Wordpress 2.1.1 has been hacked. There is an emergency upgrade notice out.
Upgrade to 2.1.2 here.
Luckily, all our sites are still on the 2.0 series, not the 2.1 series, so this does not affect us.
Thanks to technosailor.com
On Friday, Google announced that it would now be reporting on subscriber figures.
Since then, bloggers around the ’sphere have been reporting their findings.
So, have you checked your referral stats, gone into Feedburner, and been surprised at how many Google subscribers you have? How does Google play in your stats?
It seems, for large sites, Google is most likely to dominate, especially in a business or technology niche. Overall, it may not mean much in terms of how many readers you have - they didn’t really jump, but were just reported on - but it will give you more powerful insight into what your readers are interested in (if you use a tool such as Feedburner.
Tags: google reader, feedfetcher, google feedfetcher, feed subscribers, feed stats, rss readers, feedburner
Google’s blog service, Blogger, now offers support for custom domains. Plus, they’ll host it - free - and redirect your old URL for you.
Blogger added a new feature: Bring your own domain. All you have to do is buy a domain, anywhere, at any price you can find, set up your Blogger account and point your DNS at Google’s server at ghs.google.com, and viola*! Now your Blogger blog appears at its own domain name, and all you had to do was pay less than ten bucks a year for the domain. You don’t need hosting, because Blogger handles all the traffic, you just bring the domain. [InsideGoogle]
Of course, you’d still be stuck with the Blogger platform, which is quite the chore to muck around with. Even free hosting won’t tempt me over to use Blogger. Wordpress is still my choice, hands down.
Via duncan ; Tags: blogger, google, blog software, google news
Feeds have re-refreshed and Google News is full with read items again.
Perhaps it was a temporary bug in Bloglines that was overwriting the other bugs. Or something. Dammit.
Guess it’s back to trying new options :)
Tags: bloglines, rss readers
Ironically, on the day when I had Google Reader open in a tab and NewsFire on my desktop, Bloglines comes back to life.
That’s right, I think Bloglines is back in action.
After months of feeds not showing up as new, feeds refreshing, and constantly renewing Google News feeds, all seems to be resolved.
All of a sudden I was wondering why the news was so quiet. And realized hey, it’s because my Google News feeds haven’t refreshed. No inflated reference for "new" news. Interesting.
Then I noticed my b5 folder was quiet. Nothing had refreshed. Bonus.
And 5 minutes ago, my "Tracking" folder, which has all my ego feeds, reappeared as new. Hadn’t seen that in a long time.
All at once, Bloglines is back. And perhaps has kept me as a user, with only minutes to spare.
If you are still on Bloglines, have you also experienced improvements?
And to those of you who have switched, are these improvements enough to entice you back as a user? Or are they just fixing problems that took too long to be addressed, without really adding anything new?
Tags: bloglines, rss reader, news reader, aggregator
Google blog search is now accepting pings.
You can add this endpoint to your list of ping services:
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
Via Niall
After the whole YouTube fiasco we have now switched to blip.tv for our own personal videos.
We’ve been using blip for our last couple of videos. I find the service fairly easy to use. In comparison, the files seem to load as fast as with YouTube and the quality of the compression seems a fair bit higher. However, the conversion into flash is slower and the ease of embedding is not as user friendly - I love that on YouTube the embed code is right there. With blip, you have to click a couple of times to get there.
As far as the embed video player is concerned, they seem equally good. The YouTube one "feels" more web 2.0 - it’s all curvy and whatnot. But the blip one is much more seamless and unobtrusive. Just a preference choice there.
I will continue to use YouTube from a consumer perspective - I search and embed them all the time. But from a copyright perspective, we are moving our own personal content to an area that allows us to assign the license per video. I am sure there will be many more video services to come, but I am pleased so far with blip.
What other video services have you used?
Just a quick ‘how to’ for subscribing to YouTube video tag feeds.
