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Archives for May 2006

The State of RSS Reading in Linux

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As a desktop Linux user for over 5yrs, almost 3yrs of which I’ve been using Gentoo, I find it annoying to say the least that the RSS readers I’ve encountered are less than wonderful. There are some interesting projects of course, but for someone that lives on his feeds, I’ve yet to find anythiing that meets the kind of standard I’d wish for in a reader.

The two main projects that I’m aware of are Liferea and Akregator, part of the KDE desktiop system.

Liferea hss been my reader for a long time, and it’s OK, but clunky and somewhat ugly. Akregator is something i’ve been meaning to go back to (the last time I tried it it was really not ready for primetime) and this morning I did. It’s better, but still lacks maturity and full keyboard navigation. It also (like liferea) takes a long time to mark a folder as read if that folder contains a lot of feed items. For now, I’m going to stick with Akregator for a little while and see how I get on as it does have some features I like (like an icon that sits in the system tray and tells you how many unread posts it has) and it’s much more “readable” for me. I have pretty poor vision so that’s a top priority.

What About Firefox?

Lets be clear: I won’t put myself at the mercy of an online service, I want a desktop reader.

When I first discovered feeds and blogs, I used Firefox’s Sage, which seemed ok till it started mangling my feeds, it seemed to top out at around 300 feeds and start going all wonky. I’d be very interested to hear anyones experience with that app recently.

Is Sage ready for primetime? Is it of industrial strength now?

Im not sure what else exists for Firefox, or if they’d be worth trying, so if anyone has anything to say about RSS reading in Firefox it would be appreciated. I already do all of my blogging using our own blog editor for Firefox so that would make some sense. Hell, maybe we should build RSS reading into PFF?

Anyway, your thoughts welcomed on the state of blog reading in Linux….

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Filed Under: RSS

Handling Mistakes in Public

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When, inevitably you make a mistake, or a bad call, what do you do? Pretend it didn’t happen, hope it will just go away, wrap it in corporate speak and pray it just blows over before the boss gets back?

For those that missed it, there was some fun and games yesterday as O’Reilly got their knickers in a corporate twist over the copyright of “web2.0”. Sheesh, how un-web2 can you get?

Owning Your Mistakes

Read the O’Reilly response to this PR fiasco then read Rick Segal’s excellent analysis and advice on how it should have been handled.

First, if you own it, step up, take the direct hit, and stay put to deal with the fallout. “Brady” on the O’Reilly web site does the standard our pr people released the following statement nonsense and off we go into corporate-speak dribble. Sara Winge didn’t personally get on the blog and say, I made this call. A VP of Corporate Communications should know better, should have anticipated the fallout and, even with Tim on vacation, should have known how to deal with this.

The post is a well deserved slam at O’Reilly’s corporate muppets, but also has some great advice for how to handle these things when they happen.

But Dont SuckToo Much…

In contrast, in a fun post also from yesterday Nick Carr slaps Steve Rubel over a somewhat ridiculous post entitled I like companies that say “we suck”. I thnk there is a balance that needs to be struck between between showing accountability, and communicating clearly with your customers/readers/users and handling the day to day business of running a company.

It doesn’t pay to take these things too far, but they’re certainly best not ignored. As Nick point’s out, he’d rather deal with companies that spend their time creating better products than whining about how much they suck.

Friday food for thought….

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Translating Performancing Firefox – Looking for Partners

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We’re getting pretty close to releasing the next version of Performancing Firefox, and it promises to be a significant release in that for the first time, users will be able to use the blogosphere’s #1 blogging tool in their own language. Provided we can enlist your help with translations of course.

Looking for Partners

When we release in new languages, it would be a good idea to be able to promote Performancing Firefox in the local language, and for that, we’re looking to team up with people and organizations that have a [insert language here] audience that will be able to let their readers/users know about the language release aswell as help us maintain the translation files and address the Performancing audience in that language in the form of an announcement here on the site.

In return, we would like to help promote you or your service to those of our memebers that speak your language.

Who this Would Work Well For

If you run a blogging service, or a popular blog in your own language, please contact me ([email protected]) in english. We are already teaming up with some great folks for an Arabic version of PFF and would love to speak to people initially about other major languages before we start tackling smaller ones.

How YOU Can Help

If you’re German, French, Spanish, Chinese […..] and do not run a popular site/service in your language, you can still help, and we’d be very very grateful if you would.

