Return of the Bookmark Badge

Recently, I received an email from Pat (also known as MicroPat on Twitter), the creator of Add to Any.  He wrote my webmaster account to let me know that he had found my article on ShareThis and Add to Any’s interaction with the Snap! service, and was looking in to it. 

I decided to take the time out to write a reply documenting why I eventually chose not to use any bookmarking tags on my site.  I had about 4 reasons.  I have also stopped using Snap! just because people found it annoying. 

Pat was nice enough to reply with a well-reasoned point-by-point discussion.

The upshot of that conversation was that I decided to give Add to Any another shot, but I am limiting the button to only appear when the full article is opened. The way the button is implemented keeps it out of my RSS feed (this is very important to me, apparently part of WP’s bad feed handling and something the ShareThis plugin does), and also gives me usage stats directly in Google Analytics.

I also added a new voting question in the sidebar asking if you like bookmarking buttons or not. I’d like to hear from you! 

If you have any additional thoughts on this topic please feel free to share them in the comments here.

Posted in Status |

Disqus Clout: Fail!

Man, I really need to step up my commenting game. I’m not saying I need to game the system or whatever.. you know what I’m talking about.

Just look at it. It’s not good.

Even if you don’t know what clout is you can guess that three is pretty low. We aren’t playing golf here, the point isn’t to get as low as possible.

What is Disqus clout?

Glad you asked. Without going too deep into what the Disqus comment system is and how it is similar or different to other comment systems (including the one built-in to Wordpress), the high-level overview is that Disqus manages my comments on this blog, as well as comments on thousands of other blogs. Because these comments are managed centrally, on Disqus’ site, this means that people using the system to write a comment only need one login everywhere that Disqus is used.

Aside from the convenience of a single login, this also means that each user gets assigned a clout value. By default the clout value is 1. When you comment on a blog, and someone likes your comment, they have the option of voting your comment up using a small arrow next to the comment. Each vote adds one to your clout. Conversely, they can vote you down as well, taking away a point.

As you can see the official FAQ documentation is deliberately vague. I believe that clout can’t drop below 1 (at least, I’ve never seen negative clout), and right now, having a lot of clout points doesn’t really net you anything awesome except a certain kind of Disqus-specific prestige. So far.

So Lets Talk About My Clout

Yeah, so the point is, my clout is in bad shape. I’m not sure if this is because my commenting is spotty and of low-quality (probably) or people are forgivably forgetting to vote my comments up (they are busy, no worries), or there is a vast conspiracy to destroy my clout rating (they follow me wherever I go!) Whatever the reason, I am now on a campaign to get it higher. Take a look at some of my peers’ clout ratings:

Ok, so putting Daniel Ha in there can be seen as cheating since he is a Disqus developer, and pretty much answers all the questions on the Disqus Blog and Forum.

Also, I cleverly didn’t list anyone who had less than 10 clout. Hey, it’s my blog.

What You Can Do To Help

Ok, so my goal is to provide more insightful and interesting comments on a wider variety of blogs using Disqus. What you as a Disqus user can do, to me and anyone else you notice writing a good comment, is to vote more. Or, if you are lazy, you can just vote me up.

I won’t complain. I promise.

Posted in Humor |

Tell Me About RSSmeme

This isn’t going to be just any run-of-the-mill review from me. Why? Because the application I am going to review is different in several substantial ways:

• It isn’t a piece of software you install on your PC
• It isn’t a web application like Gmail or YouTube
• It really isn’t exactly meant to be a destination page like My Yahoo! or iGoogle

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Review |

New Site Feature: Polls!

I just added a poll feature to the sidebar of my site.  My first poll asks the question, do you prefer the default action of a link to open in the same window/tab, or in a new window/tab?  I’m interested because up to this point, I’ve defaulted to a new window.  I just realized, some people may be annoyed by that.

After all, you can always use shift-, ctrl- or command- to force a link to open in a new window or tab, but there’s no keyboard key to force a link to come up in the same window.

