $14.95 for the yearly subscription to the Premium service for the couple extra features (and more to come) even though my site hardly warrants it.

So far I'm quite pleased with all the information the new Metrics supplies. Since the other purpose of my personal blog is to gauge for myself what brings in readers and what doesn't in preparation of deciding what type of niche I may want a second blog I'm planning on to ride in. Other statistics engines serve that purpose more or less and but I find myself relying on three different type of stat services (Google's Webmaster Tools, FeedBurner site stats and Awstats provided by Bluehost) on a regular basis and still not getting the whole picture that I'm looking for. So far, the new Pmetrics looks like it may well provide this whole picture I've been looking for and all in one place.

PFF and Firefox 2, just an observationPFF and Firefox 2, just an observationFirefox 2 RC2 rolled out this evening (for me anyway) right on time and PFF didn't even wake up for it's arrival. That's how seamless the new FX2 update system is and how well integrated Performancing for Firefox has become.

Thanks to the fine efforts of the PFF team (we know who you are) this great little editor for Firefox has settled right into the newest update towards the finalization of version 2 like it was a part of the original browser in the first place but then again, that was the intention. Except for the ever present "occasionally twitchy cursor", all the early burps, glitches and crashes that were seen using PFF with the first couple of public beta releases of Firefox 2 have disappeared and with the up and coming version 1.4 and all that it is going to offer, PFF and Firefox 2  are beginning to look like a match made in browser/blogger heaven.

I also heard from the Flock team a few weeks ago that the next major release of this "made for blogging" browser will be based on the Firefox 2 code and therefor will have the inline spell checking module as well. The current version is based on Firefox 1.5.0.7 which already has a spell checking module installed but without inline capabilities. Since PFF installs into Flock as easily as it does in Firefox than that's definitely good news indeed.

If this sounds like I'm stroking PFF...well, I am and without shame. After year upon year of working with, beta testing and troubleshooting suppos-ed mainline software with all their unique compatibility issues IE; things that almost work with that and things that have bugs with this, you can  believe me when I say working with the PFF team the short time that I have has been a singular pleasure.

Great job you've done folks and I'm looking forward to breaking...er...I mean, testing the first build of 1.4.

powered by performancing firefox

Ironically enough I've just today added my Performancing blog to PFF. Please don't ask me why I've waited so long because I don't know myself. Sometimes the obvious just never gets noticed. :-)

A totally subjective post on my part:

I was reading Chris Garrett's latest post on "Blog Pulling Power" - Creating Flagship Content which had to do with providing your readers with an underlying theme to your blog. An idea or "message" you can build your blog around that your readers can point to and say "that's what this blog is all about". At least this is what I got out of it and it does make sense.

The same sort of idea has been true in anything that is or has ever been offered to the general public. A company's "idea" or "mission statement" or the overall theme of an advertising campaign. You can see it even in the newspaper business where a person prefers one city paper over another even though each paper runs the same stories as the other day by day. It's the "theme" or "personality" of the newspaper that makes the difference.

So how does this apply to myself and blogging? Read on:

Although I'm not new to writing I am new to blogging (since early May, '06) and the biggest difference I've found is that unlike writing a paper or a book or some  such thing where public exposure to your writing is obviously severely delayed, public exposure when writing a blog is almost immediate and only delayed for the time it takes to upload a finished post to your blog host. In this, blogging becomes a very personal thing indeed especially if your blog is popular and you have a lot of readers just waiting to comment.

One of the first things I noticed when I began reading and researching blogs and blog writing  was that the personality of each individual blog I came across just about reached out and grabbed me. Blogs have tons of natural personality where your average website does not. Chris's example of the very popular BoingBoing not having any of the things that he was talking about is what I'm getting at. "BoingBoing" may not have a running theme, message, or anchor throughout, (I love Chris's analogy of anchor stores at each end of a mall) but what "BoingBoing" does have is loads of personality and that alone seems to make it quite popular. What Chris points out is correct though. The other qualities he mentions are always a good addition to any blog or website.

