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Archives for February 2006

Productivity: Clipboard as Auto Save

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I just thought about how to auto magically save my textual work without all these file here, file there and how to name it aspects. Just auto magically save my work without all the hassle. All these nasty ‘did I really delete this text’ moments are gone with my solution.

Best of all … It works for absolutely every application because it uses a system wide available feature and it gives you chronological versions … primitive but very effective.


It is so easy … use a clipboard monitor!

What is a clipboard monitor? A clipboard monitor is a feature which exists in every good editor. A clipboard monitor automatically appends data copied to the clipboard to a file or draws it into an an internal application which manages clipboard activities. If you are lucky this file can be auto saved every n minutes. If you are very lucky both applications ‘monitor’ and ‘manager’ can run parallel and give you plenty of possibilities to monitor, manage and save your textual work just by the simple use of ‘copy to clipboard’. Ctrl-C becomes your backup wizard!

Open up the text editor of your choice, open a new file and activate the feature ‘clipboard monitor’ (if available). I am using and recommending two editors of my choice. In PSPad it’s in the menu tools / ‘clipboard monitor’ or can be activated with Alt-M. In Note Tab light it’s the menu Document / ‘Use as paste board’ or the shortcut Shift-Ctrl-P.

PSPad gives you the opportunity to manage every single clipboard entry but doesn’t automatically save the monitored content to a file. The ‘manager’ feature is very helpful because during a day you will have many messy entries and maybe just want to reuse a single one or a single version. PSPad does NOT SAVE the clipboard monitor entries if the application is closed (as far as I know)! This is totally fine for people who don’t need the storage feature of clipboard monitoring. Better use a second application which gives a more messy result but saves every copied text. Below I will explain how to do it with the free text editor Note Tab light.

In Note Tab light it is also very easy to get incremental versions of the saved files if you need it! How to activate and configure the Note Tab light text editor:

  1. Open the general options in menu View / Options
  2. Go to tab Files
  3. Activate ‘make backups‘, backup type ‘incremental‘ and ‘every n minutes‘
  4. Open a new file
  5. Save it as ‘you-name-it.txt’
  6. Activate menu point Document / Use as paste board

So, how to use it? For safety reasons I use to copy the version of my content always when switching views in i.e. PFF or an online editor. I do this automatically to makes sure I always have the latest version in memory in case the application is messing things up. (Side note: It’s also an often criticized AJAX feature if it is not caught by the developers … press ‘back’ and your text is gone!) That’s the old experience with software testing. I learned it the hard way 🙂

You have the choice … it’s a feature not a bug 🙂
In PFF text is copied depending on the viewing style. If your are copying from RTF view the source code is not saved but a text version of your content. If you are using the source code view … well, then the source code is saved.

The best thing is that you can use both applications parallel. Use PSPad as clipboard manager and use Note Tab light as storage device for all the great things you are copying to the clipboard.

Clap hands, spread it, link it, comment it and give feedback how YOU are saving your work!

PS: Paste without formatting … search for PlainPaste.ahk. A double Ctrl-V and formatting is gone …

Categories / Keywords / Technorati Tags: Markus, Merz, 2006, clipboard, monitor, manager, tool, cool, auto save, editor, PSPad, Note Tab, text, productivity, safety, storage, backup

Focus or Fail

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A thread by Chris McLeod that I commented in got me thinking about focus. Raj has mentioned a couple of times about his zomblogs, and it seems part of the problem is an affiliction I am very familiar with;  an addiction to starting projects.

I love starting new projects. The invention part is my favourite bit. I’m aware enough of this part of my character that when it matters I know how to deal with it but if I left it unchecked I would start a new blog every day and never look at it again! What I see in my own work is if I focus my projects do well, if I do not focus they fail.


Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying you should only have one blog. There are many advantages to having several blogs running in parallel

  • Spreading risk
  • Network effects
  • Variety keeps your interest
  • More income
  • Learnings from one used in rest
  • More opportunity to make contacts
  • Testing ideas
  • …

With so many advantages I would recommend anyone have at least a go at one more blog. The problem comes when you spread yourself too thin or try to do too many new things at once.

Each blog needs to have a lot of effort put in at the start to ensure it takes root. You need a good body of content so you have at least a small archive. People need to see more than a “hello world” post to decide if they want to stick around or not.

One you have a new blog up and running though you can reduce your time commitment to it down to posting a few times a day and tending your daily comment and spam crop. That is when you have the opportunity to start a new one.

How many blogs are too many? Only you can decide that. It’s based on how much time you have, how much energy you want to put in and how difficult the topics are to find and generate content.

The other problem of course is you really do need to start. I had a phase of buying domains and not doing anything with them, or I would get as far as building a “coming soon” homepage full of promises of how great the new blog will be if I could only get off my big fat arse and build it.

While you might have grand plans for your new blog the only solution to this problem, if it is one you are at risk of falling into, is to actually build something (anything) no matter how imperfect and get it started. Commit to updating it with content and improve as you go along. It is better to have a maintained blog with a default theme rather than a beautiful but contentless blog left to rot.