What we’d like, is to make contact with Performancing members that can help us reach the right people to team up with, and work with us as liasons to those groups. Again, please email me at [email protected]

We’d also welcome any comments and pointers or suggestions you may have on the subject in general, and the comments section of this thread is the best spot for discussion

Thanks everyone!

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Using the Web2.0 Bandwagon to Jumpstart a Real Business

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I was reading this story about a new “web2.0” site called WineLog this morning, and had several thoughts on it that I’d like to share with you. Frankly I was a bit surprised at myself. Pre- seven cups of coffee and shower I’m not generally this thoughtful, but I think there’s food for thought, and fodder for discussion here…

When I saw the headline in my reader, my first thoughts ran a bit like this:

  • How much did they pay to get that mention?
  • Is 53k partially targetted web2.0ers enough to kick this off?
  • Wonder if they built that using Drupal?

In the course of reading the article, and taking a look at the site, I managed to answer those questions and draw some conclusions. It’s those conclusions I want to talk to you about.

Using the Web2.0 Bandwagon to Jumpstart a Real Site

The first question was easy to answer: I simply don’t know, and really don’t care too much, I just wondered why such a mediocre idea had gotten a full write-up on TechCrunch — And the answer to that, is probably as simple as “they put a few web2.0ish things like comments (gasp, horror…) and RSS on the site and made a good pitch to Arrington.” Which led to the second question, and some thoughts on web2.0, Search engines and bandwagons.

There’s no doubt that dumb as we may find some of the web2.0 “oooh, i made a website!” silliness out there, if you pitch it right, and get a kick start from blogs like TC and others where the blog/web2.0 crowd is dense (pun not entirely unintended) you can get an awful lot of link love. And I’m thinking that if you’re smart, and build your site with Search in mind, you may just be able to jump the “tech gap” (the gap between your first 25k users and real users.)

If you’re a bit lost, go check out Om’s summary of the 53k meme that was doing the rounds a couple of weeks back.

Using Search to Reach Real Users

So, you have your idea for a web2.0 site like WineLog — You want to get users submitting wines and commenting on them, and build a community of passionate wine buffs that will add content, buy wine and recruit thier friends. You don’t want much huh? Here’s how you do it:

  1. Build the site, put all the web2.0 crap you can think of on it (whilst not making it entirely useless to real people),
  2. Season with AJAX, but be careful not to overdo it, as you’ll want people to be able to actually link to individual pages
  3. Pay very close attention to the way your urls work, and make it easy for people to share pages by linking to them from their own sites using your preferred link text.
  4. Do everything you can to bill it as “web2.0”, really, these folks will link to anything. and pay particular attention to the A-listers in this category and delicious tags. Do all of the normal things you would to promote a site, but do it “web2.0 style”.
  5. Every couple of weeks, launch a new feature (an AJAX gimmick will usually do) and repeat step 4
  6. Rinse and repeat for 6mts.

If you do a good job on every step, chances are that you’ll be getting some serious Google love by the end of your first six months, and that should be enough to take you to phase 2 – Real Users.

Make it Easy for Real People

By the time you start getting real users in though the front door(s) you’ve created using Search, — every page is your front door — you’ll need to start thinking about them in terms of revenue. Real users don’t want gimicks, they want simple things like:

  • To find what they want without having to think
  • To know where they are and what they can do

Im not saying take useful features away, particularly not sharing features, but do go easy on the real gimmicks. At this point it’s all about usability, and ease of transaction. Think about the original web2.0 site: Amazon

Where WineLog have Gone Wrong

Ok, so we’ve been talking thusfar about using the web2.0 bandwagon, and the link frenzy anything with a few AJAXy widgets on it can incite, but you do need to get the Search engine bit right in order to jump the tech gap in this manner.

There are other ways of jumping that gap im sure, but tech folks tend to share with tech folks, and though making it easy to email a friend etc etc are all things you should do, they’re not going ot get you real users (the non web2.0 crowd) half as quickly as using Search, and you dont want to be paying for your users or doing the PR dance with traditional media if you can help it.

If you go look at WineLog, the Search savvy among you may notice a few fundamental mistakes:

1. Page Titles

The biggest, and most obvious, aswell as damaging mistake is this: Individual wines DO NOT have individual titles. Eeek! In Search terms that’s a cardinal sin, and it’ll cost them big time unless they correct it.

The correct title for that page is: 3 Rivers Cabernet Sauvignon 2001 with possibly a ‘| WineLog’ at the end for branding. Titles matter a lot!

