Blog

5 Steps To Increased Blogging Productivity with PFF

In my last post, I talked about how to find writing ideas using your web analytics package. Here’s a simple technique I used in Firefox, with the Performancing for Firefox extension, to set up several posts and increase my productivity.

Step 1: In your blog’s web analytics reports, find the one that shows the top search terms used to come to your site.

Step 2: Open up the PFF pane and make sure you don’t have a draft open.

Step 3: Highlight an interesting search word or phrase and drag it with your mouse into the “Title” field of PFF.

Step 4: Save the “stub” either by using CTRL-S or the “Save as Note” button.

Step 5: Now “Clear Content” and repeat steps 1-4 for the next search term that interests you.

I used this technique the last three days to drive up my productivity level – to as high as 14 posts (yesterday), over 4-6 blogs. What happens is that by building a collection of post stubs with suitable titles, you prep the background processes of your mind. You tell it that you are planning to write these articles, and your subconcious takes over for your conscious mind.

If you use this technique often enough, and are clear on what you are writing about, it organizes your thoughts. Sometimes, you might even see an article in your head. Articles may appear to you immediately, or they may take a few days.

It has worked for me. I used this technique (without the PFF of course 🙂 about 4 years ago to produce ideas for 100 short stories, and 40 or 50 completed stories, in about a month, as well 900 pages of content for a computer programming book in 3 months, including editing.

It works, when I remember to use it. And with PFF, I’ve successfully used it for blogging. Provided you have a web analytics package, this is an effective way to drive up your blogging productivity while actually maintaining writing quality.

Blog Hijacking

I was speaking with Tris earier this evening, and he drew my attention to a nasty little case of blog hijacking involving Blogger, and Gmail. According to his post about the hijacking, its been about 24hrs since the distraught blogger put in a help request to get Google to help her get her blog back, but still no help.

Come on Google, you should know better than this. When the shit hits the fan, someone needs to hustle before things get out of hand.

See Tris’ post for the full scary details, and if you have Blogger and Gmail account, start taking some steps to protect yourself from similar problems. Changing your password immediately would be a good first step, and reading Chris’ post on personal information would make an excellent 2nd step.

Risk Aversion Kills Creativity

I’ve always felt that committees were pure evil, something to be avoided at all cost. The decision making process grinds to a halt, creativity is throttled into submission and the life is kicked out of any potentially great project.

I’ve been neglecting my blog reading this week (and last) as we all scurry around in a kind of organized chaos getting ready to release our somewhat 007 major product offering for this year this month, but happened to stop by Jeremy’s site and see his post about how committees suck the life out of projects and displaying this rather natty graphic from a post about risk aversion at one of my long time (hehe, well a few months at least) favorite blogs, creating passionate users.

The post at CPU is superb btw, read it.

Being a company of 3 and a half (i dont get to steal all of andy’s time..) we dont suffer from this particular ailment, if we all agree, great, if i want to get my own way i just shout and scream untill i do 🙂

Tracking Conversations

One of the frustrating things about blogs as “distributed conversation” is keeping track of places where you have commented. People often reply but you never see their answers because you forget or lose where you have commented. There are a couple of low-tech ways of dealing with this and a new service that aims to solve the problem.

Getting involved in the conversation is essential to your blogging success. You need to network, get known, of course, but also you need to know if people are criticising you, commenting about your blog or service and engage in discussion about their points. Here at Performancing we have to track what the blogosphere is saying about us and Performancing for Firefox in particular.

What I tend to do is to bookmark (plain old browser bookmarks) posts and re-visit every once in a while. This is not optimal, particularly as I could be using any one of three machines at any time!

A better approach that I recently heard about is to use Del.icio.us and tag posts where you have commented with a tag that you use for following up.

These are ok workarounds, particularly the del.icio.us approach but still when you think about it pretty lame solutions compared to what is possible with the technology, it amazes me that nobody until now has addressed the issue.

coComment is a new service that aims to automate tracking your conversations, complete with real time notifications and RSS feeds.

Whether you’ve commented on a blog or you’re just following a blog-based conversation of interest to you, coComment can let you know what’s been added to a particular discussion in real time

Currently you need an invitation to use the service. Lucky me I got one! You will be able to find codes knocking around the web, I am sure this is an intentional “leak” to build buzz.

