Art of Blogging

Obviously, I have hit the end of my rope with WordPress.

However, I am not ready to go work at some fast food place, so I have to come up with something.

I looked into Habari again and rather deeply. I have to say, it looks like they are doing some really good work and trying hard not to make mistakes that have been made before. Unfortunately, their ideas for what a blog should do are not the same as my ideas. Mostly, this is just a matter of taste, except for one major detail.

It seems they think it is a bad idea for blogs to be indexed by Search Engines and do some things to stop the SE’s from coming along and indexing. One of these things is stopping the blog from pinging Google et al. While I can see their point, I vehemently disagree.

I think unless you are making something truly private, EVERYTHING should be indexed.

One reason is because I am a marketer, and not a blogger. I want new people to find my stuff and not just the established blog community.

Another reason is due to how I use the web myself. For instance, for right or wrong, I do not go trawling Digg and the like for stuff to read and learn. I use Google. Every blog I have ever found has been through either Google or link travels.

Why would I want to do something that would make my personal methods of travel no longer work?

OK, I may very well be missing the point and have failed to do my homework fully, but this isnt my major reason for not trying Habari out at this time… my major reason is this blog network we are on right now.

I have a few such networks and Habari isnt set up to handle them the way MU tries to.

This isn’t a flaw with Habari, just a different set of priorities between what the developers want and what I want.

Again, I briefly looked into what it would take to roll my own blog script… I am pretty sure I could hack up something that would do what I needed and be fairly secure. I could even get it up and running in a fairly reasonable amount of time… say 6 months or so and it would do what I needed.

Seeing as how this blog network is easily a YEAR behind schedule due to personal reasons and dicking with WordPress and their inanities, that is not an option.

I started looking again at other options available to me in the pre-rolled realm.

The old school big hitter in the blog network arena is Movable Type. Sorry, I am not going to pay for it. If I wanted to pay for a blog engine, I would roll my own.

This sounds awfully callous of me, I know, but it is actually more a matter of cynicism. I have no real confidence in any code I didnt write or control the development of. There is always *something* that other devs do that I do not approve of. This means I have to hack and slash the code. If they make me pay, the license is far too restrictive for my purposes.

Also, I “pay” for the use of code by teaching others how to use it. This is my personal business model and ethical thinking… and I also am not unknown to make a donation to a project out side of my normal writing.

If MT was open sourced and free, they would get me as a user and would get far more value than their licensing fees… and odds are, they would get more actual cash out of me too.

On with the body count.

I looked at several other alternatives as well, but none of them even remotely looked like they would make me happy. Since most of those reasons are personal bias and NOT my thinking they were junk I wont go into the big long list.

What I am about to install and try out is LifeType.

LifeType is an Open Source multi-user, multi-blog platform.

It is not a hacked up abortion like WordPress MU is. LifeType is designed out of the box to run either one blog or hundreds of blogs.

To me, this is the proper approach to making a script of this nature.

A minor but important point is that the group doesn’t seem to have a problem saying they made a mistake.

For example, their current release comments are:

“Lifetype 1.2.6 is the latest maintenance release of the 1.2 branch and though we said that 1.2.5 was “as rock-solid as it gets”, there continued to be a number of improvements and at least one significant bug fix.”

Guess it wasn’t quit as rock solid as they thought.

That is the problem with bold words like that…. too much code to be able to say anything is perfect.

Least they ate their serving of crow and did the right thing rather than sweeping it under the rug until the next release version.

It seems that I can migrate the existing WP DB over to LifeType. If so, I will be publishing the slew of back logged articles I have here on WP and WP MU purely for archive purposes (and to not waste the content that I created) and we will continue as previously planned at this blog.

At this point, I have only uploaded the code to a test location and not started the installation, so this post itself counts as bold words on my part.

Wish me luck, I am going in!

I was reading a blog the other day about blogging (go figure) and I was reading about a different opinion than I have about how important commentators are.

I was going to link her on up here for your review because what works for me may not for you and so on.

Different opinions at the very least cause you to think.

This blogger explained that commentators only represent about 1% of your traffic on the whole and therefore are not important. As I am sure you have read, I think Blog Comments And Commentators Are Important.

So, why didn’t I give her that link?

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Web 2.0! The salvation of us all! Yeah, ok, whatever.

We have all heard the hype of Web 2.0. Even people who barely know what a browser is have heard that buzz phrase.

What is Web 2.0?

What makes it so great?

Can you define Web 2.0? Is it outlined like HTML 4.0 is?

Let’s cut through the hype and get down to just what it is.

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What happens if I start a blog and I don’t keep at it?

That is what a friend of mine asked me. The answer I had for her was the same one I stole from this User Friendly Comic… “your blog will just become a clog and sit there.”

So?

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What lead to this particular babble is a series of comments on this blog and another that I was involved in.

Unfortunately, the comments I was a part of are mostly off topic, so I won’t link them here. (There really are times I am such a bad blogger.) The other blog, however is wordpress

The other night I decided I needed to have some php run from my posts now and again. I started doing the “normal” WordPress thing and messing with plugins and seeing which worked on WPMU and which did not.

This went typically… find the plugin, install the plugin, watch it blow up, remove the plugin, find the next one, modify WPMU configuration so it works… hack hack hack…

I finally found a couple that worked and I will write them up soon.

Except…

When I put the php code in my post and hit save, it just vanished.

O_o

My first thought was, “gee, how STUPID!”

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Unless you are just making your blog to amuse yourself and friends with or otherwise for fun, the point is to market with it and make money. Right?

OK, other exceptions are like this blog right now where the purpose is to disseminate information, but even this will go to a more commercial stance soon. (Don’t worry, I mean I will add advertising to the sidebar and other tasteful ways for you to show me support for giving you great content… unlike this entry.)

Anyway, this is a rant, so expect it to dance around like it just did. I have a bad attitude and I am angry.

What made me angry? Specifically, Internet Marketers. No, I do not necessarily mean you or me, I mean the Marketers that keep trying to sell you and me information and tools so we can do our jobs better.

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Ok, so it took me FOREVER to get my server stuff sorted out and this blog moved to its permanent home, but here it is!

Hopefully I will get back on track with it now.

Must take a moment and point out the incredible irony in that last post… I honestly had no idea it was prophesy.

I think this User Friendly Comic says it all. Think about it.

Happy New Year!

May it be good and profitable!

Make good art!

As I said yesterday on Search Engine Optimization, take a break!

I know it looks like I am not taking a break like I said, but that is today’s lesson.

Write your stuff in advance and your blog can run like clockwork even if you take a month off.

In the future, we will go into some real automation methods for blogging, but for now, start learning how to make a blog work properly and then you can get into all the cool things. If you have been paying attention to me so far, you already have several articles in some shape or form in your admin. Do yourself a favor and instead of publishing them in order, save a couple specifically for a rainy day. If your blog is a blog where you just write about what is in your head and sharing some of your prose, save some of your poems to publish on days when you don’t feel like writing or just can’t cause you couldn’t spend any time at a keyboard.

By the way, articles in my admin that are done i mark by putting “(d)” at the end of the title so I can see at a glance what is ready for days like today.

If you read this on December 25th, Bah Humbug! Aren’t you glad I gave you this drivel to read?

If you read this anytime after, I hope you and yours had a great holiday!