Darren Rowse at ProBlogger asked his readers about their feed reading habits. In particular he wanted to know what makes people unsubscribe from a Blog feed. I have been cleaning out my Google Reader lately and I have found myself unsubscribing to feeds for the following reasons:

1. Partial Feeds: I still click through to the originating site even if I’ve read a full feed. Partial feeds seem like a cheap way to force me to do something I already do so I just unsubscribe to pages that use them out of spite.
2. Poor Grammar: Mine is not perfect, nor is my spelling, but seeing bad grammar and poorly constructed sentences on a regular basis makes me lose respect for the author. A lot of the errors I see could be corrected with a quick run through the spell and grammar check on Microsoft Word so there is very little excuse to post before checking.
3. Repetitive Posts: I know that sometimes the media gets carried away with certain topics (Anna Nicole, Oscar Coverage, etc.), but I expect more from a blogger. Unless your blog focuses on a specific topic, I don’t want to see 10 posts on a specific topic over the course of a week.
4. Off The Topic: When topic focused blogs go off topic and stay off topic for a while I just lose interest. If it is a topic focused blog I signed up to read posts on a specific topic and related items.
5. Furry Friends and Cute Babies: I don’t want to see pictures of your kids or your pets unless they are doing something that is really special. I set the bar very high when I use the term special — that video of a cat sitting at a piano and attempting to play was on the low end of what I consider special. Truth be told no one really wants to hear about your munchkins or pets unless it is a blog that regularly features appearances by them. If I am subscribed to a blog with this kind of material, I most likely know the blogger quite well.
6. Regurge: Please try not to regurgitate stories you found on the last ten sites you visited when you were reading through your own feeds. Chances are I’ve read half of them or I subscribe to similar feeds and will get to that news from an official news source as well. Not every tech site has to report on the newest USB gadget as soon as it drops. Go for a weekly roundup of new gadgets if that is not the primary focus of your blog.
7. Miscategorization: Don’t try to pass your blog off as a tech or gadget blog if you only make one post about a gadget every week or so. If it’s a personal blog, don’t be embarrassed to let it be a blog about you and your experiences. Don’t try to pass your opinions off as fact or try to spin them as real news either. If you think your readers are fooled, you’re wrong and Fox News already does a better job of it.
8. Video Clips: If you are going to post links to video clips in your blog, at least put some text in the blog post. Spending an extra second to tell the viewer what the video is about should be common sense.
9. Excessive Updates About the Blog: You don’t need to tell me about every update you do to your theme, how you’re changing your blog, and constantly apologize for being offline or for not posting constantly. We are human and most bloggers work alone. We understand that your posting frequency will change depending on what is going on in your life. If you want to put some ads on your blog to pay the web hosting bills, more power to you. If you made a change that may have caused down time or screwed something up for the readers, by all means explain yourself. Just don’t do it every day.
10. Blogging about Blogging: Don’t do it. I’m guilty of it as well and I’ve made an effort to stop it. Blogging about blogging is the snake eating its tale (ha ha).

[Link to What makes you unsubscribe from a blog’s RSS feed?]

When I first started blogging regularly I purchased a license for Ecto which is an amazing application. I started using it on OS X, so I was a bit disappointed in the Windows translation. Most applications that start on the Mac platform don’t quite translate to Windows just because of the limitations of the operating system. At any rate, since I moved back to Windows (temporarily) I have struggled to find a good desktop blog editor.

A while ago I went through almost every free and low cost blogging software package that I could find for Windows. I found a software package with a good interface, it ran slowly. If I found one that was good all around, the price was too high. For kicks and giggles I figured I would try Windows Live Writer because other people seem to like it, and I also found a quick and dirty article on getting it to work with the Wordpress Ultimate Tag Warrior plug-in. It causes me physical pain to say it but I like the software and it works well for my purposes. Furthermore it’s free. It also has a growing library of plugins which will encourage versatility. I just hope it doesn’t become bloated like Microsoft applications tend to get after they have been around for a while. I also hope it remains free.

Do you use Windows Live Writer? If so what do you think of it? Do you use another application I may be unfamiliar with? Let me know about it.

