MyBlogLog is a favourite website of mine and they have just introduced a new Wordpress widget called “Just For You“.

The concept behind it is that when a MyBlogLog-registered visitor turns up at your blog, Just For You (assuming it is installed on your blog) will scan the visitor’s MBL tags and see what their interests are.   The widget will then scan your blog archives, match the person’s MBL tags to your archives and bring back suggested stories from your archives for the person to read.

Quite an interesting idea - if you have space on your blog sidebar for another widget.

Just for You Personalizes Your WordPress Blog

Technorati Tags: blogging, mybloglog, tags, widget, Wordpress, Yahoo

There’s an interesting post over at Search Engine Journal about why you shouldn’t use Blogger to blog.    In fact, I think it’s a good argument overall about why you shouldn’t use any blog service’s own blogging space.

Right back when I started blogging for the first time (this must be late 2004 I guess), I went to Blogger like everyone else and I had my blog hosted on Blogspot like everyone else.    Most beginners get their blogs hosted on Blogspot because they don’t know any different and because it’s easy.   It’s like everything else in life - if you’re starting out with something for the first time, you want the learning curve to be quick and easy.

But eventually, I learned through friends that eventually the best way to deal with a blog was to get it off Blogspot and have it moved to a domain where I could control it.     As the Search Engine Journal post points out, if you are using the server space on Blogspot or Wordpress, you are subject to their whims and rules.    They can delete you at any time, lock you out at any time, whatever.   I mean, who actually reads all the small print of their Terms of Service?   So it’s much better to move everything over to your own domain where you alone control it.

Now of course I don’t use Blogger.   Last year, after many false starts, I finally managed to get a Wordpress blog installed and I haven’t looked back.    Wordpress is the King of blogging platforms.    But for beginners, a Blogspot platform is good to get a feel for things and to get a basic grounding in blogging.    Once you get going and you know what you are doing though, moving to a self-hosted Wordpress blog is a wise choice.   I’ve never regretted it and I am blessed to have friends who have pointed me in the right direction.

That’s not to say though that Blogger blogs have no value.   They do.   I like Blogger for the simple fact that they empower people to set up a blog.   Anyone, regardless of their technical knowledge, can set up a blog.    Even my mother can set one up.   You can’t help but admire that.  Blogger single-handedly defined blogging on the web and despite everyone trashing Blogger now, you still have to thank them for what they have done for blogging.

Thank you Blogger!

Technorati Tags: Blogger, blogging, Google, search engine journal, Wordpress

There’s one thing I know for sure - instant messaging networks have come a long way over the past few years and the uses that people have thought up for them have progressed beyond mere chatting and LOL’ing.

Here’s two :

Creating link-sharing request networks : I have been approached by people very active on places like Digg and Stumbleupon, asking me to approve them on my IM contact list, and me on theirs. Not really to chat but mainly to digg and stumble their links and they would do the same for me in return. The person with the link would just open a chat window and send the link to everyone in the list with the request “digg / stumble please”.

One guy told me he had 20-30 people in his network all digging and stumbling each other’s work. There’s been a lot of grumbling about how flawed the Digg Shout system is and so people seem to be turning instead towards IM programs to do their own informal “shouts”.

I am not sure if asking someone to digg / stumble your personal posts goes against the TOS of these sites but it’s an interesting concept nevertheless. If you have a weblink you want to instantly get out there, you can quickly ask everyone on your network to digg and stumble it for you.

For such a network to be truly effective though, you would need to have some diggers / stumblers on your list that are at least a bit influential on the sites. Kevin Rose would be a good choice on the Digg side although I seriously doubt he would agree to be on any IM network that I have just described. If you have a lot of contacts who are not so high up in the site’s hierachy then the stumbles and diggs they could do would have a limited effect.

For a list of top diggers, check out this list. For a list of top Stumblers, there are two lists in existence, one here and one here.

An unique twist on the “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” concept.

Controlling web-based services from the PC desktop

I recently posted about this on Geeks Are Sexy with a follow-up today. More and more online services are setting up IM access to their services, sometimes using Twitter as a conduit.

The top ones - Twitter, Facebook (in a kind of roundabout way using Twitter as the middleman), Google Calendar, Remember the Milk and all the major blogging platforms (including Wordpress). Just see my Geeks Are Sexy article for more details.

A lot of them are controlled through IMified which is easy to set up.

Technorati Tags: Digg, Google, google talk, IM, imified, Instant Messaging, networking, Stumbleupon, Twitter

Quite a cool Wordpress plug-in which stops most spam in its tracks by asking it a math question. Pretty bad though if the blog reader is bad at math though!

read more | digg story

Technorati Tags: Digg, math, plugin, Security, spam, Wordpress

I figured writing about the blog migration process from Blogger to Wordpress would help Yahoo customers who are trying to do the same thing, as moving this blog over to Wordpress was harder than I thought. The phrase “third time lucky” really applied in my case because after two unsuccessful attempts to move to Wordpress, I was ready to stay with Blogger. But upon the third successful try, I realised that all my previous problems were due to Yahoo.

