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Showing posts with label big-brother. Show all posts
Showing posts with label big-brother. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
OpenID
OpenID is very Good IdeaTM. At the very least, it will allow me to identify myself when commenting on Deborah's blog (from now on). I hope it picks up steam and the big sites start using it.
A few useful OpenID resources:
What I did is set up tags on my blog which delegate OpenID to MyOpenID.com, so I can use my blog URL with MyOpenID.com's service.
Here's what it looks like (inside the <head>):
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Web Feeds and Aggregators: Thoughts
I just "discovered" Google Reader.
Oh, no, I knew it was there all along. It's even one of Firefox's default feed subscription options. I had simply been ignoring its existence this whole time, content to use Firefox's Live Bookmarks feature for all my RSS/Atom needs.
For the uninitiated, a "web feed" is a way to "subscribe" to the content of a website, such as a blog, news outlet, podcast, or just about anything these days. After subscribing to a web feed, a visitor is automatically notified of new content on that website by their feed reader of choice. There are quite a few out there, including Firefox's Web Feeds feature, Google Reader, the Opera Browser, and Thunderbird.
Basically, in stead of having to go to every website to see if there is new content available, the reader can subscribe to the websites' feeds, and will be automatically notified of any new content on each site.
The problem is that with some feed aggregators, they simply pull all of your content off the site, and allow the readers to get the content without visiting the site. This becomes problematic for ad-supported websites, which typically either draw the readers to the site by providing unique participatory content, such as a discussion forum or comments, by only providing a summary of the actual content in the feed, or by injecting ads into the feed.
I am not an ad-supported website, but I do like my readers to interact with me and each other through comments. If none of the users are drawn to my actual website, then none of them will see each other's comments.
The other thing I like to do is keep track of roughly how many people are reading my blog, and blogger doesn't provide tools to track users on the site itself, much less the feed. They do provide a mechanism to insert something into the feed at the bottom, which could be used to tally readers.
What I have been doing is having the feed only contain the first paragraph or so of the post, and then the readers are directed to the post's actual page. This may prove inconvenient for some readers, although I was trying out Thunderbird, and what it did with my blog was to simply load the post's page directly into the reading frame, which is actually ideal from my perspective.
Other readers, particularly aggregators such as Google Reader only display the text and image content, and use their own formatting.
I have been considering switching the feed to contain the entire post, but I'm not yet sure. What do you think? Is anyone actually reading this? Do you use web feeds? What reader(s) do you use? Do you prefer to have blogger format the post, or do you prefer your reader's formatting?
I have decided that for the time being I will try out Google Reader for all of my friends' blogs, and for newsletters that I read every time, but for news sites where I tend to cherry-pick the articles, I'm sticking with Firefox's live bookmarks: it gives you a menu of the latest posts, with the ones you've read already grayed out. I wouldn't want my feed list to get clogged with every article on Ars Technica, Slashdot, Technocrat, and certainly not Digg.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Wordpress
When I switched from the old Blogger to the New Blogger beta, I posted about some of the changes that they had made, and also touched on some of the things I liked and didn't like about the changes. Since then, I've had some time to work with the new Blogger, and I've noticed some annoyances.
Recently, I was (slightly) involved in beck switching her blog from Typepad to Wordpress. In researching Wordpress' features, I noticed a few things that I liked, and I also recently noticed that it is possible to move an entire blog, comments and all, from Blogger to Wordpress without much trouble.
So the question arises, should I switch to Wordpress?
Here are some things that I like about blogging with Wordpress over Blogger:
- Big Brother: Google gets to corrolate my blog with my search history, e-mail, my Google Checkout purchase history, etc. There are some parts of "the world's information" that I would like to keep unorganized and inaccessible, thank-you-very-much.
- Login issues: whenever I log in to my e-mail account and the session expires, I get logged out of my blog. This is annoying, and it didn't happen before my Blogger account was absorbed into my Google account.
- Web Statistics: Wordpress gives you excellent statistics, not only on traffic to your blog, but also on how many people are subscribed to your feeds. I use Webalizer and ClustrMaps to get something similar in nature, but I have no idea how many people are subscribed to my feeds or where else they come from.
- It requires no change: I'm already doing it.
- Uploading pictures to Blogger posts with Picasa: it's easy, and the hosting is free (to a point).
- Wordpress makes labels (tags/categories) as I use them less convenient, or at least so I hear. This is one feature that Blogger does quite well.
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
New Blogger Layout
You may have noticed that my blog now looks like everyone else's, with the navigational bar on the right. You may also have noticed other changes. These are all due to the fact that I just changed over from the old Blogger to the new Blogger, with its new layout engine. Before, I was able to use the same template on both of my blogs, simply by copying and pasting the template HTML from one blog to the other. With the new WYSIWYG editing, this is not possible, because the modules are unique to each blog, and copying a template which references nonexistent modules is a bad idea. I was able to keep most of the same page elements, though I have since removed some of the lists of links from this blog so that I only have to maintain one list. From this point, I expect the content of the nav bars to grow apart, so I'm paring them down to what makes sense for each.
The advantages of the new layout engine over the old are:
beta" is the fact that it's tied to my Google account. Now, not only does Google have all of my e-mail indexed, it "knows" that the same person owns these two blogs, and performs the searches that I perform while logged in. It also has a few purchases associated with my account, thanks to Google Checkout. I'm not paranoid or anything, I just don't like that the same company has all of this information on me. It increases their confidence that they can predict what I will like (which no doubt drives the AdSense ads that I see while online), but that also decreases my freedom to dictate how I am perceived by the websites I use.
Obviously, I could use a separate account for all these things, which is pretty much what I was doing before I started using my Google account with Blogger, but there's the convenience factor. That, combined with the $20 off $50 deals they were offering is why I use Google Checkout. The world would be a more convenient place if all websites had a single login in order to make a purchase in stead of a separate account at each, but I would rather that my bank manage that account, and that my bank not also have access to all of my e-mail and online musings, conveniently tied together in the same account.
Don't get me wrong, I'm rooting for Google against Yahoo, Microsoft, and the other portals because they generally do things right, but that doesn't mean I'm going to drink their Kool-Aid and trust them blindly. I may yet decide to create separate dedicated accounts for blogging, e-mail, and purchases. It's so convenient not to, though.
- Labels
- Comment feeds
- Graphical layout and template content management
- Dynamic pages: instant publishing
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