John Lamansky

Sure, I had set up basic feed redirection. I had set it so that the feed/ and feed/atom/ WordPress feed URLs would redirect to my FeedBurner feed.

But when I saw that the Best of the Web blog directory had listed my RSS feed as being http://www.johnlamansky.com/?feed=rss2, I knew I had to implement more extensive redirection.

I had heard of this “WordPress Feedburner Plugin” before, and decided to give it a try. After a little bit of trouble at first, I got it to work and - lo and behold! - the next day my Feedburner subscriber count had almost - not quite, but almost - doubled.

It just goes to show how important it is to make sure all of your feed traffic is directed to the right place.

I would highly recommend the aforementioned plugin to WordPress bloggers who are using Feedburner; and if you haven’t already, be sure to check out Feedburner’s feed redirection tips.

I’ve noticed something very interesting on this blog, and on others; it’s something I’m calling “customer service blog comments.”

It seems that it’s becoming more and more common for company representatives to post comments on blog posts related to that company or its products. For example, so far on this blog I’ve had comments from FeedBurner, Dell, and Microsoft employees, plus a comment from the CEO of FeedBlitz; the comments were in reply to various blog posts I wrote that were related to those companies.

What I find interesting is that even big companies like Dell are getting on the bandwagon. I think it’s a great idea: don’t make the customers come to you, making them wait on hold or for an email response; instead, go directly to the customers and help them solve their problems with friendly, personalized service. That’s the way to do it.

One thing I don’t really like about blogs is that the old content gets shoved out of view. This is okay if the old content is time-sensitive, but otherwise, that isn’t always desirable.

Because quite a few (but not all) of my posts are NOT time-sensitive, I’ve decided to start posting some lists of past posts.

So, as a little something for this blog’s “first birthday,” here is the list of the Top 5 most popular posts (based on how many visits the posts have received) in this blog’s first year of existence. Enjoy!

1. Lifecycle of Innovation
   (posted July 25th, 2005)
2. Visual Studio 2005 Express: Free Forever
   (posted May 13th, 2006)
3. The Mystery of the Orange Light, Part 1
   (posted October 26th, 2005)
4. The Mystery of the Orange Light, Part 2
   (posted November 11th, 2005)
5. Vista Beta 2 Access Not Shut Off After All?
   (posted July 8th, 2006)

What I find amazing is that despite the fact that the “Vista Beta 2 Access Not Shut Off After All?” post is only about 10 days old, it has still managed to skyrocket into the top 5 posts, on par with the popular Mystery of the Orange Light posts. (Though note that because this list is list three days late, due to the fact that I was out of town recently, and therefore because this list takes into account visits from those three days, it’s possible that three days ago the post wouldn’t have made the top 5.)

I was also puzzled as to why the “Lifecycle of Innovation” post was getting so many visits. I finally figured out that apparantly the post ranks high in image search results for “innovation.” When I posted that post, I had no idea how popular it would turn out to be.

Well, with blogging, you never know…

You may have noticed that for about two weeks or so now, across this blog the word “tag” has been used in place of the word “category.” You might also have noticed the list of the 20 most popular tags (on the sidebar on the homepage) in replacement of the giant category list. And last but not least, another new addition to the site is the cool-looking tag cloud.

The reason I made this change was because, in short, I had a lot of categories. Dozens and dozens of them. The list on the sidebar was huge.

The problem was, I wanted to have more. Even if I talked about, say, DMOZ, just once, I wanted to have a category for it so that my post would show up in Technorati searches for that topic.

With the default WordPress system, that just wasn’t feasible.

I had known for quite some time that I wanted to make the change to the more flexible tagging system. So once day I decided to do some plugin searching, and I found the perfect plugin: Category Tagging. From the plugin website:

WordPress has a categorization system that lets users categorize posts. However, using categories is no longer state of the art: In the word wide web, tagging is established — and categorizing is obsolete. Tagging is quite different to categorizing since it is based on keywords.

[…]

[The] Category Tagging Plugin provides the following features:

1. Tag cloud
   It displays all tags (categories) as tag cloud.
2. Related posts
   When visitors find your website via search engines or other websites, they are often there for a reason and want to find out about a particular topic of interest. Presenting a list of related posts to a given post makes life easier for your visitors by showing them other posts you have written on the subject. This increases the chance that a visitor will stick around browsing your blog, and is perfect for existing visitors to find out your past thoughts on a particular subject.

Very cool.

I would highly recommend the Category Tagging plugin, although be forewarned that it’s not easy to set up.

While I was at it, I also fixed that annoying WordPress “bug” that causes categories to be arranged by ID when the categories for a post are listed. All I had to do was install the Simple Category Sort extension (link not working as of this writing; hopefully it’ll soon be fixed), click Enable, and tada! sorted categories… er, I mean tags.

As you might know, I’ve tried Google AdSense on this blog several times before. For those who aren’t familiar with AdSense, it is a Google service that lets you put ads on your site (the same kind you see on Google search results). When people click ads on your site, you get a portion of the what the advertiser pays Google. Here’s an example:

I’m not sure how relevant the above ads will be, but every time that I’ve tried AdSense I’ve removed it because I have not been happy with what ads have been displayed.

For example, after I published the post Mr. Monopoly vs. The Deet, in which I described how some deet-containing bug spray ate the ink off my grandma’s Monopoly board, then my AdSense ads started showing advertisements for, guess what?, deet-containing bug spray.