The service works using bookmarklets, just like those available for del.icio.us and technorati. When you arrive at a post you want to comment on you fill out the comment form as normal, before you submit though you click your bookmarklet. Once the bookmark has done its business you submit your comment.

So far the comments I tried to post haven’t shown up and a couple of times a message has appeared saying the blog I am trying to use the service with is not supported. Not a great start but I will persevere with it because I hold out hope it will help me a lot. Other people seem to be getting on with it just fine.

Each user has their own page that allows you to track your conversations, here is mine. You can also subscribe to your conversations with RSS.

How do you track your blog comment conversations? Is this something you can see yourself using?

Handling Hate

Chris posted on the dangers of revealing personal info on your blog. I’d like to explore the issue of negativity a bit further: a surefire indicator that you’ve made your mark in the blogosphere is that you receive hate. What is it, why does it happen, what to do about it?

What I mean by hate

When I use the term “hate” I mean any type of negative language that is not meant in a constructive spirit; for instance, if someone says “Gee Andy I thought this Handling Hate post was a bit boring, I wish you would go back to the Monetization Makover series”, that would not qualify as hate.

What would qualify as hate:

Consistent trollish comments meant to degrade, hurt feelings, slander, etc.
Name calling / hate posts which go beyond disagreeing with your ideas and instead ridicule your religion, appearence, sexual orientation, etc.
Certainly any type of threat or violence (although keep in mind if something reaches this point it is time to call the police AND your personal attorney)

Why does it happen?

For some reason people say and do things on the Internet that they would never do or say in the real life.
Jealousy: however hard you work to make something a success, you can be assured that others will try just as hard to tear it down. The beauty is, if you’ve built something truly good, no amount of hate is going to bring it down (although it may hurt your feelings).
Stupid kids: I also think a lot of it comes down to the matuirty level of much of the blogosphere. I suppose it mirrors the Real World: it just isn’t that high. Further, there are a lot of teens and young’ens on the Net who may not know exactly where the “line” is (I know that when I first got on the Net, I sure didn’t).

The funny part is, I think the more successful you are, the more hate you get. Usually (*exceptions) if you’re getting hate, you’re doing something right.

What to do about hate

To me this question does not have one answer; it depends on the situation you’re in and what type of hate you’re getting.

Constructive hate: this is the best type of hate. Someone tells you how to make your blog better, without attacking you. In fact this isn’t really hate at all! How I’d react: read their criticism (with a grain of salt), and possibly act on it.
Good-spirited hate: hate that pokes fun at you but isn’t really mean spirited (e.g., parody). How I’d react: Either ignore it, or participate/reply (showing you have a sense of humor and humility will usually win you more fans). Again, this doesn’t really qualify as hate.
Comment trollers: How I’d react: If they do it once, moderate their comment as you please. If they do it twice (or thrice, or whatever threshold you like), ban their IP, as well as username (if applicable). Remember it’s your blog and you can do as you like!
Slanderers: If someone states something untrue about you, which they know to be untrue, with the intent to do you harm, you may have a legal case (in the USA, at least). No I don’t think you should use the legal system to solve all of your problems but if it’s slander that’s harming your biz, you should definitely act.
Name callers / racists / personal insulters: This one is a judgement call. If you think the person is an ***hole but harmless, you may wish to highlight their behavior (without namecalling back); you’ll be surprised just how many readers will come to your defense, and the hater may lose some reputation. However depending on the seriousness of the hate/insult, you may wish to do any of the following: ignore the hate; (if the language is very offensive) send an email complaint to their Web host; or if it’s really bad see the next point…
Threateners / weirdos / stalkers: You never know about people, esp. on the Net. There are a LOT of crazies out there. Don’t take any chances. Seriously. If someone has threatened you, it is time to call the police AND your personal attorney.

Personal reflections on hate

In the past I’ve gotten some hate and haven’t reacted very well. In hindsight, yes, I wish I would’ve handled things differently. I’ve also hated on people more than I should have (though I’ve never gone “too far” of course).

Part of it was that I was young & foolish, and part of it is that when it happens to you for the first few times, it really blindsides you, and you’re not sure how to react. Sometimes I just reacted too fast, when I probably should have “slept on it” before replying / posting / emailing.