Some blogs deserve to wither, they are experiments that don’t pan out. That’s fine providing you really did put in the effort. Remember it is hard to judge when a blogs tipping point will be. It takes months before you know a blogs real potential in traffic and income.

For myself I resolve to either drop my domains or do something with them. After our crazy current schedule is more quiet and sane I will create a new blog and actually stick with it.

How about you? Do you find the “million domains and not doing anything with them” experience of Raj and I familiar? Or do you have only one blog and can’t understand anyone wanting more? Let us know ..

Scoble Nails It: Why Full Text Feeds Are GOOD

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Not only does Scoble do a fantastic job of describing why full text feeds are good for everyone, including pro/commercial bloggers but he also nails Duncan for slapping Steve Rubel about over his views on RSS which is quite amusing in itself. Much as I’m loathe to break the habit of a lifetime and agree with Steve on anything, I have to say that him and Scoble are bang on the money, and Duncans views are just wrong, wrong, wrong.

Duncan Said:

How bout then RSS advertising actually pays out Steve? The reality is RSS advertising sucks (sorry to my friends at Pheedo who are trying very hard to make it work, and continue to get better at it). I’m yet to find anyone who is making decent money from RSS advertising, particularly compared to traditional on site advertising (both CPC and CPM). Firms like Weblogs Inc can offer full feeds with RSS advertising only because they’€™ve got enough revenue coming of the main blogs themselves.

[……..]

In another note Steve, I’€™m starting to worry about you, you are starting to sound more like Scoble every day, please don’€™t join the everything for free and damn the money crowd, some of us are trying to blog for a living.

To which Scoble went completely off on one, in the nicest possible way of course, but a slaps a slap, and as far as they go, this was pretty interesting, because what came out of it was a fantastic post on why FULL rss feeds really work for both those of us making ad $$$’s on regular web pages and readers. Its a long post, and I suggest you read all of it, but here’s a little snippet to whet your appetite:

So, how does anyone make any money?

Well, let’€™s stay in TODAY’€™S world. In today’€™s world you get journalists, geeks, bloggers, connectors, to read your content and link to it. That’€™ll bring a larger audience to visit your Web page. How do you do that? Serve out full-text RSS. Why? Cause by doing that you treat the connector with the most possible respect and give him/her the easiest way to consume your content and link to it.

I tend to view the full text vs we want to make money debate a little like the p2p vs record industry debacle. It’s been proven, i think, that p2p users buy more records. And in the same vein, having more link friendly bloggers read your work, weather it be on your blog or in a news reader, the more your influence spreads, and the more links you get, and……. the better rankings, page views and ad clicks you get as a result.

Time Wasters Need Not Apply

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I got a great lesson in how to stop other people wasting your time yesterday. Its one thing to be efficient, and dilligent in your productivity efforts, but when you start adding other people to the equation you can quickly get bogged down in tedious, unproductive tasks, conversations and meetings.

I got a chance to talk to Merlin Mann from 43Folders, and before we’d even spoken he’d politely asked if i’d like to bullet point what we needed to get done in our discussion, and asked me if 15mins would be sufficient.

As a result of sticking to a time frame, and having a defined structure to the call, we got what we needed to do done in time, and managed to chat about his odd way of scheduling calls in the process. In fact, he posted about better meetings later that day, and its well worth a read.

The act of deciding what had to be accomplished in the call, followed by agreeing how long it would take made for a very productive meeting, and I learnt a lot about getting other people to be productive when it would affect me in the process.

From now on, im going to adopt the same strategy, as i can’t stand rambling, going nowhere conversations when im busy 🙂

If only we could do that for IM heh….

By the way, the other thing I learnt was that though I consider myself a fast thinker, there is always someone faster — The only reason I dont suspect young Merlin had amphetimines for breakfast is that he actually managed to talk a lot of sense, even at 90mph heh!

Using Group Chat to Build your Blog’s Community

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What is the best strategy for building a community around your website/blog? Forums have been, for a long time, the primary tool for building a community on a website. The downside here was that you needed considerable traffic (or heavy marketing) to get the forum going – nothing kills a forum more than a lack of participation. Message boards and IRC chat rooms provide a tenuous alternative (as do discussions in the comments section of a blog), and leave something to be desired for, especially on websites that are not popular enough to support their own forums.


Interactivity on most blogs is limited to comment conversations (read Chris’s views on tracking comments). It’s easy to say that this is sufficient, but is there any real need for a better solution? The questions I’m trying to ask here are:

  • What can we do to improve the stickiness of a blog?
  • Which tools are most effective in community building – especially for those blogs that do not (currently) enjoy the sort of attention Performancing or SEOBook does (in other words, 95% of the blogs out there)?

For my part, I’ll talk about group chat solutions. Hopefully other readers can shed light on what I’ve missed and on other techniques as well.

