Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

The term “mash up” has emerged in recent year. It means using various data from differing sources. Sort of like showing a google map of the locations of those tweeting you. The map comes from google, the tweeets come from twitter and when you put them together it’s a mash up.

So, in that light I wanted to list sources of data/functionality that you can pull into your blog to mash up what you offer your readers.

http://YouTube.com
http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com/
Google Maps
Twitter
Facebook
MySpace

Both MT and WP offer a feed which can be set to a full feed or just an excerpt. Blogger who rely on ad revenues will generally choose just an excerpt, while bloggers who are more focused on getting their stuff read will offer a full feed. Then there are the other 99% of bloggers who don’t know what feeds are.

For those, let me give a quick explination. The feed would be the bare-bones info of your blog. The title, author and text (exeprpt or full) that in in a format easy to process by scripts. At my site http://new.elevenoclock.comI use the feeds provided by many news sources as well as blogs to display the current headlines.  News readers like Eleven O’clock News, Google Reader (http://google.com/reader ), and http://BlogLines.com use the feed from your blog to show the content to others. If you just like people reading your stuff, then that would be okay. But if you want people to go to your site, then you’d offer only an excerpt so to finish the article they’d need to come to your site.

One of the most important things about feeds, if you want people to use them, is to make them handy, and display the link to your feed somewhere where it’s easy to find. Typically it’s either at the top or the bottom of the page, but sometimes it’ll be in the sidebar. It’s also, typically, included in the header of the page so scripts can pick the link up there.

Some blogs (and online newspapers) have gone even further than limiting the content, and insert ads into the feeds themselves. That’s perhaps a bit stingy, especially if you’re only offering an excerpt to begin with, but it’s what they choose to do.

Way too many times I click on a link to a blog post and must wait while tons of ads, flash embeds, graphics and who knows what else load, maxing out my CPU for an annoyingly long time. I still can’t understand why bloggers do this.

I’ve addressed the problem of page size, but now I want to address the problem of un-monitored ads.

Getting ads on your blogs is hard enough to do to begin with, so I can understand the temptation to let advertisers have their way, but when it drives away readers, you are giving up future ad revenue for current ad revenue, which is, more than likely, a net loss.

My suggestion would be to monitor frequently (several times a day) the behavior of the ads on your site (specifically the individual posts, since that’s where a lot of your traffic will be funneled to from search engines) . See if the load time is acceptable and make sure none of the ads are loading things you didn’t approve (porn, semi-porn, malware, viruses).

Also, leave a link for readers to report abusive ads, since many will send the bad ads only rarely, not enough for you to catch, but enough to run off regular readers. If the reader know he can report the ad, then he may feel better about returning. Notice that Facebook has that feature.

The key here, is to be more than the writer, be the reader, too, and know what they are experiencing.

I like the autogrow textarea I did back here. But with a mulit-user installation like http://BiographyJournal.com it would be tiring adding it to every comment field. Even a remote script would still nee to be pulled in and the exact form name used, or it might miss one. So I found a way to apply the behavior to every textarea on every page with just one script. Here’s the script.

<script>
  for(var f=0;f<document.forms.length;f++)
    {
    var elem = document.forms[f].elements;
    for(var i = 0; i < elem.length; i++)
      {
      if(elem[i].type=='textarea')
        {
        elem[i].style.height='28px';
        elem[i].style.overflow='hidden';
        elem[i].onkeyup=function(){myOnKeyUp(this);};
        }
      }
    }

  function myOnKeyUp(el)
    {
    if((navigator.userAgent.indexOf('MSIE')>-1) |
        (navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Opera')>-1))
      {
      el.style.height=(el.scrollHeight+14)+'px';
      }
    else
      {
      if(navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Firefox')>-1)
        {
        el.style.height=(el.scrollHeight)+'px';
        el.style.paddingBottom='0px';
        }
      else  // Safari and Chrome
        {
        el.style.height=(el.scrollHeight-8)+'px';
        }
      }
    if(el.scrollHeight<28){el.style.height='28px';}
    }
</script>

The first bit searches through every form on the page and then every element in the for to find textareas. It then applies the function to thet field.

I got the domain name http://BiographyJournal.comseveral years ago and set up a multi-use blog. I’d toyed with that setup using various scripts and settled on WPMU. I left it running a while and had a journal for a new dog we got so the previous owners could see how he was doing. But after about a year there were no active users other than spammers, who packed the thing full of annoying links. I shut it down and focused on other things.

But the idea remained intriguing.

Most blogs are simply people giving their opinions about current events. I saw the blogging platform as a way to journal ones life. The last week I cam across a blog written by an amazing American girl who’s adopted 14 kids in Uganda and lives there raising them. I tried to read her blog from the beginnign to try to get the full scope of the story, but she uses BlogSpot which does not lend itself to reading blogs in that way. It was pretty difficult to keep up with where I was.

That’s when I decided to re-open http://BiographyJournal.com. It may sit empty again, but I want to at least make the effort to offer a platform geared more to journaling than just blogging. I’ve already added dozens of themes and lots of plugins, many that I’ve tweaked (and unfortunately lost some of the work when upgrading a plugin)

Check it out and see what you think and offer suggestion that may make the focus (journaling) work better.