2. Coding

Oh boy, as a proponent of clean, standards compliant code, and a recovering SEO™ I was rendered near apoplectic by doing a “view source” on their pages….

Lets do this one by one:

  1. Check out all the code in the of the page. Completely unnecessary, and serves only to push the real content farther down the page. Not a huge sin in Search terms, but it’s not good for sure.
  2. Outdated, bloated code: They’re using a hybrid div/table layout that pushes the real content down even further (again) and makes little or no sense bearing in mind recent browser shares.
  3. What should be both title and headline of this page, actually looks like this: 3 Rivers Cabernet Sauvignon 2001
     — it’s a tag that has no place in modern web standards, but worse, it should be an

    as close to the top of the page body as possible, not a million miles down. Useless.

3. URLS

Hmm.. well there’s nothing wrong with not having your keywords in your url. The benefit from such things is small, but when you’re making a bid for Search traffic, even small benefits are well, benefits right? urls like http://www.winelog.net/wines/Red are great, but http://www.winelog.net/wines/wine/963 is just a missed opportunity.

Tip: The reason keywords in urls DO make a difference, is not that Search engines think those urls are particularly more important than others, its becuase poeple paste whole urls on message boards and blogs that get turned into live links — those live links are gold, as they link to you with good link text.

I could probably go on, but im getting high blood pressure just looking at it heh…

By looking at where WineLog have gone wrong, you can (and so can they I hope) see what you need to do to get this stuff right. It’s not rocket science, there’s no seo-magic, (no seo is magic, its mostly either common sense or spam), just plain simple things you can do to increase your chances of coming up in the top 5 for 4/5 word key phrases on a community driven site like WineLog — which is, as this whole article has been about, the point.

Im sure the people from WineLog will read this, and I hope they correct these things and take the criticism as constructive and helpful.

Doing it On a Shoe String

The last thing I want to look at, is how you can do all of the above, every bit if ot, with almost no budget whatsover.

Remember my third question? “Wonder if they built that using Drupal?” Well, they didn’t. If they had, they could have avoided a lot of those Search mistakes without having to even think about them.

Having read some of their site, and Mikes review, the only thing they’re doing (planning on..) that may need some investment, is the “send to mobile” functionality. Even for that though there are relatively cheap web services that a drupal module could be built from easily. Everything else they’ve done Drupal can do pretty much out of the box.

Build a new module for the “wine” content type, and away you go, easy.

Nothing New

The funny thing, and it’s something that amuses me on a daily basis whilst reading about web2.0 startups, is that there is absolutely nothing new about this. It is NOT innovative to put comments and RSS on a site where people can submit reviews and send them to their friends — Amazon have been doing it for years.

But, this really is web2.0 — we’re doing a lot of the things we’ve already done, again. And this time, we’re doing it with new buzz words, and better communications (blogs) — it’s simply easier to spread ideas, and those ideas can spread very, very fast if you get the buzz right, and successfully hop on the web2.0 juggernaught as it motors by.

If savvy webmasters, bloggers and developers can weave a little Search mojo into their applications, then they may well be able to jump the web2.0 tech gap and actually make money.

Wouldn’t that be a shocker?

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How to Get 53% More Readers for Every Blog Post You Write

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You know from the 80/20 Rule of Headlines that the best way to get your writing read is to improve your headline. It can be a bitter pill to swallow when you realize that most people, even among those who subscribe to your blog, are not reading every post, but it’s not just you — it happens to us all.

So what was it about the headline of this post that got you to read this far?

Well, it’s not only that the headline makes a promise to deliver unique and useful information to my audience of bloggers. It’s also the way that it makes that promise.

The headline is very specific.

While certainly not the only method for writing good blog post titles, just about any headline can be made better by being as specific as you possibly can. Specificity increases credibility because specific details are simply more believable than broad assertions. Plus, a specific headline conveys more valuable information to a potential reader, which acts to draw them magnetically into the content.

Here are a few examples of ultra-specific headlines:

  • How I Made $19,931.42 Last Month With Google AdSense
  • In This Free 10 Chapter, 123 Page Ebook You’ll Learn…
  • Eleven Secret Techniques That Make Bloggers Money
  • Lose 36 Pounds in Only 7 Weeks
  • How to Shave 5 Strokes Off Your Golf Score in 3 Days

Of course, the single most important rule of ultra-specific headlines is that you need to be able to back up your assertions. And as I’ve done before, I break the rule in order to make the point (which is the true joy of writing a copywriting blog).