Group chat services such as Campfire and Tangler (read TechCrunch’s review on Tangler) are more suited to project based collaboration, event-specific conversations, Q&A sessions (Andy, do you think you could do one on link-building anytime soon?) and personal chats. Like instant messaging, group chat works best when the connections between people are personal – it would be more natural for the moderators of a forum to communicate via Campfire rather than a bunch of strangers who drop by my blog for the first time.

The real benefit of placing a group chat solution on your blog / website is that it can be equated to your blog having a chat-room, which in turn encourages readers to interact and discuss posts as well present their own comments.

Secondly, without allowing chat transcripts to be indexed, there will be little search engine value for such a solution. For a contrast, consider how useful forums are for building search engine rankings. Forums offer a phenomenal gateway into producing tons of fresh, useful content on your website in a short period of time. In return, forum posters get recognition and a chance to build their reputation (yes, some of us do it for the sake of helping others, but that is a small minority).

In the end, a major part of community building comes from giving your blog readers a chance to ask questions and interact with other readers. Group chat achieves that splendidly.

What do you think?

PageRank: The Blogosphere’s Stupidest Metric

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Hmmm… So i break my blogging silence of a week or so to post about bloody PageRank? Sheeesh, it just doesn’t get any funnier, or perhaps sadder heh! Out of all the many, many things that we can judge a blogs worth by, judge its meaning by, and it’s contribution to the ‘sphere, PR has got to be the stupidest.

Im just starting through an enormous backlog of RSS and of course am seeing all the “update!” posts. Good grief, what drivel;

It was useless 3yrs ago, and it’s still useless.

You’d have more luck judging digestion by turd length than trying ot work out how well your blog is doing by it’s pagerank 🙂

It’s Time To Start Treating Your Blog Readers Like Customers

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I remember in 2003-2004 having to hear from hundreds of people every month about “how blogs aren’t supposed to make money” and “your ideas are crap because bloggers can’t make money”. Allow me to say to those people now… I told you so. :p

So here we are, finally at the point where you can make money with your blog. It DOES work. This is great for us bloggers who have toiled away and taken our lumps over the years, but it also creates an entirely new dynamic for us as well, especially the new breed of bloggers who aren’t sellers.

See, to be a pro blogger, you need to start thinking like a seller. You’ve instantly become a publisher. It is now your job to provide not only what your readers want to read, but to also make money. Making money with your blog does not happen simply by writing good content, it’s way more complex than that.

The problem with this is that most bloggers aren’t sellers. They’ve never had a sales job. They don’t realize the things you need to think about and do when dealing with a customer, as opposed to a reader.

And if you don’t think your readers aren’t your customers… they are. They are the consumers of your content, the ones who allow you to put up your blogads and the ones who click on your Adsense ads.

So shouldn’t you be worried about customer retention just like everyone else? What are you doing to retain those readers and keep them? It’s time most bloggers started to think about these questions if they plan on keeping their blogging business going long-term.

Conversational Advertising

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Somewhere during the struggle to reconcile the need to bring in revenue, and maintaining the “purity” of the medium, some bright spark thought she’d ad comments to ads. This idea grew a little, and we eventually had “story ads”. Neither of these attempts to take advertising into the conversational space is particularly groundbreaking. Its a painfully obvious step toward breaking out of interruption advertising and truly engaging the reader, but it is necessary.

My friend kpaul recently got a nice write up from Steve Outing over at Poynter about his efforts in this field at the Muncie Free Press

Mallasch, who describes his strategy for the site as coming from the “Craig Newmark school of business” (a reference to Craigslist’s founder), says he’s had some success recently selling “advertorials” along with banner ads — “basically, a story page labeled as an ad where customers or potential customers can comment.”

And he seems to be doing a little better than I. We played with this over at Threadwatch a while back (I ran that site untill Performancing for those that didn’t know) and although it was fun, and personally I felt, and still feel it has promise, didn’t have a lot of success with it.

Inherent Problems

The biggest problem with running story ads is that as a group, advertisers are a lazy bunch, they want the world, and expect it for little or no effort on their part.

That could be a fault of ours, of mine, us the bloggers, who’d like to show ads that engage our readers, keep our content relevant and fresh and STILL bring in the $$$’s.

Unfortunately we’re a lazy bunch too. We don’t appear to be taking steps to change the advertisers opinion, to coax them over their fears of (omg!) the prospect of public criticism but like the advertisers, we still expect it to work, and at least for my part, are dissapointed with the results.

Solutions?

Im not sure. It really is a tough one for both advertiser and blogger, neither has the luxury of an effortless success, both risk public criticism and it’s a hard balance to strike with regular readers.

I don’t have an answer, but im all ears if anyone would care to offer one.

Some random thoughts I’ve had on this in the time its taken me to get to this sentence:

  • Could advertisers be bloggers? Guest bloggers?
  • Could the lure of the giveaway overcome the fear of a “bad comment” and keep readers relatively positve? // Do we want that?
  • If not story ads, how else can we engage the reader, without overstepping editorial bounds?
  • Perhaps we need to push editorial bounds, no pain, no gain

Interesting challenge isn’t it?