This humble blog is four years old today so tonight I will be taking ‘Blog in isolation’ and some of its closest friends to LazerQuest (Mega Death Match Party Edition with Pizza and gallons of Coca Cola to ensure the kids are well and truly revved up). Everyone loves meaningful statistics so here is a pretty chart of posts by month (for all you management types): Curiously, since I returned from my holiday, I seem to have rediscovered a little of my zest for blogging....
There’s been a lot of chatter recently about Feedburner’s support for the PubSubHubbub protocol. Apparently, it means that blog posts show up much quicker in FriendFeed, Google Reader and other services. I must admit I was fairly sceptical as my posts still take a couple of hours to appear. However, I was wrong (again). Look at this recent example. The post showed up a full three and a half hours on Google Reader before I published it....
This is a quick test to check that Habari is no longer adding additional paragraph tags and random line breaks for people consuming this blog in a feed reader. Both of you. Many thanks to arthus (possible pseudonym alert) aka Morgante Pell (additional pseudonym alert) for creating the plugin that made this possible and the death of autop().
Yet another service in the overcrowded blog comment field is JS-Kit who already have a conventional outsourced blog comment capability (similar to IntenseDebate and Disqus). JS-Kit recently announced an extension to the service called ‘Echo’ which also includes any fleeting reference to your blog post, refreshed in real-time from other services like Twitter, FriendFeed, Google Reader and Facebook. Echo isn’t generally available to mere mortals yet. Yes, you guessed it...
There’s only one man in the world who could have uttered the following: ‘On Monday I unfollowed 106,000 people on Twitter.’ Yes. You guessed it - Robert Scoble. And yes, before you ask, he used a script.
Since I started this blog almost four years ago, I have posted every month. Until last month - July 2009. To accentuate the radio silence effect, this blog was also completely offline for the latter two weeks of July 2009 (PHP/FastCGI configuration problem at Bluehost).
You see - I’m really wasted in IT. I really should be in pre-sales or on ‘The Apprentice’. I thought I’d return to my minimalist roots and change the theme on this blog. If you’re reading this in an RSS reader, no need to click through and leave a comment telling me ‘I use an RSS reader so I don’t care about your new theme’ because I already know. If you think ‘Hey - this theme is simply a blatant rip off of Russell Beattie’s blog, I’m going to run and tell him’, don’t bother....
Since I started this blog, I have maintained an interest in various blog commenting services. Back in November 2007, I experimented with SezWho and also reviewed three more similar comment tracking services before finally settling on Disqus. Competition is obviously a good thing but this is proving a tough climate for small, Web 2.0 companies competing in a small, overcrowded marketplace and we have recently seen some consolidation in this area....
Just quickly reviewed the number of posts in each full year since I started this blog. 2008 - 94 2007 - 219 2006 - 395 What does it all mean ? Not sure. Does it matter ? Probably not.
Yesterday was 1 December and an innocuous post on identi.ca about an Advent calendar immediately reminded me of an amusing (and completely true) blog post I wrote two years ago. This, in turn, prompted me to write this short note on identi.ca and the post on identi.ca subsequently appeared on my FriendFeed stream. Normally, when I post a new blog entry, the post gets visited by a handful of people - presumably a subset of those subscribed to this blog....