For a start, they do not allow the uploading of a file called “.htaccess” which is what you need if you want to use the WP-cache or if you want to set up blog re-directions. Just type in “Yahoo + .htaccess” into any search engine and you’ll see that this is a widely contentious Yahoo policy.

Secondly, Yahoo offers an automated Wordpress set-up process for anyone who has signed up with Yahoo Webhosting. But this is not as generous as it seems. For a start, the current version being offered is Wordpress 2.0.2 (so they are pushing an outdated version at paying customers) and to rub salt into the wounds, they try to dictate to you how your permalinks should be set up! If you fail to use of their permalink structure suggestions, they block your customised permalinks by refusing to allow you to upload the .htaccess file. The lack of this file means that your customised permalinks are broken and you are virtually forced to go back to one of theirs. So I was forced to do a quick hack job by adding “index.php” to the beginning of my blog pages. I’ve been told by a reliable source that this will have search engine positioning implications. But at the end of the day, I can live with that if the blog works properly.

The biggest thing I hated about the whole automated Yahoo process was that it did not allow you to set the blog up at the root folder. The root folder is the name of the blog so my root folder would be http://www.betterthantherapy.net . Along with many other bloggers, I want people to be able to type in that URL and be taken directly to the blog. But Yahoo demanded that I set up the blog in a sub-folder such as http://www.betterthantherapy.net/index . You want to refuse, Mr Blogger? Then we’ll just cancel the automated process and delete the blog! Ka-POW!

So in short, they push outdated software at you, dictate how your blog should be set up, ban certain files from being loaded to your domain and then they charge you $11.95 a month. I don’t know how you would react to that but it really got my back up until I was in a rage. I intensely dislike being pushed around - and having to pay for it as well!

I was lucky the third time because I had Aibek from Make Use Of to help me out. We started by completely wiping the entire domain of all Yahoo-set up files and then we downloaded and installed the Wordpress 2.3 software directly from the Wordpress website (well, Aibek did. I just watched and learned). You will need a FTP program to move the set-up files from your computer to your domain - FileZilla is my favourite. Aibek set up a new database and did his magic. I have to admit he lost me part-way through so I just trusted his judgment to get it right. Maybe he will blog about what he did one day so we can all learn how to do it ourselves. I hope so!

Once the Wordpress files were uploaded to the website, I then had to choose a theme (a design for the page). This is harder than you might think as there are thousands of templates out there to choose from. Some are for sale while a lot of others are for free provided you keep the designer’s link at the bottom of the page. I must have went through about 20-30 possible themes, all of which looked great on the designer’s website but which absolutely sucked when I got it uploaded to the website. As one person remarked on a website, “most Wordpress themes look like they were designed by a crackhead with a set of crayons!”.

Then I went through a Goth period and wanted an all-black website but I was advised that would turn a lot of people off. So Aibek came to the rescue once again and recommended a very nice theme called “Cleaker“. I went with that one, mostly because I really liked the design but also partly because I was so tired of the whole process that I just wanted to choose one and get it finished. But I really like the theme now. It kind of grows on you!

Many tweaks and little problems later, the wrinkles were ironed out and the blog was finished. Once it is installed on your website, the key is just to go through all the options and get it the way you want it. As many people pointed out to me, “if you don’t like something on Wordpress, there’s a plug-in to change it.” Plug-ins and widgets are what makes Wordpress great as you can virtually make the blog do whatever you want. In fact I am stunned that I stayed with Blogger for so long when all these fantastic tools were at my disposal here at Wordpress. I mean, I was completely ignorant about trackbacks when in actual fact it is the backbone of blog promotion! So you can see the steep learning curve I had to quickly get used to.

But I decided to leave my old blog where it was at Blogger and start afresh here at Wordpress. The main reason is that any permalinks and comments at Blogger should be kept and maintained, and moving the blog would have broken them all. But to be honest, I was glad because the thought of manually moving over all 248 posts was not an appealing one. The old blog will always be up and available if anyone wants to see it. I just won’t be updating that one anymore.

But I really love Feedburner. As well as ensuring that my RSS subscribers don’t have to change anything at their end, it also formatted my blog title for me, which was one of the sticking points. Feedburner is an amazing tool and should be used by every blogger.

As more of the migration experience comes back to mind, I’ll blog about it again but this is basically everything. In short, Yahoo doesn’t make things easy with their various policies but that is probably why they have such a reliable uptime with their servers. I guess if you want big reliability, you have to sacrifice some things, but my once-perfect image of Yahoo has been tarnished a little. They could, if they cared, make the whole Wordpress set-up process a little easier and relax some of the restrictions a little. I was ultimately lucky in that I had someone skilled enough to help me but what about all the people out there who have no-one to help them? How many incorrectly formatted blogs are out there because of Yahoo’s restrictions?

Technorati Tags: .htaccess, Blogger, cleaker, feedburner, makeuseof, migration, set-up, Wordpress, Yahoo