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.

We knew it was going to happen.. just a matter of time. Six Log got hit with some lovely Trackback spam. Wasn’t Typekey supposed to take care of blog spam? Was it not touted as the cure-all for the spam problems bloggers were having everywhere? I had been asking about turing and comment moderation for a while, but neither made it into MT and I didn’t feel compelled to spend my money on it. The hardcore MT crowd spent a lot of time talking about the Wordpress defectors, but a lot of people left because MT3 did not solve the problems that needed a solution like the spam issue.

Since I migrated my blog from MT to Wordpress, the comment spam has dried up. Perhaps Google hasn’t finished indexing my site or I’m just not drawing as much traffic as I used to. I don’t know what caused the change but I love the peace and quiet. Comment moderation seems to be quite effective. I have heard a lot of stories about Typekey has driving away comments while people are still getting comment spam. I thought Typekey was a good idea for a minute and realized it’s just going to create more work for the readers. When you make your readers work too hard, they don’t stick around. When I was using CMS software like Xoops and PostNuke, I had the same problem. The users didn’t feel like creating logins to see certain content so they didn’t. The news page got tons of hits and no one went any deeper. With precious few readers, the less work you make them do, the better.

Yeah. More changes. I am trying to clean up the site, make it more functional, make the browsing experience more pleasurable, and learn Wordpress all at the same time. Mostly I’m leaning on Jason for help with plugins and scripts and stuff like that. I think he likes it, well he’s not as burned out on this crap as I am. I dealt with MT for a few years and this is my first blog endeavor outside the MT world since I mucked with LiveJournal and some other server-side scripts. I’m impressed with Wordpress, but the documentation is pathetic for a lot of the plugins. I don’t think that the developers take as much pride in their work as the developers did in the MT community when I was still actively using it. There was more of an effort for documentation and communication. My biggest wish for the Wordpress community is that they install a real threaded bulletin board system for their users. Finding answers to my questions and posting things in the right place would be a lot easier if a real forum was installed.

I also think the Wordpress community could stand to start a plugin/hack site like the MT Plugins site, where things are posted when they’re updated and users can help each other with problems. Most of what I miss about MT relates to the community, but WP is young yet so things will hopefully change for the better.

So I finally jumped ship. After all those years of using Movable Type I have finally jumped ship. Yes I did it because of the licensing, but not because I wasn’t willing to pay. I just wasn’t willing to pay what they were asking for the four blogs and three authors that were running on my install. Furthermore, as far as I can tell the changes in MT3 were minimal and did nothing to quell the problems with the comment spam. By employing a centralized login system, the only
thing that Typekey did was drive visitors and comments away. Not all of the people who refuse to log in are comment spammers. Some people just don’t like creating accounts on every damned website and they’re entitled to that, as I should be entitled to quell comment spam with a reasonable level of ease without requiring logins. MT3 did not provide that solution for me, so why would I pay for something that didn’t fix the problems I had with the previous version? Furthermore, there is no guarantee that I won’t have to pay through the nose for the next version when its released. I just didn’t feel secure paying that amount of money to not solve my blog problems so thus I am here. Wordpress is a learning experience, and I’m excited because it’s PHP based and I’m all about learning some PHP. Maybe I will be compelled to produce some plugins. We’ll see. Anyway, tell me what you think of the WP setup here, and I’ll try to accommodate any issues you guys find with my site.