This got me to thinking about my own personal blog that I've had on WordPress.com for a number of months now. I began blogging just for the fun of it (getting DSL made a heck of a difference) and that's why I've continued with it...I simply enjoy it and it gives me badly needed practice as well. The blog is certainly not laid out as good as it could be. I've let my various links and blogrolls go by the wayside for too long and it's certainly not monetized in anyway (not even AdSense or the like). Just plain content ranging within a mass of different, totally unrelated categories. Comments are a somewhat rare occurrence also. So what has this to do with anything?

A couple months ago my blog, apparently out of nowhere, attained a Google ranking of 4 and the Alexa rating dropped over 200,000 points into the mid to high hundred thousands range. Now this may sound like chicken feed to most but considering I had a previous Google ranking of 0 and no Alexa rating whatsoever it definately made my eyebrows  waggle some.
 
So as I said, it came as a bit of a surprise when I happened to have the SEO extension enabled in Firefox and looked up at the top of my blog and saw that I had "made it into the phone book" as it were. The only reason for this somewhat personal phenomenon that I could think of is that for some reason, there are people out there that happen to like the personality of the blog and if I do have an underlying theme or overall message, it's beyond me. I may eventually find that I've had one all along but you can easily get caught up in all there is to learn about the art of blogging if you bother to try to find out about it.

I don't believe I would have had any understanding as to why this had happened if I hadn't read Chris's post even though that wasn't the main message he was trying to get across. Thanks Chris.

The only reason for this post is probably because it was such an eye opener for me which may not make sense to some but when you're (somewhat) new at this and driving your (somewhat) new blog from in front of your computer you can easily miss the obvious while trying to understand all the rest.

powered by performancing firefox

I have become a bit concerned since the release of Windows Live Writer (WLW).

What I have noticed in testing this new blog editor is that even though it's still a beta, it looks like it will end up blowing away most if not all "stand alone" local wysiwyg type blog editors such as Qumana, BlogWriter, BlogDesk etc, and especially those editors that you have to actually pay for (which usually aren't as good as the ones that come free of charge ironically enough).

Although I don't believe PFF will be "blown away" since it's the only editor that's incorporated into the Firefox browser itself but I do think it may lose some if a couple functions aren't added to this already quality product:

1. The ability to upload pictures from the the user's hard drive directly to the blog hosting service (such as offered by WordPress.com) or by FTP, not just by tagging a url to such as Flickr or Photobucket for example.

2. Also, there's a problem with where WLW stores it's uploaded images in some blog hosting services. I'll use my blog's example (a WordPress.com hosted type).

--This is the url that Wordpress normally stores one of my uploaded images:
http://justhinkin.wordpress.com/files/2006/04/1144022719031.jpg

--This is the url that WLW stores an uploaded image to WordPress.com:

http://justhinkin.wordpress.com/files/2006/09/WindowsLiveWriter/
Secondstainedglasspanel_E9E1/Glass%20Panel2%5B1%5D.jpg

You'll notice that the extra directory, "WindowsLiveWriter", added to the path along with the "Secondstainedglasspanel_E9E1/Glass%20Panel2%5B1%5D.jpg" at the end.

If PFF is used to edit a post (with images) that was originally written and posted using WLW, the text edits will post correctly but, even though PFF seems to be aware of the path to the embedded images in the post that's being edited, once uploaded "as an edit" to the blog, all the images will disappear. Checking the image placeholder "Properties" usually shows the correct WLW path (as above) but the image still does not show. All images have to be uploaded using WLW once again.

Read the rest of this entry

Just a note and a first post.

I just installed the PFF extension into the latest version of the Flock browser(based on Firefox 1.5.04) after reading that PFF was available for Flock (I'm currently testing the PhotoBucket Edition).

It may seem to be a bit redundant since Flock has it's own WYSIWYG editor but although the built in editor works fine, PFF offers up many more functions such as being able to edit or delete previous posts, a few more publishing options and I can drag and drop from the photo bar at the top as well as the "Snippet" bar at the bottom with no problems as yet.

The combination of the Flock browser, it's built in blogging and photo tools and the ability to install the PFF extension pretty much makes it your average blogger's dream tool and since it's based on Mozilla's tried and true Firefox 1.5.04 it's stable as well.

I love it when 2 things work this well.