While I’m positive that being more specific in your post titles will increase the number of people who read your post, I have no earthly idea what the actual percentage will be for you. There are way too many variables involved.

So I really should have said:

How to Get More Readers for Every Blog Post Your Write

But that’s simply not as good a headline 🙂

Recruiting Blogging Partners

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Over the last couple of weeks as I looked over my metrics reports for my blog I realised I am going to need to bring in fresh blood if it is going to go any further. Originally launched with four bloggers there is only really me who posts to it in any real quantity with one other regular contributor. While not a failure as such the blog is being starved of content while I am busy with my work. So I just need to invite some people over and problem solved, right? Unfortunately it has not proved to be that easy.

We have established that blogging is actually surprisingly hard and many bloggers will not make it. Having blogging partners share the load is an obvious and possibly very enjoyable, potentially profitable arrangement. I have described the benefits of blog partnerships early in Performancing history (wow that seems like a long time ago). Perhaps my natural positive nature and wide-eyed optimism got the better of me, hah. Fact is just like with the majority of blogs where someone starts a blog and can’t keep the momentum, the same goes for blogging partnerships.

In theory the guilt-factor of letting someone down does keep a partner blogger working longer and harder than they would otherwise. Inevitably though the reasons for keeping going and the reasons for not will compete for attention and many bloggers, no matter how eager initially, will cave into external pressures or sheer laziness. Only a low percentage of bloggers stick at it, part of a team or blogging solo, paid or no.

Finding Help

Aside from financial incentives we have two choices; find bloggers who look like they will go the long haul or embrace the fleeting nature of the beast and allow a revolving door.

I have found the best place to look for long-haul bloggers are blogs. People who have maintained a decent blog for a length of time have proved they have that special something. This brings its own problem of what are you going to offer someone who already has a good blog. You will either need to make good friends with the person or need to incentivise somehow. There are intangible benefits of being in a writing team plus you can offer a cut of the proceeds. Inevitably this will need to be done carefully and sensitively, and best not to make promises you can’t keep. There is probably no point in even approaching someone who already has a lot of blog output, where will they fit you in to their schedule?

For me the choice is clear, I need to accept the people I bring on may not post for long, might turn out poor bloggers or might never contribute. I could put in a lot of effort to bring in others only to find I am still doing the majority of the work. The upside will be there might be some diamonds in the rough, plus if they only fill in on the days I can’t find time to even look at the thing that could still work.

The first place to look is the comments of your own blog. These people know what topics you often cover and do not need any introduction to your niche. I find with my own blogs though the majority of people who comment are already bloggers.

My approach for finding bloggers has been whittled down to observing regular contributors to good forums. People who spend as much time writing a forum comment as it takes to write a good blog post is going to be a good candidate. If they write entertaining and intelligent answers with bags of personality they are just what I am looking for. It sounds like a tall order but you have to remember you only need one or two posters for a blogs output to be transformed. There are stacks of forums with many many posters, not quite a needle in a haystack. The big benefit is these people might like to join you just for the fun of blogging, no promises on either side required. Bonus!

The downside to taking on people new to blogging is they need a modicum of training. Not exactly a three-week induction, but they will need some hand-holding.

Train them up, let them go

Obviously I recommend anyone new to blogging would find it easier to use Performancing Firefox rather than get to grips with an unfamiliar blogging system if between you they can get it configured. Otherwise many blog systems have quick-start tutorials.

You will need to teach them at least how to log in and post text. For the first little while you can probably make up the rest as you go along, editing their posts to your satisfaction along the way. If you make changes make sure you explain why and how. You might upset the blogger otherwise and it helps no-one if you make alterations forever, at some point you want them to be able to do this without supervision.

After you have shown them how to post you will need to get the blogger to post in your blogs house style.