It’s been a terribly long time since I made any updates to the site. A lot of things happened including a trip, an impending move to a new apartment (which implies lots of packing), a decent spot of work, and a major theme crisis. I wasn’t just lazy I was busy and because this is a one chick show, I had no one to pinch it.

The good news is that the theme crisis is over. I have found a great theme called xMark. My old theme was nice but there were a few things that bothered me about it after I had some time to spend with it. It wasn’t fluid and did not degrade gracefully when placed in a very small or oddly sized window. These things just make a theme less usable. I’m not a usability freak by any means but if it bothered me it’s going to drive people with sensory differences absolutely nuts. I also got tired of the header image thing even though I had one of my own up there. I wanted a theme that was lighter and loaded quicker. xMark accomplishes both of these things.

If you see a lot of layout changes over a very short period of time, do not freak out. It’s just me mucking with the CSS which I tend to do. Expect slight changes to the look and feel and expect more posts in the near future.

After a couple of weeks of use I decided to remove the Snap website preview functionality from my site. I don’t mind it personally, but it gets tedious after a long day of browsing. It is a great idea for sites that are very link-heavy like Wikis so that the reader can catch a glimpse of where they’re going before they click on a link. I just don’t think its right for my site. I would like to enable it on a link-by-link basis but I think that would become tedious after a while.

There are enough people out there that are uncomfortable with Snap, and I have no idea how a screen reader would react to it. For now I think that it could work against me and annoy readers enough for them to leave without subscribing to my feeds. That’s a risk I’m not willing to take.

As you can see, my site seems to have experienced some technical difficulties. What had happened was I upgraded to Wordpress 2.1 and was having problems with categories (namely I couldn’t create new ones or save anything to existing categories, and forget about the list of category names on the writing page). There were also problems with UTW and various other plugins which the individual authors are working to resolve. Anyway, I posted my issues in the Wordpress Support Forum and waited a couple of days but got no potential fixes so I decided to blow everything away and start on a fresh install. When I re-imported my posts everything was placed into a generic Uncategorized category so now I have to go back and re-file them. I was planning on adding some new categories and trimming down some of them that had become too general so this incident has given me a great chance to do just that. I am a little disappointed at this Wordpress update. I know it fixed over 500 bugs but it seems to have generated a couple hundred new ones. We’ll see how this all pans out. Overall I like the changes that have been implemented.

I have recently renamed both my content and comments feeds (I know it’s bad webmastering but it’s part of my grand scheme). Please update your subscriptions!

Full Content Feed is now: http://feeds.feedburner.com/itsreallyjustme_fullcontent
Comments Feed is is now: http://feeds.feedburner.com/itsreallyjustme_comments

Why is every other blog telling bloggers how to blog? I read a lot of blogs. I am a feed addict. My OPML file from Google Reader would make you weep. Recently I’ve noticed that I’ve been reading a lot of blogs that are telling me how to blog. If I do these 20 things, I will drive more traffic to my blog, sell more ads, and soon my blog will pay for itself (and possibly a nice Georgetown-style townhome here in Raleigh). If I stop doing these 15 things, I will be a more effective blogger. If I link here and here, use tags, hop on my right foot in a circle while patting my head and rubbing my tummy in a videoblog posted to this site it will be regurgitated to YouTube, then it will be Dugg, and I will be the famousest of bloggers for about two hours. Lately it just seems that I am getting hammered with blogging tips and tricks. The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) gurus are out there pushing their tips on the masses. Oy! A lot of the tips are great and make a lot of sense. If you’re a professional blogging consultant and the sole purpose of your blog is to teach other people how to live off of their blogs, blogging about blogging and telling people how to blog makes sense. If you are just a blogger and you spend half of your time regurgitating the awesome knowledge that the SEO gurus have blessed you with, and your daily link roundup is simply an ode to Problogger.com, what excatly have you done? You probably haven’t used any of the tips you’re regurgitating, furthermore you’ve just taken your eyes off the prize and wasted time you could’ve been working on your own content. You’ve just given lip service and driven more traffic from your blog to a blog that already gets astronomical hits and has a loyal following.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t read the SEO guru blogs and try to use the tips. I just think it’s a bad idea to spend a lot of your own time advertising someone else’s ideas. Time which you could’ve used to write a compelling post or tweak your blog’s appearance.