*Note that YouTube tags seem to also encapsulate user profile names, so you could end up getting lots of irrelevant material, especially if it’s a single word not a phrase
e.g. I cannot subscribe to the word "Bones" for a blog I cover because there is a user with "bones" in his/her profile name and they post a lot of videos cluttering up the tag feed.
I am a big fan of both Bloglines and Google News. They are the means by which I make my living: the edge I get in providing my readers with up-to-date news.
Now, I gather news in a variety of ways: Google News, Yahoo News, Technorati Search, Technorati Tags, Feedster, PubSub to name a few. Google News provides me with the most relevant "news" pieces for my blogs.
However, I have one main beef about Google News/Bloglines. If no "new" news has appeared since my last check of the feed, it will update the feed as "new" and show me all the stuff I’ve already read. Sometimes with mixed up timestamps. However, it’s inconsistent. Sometimes there are a few new ones and 20 old ones. Why does it do this?
This is annoying to me because I’d love to just click on an entire folder and read it through - it’s all new, and I need to read it all anyway. However, I go feed by feed just so I can eliminate having to scroll down tons of stuff I’ve already reviewed.
So - whether it’s Bloglines or Google News or both, please find a way to fix it. Thanks!
Tags: bloglines, google news, news readers, news, reading, blogs, blog readers, rss reader
Qumana has a new release out (3.0.0-b4) which Ianiv has been working a ton on. Of course, there was that month lapse when we took our honeymoon, but it’s a big step up from our last beta release.
For me, I am one happy blogger. Aside from nipping some bugs in the butt, we made some big changes that save me a ton of time and effort.
You can download the latest here. As always, it’s for PC and Mac.
We have big plans for the rest of the summer for Qumana development. Of course, starting on those plans now needs to wait till after Ianiv gets a new computer and we get back from Gnomedex. Ah, the unexpected ;)
*big pat on the back* for my hubby and all his hard work on Qumana.
Tags: qumana, blog editor, professional blogging
Flickr is no longer beta… it’s gamma! Flickr has been in beta for so long that perhaps, with much humour, the good Flickr folks decided rather to keep us laughing and go into gamma instead.
Well, beta, gamma or whatever, I’m much impressed with the new features. I’ve been using Flickr a lot since we came home to upload the month’s worth of honeymoon photos and the wedding photos, to add tags, sort into sub folders, add notes and titles and commentary, and of course to send stuff to the blog.
Using Flickr is even easier than it used to be, and it’s always been easy - so that is a huge thing to say.
Here is the shot of the new Organizr:
Along the bottom are displayed your photos - you can zoom to a date (taken or uploaded), then drag into the main "workpad" area. This is much better than the previous version where all photos were displayed in a pad. The load time is much improved.
After you have created a batch to edit, you can do way more with it. Aside from adding tags (shown above), you can even change the CC license now en masse (something new). Then, you can add it to a new or existing set. I like that there are different "tabs" to the Organizr and that you can switch between them for different things, and that your batch does not disappear from your editing workpad until you close it. So much better. So much faster.
Ok, so aside from being absolutely in love with the new Organizr, Flickr has added great new features all over the place:
Love it. If you don’t have a Flickr account now, you should! It’s one of the best productivity aids I use in my blogging. It’s a place not just to host my photos, but to create an online community through groups & tagging, and to quickly add photos to my blog (it’s easy to set up the ‘Send to blog’ feature).
Tags: Flickr, Flickr gamma, gamma, photos, technology, photoblogging
We’ve begun the migration of our blogs to WordPress. When we started all our blogs, we put them on different platforms to ensure we knew them all. Now, we’re past that. It’s time to get serious.
BloggingHelp was our original WordPress blog. After we had 2 on Movable Type and one Drupal, we decided to stick with WordPress for all new installs. Faster. Cleaner. Easier to maintain.