But burnt hand teaches best. These days, when I see something like this, I’m less inclined to think “those bastards!!” and more inclined to think “Wow I’m in great company there” instead, and have a quiet laugh.

(As I side note, I find it odd that this poll has only received 12 votes to date, either it’s turning most members off from participating, or that forum just isnt very popular.)

Spread Performancing Firefox

If you’d like to show your support for our Performancing Firefox Blog Editor, or just tell your readers where they can get it, then please feel free to use the images on this page in your blogrolls, sidebars or posts.

Choose an Image

You can just right click and choose “save as” with any of the images below, or even grab a zip of the whole lot so you can play around with them, modify or alter to suit. The zip is posted at the bottom of the page.

The following two sets of images were contributed by Wayde Christie and were the winning entries in our first PFF banners competition.

Grab the Code

You can use the code below, once you’ve uploaded the image you want, or do anything you like with them.

Get the Zip

If you want a zip of all the images on this page, you can download it here

Made Your Own Banners?

If you’d like ot make your own buttons/banners we’d love to see them! email a zip file of your images to [email protected] and we’ll post the ones we like best on this page.

Thankyou!

Thankyou for your support of PFF, its a great tool, even if we do say so ourselves, and its all down to you. Fueled by your feedback, support and help over the last few months we’ve managed to shape PFF into one of the finest blog editor platforms on the market.

Not only that, it’s free, and will remain free!

Blogging Risks: Personal Information

I have just worked out this morning that two days ago was my seventh Blogiversary! My first ever blog post was February 1999. It was great looking through my old life but one thought stayed with me after reviewing my old entries, how much should I have made public?

One of the weird things that started happening after I had been posting for a while was I would be contacted by people I had never met. At that time I called the site my journal, I don’t know if the word “blog” had been coined yet. I wasn’t really part of any blog scene so my visitors came from search engines and clicks on newsgroup and discussion list signatures.

I got some very weird messages. People would email me like they knew me, really over familiar. I would get people asking to meet up because they were coming to England. People would ask how my wife and daughter were. They would comment on my photographs. I think I shared too much now thinking about it, I even had details of our new house on there – we could have had visitors!

We tell people that to get people involved in your blog you need to put across personality, people need to feel connected. Can you do that while keeping a distance? How personal do you need to be to have personality?

If you look around at some of the top bloggers, they all vary in how much personal information they share. Scoble gives quite advance notice of his travel plans, he even has his contact details right on his blog. We know about his family life. Darren Rowse very explicitly says he does not like to share too much and is very selective about what he does divulge.

I think Darren has it right now I have thought about it. Scary thing is, even though Darren is ultra careful he still wound up with a stalker making a physical attack on his house!

Thankfully they do not feel threatened now it has been resolved but I think there is a lesson for all of us, be careful how much you share. It frightens me now to think of how much I have let slip over the years, how much information I have put out there for anyone to read.

Your blog is not worth risking your families safety for.

PFF 1.1.1 Beta 2 – Nearly There!

You can now download Performancing Firefox 1.1.1 Beta 2 if you’re feeling brave, and help us trouble shoot the last couple of little bug fixes. We really appreciate your help, and although public beta testing got off to a slow start, we’re now starting to get some great feedback on posts posted by PFF devs in the PFF Beta Forum.

As always, please follow Jed’s instructions for using beta builds

Please Help Us Test!

There are a few points we would really like some help testing on this beta, hopefully it will be the last one before 1.1.1 final.

General Posting/Editing: Does PFF still work as it should in your blog software of choice? Particular interesting in this beta is category support in Drupal, yay! Because of that, it’s possible there are some regressions with other systems. Though we think it unlikely, confirmation that all is well in your software would be great.
General Functions: Context menu still working, side tabs for tools and bookmarks etc?
Set up your Performancing Blog! If you want to blog on the loose topic of pro blogging right here on performancing.com, you can now setup your blog right from PFF — registered users have had blogs for a while, but thanks to Emily, we’ve now integrated it more thoroughly into the account manager. Is it workiing ok? (tests will be removed, so dont worry about that…)
Blog This Blockquote Bug: If you don’t know what it is, dont worry about it, if you do, please let us know if it’s fixed.

Ok, have fun with this one, and please give us feedback on how it’s shaping up, hopefully we will be able to move onto 1.2 in a matter of days.

Thanks everyone.

Skip links