Skip links

Performancing

Main navigation

Blog

Productivity: Changing Your Writing Perspective

Writers have often been given the advice  that if they’re running into writer’s block, that they should change their perspective. This can mean any one of a number of things:

  1. If you’re reading the newspaper trying to get ideas, watch TV or turn on the radio.
  2. If you’re in the study room, go to another room, or even take a walk outside. If you’re outside, go to the library.
  3. If you’re typing on the computer, pull out a pencil and notepad.

You get the idea. Another option that has worked well for me in the past, especially when I’m trying to capture my natural voice, is voice recording. This is great for some types of blogs, and it’s often easier to capture ideas on a voice recorder.

In fact, most of this entry was done on my PalmOne Treo 650, through a combination of voice recording and some cryptic notetaking. The rough edtion was punched into the native mini-keyboard. To save time, I left out most of the vowels. Here’s an example of what I typed in, errors and all:

this works very well for me. One example of this tchnq is to chg rms. Or turn on the tv, or rdo dpndng on wht yr dng rt nw. Or if yr wrtng on paper, start typng. Or recording yr vce. As I’m wrtng ths, I’m at my fve chnse bfft. I didn’t wnt to lse the idea, so I plld out my treo.

You can probably decipher most of it, but basically I’m saying that I was at my fave Chinese buffet and got the idea for this post, and a couple of others. So as not to bother other diners, I didn’t do any recording until I was outside. The redundancy of text and voice helps me when I’m procrastinating later on in the day: two reminders that I must finish the blog entry.

Any voice recorder will do, provided that you have an easy way to replay your recordings over and over while transcribing. When I ran my print magazine, I always had several mini-dictation type recorders on hand for my interviewers. I also kept 2 in my car so that while I was out doing distribution or ad sales, or even just driving (not recommended), I wouldn’t lose a great idea.

While I still have a box of recorders, I’m much preferring using Ryan Rife’s free SoundRec program on my Treo 650. While spare on features, it turns my Treo into a reasonable sound recorder, which, surprisingly, is not a native function. In fact, when I read the PalmOne site’s specs for the Treo 650, I saw no mention of being able to easily record voice memos despite the device having a microphone. SoundRec makes it simple. Although, to my disappointment, the Treo doesn’t have a high enough signal-to-noise ratio to warrant using the recordings for podcasts. (For that, I use my low-hum desktop computer with a microphone and the OpenSource Audacity recording software.)

Still, this recording technique, along with a bit of text, helps me jog my memory later, when I actually sit down to post the final version of the blog entry. Overall, I get writing done than when I work without it.

Technorati Tags: writing, blog content, productivity, writing techniques

What’s More Valuable – A Comment Or A Trackback?

Steve Pavlina’s blog is the first one I’ve ever encountered that only allows trackback links. Steve has said that because of the volume of monthly traffic that he enjoys, it’s quite a task to manage the comments that he would typically get for his incredibly popular and valuable personal development site. He also indicated that it’s rather draining to moderate large volumes of comments. Instead, he has turned off comments and turned on trackbacks.

Trackbacks are mystery to many bloggers, but their value will grow on you. In fact, it took me about 3 weeks since reading about Steve’s use of them to truly understand their full value. Now this is only my own interpretation, but here’s a brief explanation and a list of positive reasons for using trackbacks on your blog:

  1. Say that you write a blog entry that references one of my entries. If I have trackbacks turned on, an excerpt of your post will appear in my entry as a trackback comment. The text that appears typically starts and ends with an ellipsis (…). The actual excerpt text both surrounds and includes the anchor text with which you linked to my entry. The exact specifics of trackbacks vary from one blog platform to another, but with WordPress at least, I’ve found them to be on automatically.
  2. While getting comments is an important aspect of building a successful blog, there is also the problem of getting unwanted comment spam. On one weblog that I called a hiatus on recently, I started getting 4-8 spam comments daily for several days. Now while I already had moderation turned on for comments, it was still a nuisance I had to deal with. I may yet have to deal with it more strongly in the future by blocking a list of IP addresses, if necessary. Steve Pavlina didn’t spell out his specific reasons, but he did say that comment moderation was a draining activity.
  3. Trackback comments, on the other hand, are generated when someone writes their own blog entry that references your site. Since spambloggers don’t generally write content, you will not have  spambacks. (At least not that I’ve seen so far; fingers crossed.)
  4. Enabling trackback comments encourages people to write posts that reference you, more so than if you only allow regular, manually-submitted comments. This arguably adds a bit more weight and credibility to the trackback comment, and thus might encourage other readers to visit the linking site.

Now here’s where I think that Steve Pavlina is even more of a genius than he already is, whether by design or not. By allowing only trackback comments, he’s either intentionally or unintentionally guaranteed that if you really want to comment on something he’s written, you’ll write your own post linking to him. Not only does he get you to write something possibly more lasting than a comment, but he also gets you to link to him.