Style guidelines

You might think your blog doesn’t have a style but believe me once you allow others to post on your blog you will discover you need one, or at least the other bloggers don’t post exactly what you expected. Ok, you might be delighted with their output but I think it’s best to start with some basic pointers. Here are some examples you might want to use as ground rules:

  • Be careful with images. Images are great to include with posts but ensure your bloggers are aware of copyright do not include massive files that throw out the template or slow down page load
  • Impress on them to only write subjects of interest to the niche. It might seem obvious to you but believe me once some people start blogging they post anything that enters their heads.
  • Get them to at least briefly check their spelling and grammar
  • Make sure posts are formatted with good paragraph breaks etc. Readability is vital to maintain an interested audience.
  • Use HTML, especially for links but also to wrap text around images, provide bold, etc.
  • Be wary of new bloggers that they are not just out for links to their affiliates. No promotional posts or PR copy and paste
  • If they reference someone elses post ensure they provide commentary, you don’t want to turn your blog into a proxy for del.icio.us or boingboing!
  • Choose an appropriate categories – it is amazing how many posts are filed under “misc” or no category at all.
  • Ensure no edits happen once a post is live. This infuriates RSS users!

If your blog software allows it, set posts unpublished by default so you get to decide what arrives in the subscribers RSS. This gives you chance to coach your bloggers, do some editing and make sure the quality is maintained while increasing volume.

It’s about people

In the end, for all the talk about blogging and style guidelines, the success or failure of any partnership, blog or otherwise, comes down to your ability to work with people. There is no predicting how well you will gel as a team and all you can do is work at it. Agree up front there will be a trial period and you might want to make it plain you retain veto on any changes or decisions.

Finally…

Looking over this post I might have made it look like a lot more work than just posting yourself. It is a lot of effort but you would be glad you brought someone else in if you are ever too sick to post or would like a break, plus there is nothing better than making friends – that has to make it worth it.

Would You Show Video Ads on Your Blog?

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Now that Google are allowing Adwrods advertisers to place click to play video on their content network (Adsense), we’ll soon be seeing them no doubt. The question is, would you want to show video ads on your blog?

unlike some intrusive advertising, users will have complete control. When a page loads, only a static image will be visible; the video will not start playing until the user initiates it. He or she will be able to advance the video, pause it, adjust the volume or click through to the advertiser’s site

Personally Im not keen on them, but not for any other reason than I just can’t envision them being successful for me.

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HTML for Bloggers

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HTML for Bloggers is a course intended for publishers who want to learn just enough code to make better blog posts, and be able tweak their own templates. When we discussed if bloggers should learn HTML and CSS, we talked about this course in terms of a series of “hacks” rather than a full on start to finish resource, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do. Read on for an introduction to the course.

What is XHTML?

XHTML is the eXtensible Hypertext Markup Language, and it’s not nearly as scary or hard as it sounds.

XHTML is what we use to markup text and images so that a web browser or other device can display our pages. It’s how we make lists, images, and links in our posts.

What is CSS?

CSS is what we use to style the text and images within our pages. It’s how we make text wrap around images, and how we make links change background color when you hover over them. CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets are responsible not only for how things look, but how they are positioned..

In this course, we’ll be focusing mostly on simple styles, as that’s in line with the target audience, but we will touch upon CSS positioning, and link to more in-depth resources.

Why Should You Care?

Modern publishing systems make knowing XHTML and CSS unnecessary. They provide handy buttons to format posts and upload images, and even some limited WYSIWYG functionality. So, if you have all of that, why would you want to learn to code yourself?

Many wouldn’t. Those that would, are those that publish professionally, or those that would just like to have more control over how things work on their blogs. Knowing a little about the mechanics of XHTML and CSS will enable you to write better, more professional looking entries.

Unfortunately, it won’t make you a better blogger though, that’s something else entirely 🙂

What Will You Learn?

As hinted at above, this course is being written for publishers, not designers. If you want to become a web designer, there are far, far better resources out there for you. W3Schools make a great starting point.

What you will learn here includes:

  • How to handle lists, images and links in posts
  • How to style those elements to fit your post and your blogs look and feel
  • How to tweak your own templates
  • Some of the theory and ideals of blog design
  • Some hacks for working with advertising
  • Resources for further learning, and tools of the trade

I’ve probably missed some things, as im kind of making this up as I go along but, we’ll add to it as we go, and eventually add a proper index page here.

Contributing to HTML for Bloggers

One reader asked if we’d accept contributions to this book: Absolutely, if you’d like ot contribute then either email me at [email protected] or send me a private message so we can collaborate.

Alternatively, you can post in the design forum or to your Performancing blog, and we’ll include the most useful ones we see.

Coming Soon…

like most of us, Im busy with a whole bunch of stuff all of the time, but I’m still hoping to crank out something on a weekly basis for this course. In the meantime, if you have suggestions, requests or ideas that you’d like to share, please do!