November 16, 2008 – 10:06 pm
Epiblogger… it’s what’s for breakfast. That was a delicious breakfast. It’s a meal like that that let’s me know I am doing ok. But I can’t say the same for Epiblogger or for the genre.
Is it just me or does everyone notice that the world would be far better off without metablogs? I subscribe to a large portion of metablogs and I can skim through them and think—what is this bullshit?
I have two problems:
- I assume that everyone thinks like me.
- I shouldn’t be passionate about anything because I just get pissed off.
The first problem is probably most peoples problem. For all I know you love metablogs. You can’t get enough of them. You could—if faithful enough—live on metablogs alone. The second problem is probably familiar as well. I don’t watch hockey because I end up spending three hours yelling at my television and it becomes obvious that I am slowly becoming my father. While I love my father, that’s not a bridge I am ready to cross.
The solution
Here is the solution as I see it: stop metablogging. But on the other hand we have a PR3 and why should give that up? Plus I think at least 4 people read this blog on rare occassion. I mean, the reasons to keep going are overwhelming.
This is point where I use an analogy
And a bad analogy at that. I think it has something about how everyone needs breakfast and I have the best breakfast in town so keep coming back to Epiblogger… right?
Lament or rejoice?
I am somewhere between being completely in love with blogging and the community it represents and disgust for the constant white noise that spewn from the general metablog community. However, who is going to benefit from me sitting around bitching about it? So what am I supposed to do? At the very least you can be happy I am using headers.
Keep going
I have ideas. We have changed the theme. I am feeling a fresh breath of air for Epiblogger. I am going to go in slightly different direction and tone with my posting here. I am going to continue to experiment with new ideas. And I suppose you’ll probably be able to find helpful stuff here too. But don’t expect me to play nice. Expect me to play nice-ish, but with a small splash of bitchy.
Long story short
I am back. I want to rejuvenate the genre of metablogging. Also, in case you don’t know, I have to talk things out. Thanks for listening.
November 12, 2008 – 2:30 pm
One of the things I like about working on the Internet is that things never stay the same. Things are always evolving and changing. Most bloggers will tell you that it is a good idea to welcome people that come to your blog. The plugin “What Would Seth Godin Do?” is one that is mentioned fairly often and of course you want to encourage people that come from social networking sites like Digg and StumbleUpon to Digg and Thumbs Up your post. Not long ago I came across a WordPress plugin that can help bloggers offer custom messages to users based on the website that referred them as well as offering a default message. The WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin does all of this and offers easy customization.
The WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin gives bloggers the ability to show custom messages to readers based upon the referrer that sent them to the blog, as well as showing a default message to users that come from a referrer that is not defined. The plugin combines many of the popular plugins so you only need to run the WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin instead of a plugin for Digg users, StumbleUpon users, Delicious users, etc etc. The plugin also works well with sites that use cache plugins by using JavaScript to output the messages. This prevents the welcome to a Stumbler of Digg user being output into the cache version of the page and being shown to the wrong person, a common problem with some of the other plugins to welcome visitors.
The WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin has also made it easy to add additional messages for other referrers by simply adding a new URL and message. This can great if your blog starts to get referral traffic from a specific URL such as another blog or forum, allowing you to offer those readers a custom message.
You can download WP Greet Box from the WordPress plugin repository. It might be the plugin you were needing to be able to disable several other plugins and have a solution to welcome visitors that is compatible with cache plugins.
November 5, 2008 – 11:50 pm
I like social media and I have accounts at most of the social media sites including Digg but I have been wondering lately what it is about Digg that causes me to not be an active participant in the site. Being a bit of a stats junkie I have read many posts talking about what the traffic from Digg is like. Recently I was Stumbling and came across another post talking about a blogs recent Digg when it hit me, Digg is like a one night stand for a blogger.
Digg can send an enormous amount of traffic to a blog, there is no doubt about it, but the rush is short lived and and then you need to pick up the pieces of your smoking server and carry on. Face it Digg is like a one night stand. Like meeting someone at a night club and being taken up in the moment. Sure it might be fun for the night but the next day after you sober up and you just end up having a headache and hoping you have not caught anything. The biggest long term benefit you can gain from Digg is a chance that others will blog about you and give you some backlinks. Of course that can backfire on you as well depending on who it is that links to you. Face it, Digg is a one night stand, and nothing good ever comes from a one night stand. Look at the types of posts that people write for Digg, nothing but top 25 this and top 50 of that. Drivel! I guess that is what appeals to Digg users.
There are many bloggers that say you should write for social media, and it is tempting to come up with those kinds of list posts. I do write the occasional list post, because they are easy. They take very little thought just some time to compile the list. Great content to enhance your blog and offer something more substantial to your readers does not fit will in a huge list. Relationships take time to nurture and grow. Building relationships with people and offering them content that allows them to grow and think will provide your blog with more long term growth than the flash in the pan Digg can provide. As you write your next post think about how you can offer your readers content that will grow relationships with them and not feed them junk food.
Photo by Night Star Romanus
October 23, 2008 – 10:08 pm
You pour your heart and soul into your blog. You work hard to come up with new and creative ideas to write about and keep looking for your purple cow to make your blog stand out. Then you go and look at your statistics, and discover that no one is reading and appreciating your hard work. It happens to all bloggers at one time or another. It can be frustrating and might make you want to just throw in the towel on your blog.
If your blog has been feeling under appreciated lately then you might be interested in joining an idea to help under appreciated blogs become more appreciated. Chuck Westbrook has an idea that might help. The idea is simple in some ways join together and appreciate other blogs and your blog will be appreciated by others. This might be just the thing to give you some new blogs to read and gain some more appreciation for some new blogs as well.
October 18, 2008 – 4:15 pm
One of the things that has always bothered me about using Blogger.com as a blogging platform is how limited it is for adding extras to your blog such as a top posts widget. Sure it has gotten better, but if you use their FTP publishing service you are still limited to either some kind of server side scripting hack, doing it manually by editing the template HTML or some kind of Javascript widget. I have not found a decent top posts widget for Blogger.com up until now. I came across AideRSS a little while ago and quickly realized I could use it to add a dynamic top posts widget to my FTP published Blogger.com blog.
AideRSS is more than just a top posts widget. AideRSS is actually a way to sort through a lot of the noise by filtering out posts by different levels based on your interests. For example you might not want to read every single post Boing Boing posts. Using AideRSS you can subscribe in your RSS reader to the best posts that they create, thus eliminating some of the noise that can clog up your RSS reader.
The side benefit of AideRSS is that they create top posts widgets. You can submit your own blogs RSS feed, such as your Blogger.com blog and AideRSS will create a top posts list sorted by what they call postrank. You can choose the time period that you want the top posts to be created from. Either year, month, week or day, and the number of top posts you would like to show. Here is a sample of Epibloggers top posts widget showing the top five posts for the year.
If you are looking for a top posts widget for your blog the AideRSS widget might be just the one you are looking for. Because it is Javascript it will create no extra load on your web hosting if you use a self hosted blogging platform and if you are on a hosted blogging platform, such as Blogger.com, most allow some Javascript widgets to be added. You could even use it to show off your friends blogs top posts if you want. With a little CSS styling you could probably make it blend in perfectly with your blog.
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