Let that sink in for a moment. Some sites do not allow your comment to link back to your site. Some do. So comments are one-directional at best. Trackback comments, on the other hand, produce bi-directionality: links in both directions. The value of this is that many search engines and blog directories (such as Technorati) give your site more visibility as you gain an increasing number of links. I’m not talking about PageRank; if Nick says that links don’t matter, he needs a cyberspanking 🙂

That said, what Steve’s site does not have is an interactive discussion between readers. So while the linking is bidirectional, the conversation is not. Thus, disabling commenting in favour of just trackbacks might not be something you want for your own blog. However, if your blog does not have trackbacks enabled at all, I highly encourage you to turn them on to supplement commenting. Unfortunately, some blog platforms just do not support them. This includes Blogger.com and some platforms that do not fully support XMLRPC functionality.

Technorati Tags: blog comments, trackbacks, site promotion

Mining Search Data with Metrics

One of the neat things you can do with Performancing Metrics, and many other stats tools is to mine search data to get an idea of how people are finding your blog through search engines.

Be warned though, people search for some weird shit heh…

The Devil is in the Details

We’ve been working hard on the “details” page for search referers in Metrics. You will now be able to get your hands on more detailed metrics in that part of the system, and see exactly what search engnes are refering, and to what page — All GOOG all the time? Sure looks that way, but once you start getting really deep into your blogs referers you can certainly learn a lot of useful things.

One such thing is to get ideas for new posts by learning what users are looking for when they reach you — an even better way is ot look at your sites local search log if you have one.

I don’t think I’ll be writing anything about “body language” anytime soon on Performancing, but it’s interesting stuff nonetheless….

Don’t Write For the A-List

One of the topics of conversation that pops up every so often is the “A-List”. There are people who want to be in this exclusive club, people who envy them, people who love or hate them (without knowing them). I have seen many complaints this week alleging that the A-List only link to each other. Why this obsession?


Who are the A-List anyway? I am not even sure what the strict definition is. Is it the Technorati Top 100? Or is there some hidden committee somewhere with secret handshakes and rituals that decides?

Whoever they are, it seems these are the people who get a lot of traffic to their blogs. I’m convinced though it is not the traffic per se that people get all worked up about. I think it is the need for “fame” that gets bloggers panties in a bunch.

I am not knocking bloggers for wanting to be famous. Personally I would rather have a popular blog and be personally relatively unknown, but hey whatever floats your boat. What I do take objection to is when people write posts specifically and only to get an A-List bloggers attention. (This is why in this post I will not mention any bloggers by name, heh). This says to me that they would rather ignore their real audience to achieve an audience of one.

It might well be a technique that works, I expect it does to an extent. Once you have that bloggers attention though, then what? They might comment or link, yes. Great stuff if they do. But what will your main audience think of you? And if you have put all your effort into building a pitch to one A-Lister, will your archives have enough meat that your new found friend will want to subscribe?

Here’s a better idea. Get attention by doing good work. Attract A-Listers to link to you as a side-effect of having a great blog and something interesting to say. Remember todays A-Lister could be tomorrows “remember him?”, and they all started out somewhere. The audience you are ignoring could be tomorrows A-List.

If you want to be famous online then it is no different to getting famous offline, do something to get noticed. You just have to be a big enough self publicist and eventually you will get there. Be prepared though if all you have to offer is attention-seeking then you will soon drop out of the spotlight. A lot of the top blogs maintain their position because they offer something real and valuable every day. Attention whoring would only get you so far.

For me, success in this game isn’t so much about making some list but having the best blog or blogs you possibly can and really serving the audience you identified very well. I don’t know for a fact but I have to believe it is so much more satisfying than chasing after attention. And wouldn’t it be so much nicer if you did get that attention for doing something worthwhile?

How Many Blogs do You Wanna Track?

If you own a blog network, or just have more than one blog – be it 5, 10 or 300, you’ll be glad to know that you can add as many blogs as you like to Performancing Metrics when it is launched in public beta next week

Own a Network? Want to Start One?

When I told you earlier that PMetrics had a little more bollocks to it than your average stats package, I wasn’t kidding. We’ve built this with professional bloggers in mind. We know you have more than one blog. We know you’d like to track all your blogs from one place….

And that’s not all, we know you’d like to see aggregate stats for your entire network right?

It’s coming, and it rocks.

Aggregate functionality is still in development, but during the beta period (maybe 2wks from now..) it will be added, and you’ll be able to get an excellent feel for the health of your network in one place.

How cool is that?

Performancing Metrics

Some months back when the ideas for this site, it’s community and it’s tools were still being formed, we took a long hard look at blog statistics, and thought we could do something different, something better. Something with a little more bollocks.

Several months later, we’re nearing the public beta of a world beating blog statistics service designed by professional bloggers, for professional bloggers.

