Blog Roll Gadget

I used to have a Blog Roll on all of my blogs. This linked them together so a reader of one of my blogs could find my other work. These were implemented with Blogger’s link list gadget. It was a little clunky. But it got the job done. After a while, I found other uses for the space where my blog rolls went. So I deleted the link lists.

Recently I wanted to restore the Blog Rolls to my blog sites. When I was going through the motions to add some link list gadgets to my sites, I found a new Blogger gadget which was specific to blog rolls. This new gadget only asked you to put in your blog URLs. It automatically extracted and displayed the blog title on your page.

The really cool part of the new Blog Roll gadget is that you can show a previous of the most recent post from the blogs on your list. This is all done automatically. I imagine it will update when new entries are added to the blogs on your list. This is really handy, and makes my blog page look visually appealing.

You can bet that I have gone back and added this Blog Roll gadget to most of the blogs I author. It seems as though the Blogger team is still adding useful features to the Blogger platform. They had better do this. There are other choices for blogging software and platforms. I can not complain any because Blogger continues to be offered free of charge. How does Google do this?

Magazine or Web

I finally got around to reading the latest issue of Redmond Developer News. It is very informative about all the technologies being released by Microsoft. This issue I noticed a new column in one of the first pages of the magazine entitled Dev Disaster. This column had some crazy story about a real life developer. It seemed very familiar to me.

When I got to the end of the column, I found out that the story was provided by The Daily WTF. That is a web site I enjoy reading from time to time. Perhaps I had already read this very story, and that is why it sounded all that familiar. I suspect this column will continue in future issues of Redmond Developer News.

It felt like I got short changed a bit there. I want to have original and new content when I read this magazine. I am not looking for some recycled web site information. To their credit, Redmond Developer News solicited readers to send their own stories in so they might be able to share. The other stories in the magazine are normally good breaking news that I cannot easily find elsewhere.

There is some benefit to having a physical print magazine to touch and read. It is nice when most print media are either going out of business or going to the web. For all I know, this magazine is funded by Microsoft profits on the software they are selling. I do know I get the magazine for free. For now I plan to continue to read The Daily WTF on the web, while still looking for original content in this print magazine.

Google Risks

Some guy wrote a rant that his Google G-Mail account got disabled. So he used the Contact Us form to alert Google. He swore that he used a secure password. Therefore he doubts that his password was compromised. Google responded that they were looking into the problem.

In the end, the poor dude lost all his G-Mail history. This falls under the general risk of keeping your data in the cloud. I understand how easy this can be. Google has huge amounts of disk space. They have a nice and free product for you to use. You start using it and don’t look back. But you have to plan for the work case. That’s what I do.

You do not have to move away from the cloud to minimize the risks associated with it. For example, you can keep more than one Google account. That way you can split some of your email across multiple failure points. Yes this might cause some overhead while you check multiple accounts. However you can also use one account to aggregate mail from all the others.

The example guy from this story also lost his blog. This is something that is dear to me. I have spent the good part of a year blogging hard. I would hate for all that to go to waste. That’s why I have moved away from creating multiple blogs under one Google account. I am at the point where I create a new account each time I create a new blog. This is done even if I am working on a throw away blog.

I expect these problems to become more common as the industry embraces and moves into cloud computing en masse. You would be wise to assume that everything on the cloud will fail. The earlier you prepare for such a pending disaster, the better off you will be.

Blog Authority

In 2006, Mads Kristensen stated on his blog that Deflate was faster than GZip. In fact he found Deflate to be 41% faster than GZip. Recently Jeff Atwood wrote a post on his Coding Horror blog about this. He figured there was something wrong with this comparison. Both programs use similar algorithms. He determined he would not take this information for granted. So Jeff did a test. He found the programs to have comparable performance.

Jeff used random HTML files. He varied the file sizes for his tests. Jeff did realize that the Mads post was from two years ago. However he used this example to make a point. You should not trust what you read on the web, especially in blogs. He said that blogs posting incorrect information are dangerous. The real danger lies in developers believing what they read on the web. The real interesting part of Jeff’s post was the numerous comments from developers.

Not all blogs are created equal. Incorrect information posted on rarely read blogs does not do as much damage. In other words, blog authority matters. You really should not trust anything you read. A blog is just somebody’s ideas. It is not hard fact. It is unfortunate that programmers are gullible.

