Seattle.BloggersPub

A couple months ago I was getting quite a bit of traffic from an article at The RSS Blog titled Top 10 Mistakes Made by My Blogging Friends, which was linking back to one of my posts on Google Juice. Curiosity got the best of me, so I read the entire article. I had some thoughts on several of the points made in the article, so I figured I’d jot them down here:

Forfeiting Google Juice
I think the 301 Permanent Redirect option is a bit understated here. If you really care about your Google Juice, put in the extra research and put redirects in place. Relying on an h1 link seems too old school to me, and definitely too risky.

Forfeiting Your RSS Feed
Redirecting your feed may be a nightmare, but it really depends on how well you did your research. It is most certainly not impossible. Redirecting your feed is just as simple as redirecting individual blog posts, your entire blog, etc. Again, this is worth the effort, especially if you have a lot of people who rely on your web feed as consumers of your content. I’m still a bit bewildered why Robert Scoble never did this with his original web feed. Instead, he seemed to take the old school approach.

Invalid RSS Feeds
This is an important one. I remember there was a period of time where Ryan’s web feed was down for several weeks. I just assumed he wasn’t posting anything. Eventually I dropped by his blog to find that he had been posting for quite some time, and I had been missing out. Subscribing to your own feeds is a good idea (I guess that answers a long-standing question), since you’ll notice before anyone else does that something’s not quite right.

Making it Difficult to Subscribe
You’re doing yourself a disservice if you don’t make it easy for users to subscribe to your content. I’ve gotten used to copying and pasting web feed URIs into Bloglines, but don’t expect your average Joe user to know how to do this, or to want to even if they know how. Now that Firefox has made the subscription process even easier, you really need to have something like the following in your blog’s meta data:

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”Blog Feed” href=”http://www.bernzilla.com/xml/blog.xml” />

Not Reading Your Readers
This is another good point. If people are going out of their way to leave comments on your blog, it isn’t a bad idea to stop by theirs every now and then and provide feedback or comments where you think it is relevant. People who show interest in what you have to say are probably interested in similar things (or the exact opposite, in some cases), so you’re very likely to find something comment-worthy over at their blog. You might even find comments from other people who share similar interests. It’s that whole six degrees of separation thing.

Putting Yourself on a Pedestal
Let your actions speak for themselves. I can think of at least one occasion where I was excited at the thought of subscribing to a particular blogger’s feed and then quickly unsubscribed when one of the posts registered at Kanye West levels on the ego-meter.

Partial Feeds
You already know where I stand on this one.

All-in-all, Top 10 Mistakes Made by My Blogging Friends is a solid list of pointers, so definitely head on over and read the original article. If you’ve got any tips of your own, feel free to share them here in a comment.

PC World ran down a list of top 20 innovations for 2006. It ranged from Farecast to the Nintendo Wii and at the end they gave a list of top 5 innovations to look for in the next year. One of those was offline Ajax applications:
Offline Ajax applications: The Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) programming […]

I’m sitting at a bar in Silver Star, a ski resort in Canada trying to answer as much email as I can before I go back out and brave the cold. As I went through it, I saw a suggestion by a friend to do a top 10 news stories of Rich Internet Applications for […]

Tim and Mark snowshoe across a creek, Xmess 2006
Tim and I spent Christmas with Mark and Lauren (Schwa) snowshoeing near Hyak, Washingtion (which is near Snoqualmie Pass). It snowed heavily the day we arrived but Tim guided us straight to Azur’s sweet little snow covered cabin. It was pretty much like being in a […]

Tim and I were both drawn to the cover of the New York Times Arts section today because of this beautiful photo of and by Stanley Kubrick, taken in 1949 when he was a photographer for Look magazine.

from the collections of the Museum of the City of New York, as seen at NYTimes.com Artsmetadata:b&w […]

After seeing Seattle Busmonster and a dozen other cool Google mash-ups, I had the brilliant idea of creating a Seattle Happy Hour finder only to find out that it already existed. Unthirsty.com is a happy hour finder for anywhere (including Seattle of course) and as of this writing there are dozens of happy hours posted […]

FanPop! is a website where you can find existing ’spots’ for things you are interested in or start your own if it doesn’t exist. Each spot is a user community dedicated to a specific topic where people can go to find and share related information. Because the site offers RSS feeds you can subscribe […]

The interactive animation below accurately describes the state of my e-mail situation, in this, my 13th year with the medium: …Over the last couple of years, I’ve gone from someone who returns 99% of e-mails — and relatively quickly — to someone who routinely takes days, weeks, and sometimes even months to return certain mails, recently resorting to instant deletion just to avoid the buildup.

I’ve tried to figure out how to best express the dynamics of the situation in words, but an animated illustration seemed to get the point across much better, so this weekend, I whipped out Flash for the first time in about a year. The end result is kind of soothing actually…

My Friends Anonymous is a new feature on mahalie.com, saving for posterity the hilarity that occasionally drifts out of the mouths (or keyboards) of my zany friends.

That’d be over a foot of traditional Czech Christmas braided bread, Hoska, baked by my cousin Mary Hardin. Photo (but not the quote below, hence, anonymous) also by Mary.
Hope […]

Looking back, this month has been a pretty lame one for me blogging wise. I suppose if there’s any time of the year to spend more time with family and friends and less time blogging, this would be it, though. Plus, it isn’t like I didn’t have any other excuses.

Anyway, hopefully all you faithful visitors out there have found yourselves too busy and/or too merry to notice. Whatever holiday you do (or don’t) celebrate, I hope December ‘06 has been a memorable one for multitudes of reasons. Happy holidays, and merry Christmas!