So, I’m going to be on vacation for the next couple of weeks. When I return on the 15th, (just to whet your appetite), I’ll have a new PHP script available for download — a user registration and validation script — and a long overdue revision to my PHP poll script. As you may have guessed, I’m planning on spending part of my vacation time working on my own little projects…is it work? Is it play? Who can tell?
Anyhow, I’m going to be quiet until the 15th, unless something really amazing happens.
Jakob Nielsen, a well-known international expert on usability, writes articles. You can be pretty confident that he believes he writes articles on the basis of a recent article, “Write Articles, Not Blog Postings.” And he’s right. He doesn’t write blog posts.
However, his stance is that an article is differentiated from a blog post on the basis that blog postings are always “commodity content,” and that “there’s a limit to the value you can provide with a short comment on somebody else’s work.”
Blog postings will always be commodity content: there’s a limit to the value you can provide with a short comment on somebody else’s work. Such postings are good for generating controversy and short-term traffic, and they’re definitely easy to write. But they don’t build sustainable value. Think of how disappointing it feels when you’re searching for something and get directed to short postings in the middle of a debate that occurred years before, and is thus irrelevant.
If you’re not currently aware of the horrible circumstances which have resulted in Kathy Sierra’s withdrawal from the blogging world, you should make a point of researching them. It’s not fun to read about and it’s not nice to know about — but it’s important. I’m not going to talk about it, myself. The subject has been thoroughly discussed elsewhere in the blogosphere. I’m not even going to link to any of the discussions — you can find them.
I do, however, want to discuss one of the more significant reactions to this situation. Tim O’Reilly has published a draft code of conduct for bloggers. In some blogging circles, this has been reviled as a bureaucratic reaction to the issue. Fair enough: that’s what it is.
I’ve been tagged by Bill Slawski (edit: and also by Miriam Loraditch) in an interesting meme currently doing the rounds of search marketing bloggers. The meme is pretty self explanatory — tell the world why you blog (listing, ideally, five reasons) and then take a turn tagging five others. Michael Jensen of SoloSEO is once again tracking the meme, so you can wend your way to SoloSEO if you’re curious about where this meme has been.
But, for the moment, here are five reasons that I blog (cross posted at inter:digital strategies):
Google’s “new product” TiSP — all I can say: I bet it’s a shitty service. 
Dennis Lembree and Ross Johnson run a podcast on practical web accessibility called WebAxe.
Dennis and Russ aim to cover a wide variety of subjects in the basic of web accessibility. Their last podcast discussed the accessibility of CAPTCHAs – and the next podcast up, for whatever reason, discusses me. Well, not precisely. More specifically, it features an interview with me on the subject of the definition of accessibility – a topic which I’ve written on before.
It’s not a topic where there’s a nice neat answer, so I can’t claim that we reach anything vaguely resembling a conclusion. Besides that, an audio interview is rather a new experience for me, and I have to admit that I may have been too verbose to be able to actually reach any kind of solid conclusions.
Nonetheless, if you’re interested in learning more about accessibility via an aural learning method, you should subscribe to the WebAxe podcast. Or, at least, give the next episode a listen!
It’s not up yet; but Dennis tells me that he’ll be posting it sometime this weekend.
It’s available now! Podcast 41: Definition of Web Accessibility
Well, after a bit of thinking, I guess I’ve resolved my popular posts problem. The popular posts plugin I was using had a significant flaw — largely because I’m also using the wp-cache plugin. Namely, any cached article was not being registered as having been visited. However, any article which had it’s comments feed accessed was registered as being visited. Therefore, the so-called “most popular” articles were actually the articles which had somebody subscribed to the comments feed. I could control this by closing comments — but this seemed like a highly undesirable way of dealing with the issue. It would only truly be accurate if I closed all comments and reset all counts to zero. Even then, the caching issue would mean that the visit counts would be highly unreliable.
Then there’s the issue of popularity. As I commented previously, I’m not really all that happy with the self-defining nature of popular posts. Once popular, always highlighted. It’s an ineffective way of giving people some access to my past articles. Using the least popular posts really just meant highlighting the most recent posts. Somewhere in the middle? Just kind of a strange way of going about it. Tried it; didn’t really like it.
So I’m now incorporating two plugins: Recent Posts and Random Posts, both by Rob Marsh, SJ. They’re both heavily configurable plugins, allowing me to eliminate selected posts and define the structural code surrounding them amongst other options. I think this will give a more worthwhile glimpse into the “back stacks” of this blog as it continues to grow.