There may be some hope. There were a number of readers who commented that they did not believe in Jeff Atwood’s findings. This caveat holds true – reader beware. Blogs after all are really not that important. You can read blogs to look at different approaches. However you should verify all that you read. That’s the due diligence that us developers must perform.

The Future of Blogging

I read two articles/blogs about the future state of blogging. One was from Wired. The other was a response to the Wired article by Mark Evans. Both painted a somewhat bleak picture about the state of blogging. I take these outlooks seriously since I am very much into blogging myself.

The Wired article stated that blogging has been overrun with assorted marketing campaigns. There are very few real voices in the blogosphere. Blogs are becoming very impersonal these days. They are mostly professional sites that do best. It is hard for the little guy to get noticed. The true bloggers get a lot of aggravation like being insulted on their blogs. New formats are talking over. Twitter is the new Blogger.

Mark Evens responded to the Wired article. He is a guy that provides the Canadian perspective. He said that blogs showed up around 5 years ago. Now there are a total of over 175 million blogs out there. And by blogs, he means sites with text, links, and maybe an image or two. There is a very low barrier to entry. Hey. Most of my blogs are on free hosts. Even though the total number of blogs may be large, there were around 7 millions new blogs in the last 4 months. In other words, the popularity of blogging may be dwindling.

Is it true that Twitter and video logs are taking over? I know they are popular. However I continue to author a number of blogs. I also read a good deal of other people’s blogs. Perhaps it does not matter what other people are doing. One important side about blogging is that you do it if you like it. I also don’t care about others if people continue to visit and read my own blogs. It might be that blogs are not the hip thing to be doing. That is also fine with me. However I don’t think the sky is falling here.

Auto Blog

I enjoy writing posts to some of my blogs. However sometimes it is a real chore. I want to add some value and provide some pictures for a bunch my blogs. But who has the time? Hey. I am a computer programmer. Why don’t I write a program to do this for me automatically? I shall call this project “Auto Blog”.

At first I think that I will just write a program that mimics me. In other words, the program will start my web browser. Then it will type in my Blogger account and password. It will upload some pictures. And it will type away in the browser. This is almost like a virtual me. It also seems like it will be a lot of work. I might be able to handle writing a program that mimics what I would write. But it will take some time to make the web browser think the program is me typing away at the keyboard and clicking the mouse.

So I do a little research. There must be a way for my program to communicate directly with Blogger. I find that there is. Blogger has an API that programmers can use. It even does this via XML which I want to learn as a programmer. If you do not know what XML is, don’t worry about it. I start to dig into the details of how to make my program communicate with Blogger. Then I find a critical piece missing. There is no way to programmatically upload images.

Ouch. That was the whole point to my Auto Blog. I want to share a lot of images and post some commentary with them. I guess I will have to go back to the drawing board. In other words, I need to take the path where the program simulates me typing on my keyboard and clicking my mouse. This is the hard route. I figure that the good things in life do not come easy. This is a prime example of that principle. Go me.

Maximize Clicks

I have a number of blogs on miscellaneous topics. Recently I added Google AdSense to them. The goal is to make as much money as possible from users clicking on the ads in my blogs. To this end, I want to eliminate any distractions that might cause the users to not click on the ads. So I have tried to configure my blogs to not have many things to click other than the ads.

Therefore I have removed comments from my blogs. I have also hidden the labels for each post. As far as the sidebar goes, I got rid of the About Me link. I also ditched the blog history. In some cases, I have even gone as far as to eliminate the titles of each blog post. The title is clickable and brings you to a page with just that blog post on it. There should be no need for users to click that.

One of the few extras I did keep was the images I include in each blog post. Those are essential to a good looking blog. I did shorten the number of posts that are displayed on each page of my blog. This number was strategically chosen to be as long as the ads that are placed on the sides of the blog posts.

My hope is that this increases the chance that viewers of my blog see the ads and click them. The danger in these extreme methods is that my blogs will not remain interesting to keep the users coming back for me. So now I really need to engage the readers with some sharp writing and awesome pictures. I also need to ensure I post very often, as they see less blog posts per page.

I will let you know how this works out. For now I am already seeing an increase in the click through ratio on my popular blog pages. It is my hope that this trend continues indefinitely.