When we look at technology we use everyday, the great success stories all have one thing in common: competition. They all achieved their success despite healthy competition, or perhaps because of it.
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Category Archives: Becoming a Better Blogger
Fixing the WordPress.com Possibly Related Feature
April 27, 2008 –
You might want to skip this post if you aren’t hosted on WordPress.com.
You may have heard talks about how “Related Posts” was going to become an integrated feature in the WordPress core. Last friday they released a feature called “Possibly Related”. They use Sphere.com’s technology to analyze what posts are related to the current post and add links to the bottom of it. Doesn’t sound bad, right? Wait for it…
For WordPress Multiuser (like WordPress.com) they’re including links to other “related” posts by other people.
Who Moved My Cheese? The New WordPress Admin Interface
April 18, 2008 –
Two of my blogging heroes and inspiration Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky have joined together on a new venture called StackOverflow: overflowing with awesomeness. They are also doing a weekly podcast, and you can download the first 45 minute podcast here (8 MB). In the discussion, Joel makes a great comment: Windows Vista gives you change without giving you any value. As a Windows XP user there is no compelling reason to upgrade because you’re going to have to relearn where everything is, but you don’t get any new and compelling features or applications to offset that.
This perfectly explained my resistance to the new WordPress 2.5 admin interface.
Presenting: Livejournal Theme for WordPress
April 01, 2008 –
You know the story. You’ve been using LiveJournal since 1999. It’s your home. You’re familiar with it. You’re on the list of notable LiveJournal users. But times they be a changin’. You’re friends are all leaving LiveJournal for WordPress because it’s a better C-M-S (whatever that is). You’ve switched to WordPress, but everything looks strange and confusing.
Don’t worry, as usual engtech has your back.
How to Generate 100s of Backlinks in Minutes
March 25, 2008 –
The abrasive model:
1. Say something bone-headed so people clamour to their keyboards in order to prove you wrong.
2. Make commenting on your post as hard as possible so that people will respond with blog posts of their own instead of a comment.
Free WP Plugin Idea: Use Referrers Instead of Trackbacks
March 19, 2008 –
Blogs have a way of keeping track of who is linking to them using trackbacks or pingbacks. It’s a good idea in theory because it helps you follow the discussion as it spreads to new areas, but in practice it is mostly filled with spam because getting a well-placed trackback on a popular website can be a good source of traffic.
Instead of using trackbacks, why not use referrers?
The Fragmentation of Identity and Discussion
March 18, 2008 –
Once upon a time the way someone would comment on something you wrote would be to write a blog post of their own in response. Then blogs got a comment section and people could write what they had to say directly on the post. Now the discussion around a post has completely fragmented: people are saying stuff about your content on Twitter, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Facebook… pretty much anywhere except for the post where you originally wrote it.
How to Explain RSS to Normal People - 2008 Edition
February 28, 2008 –
As a geek who enjoys spending too much time on the internet, I like RSS almost as much as delicious toast. As a blogger, RSS is the shiznitz because it lets you consume a lot more information and it makes it easier for other people to read your blog without having to drop by every few days to see if you’ve written something new.
For something so useful, it’s pretty hard to explain why people should use RSS. Lots of people try to do it. This is my take on it. It’s 2008 and explaining RSS should be much simpler because if you’ve used Facebook, then you’ve used RSS.
How to delete your Tumblr tumblelog with TumblrCleanr
February 25, 2008 –
There’s one feature missing on Tumblr: how do you delete your Tumblr? At some point you might want to destroy all traces of your tumblr (privacy concerns, or you want to use it for something else) and there isn’t an option to do that — other than click the delete button on every individual post. I wanted to repurpose a tumblr I had been using for feed aggregation and it had over 18,000 posts. That’s a lot of clicks.
Enter the TumblrCleanr. Provide it with your tumblr domain name as well as your username and password and it will delete up to the latest 3000 posts at a time. You can keep running it until your entire tumblr is clean as a whistle.
How to Play Downloaded Videos on Your iPod, Xbox 360, or DVD Player
January 27, 2008 –
I’ve been slumming through the support forums at answers.yahoo.com lately and this is a question I see come up often: how do I download a video and put it on my electronic device? More and more consumer electronics devices that can play videos, but that means we have to learn more about the big, bad scary world of video codecs.
Online Survival Guide: 9 Tips for Dealing with Idiots on the Internet
January 09, 2008 –
Winter is one of the worst for flame wars because environmental conditions make people more irritable and more likely to spend more time online. Here are some tips for navigating online discussions from someone who has been participating and managing public forums for over 15 years.
Internet Duct Tape featured in Blogging Heroes
November 09, 2007 –
When bloggers like Gina Trapani, Mark Frauenfelder, Chris Anderson, and Phillip Lennsen are honored to be collected in New York Times’ bestselling author Michael A. Banks’ new book, Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World’s Top Bloggers I can’t even begin to describe how exciting it is to be included in the list. “Someone must be making a mistake” went through my head several times.
Blog Action Day: Save Paper when Readers Print Your Blog
October 15, 2007 –
Today is Blog Action Day with a focus on the environment and I’m going to teach a quick CSS trick for how to save paper by reducing what gets printed when someone prints an article from your blog.
Blog Tip: Create a Link Post in 3 Seconds
October 03, 2007 –
One question I’m frequently asked is “how do you build those Best of Feeds weekly links?” The way I do it is pretty complicated, but I’ve found a much simpler way that I want to share with you all.
Blog Tip: Creating a Blog Maintenance Start Page with Netvibes
September 25, 2007 –
In Blogger GTD, Leo mentioned that it was a good idea to have one inbox for all your blogging related notifications. I hate cluttering in my inbox, but I do agree that it makes sense to have a single point of reference rather to spend 5 minutes checking some information in one place and then spend 5 minutes checking information in another place. As Skelliewag says, those 5 minutes add up over the course of a day and by the end of it you’ve wasted an hour.
Directing everything to my inbox would never work for me, but it is possible to have a single start page for all your blog maintenance activities using Netvibes.
Only Two Days Left to Win Graphic Design Services for Your Blog
September 24, 2007 –
Two days left to win free graphic design for your blog.
Delicious Stumbles - Post to Delicious and StumbleUpon at the same time
September 14, 2007 –
Delicious and StumbleUpon are two different social networks that let you save websites you like. Delicious Stumbles is a time saving tool for the Firefox web browser that will let you update your StumbleUpon account easily when you bookmark pages on delicious. With Delicious Stumbles I get all of the super-useful features I like about delicious (speed, recommended tags) but I also teach StumbleUpon more about what I like without having to spend all that time cutting-and-pasting between two accounts.
- Submit a page you’ve saved to delicious to StumbleUpon using the same URL, title, tags and description
- Use delicious’ super-quick tagging features instead of StumbleUpon’s really slow tagging
- Stumble any of your existing bookmarks
- Stumble a page while you’re saving it to delicious
Managing Spam Maintenance with Akismet Auntie Spam Version 2
September 13, 2007 –
Akismet Auntie Spam is a maintenance script for WordPress administrators. One of the problems with the Akismet spam protection service is that sometimes it misidentifies a real comment as spam. WordPress has a spam recovery console that I like to call the spam inbox.
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