Err.. hopefully I haven’t swayed your opinion at all.  Ok, go vote.

Thanks to @corvida for the help.

Posted in Status |

Please Digg: Some Google Reader Notes Statistics

I normally wouldn’t ask this of my readers, but I’m trying to raise the profile of RSSmeme and this is a good eye-catching article. If you use Digg or Mixx, please vote this story up! Thanks!

Curious how many people are using Google Reader notes? In the last 24 hours 4527 new stories have entered into RSSmeme. Of those stories 1059 of them have at least one note attached. Across those 1059 stories are 1202 notes produced by 584 unique users.

read more | digg story | mixx story

Posted in External |

Hiatus, and News Hot Off the Press!

Sorry about the long hiatus between posts on this blog.. I definitely have a couple of reviews and primers that I plan on getting out this week. Also, with a little luck I will have a guest post, which is exciting! I have actually had a few developments happen in my life outside the blog, on the job front and also in my wife’s Annie’s business.

She runs a custom invitation business called Charming Paper, and the great news is that we have just taken delivery of a vintage Chandler & Price 8×12 Letter Press! It’s about 5 feet tall and weights just over 1200 lb. It is made of good old-fashioned cast iron. We got it in terrific shape, which is awesome, because had any of the pieces been missing or broken, they would be extremely difficult to impossible to replace. As it is, it seems to run smoothly and nothing looks obviously broken. It is not motorized, but there’s a small electric motor (not pictured) that will drive it using a belt (like a giant fan belt for a car). Annie won it on an EBay auction, and shipping cost more than the device itself.

Though I’m not that interested in the process of making invitations per se, letter press is a whole different ball park. I am going to stay actively involved with this guy, and hopefully you’ll see some really cool single and two-color prints being made in the next few months.

Ok, well sorry about the off-topic post, but it’s an exciting development and I thought I’d geek out about it. This thing is possibly the oldest device Annie and I have ever owned. So old, in fact, that my early-adopter gene is kicking in.

Here’s another link that shows a similar (old-style vs. our new-style) press before and after a full restoration.

Update: Annie has blogged about the press in her Charming Paper Blog as well.

Posted in Status |

Digsby News: Facebook Chat Support

Today, Digsby announced an unexpected new feature: direct support for Facebook chat!

As far as I know, Digsby is the first multi-IM client to support Facebook chat, and it’s a feature that many Facebook users are looking forward to. They say in a blog entry that messaging, buddy icons, status and status messaging are currently supported. The more advanced features that Digsby is known for will be added soon.

The latest Digsby build also fixes some bugs associated with Yahoo! Mail beta and proxy support. Full details can be found at their blog.

Posted in Related News |

Follow Me at Google Tutor!

I’ve been sitting on this information for a little while now, but I noticed that my first article, Gmail error 102, has been published — so now it is official! I am going to be a regular contributor to Google Tutor!

Since I am relatively new to blogging, I’m not sure how these things traditionally go, but in this case I was contacted by the Google Tutor creator to contribute.  We settled on new articles three to four times monthly on different Google topics.  You can expect the quality and usefulness on the site to be as good as on here, or better.

Needless to say, I am very excited about this new opportunity!  Hopefully you will find the site useful and will follow my posts.

See you there!

Posted in External, Status |

Disqus Enhancements

Just a quick newsworthy note, this site uses a community-based comment system called Disqus.  I’ve been really happy with it so far, and they just made it better!

According to their blog, they now have more information in their popup profile. This is the bubble of info you get when you hover over someone’s picture in the comments section here or in any other Disqus-enabled blog.

The popup profile now not only lists the Disqus user’s registered services, but also their most recent comments and their last tweet, if they are on Twitter.

Posted in Related News |

Tell Me About Digsby

You’re on AIM, MSN and Yahoo! Messenger. You have Google Talk through Gmail and you still have that old ICQ account lying around.

You think you have it covered with Trillian or Pidgin.

Perhaps you think you are a step ahead of your coworkers because you are using Meebo.

Think again.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Review |