Category: blogging

Useful Links

Letter from Taos on my writing blog First 50 Words will explain what I’ve been doing instead of posting here lately. I’ve also been occupied writing things like Eco-Friendly Recycling of Electronics at BlogHer. If you are about to get a new digital TV or plan to dispose of anything from a cell phone to a fax machine, that article will help you find a recycler who will do the right thing with all the lead, mercury and other toxins in your electronics.

Another way to Classify Twitter Users from Sarah in Tampa describes some new ways to classify spammers on Twitter. I’m hardly a power user of Twitter, but I’ve already attracted my share of spammers.

Morgan Stanley’s March Internet Trends Report: Social Applications Dominating at TechCrunch shows the entire presentation. It’s worth looking at every slide from Morgan Stanley, don’t just read the selective summary in the post.

SAP Global Survey: Australia’s Laurel Papworth: Building a Social Network for Arab Women is an interview with Laurel Papworth about her recent experiences teaching blogging at the Arab Women’s Network. My background info on this here .

Who are the Top Tech Bloggers?

Who are the top tech bloggers? What’s wrong with this list?

You think I’m going to say that there are no women on it, but I’m not. There are women on the list.

The problem is that techmeme is counting quantity, not quality. The number one blog on the list is Michael Arrington’s Tech Crunch. The article itself is on Tech Crunch. Tech Crunch publishes about 15 or 20 posts a day giving quick facts about developments in the tech world. (Arrington himself has written about the complaints from his family because he’s blogging all the time.) How could the prolific publishers like Tech Crunch, GigaOM, and Read Write Web not make the list?

Is quantity what matters?

Sure it’s interesting to see each fleeting bit of tech news as it comes and goes. I’m not saying I don’t read these blogs, because I do. Heck, I read and quote the blogs on the top 100 myself quite a lot. But I’d much rather read a thoughtful article on A List Apart or Digital Web Magazine, which in my mind qualify as top tech blogs.

Maybe the point I’m trying to make is that the blogs that matter to me help me learn something useful for my own education. The news blogs are interesting in an abstract way: what’s happening at Yahoo or Microsoft or some recently funded startup is good information—there’s nothing bad about knowing these things.

But the things I really want to know and care deeply about as a writer on the topic of learning web design come from other tech blogs.

Useful Links

New Initiative in Hyper-Localized Social Tagging at the Web Standards Project is an April Fool’s spoof good for a laugh. I’m sure you’ve seen all the lists of April Fool’s jokes around the web, but this one appeals in particular. And, Eric makes it his own with Full Disclosure. I rather like the one about This person contains outdated material. Most of me is outdated but I still work in quirks mode.

Moving from WordPress.com to WordPress is a good tutorial from OptiNiche about moving a WordPress blog.

Useful Links

15 Amazing Women in Blogging is Extra for Every Publisher’s selection of his favs. I even agree with a couple of his choices. Can you guess which ones?

Web Worker Daily provides a concise summary of links involving the Microsoft attempt of a hostile takeover of Yahoo!

The Edublogs Magazine is new. Looks interesting. Its tag line: Education and the Edublogger.

CSS Reference at Sitepoint is the first of three comprehensive reference collections. The others will be about HTML and JavaScript. This one must be bookmarked.

I hate Blogger’s new comment interface

A Blogger comment form Have you tried to leave a comment on a Blogger blog lately without using a Blogger ID?

It’s horrible! You can choose to sign in (supposedly you can) using a WordPress blog name. But you have to be signed in to WordPress first. Yes, signed in to WordPress, check.

Next you have to put the Blogname. There’s no clue as to whether this is a URL, a name like “Web Teacher” or something else entirely. OK. So I try http://www.webteacher.ws. No go. I try www.webteacher.ws. No go. I try Web Teacher. No go. What’s left to try? How about vdebolt? No go. Tells me I need to sign in to WordPress, which I am already.

I have tried to comment on several Blogger blogs in recent weeks and can never get past this. What’s up with this, Blogger?

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Useful links for the New Year

  • Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike, a NY Times article, talks about why even the most expert of people need to bring in fresh perpective from outside their “box” when innovative thinking is needed. Very interesting ideas on how the brain works. I posted a few thoughts of my own about this at BlogHer.
  • Adding Avatars and Gravatars to Your WordPress Blog gives you step by step instructions from Lorelle.
  • Time Magazine says these are the best 50 websites made in 2007. What do you think?
  • Indexed asks a pertinent question about the way culture intersects with education in “Cause, effect, or both?”

Today’s useful links

Wikipedia Competitor Being Tested by Google is mentioned at the NY Times. The service, called Knol, allows multiple entries by competing writers and develops a sort of reputation rating for the authors. The article mentions some of Knol potential competitors, but does not specifically mention eHow. Since I’m an eHow writer and am getting familiar the user generated content there, I would certainly consider eHow competition for Google’s new service, too.

Letting Them Know It’s Christmas in Liberia by Kim Pearson isn’t the kind of link I normally provide here. It has nothing to do with web design, and everything to do with the spirit of Christmas. It begins, “This is a story about an extraordinary young woman—really, three extraordinary young women—who will make you believe in angels all over again. At its center is MacDella Cooper, who literally walked out of the Liberian civil war at the age of 13 to triumph in the fashion world and create an eponymous foundation that brings the treasures of home and love to so many of the children she left behind.”

Hannah Montana Tickets on Sale! Oops, They’re Gone. I was royally ticked off because I couldn’t connect by Internet or phone to ticket sales for Hannah Montana tickets for over an hour, at which point they were all sold. I immediately went to eBay and found some already there for about $250 each. How can a slimeball profiteer get a batch of tickets when someone like me who just wants to thrill some of Miley Cyrus’ pre-teen fans cannot? The New York Times has the sordid tale. A plague upon StubHub and their damnable software.

Too Much Accessibility by Patrick Lauke has slides, audio, and information about getting carried away with a little accessibility knowledge and making a mess of things.