So if you hadn’t realized what a complete bunch of arse this whole “wisdom of crowds” bollocks was previously, you can see it in action as Digg takes a slamming due to nothing more than its own popularity.
My friend Peter sums it up well:
The lunatics invade, the system breaks, authoritarianism replaces democracy. Eventually, your founding mission statement becomes rather comic
Apparently Digg have taken steps, but is it just an interim measure, what happens next time?
We hope you enjoy this release, as it brings some more key functionallity and stability to performancing to make your blogging even better.
As always, once you’ve given it a spin, head to the forums and let us know what you think.
Update: I’ve added a section on getting inline spellchecking in Firefox and PFF.
Install Performancing Firefox 1.2
In PFF click on the Image Insert button on the toolbar.
You will then be prompted with the following window:
Click on the “Upload to FTP” Option and click the ‘browse’ button to locate the image you would like to upload.
If you haven’t done so yet, click on the ‘Settings’ tab and configure your FTP settings.
Now go back to the ‘General’ tab and click on “upload image” to start the upload process
Once successfull your new URL will be generated.
You can either Copy the URL manually or click on the ‘Insert Image’ button to add it to your current posts content.
Note:
Image and File FTP uploading is currently limited to one FTP profile
configuration, multiple profiles will be added to the next beta or
version release.
A new addition to the Account Wizard is ‘autodetect’.
While you can still manually configure your blog account, PFF will try and find your API URL and settings for most common blogs.
First enter your blog URL into the textbox:
Then click next or “Check URL”
If your blog settings were found, you will presented with the API URL and blog settings.
Note: Please
note that autodetect support may not work on many different blog
platforms, specifically Drupal, Old MovableType installations, and a
few others.
Along with FTP Image upload, we have added a very usefull utility called “File FTP Upload”.
You can access it from the main Firefox context menu under “Performancing -> FTP File Upload”.
Once launched you will be presented with a dialog very similar to the ImageFTP Upload dialog.
Click on “Browse” to select the file you would like to upload.
Once uploaded you can either copy the URL that was generated, or click the “Copy URL to Clipboard” button.
In previous version of PFF, you would frequently get an error returned from the blogger.com service called Error #3.
We’ve fixed this, and you should now have a much more seemless interaction with blogger.com. Thanks to our community member Theo for helping us with the fix.
Many have expressed their interest in Spellcheck integration with PFF, please follow the following steps to successfully get inline spellcheck to work in Firefox 1.5.x and PFF.
Let us know if you run into any issues.
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Well, there isn’t for most bloggers with commercial intent anyway. See Brians The Two Most Important Words in Blogging:
It’s certainly ironic that a medium often used as a self-absorbed journaling platform would now need to be overwhelmingly focused on the reader in order to be effective. But if you’re blogging for marketing or public relations purposes, your every post should be purposefully aimed at the needs and wants of others.
Once you realize that deep down we’re all just selfish bastards, it all becomes so much clearer 
I remember quite some years back reading about usability and instantly recognizing from my own experience that the three questions in the title of this post are exactly what we need ot know when we land on a page.
Im pretty sure it was this post from Jakob Nielsen but sheeesh, it was ages ago, so forgive me a little vaguity here ok?
Today though, i was going to do a little post about the natty new nav widgets we have at the top of each page when i ran across Darren talking about Seth’s post on landing pages.
Unfortunately, landing pages as a term has gotten rather a spammy feel to it in recent years, it always makes me think of doorway pages, pages created specifically for search engines to funnel visitors through – an ugly, but at least at one time, very effective way of getting traffic (dont try this at home kids, it’s somewhat out of date now..)
Despite the spammy feel of the term though, the idea that every page is a potential entry point onto your site is not a new one, and it’s as valuable a truth today as it was years ago — and when a vistitor does find your page, via a search engine, or a direct link from another blog, you’d better be answering those three questions dammit!
If every page on your site does not clearly answer those questions then you need ot have a think about how you can change that. Usually it’s fairly simple. Untill recently though, we’ve been guilty as sin of not following our own advice, and it’s been commented upon on quite a few occasions that it’s just not clear what you can do here at Performancing.com
Enter the new widgets…
They don’t complete the task, but they do go quite a way forward. You can now get an idea of what you can do here, and we’re better communicating our goals and steering random visitors toward the areas of the site we think most important.