Today we started the migration of blogs to entirely WordPress powered. The first to move was Vancouver Coffee. Next will be Blogaholics. And lastly Baking Low Fat, which is on Drupal.
Why do we choose WordPress?
We just couldn’t handle the volume of incoming comment and trackback spam. The comment spam was at such a high rate that we had to delete it every day… too much was getting through, and too much was being held for moderation. And those we deleted often were stll visible, which was annoying.
So, now we’re all happy. After the migration is complete we’ll be able to take our honeymoon without needing to monitor the blog spam levels like crazy people.
Tags: wordpress
Today we have a big announcement for Qumana. No, it’s not another new version (although we upgraded a bit too). It’s far larger.
Qumana is now to be distributed by Lycos as Lycos-Qumana.
From our press release:
Lycos, Inc. (http://www.lycos.com), a leading media destination for creators and consumers of quality content, today announced a new desktop blog editing tool, powered by Qumana, making blogging easier and more profitable for bloggers everywhere.
With the new Lycos-Qumana Desktop Blog Editor (http://lycos.qumana.com), Lycos enhances the freedom of blogging, allowing users to publish to their Tripod and Angelfire Blogs on Lycos, as well as to other major blogging sites, from the desktop. Additionally, the Lycos-Qumana Desktop Blog Editor works with Qumana’s Q Ads, an integrated ad program, allowing bloggers to insert ads into their blogs, while revenue from these ads is shared with the bloggers.
This deal is big news for both Lycos and for Qumana. For Lycos, it’s the first big move into Web 2.0 - by enhancing their own blog offering with Angelfire and Tripod, and topping that up with added services from Qumana, Q Reader and Q Ads, they have officially launched themselves into the Web 2.0 realm. With a splash. For Qumana, it means access to a few million potential customers - some who are already blogging up a storm.
We have really enjoyed working with Lycos so far. The Lycos team is energetic and with big thoughts for the future. It’s been a spur for us to move faster than we already were, and to continue making all three of our services even better. We’ve all had to huddle down and work like mad - a feat for us all, especially with the wedding - and we’re enthusiastic ecstatic about the news going public today.
So, if you haven’t already checked out Qumana, you should. And if you need help, it’ll likely be the "Blogaholics" giving you a hand ;)
Typically a tag will be inserted into your blog using a handy tool like Qumana in a standard format as follows:
<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/[TAGNAME]" rel="tag">[TAGNAME]</a>
However, new Technorati guru Janice offers a great tip to convert that tag to a self-searching tag.
What does this do?
Well, instead of tagging your post with a link that will take your readers to Technorati to browse other like-tagged posts, your readers can search like-tagged posts from your archives. Neat, hey?
To convert your tag, simply convert this:
"http://technorati.com/tag/[TAGNAME]"
to this:
"http://technorati.com/tags/[YOURTAG]?from=http://[YOURBLOGURL]"
Your readers will still get pointed to Technorati, but it’s a neat extension.
Let’s try it! (Note, I’m using Blogaholics since my tag archives are larger)
Regular: Tags: tags, tag, tagging ; My posts: Tags: tags, tag, tagging
Today Technorati launched something called Technorati Favorites which lets you create a list of your favorite blogs. There are several ways of adding a blog to your favorites list:
) next to a blog name.So, you’ve added a bunch of sites to your list. What now? You can restrict your searches to only your favorite blogs. You can display recent posts from your favorites on your own blog using the Favorites Widget. And, finally, you can share your favorites list with your friends.
I don’t think I’m going to use this feature much. I already keep a list of the sites I like on my feed reader and I don’t need another list to maintain. But what I would really like to see is a reverse listing. That is, I want to see who has added my blog as a favorite. This would help me better understand my readers, by looking at what other blogs they read I could get a better idea of the type of content they are interested in.
Tags: technorati, favorites
This blog has been created by Ianiv Schweber and Arieanna Foley
The blog's design and original content is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Copyright © 2005 Ianiv Schweber, Arieanna Foley
