DiPot: Ice Tea tech » Blogs

Feeds to Content & Categories Optimization in WordPress

ageor — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 20:26:03 +0000

At some point I added the category “Bookmarks” in Ice Tea tech. Thanks to the “YAAB” (short for Yet Another Auto Blogger) WordPress plugin, this category automatically gets its content directly from my Delicious feed. This way I get my own copy of what I put up there and my blog gets some added value in one move.

YAAB has an unusual but effective interface that allows adding content to any category of a WordPress blog from any number of feeds, even offering its own scheduler, if needed. It sure works as advertized.

Ever since then, I meant to further optimize the blog by separating the bookmarks from my other posts. This is just what I did, with the help of the “ACE” (short for Advanced Category Excluder) WordPress plugin. From now on, bookmark posts won’t appear in the main feed, like they don’t appear in the home page. For those interested, the Bookmarks feed is at http://dipot.com/category/bookmarks/feed (or find everything I post in my FriendFeed stream).

ACE gives a WordPress blogger full control over which Categories are hidden in any of 6 sections of their blog: Archive page, Home page, RSS feed for Posts, RSS feed for Comments, Search results & robots’ crawls. It is very straight forward, has a clean interface and works as advertized.

I consider both plugins to be great assets to WordPress blogs. Which are your favorite plugins? What functionality do you put/expect in a blog?

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12 Reasons Why You Should Own Your Blog | BloggerDesign from TopRank Online Marketing

ageor — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 19:12:50 +0000

“With the explosion of social networking and free blog sites, it is easier than ever to create your own blogs with just a few clicks of the mouse. The questions that don’t get asked are, do I own the content I create? If I upload images, are they still mine? What happens if this service goes away? Where as social networking sites are great, ultimately they are at the hands of other companies. What they choose to do with their services, you have no choice but to go along with it, or delete your account. Here are 13 reasons why you should purchase hosting and own your own blog. …”
By ageorg

This bookmark links to http://bloggerdesign.com/440/13-reasons-to-own-your-blog/

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opendba: What just happened to the database?

ageor — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 09:02:50 +0000

opendba: What just happened to the database?
By ageorg

This bookmark links to http://opendba.blogspot.com/2009/03/what-just-happened-to-database.html

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SitePoint » How Google Really Wants You to Optimize Your Site

ageor — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 13:56:36 +0000

SitePoint » How Google Really Wants You to Optimize Your Site
By ageorg

This bookmark links to http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/03/07/seo-for-google/

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spy :: visualizes the conversations on Twitter, Friendfeed, Flickr, Blogs and more.

ageor — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 13:15:49 +0000

spy :: visualizes the conversations on Twitter, Friendfeed, Flickr, Blogs and more.
By ageorg

This bookmark links to http://spy.appspot.com/

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MACON: ΣΤΕΓΑΝΟΠΟΙΗΣΗ: 9 ΑΞΙΩΜΑΤΑ

ageor — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 13:24:39 +0000

MACON: ΣΤΕΓΑΝΟΠΟΙΗΣΗ: 9 ΑΞΙΩΜΑΤΑ
By ageorg

This bookmark links to http://monosimacon.blogspot.com/2008/12/9.html

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Conversion Room

ageor — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:02:38 +0000

Conversion Room
By ageorg

This bookmark links to http://conversionroom.blogspot.com/

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Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Specify your canonical

ageor — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:02:37 +0000

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Specify your canonical
By ageorg

This bookmark links to http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

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Google News Blog: Eight Ways to Help Google News Better Crawl Your Site

ageor — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:02:37 +0000

Google News Blog: Eight Ways to Help Google News Better Crawl Your Site
By ageorg

This bookmark links to http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/eight-ways-to-help-google-news-better.html

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Mabinogogiblog: The Mom Song

ageor — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:02:36 +0000

Dedicated to all moms and kids. Excellent conveyor of the stress involved!
By ageorg

This bookmark links to http://greenerblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/mom-song.html

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locusblogus: ΠΩΣ ΝΑ ΦΤΙΑΞΕΤΕ FAVICONS

ageor — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:02:35 +0000

locusblogus: ΠΩΣ ΝΑ ΦΤΙΑΞΕΤΕ FAVICONS
By ageorg

This bookmark links to http://locusblogus.blogspot.com/2009/01/favicons.html

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Χρήσιμα και Δωρεάν Προγράμματα από την Microsoft! Ναι, είναι αλήθεια.

ageor — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:02:35 +0000

Χρήσιμα και Δωρεάν Προγράμματα από την Microsoft! Ναι, είναι αλήθεια.
By ageorg

This bookmark links to http://sotostips.blogspot.com/2009/01/microsoft.html

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30+ Interesting Twitter services and applications

ageor — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:02:35 +0000

30+ Interesting Twitter services and applications
By ageorg

This bookmark links to http://woork.blogspot.com/2009/01/30-interesting-twitter-services-and.html

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News Reading Thoughts

ageor — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:46:27 +0000

I never have enough of a good thing. The first time I read the online edition of a magazine I immediately wished for a filtered edition which would only contain the articles of my choice. When Greek Naftemporiki newspaper’s online-edition provided filtered, personalized content, I immediately wished for a method to push the content to me, instead of going around the sites and soon after that RSS appeared (what I like about technology; it always catches up).