I’d welcome comments on what more we can do, and any thoughts you guys have on the general topic of navigation and usability on blogs…
Dave Reids PMetrics WordPress Plugin has been very well received but what about users of other blogging systems? Well Drupal is the particular favourite of the Performancing team so I have put together a module for Drupal.
I would love for you to try this module out, have a look at the code and give me some really good feedback.
Features:
Due to the change in the way forms work between Drupal 4.6 and 4.7 there are two versions of the code unfortunately. Just download the appropriate zip for your version and extract and upload to your modules directory.
After enabling the module in your “modules” control panel you should see a new “block” plus “Metrics” under “settings”. You will need to enter your Performancing username and password in the settings, after submitting your user details the remaining settings will appear to allow you to select your blog and display choices.
Well, heck. Here I spent the week working on anti-spam hacks only to find that today TypePad added the ability to require CAPTCHAs for unauthenticated commenters. From Everything TypePad:
You can now require unauthenticated commenters (who don’t sign in through TypeKey) to pass a CAPTCHA test
before their comment is posted to your blog. The CAPTCHA (a
""completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans
apart") will help prevent automated robots from posting comment spam to
your blog.
You might want to read the original post to see the five new bug fixes that were announced today also.
To enable CAPTCHAs:
This is a good step forward, though I don’t feel that CAPTCHAs are the best strategy long-term for eradicating comment spam. Personally, I hate having to fill in CAPTCHA fields because they
are often hard to read. So far, I’ve always managed to get the
word right the first time with TypePad’s CAPTCHAs, so I’m gonna call
this a very good thing.
What I’d really love to be able to do is prohibit specific URLS from being used in comments or trackbacks— it’s easy to fake a name, it’s simple enough to use dynamic IPs,but since the URL is the only reason spammers hit blogs, blocking the links would just ruin the game for them. Also, names and IPs can be generated for free. Blocking URLs would require spam commenters to register massive numbers of domain, making spam less profitable.
Meanwhile, I’m still working on an advanced template hack that will turn off trackbacks site-wide. It’s proving to be a bit more difficult than expected, but should be ready soon.
It’s no secret that I am a geek. Guilty as charged, I have been since I was about age 9 so it is a bit late to start denying it. Because of this aspect (flaw?) of my character I seldom notice when things are “techy”. I take for granted things that I know others find tricky. Setting the timer on a VCR for example. Knowing this I ought not be surprised but I was shocked today to hear someone tell me that blogging is “techy”. Is it really?
Now don’t get me wrong, I know there are some things that hold back a great deal of people from getting into blogging. There is a base level of “web skills” that need to be mastered first for a start. There are conceptual things like “logging in”, “posts”, “links”, “comments”. Of course this all has to be understood and to learn it you either need a VERY friendly and helpful blog system or a friendly blogger.
But is it harder than, say, signing up for and using a hotmail account? If it is, it shouldn’t be.
Back in the day, yes it was too hard for absolutely everyone but the most determined or techy to blog. You had to know HTML and FTP, needed to negotiate the minefield of web hosting, perhaps know a bit of scripting if you wanted to be really fancy. With Frontpage and Dreamweaver, and the first content management tools more people were able to join the club. It was only really Blogger and most recently WordPress.com though that really made it accessible to most.
I usually benchmark these things using my Mum and Dad. My Dad managed to blog for a while before he ran out of steam with it. My parents do pretty well with their computer, they email, use office, MSN chat, scan, make greetings cards, that kind of thing. Surely blogging is no more difficult than those things?
This is an important question for those of us who want to make money out of blogs. Judging the correct time when blogging has reached the tipping point could be a big difference in when to invest and how much we earn.
So tell me, is blogging still “techy” or is it something everybody can do now? Is blogging ready for the masses or is it still in the nerd-zone? Is blogging “techy”?
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That’s great, but being the miserable party pooper that I am, i need to point out that the figures on Dave Sifry’s State of the Blogosphere post just aren’t reliable, as the amount of spam in the ‘sphere doesn’t appear to be accounted for, and Technorati certainly dont’ seem to be able to spot it.
Not Judging by the state of my rss subscriptions to Technorati results anyway.
Still, I DO like these things he puts out every quarter.
One thing that I wonder about every time i see these types of things is when will we finally stop gazing at our blogging navals in awe? I mean, really, the ‘sphere is growing, bloggers are human, people are arseholes, bloggers are saints… it goes on.
For a classic example see the headline over that BH this morning: Blogger arrested for Murder in Oklahoma – Heaven spare us all…