Performancing Metrics

We’ve been in closed alpha, with a trusted group of friends for a few weeks now, and even as we speak, the system is still being tweaked based on their invaluable feedback, feedback we’re hugely grateful for. We want that to continue with our beta.

As with all our tools, our site, and our services, Performancing Metrics will be shaped by you. As it stands, it rocks, but with help from you guys, it’ll only get better.

I’ll be posting a few more details over the coming days, in the meantime, if you have questions feel free to ask them here in the secure knowledge that they may well go ignored untill nearer the date 🙂

Finally im happy to say we’re out of 007 mode on this, and cant wait to open the public beta next week!

Blogger Burnout

Burning the candle at both ends is something we are becoming accustomed to at Performancing. As Nick mentioned yesterday, as well as a new release of Performancing for Firefox, we have a whole new treat in store for you lucky bloggers! While rushing mad headlong into work is always exhilarating, it’s important to maintain at least a tenuous grip on sanity so you don’t end up a useless burnt-out husk of your previous self.


There seems to be a lot of it about. I have been reading with interest D’Arcy Normans blog where he has been talking about bloggers going on hiatus, and about trying to recover some sort of balance between real world relationships and online ones. This is quite a common theme, and I can only see it becoming more so. “Meatspace”, especially to geeks like me, can be more difficult in many ways than the virtual space we inhabit. It is so tempting to give up on the real in favour of the virtual. Heck, I barely get out of the house now!

The other aspect is the amount of effort we put into blogging at the expense of everything else. It can be so rewarding, so engrossing, that we begin to forget there are other things that need to be done. For those of you with careers outside of our blogging, where blogging is a fun distraction, this can be quite threatening to the mortgage payments so be careful!

My body is telling me I am doing something wrong. I have had a cold since before Christmas, I have aches and pains and my sleep patterns are crap. I think it is about time I took the hint! I know Nick hasn’t been on top form either, to the point where he nearly had an unfortunate gastric accident at SES NY.

A sense of balance is all it takes. Even if you need to schedule time to make it happen, we need to touch base with the important people around us. Spend some time away from the computer. Especially in my case, get some fresh air and some sun.  Perhaps even (shock!) some exercise. A fresh body and mind, with healthy relationships, it has to translate into 100% more success overall.

Do you ever feel like you have the balance all wrong and you are running yourself into the ground? What do you do to manage it?

Fighting Mobile Bandwidth Costs with RSS

Nick recently talked about full-text feeds and why he felt that they were good. I approached the issue from a different angle: the cost of bandwidth for those of us reading feeds from a PDA/ cellphone/ smartphone. I’m happy to report that a partial solution to the problem exists: offloading.

I use the term offloading in the sense that you offload content to a PDA, after you’ve downloaded it to your desktop. As I found out a couple of days ago, the cost of data bandwidth for a smartphone is immensely higher relative to what a DSL line might cost, monthly. So a simple solution is one that’s actually been in use for several years: offloading.

There are also a number of RSS readers for mobile devices, however, all of them either use a browser or cost money. I know, I know. What’s the big deal with spending a few bucks for software when you’ve spent several hundred for a spiffy new device? Well, a lot of things. Sure I use commercial software, but I mostly try to stick with OpenSource. And I’ve not yet come across such a mobile RSS reader.

I have, however, come across Plucker, which is an OpenSource file format, and Plucker Viewer. Unfortunately, Plucker is only available for PalmOS-based devices for now. The Plucker Desktop and other tools will work on MS-Win, Linux, and Mac OS X desktops/laptops. Maybe someone will help produce a Plucker Viewer for devices running other OSes.

Plucker Viewer runs on your PalmOS device by letting you scroll through Pluckered text/HTML documents, much like an ebook viewer. Plucker Desktop lets you define channels for mobile editions of websites, schedule channel updates, and convert to Plucker format. You then hotsync the document(s) to your PalmOS device.

What Plucker cannot handle yet is RSS feeds. (It supposedly handles RDF feeds and PDF documents, but I saw no proof of this in the help files.) So in comes Sunrise Desktop (which also runs on MS-Win, Linux, and Mac OS X). Sunrise Desktop is very similar to Plucker Desktop, except that it can convert RSS feeds to Plucker format, as well websites and local text files.

I’m happy because I can download my (partial-text) webfeeds when I’m planning to be offline, then offload the resulting Plucker files to my Palm Treo. But hopefully, Plucker usage will spread and someone will help out so other devices can use the Plucker format. The interesting thing is that Project Gutenberg is now offering some of their free e-texts in Plucker format, so I’m guessing there are more PalmOS-based

Even if you cannot use Plucker Viewer, there are software tools that download mobile editions of websites for whatever OS your PDA uses. So you can still use this technique to save yourself the cost of going online with your PDA. However, you should be aware that downloading more than a few pages of a site all at once classifies the software you are using as a spider/bot. Overdoing the updates may get you banned on some sites. This may or may not be true for RSS feeds.

Technorati Tags: offline content, mobile browsing, plucker, sunrise