Now RSS is commonplace. Filters increase, but the implementations are still early and immature. For example, except for Google and similar sites, filters usually apply to a single site; that of the content source (like http://naftemporiki.gr -only in greek). RSS makes it easy to gather information from multiple sources to the feed reader of choice, but by itself provides no filtering in the source, except in the form of multiple feeds. So, where should filtering apply?

The tools have been expanding and improving. From the days of raw content we now have search, filtering, RSS and a multitude of clients to put them to good use. I tried the very good BlogBridge for a while for its keyword-based virtual feeds (thanks, karagos, for suggesting it). It being offline and other problems I had (bad greek support and hitting the 600 feeds limit of the free edition while not convinced to buy yet) made me return to Google Reader. Regardless of reader, my everyday struggle to get and keep informed about the news and my interests has been getting very time-consuming, mainly due to increasing volume (never have enough of a good thing, remember?).

How many sources and how many pieces of news and info am I talking about? A quick count showed around 2800 items from my (ever expanding collection of) ~750 subscriptions in Google Reader in the last 12 hours. This includes my ~450 FriendFeed subcriptions feed, but not my ~900 people Twitter feed (strangely, only a small count of the tweets I follow make it to the RSS feed). Thankfully, a good portion of the tweets make it to FFd as well (although I fear not all FFd posts make it to the RSS feed, either). At this rate of incomings, it takes me 10-20′/h to browse everything, read and microblog about whatever catches my eye.

This is way too much time. In practice, I browse some of the titles when there’s time and only read the interesting items among them. I do use the Google Reader Filter GreaseMonkey script to highlight items containing an increasing number (~100, so far) of keywords and it is helpfull. But the real problem is with the multiple sharing of the same (great) URLs in FriendFeed, which in turn produce multiple different (as they come from different users) items in Google Reader. Those are not caught by the script’s “hide duplicates” option.

So, for the time being, I consider avoiding duplication my #1 goal for increasing my news-reading productivity. I hope Friendfeed will listen and convert duplicate link posts to likes or comments of the first such post. This would also result in a major added benefit: aggregating all the relevant discussions in one thread, as discussed here. I find it so important, I even requested Robert Scoble to lobby for this here (I guess it’s impossible to read everything, even for him)!

#2 goal is to reduce sources that produce similar content, like press releases etc. Google News does well about it but doesn’t track all the sites I do. Mechanisms of bookmarking sites like Delicious might also help, as they keep URL scoring. While I work on a plan, I’ll stick to goal #1. Please join!

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Microsoft IE and Standards Compliance

ageor — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 08:17:12 +0000

There is an indirect update to my December 16, 2007 “Web browser standards: Opera Software vs Microsoft” post in the “Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone” IEBlog post. The way I see it, Microsoft effectively confirms allegations about not complying with standards (by, at least, not seriously updating IE6 in over 5 years and creating lots of problems with IE7) promising it will do so with IE8:

“… IE8 now renders the “Acid2 Face” correctly in IE8 standards mode. …”

“… With respect to standards and interoperability, our goal in developing Internet Explorer 8 is to support the right set of standards with excellent implementations and do so without breaking the existing web. This second goal refers to the lessons we learned during IE 7. IE7’s CSS improvements made IE more compliant with some standards and less compatible with some sites on the web as they were coded. Many sites and developers have done special work to work well with IE6, mostly as a result of the evolution of the web and standards since 2001 and the level of support in the various versions of IE that pre-date many standards. We have a responsibility to respect the work that sites have already done to work with IE. We must deliver improved standards support and backwards compatibility so that IE8 (1) continues to work with the billions of pages on the web today that already work in IE6 and IE7 and (2) makes the development of the next billion pages, in an interoperable way, much easier. …”

If you wonder who made the “existing web” prone to “breaking”, I don’t. In my mind, it was Microsoft. When IE was dominant, it never completely adhered to standards, while extending HTML in all sorts of ways. When standards emerged or caught up, was IE updated accordingly? No.

Is Microsoft finally entering a standards compliance era? How, by adding a “Standards mode” in IE8? I still have my doubts and for good reason. You see, past experience says otherwise.

Web developers, Microsoft hasn’t and won’t ever do it for you. If you are interested in every computer owner being able to fully utilize your sites, please do us all a favor and comply to universal, not Microsoft standards. Windows percentage in the PC market is still very large but dropping. Make them build a decent browser; or not, who cares? Firefox, Opera etc. are excellent, compliant and multiplatform browsers. Don’t build the Internet depended on ActiveX and anything else non-standard enough so only IE (therefore only Windows) users can view.