About a month later I published a post called What is Bug Control?, in which I attempted to present a pun concerning the fact that a dead mosquito landed on the Ctrl key on my keyboard. But AdSense started showing ads for bug control, mosquito repellant, and pest removal. Even though my post contained the words “bug,” “mosquito,” and “control,” the ads displayed weren’t exactly relevant.

Then apparently, the AdSense algorithms saw the words “John” and “Catholic” and decided to put up an ad for John Kerry.

Frankly, that was the last straw. I removed those AdSense ads and haven’t put them back up since.

Until Google can increase the relevance of AdSense ads, or until I get enough traffic to the point that I’ll get clicks regardless of ad relevance, I probably won’t be trying to use AdSense again. Maybe lack of relevance is just a risk that advertisers have to take. But in addition, I didn’t get a single click throughout my entire site during the entire time I was displaying AdSense ads.

So in summary, I’ve decided that for now, AdSense for me doesn’t really make sense… or cents.

My mom has started a natural health and wellness blog about a month ago called Hyvin. The blog contains lots of nutrition information, including news, tips, and research findings. Please feel free to check it out, leave comments, etcetera.

I am simply thrilled that we were able to get a five-letter domain name, since I’d say it’s quite a rarity to get a domain name that short.

However, I’m starting to feel a teensy-bit jealous of my mom’s WordPress theme. Pretty green sidebar, cool shadow effects, rotating header images, silvery icons…

FeedBurner recently released FeedFlare Phase 2. FeedFlares are links that allow blog readers to, in short, do stuff with blog posts, such as email the post to others or find Technorati links for that post. Phase 1 allowed FeedFlare links on XML feeds, and now Phase 2 allows FeedFlare links on blog posts themselves.

At first I put the FeedFlares at the bottom of my post and got all excited. “Wow, that’s awesome.” Then I wanted to tinker with it. I didn’t like those bullet points between the links and wanted to replace them with pipes, ala WordPress style.

However, the FeedFlare code that I’m supposed to put in my blog template is JavaScript, so I can’t customize the HTML directly. Hmm… that means “some CSS modification required.” Well, that’s okey-dokey with me, but this looks like CSS3 modification required, which I am quite certain will not work with Internet Explorer. Though Mozilla Firefox is superior in my opinion, Internet Explorer is what most people use. In addition, the FeedFlares are wrapped around a <p> tag, which will not be ideal for some cases in which I want to use the FeedFlares.

I finally got fed up with FeedFlare and made my own links. Things like “email this post” or “add to del.icio.us” are easy to do. Check my links out at the bottom of this post (assuming you’re reading this post directly at the site). And I recommend you also avoid FeedFlare unless you’re happy with how it looks, you’re willing to use some CSS3, or if HTML to you stands for “Hard To Me, it Looks.”

The answer: yes, it does!

I really don’t know why this isn’t publicized more, but each Xanga blog has its very own RSS feed. You don’t even need to be a Xanga member to access the feeds.

Just enter the following URL into your feed aggregator, replacing the word username with the username of the Xanga blogger to whose blog you want to subscribe:

http://www.xanga.com/rss.aspx?user=username

Xanga bloggers, be sure to announce on your blog the fact that you have an RSS feed! (The sidebar is a great place to show off your new-found site syndication options.) This also applies to users of other blogging services. Having an RSS feed, a link to which is plainly visible, can increase the number of readers and will allow subscribers to read your blog without having to remember to visit your website.

Both WordPress and its home page have recently undergone major updates. WordPress.org received a redesign several days ago, and WordPress 2.0 was released just yesterday. Some new features in WordPress 2.0 include a WYSIWYG blog post editor, AJAX functionality in the admin interface, and the ability to comment on images in posts.

To my dissapointment, I can’t upgrade to WordPress 2.0 immediately because I’m using a Fantastico installation. So I need to wait until my web host provides a version 2.0 upgrade via Fantastico. When I am able to upgrade, I’ll let you know what I think of this major WordPress update. Until then, be sure to let me know what you think of the new version if you’ve had experience with it.

I’m sure you’re already aware of this, but you can never be told enough: when you’re blogging, emailing, or using other Internet forms of communication, you need to be careful about how you present things, because you no longer have inflections, body language, etc., at your disposal. One way to “replace” these is to use emotions (but then of course there are those people who say that a well-structured sentence shouldn’t need emotions, yada yada yada…). But once upon a time I was new to email, and I learned this “be careful what you say” lesson the hard way.

I once had a “email penpal” named Nicky who lived in Australia; he was my very first penpal. After we had been writing for some time, I decided that I wanted to tell him about the funny things that had happened to us recently.

Like the time our fireplace blew up and sent glass shards flying across the living room, leaving burn marks on the carpet? (On the more serious side, it was definitely a miracle that about 15 seconds before the explosion I felt a sudden impulse to get myself and my baby brother out of the living room.)

And remember that one early morning many years ago when the house filled up with smoke because the pop-up-timer mechanism on the toaster had broken? I proudly remembered my fire drill techniques and crawled across the kitchen floor, then quickly jumped up into standing position and yanked the toaster’s power plug out. (And then my parents wake up and say something like, “Why does the house smell like smoke?”) That piece of toast was in a sorry state… (to be more specific, the slice of bread looked like greasy charcoal and had probably shrunk about 25% due to extreme moisture loss).

I never heard from Nicky again. Perhaps I gave a slight impression of pyromania…