At any rate, I feel as though I’ve just done what I’m complaining about (says the chick who filed her post about blogging about blogging in a category she has defined on her blog about blogging). Thanks very much I’ll be here all week.

I recently switched my contact form over to the Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form that will deter Spam. Comment spam was bad enough but I got hammered by over 50 emails in one day just from the comment form alone. All of this just drives a wedge between people who want to communicate with each other which is unfortunate. At any rate, use the new form which is at the same place.

I have problems with software. Sometimes it takes me several months to settle on one software package for a specific task. Even if I really like a software package and have used it for a long time, I eventually get bored and start looking for alternatives. That’s what is happening for me right now. I am currently looking for two solutions right now. I am looking for a good GTD implementation (which is FREE) and I am looking for good blogging software.

The GTD Software Dilemma:
There are a lot of web based solutions which are super quick and free (for the most part) but they’re not necessarily reliable. I have been using Tracks in a hosted environment (which shall remain nameless), and the one time I really needed it, it was down for the better part of a day (with no announcement about the incident from the people running the project). This is exactly what I fear. I can’t afford a paid solution right now, and every time I look at a free solution I am thoroughly disappointed. I have considered the Moleskine GTD Hack, but I type like lightning and taking the time to make notes in a little notebook about what I am working on seemed like a waste of time. I also have a Blackberry and it would be great if I could get some of those tasks from some sort of desktop or web based application into the Blackberry at some point in time. I like the idea of the Tracks system, but I have looked at the installation instructions and if they frustrate me before beginning the install (which I would do on the same site that hosts my blog), I don’t think it will get any better as I move through the install. Right now the best solution I’ve seen is Kinkless which is based on OmniOutliner Pro for Mac OS X. This would be extremely expensive since I don’t even have a Mac right now (:(). I’m leaning more towards the web solutions but I would prefer to install/maintain an open source one of my own. Anyone wanna set Tracks up to be installed from Fantastico in cPanel? If that would happen then I’d run Tracks all the time. Running it on a PC locally just doesn’t work for me but if I could install and admin it (with ease) I would use it every day.

The Desktop Blogging Software Dilemma:
I am a fickle software user. I am also more inclined to deal with a bug or two in an application which is more aesthetically pleasing than I am to use the rock solid solution. I also like to stray from all things Microsoft. I like Open Source applications but I don’t preach them. When a developer or small team of programmers come out with a good program, I don’t mind dropping some money on it assuming the price was right. A few years ago when I still had a pretty Mac, the price was right for me and I paid for an Ecto license. To this day I’m still madly in love with Ecto.. for the Mac. Since I am Macless right now, I have switched over to the Windows version of the software and it puts me to sleep. This is just one of the unfortunate side effects of de-mac-ifying software. When applications get ported from PC to Mac it usually works out well. When it goes the other way — not so much. I am bored and underwhelmed with Ecto for Windows and I have been looking for an alternate. I have played with Qmana and the only thing that stood out about it was all of the emphasis on Ads. I tried to Zoundry Blog Writer for about a day and got that creepy commercial feeling about it as well. BlogJet seems to have a following out there, but the price is a little steep considering there are better tools for less. Flock is no frills and great for when you’re on the road and need to get something on your blog quick, but if I’m going to open a browser I might as well type directly into the Wordpress editor. You could say the same about the Performancing plugin for Flock and Firefox. I am going to try blogging from Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets to see if it may be comfortable for me.

Right now I am using w.Bloggar and it’s pretty neat. It doesn’t get in the way of my blogging. It’s fast. It doesn’t choke when it downloads past entries. It’s intuitive. Best of all it’s free. I think I’ll stick with this for a while (at least until another Mac comes into my life).

Does anyone have another suggestion for with my GTD or Desktop Blogging Software issue? PLEASE leave suggestions in the comments!