I haven’t been doing much writing recently.

Anywhere.

After an extremely fun couple of months writing for ReadWriteWeb (thanks again for making that possible, Richard! Your team is absolutely the best folks to work with!) I found a full-time job working for CyberSource, working on the operations/support piece for a new product they (we) are developing for electronic payment processing. Sounds boring, doesn’t it?

In fact, I am learning and applying new technologies at a prodigious rate. I’m using Linux admin and deployment skills that, frankly, have gotten a bit rusty in the year I spent immersed in new media. And it is challenging me.. which also means that when I meet goals and deadlines, I feel good.  Also, I am writing a lot – but now in the form of documentation around the project. That combined with just wanting to come home and relax after a hard day has definitely made me step back from the active role I had on various social media sites and blogs.

But there are still times I find myself with an hour here or there, and I fire up Feedly or Google Reader, hit GA (go-all) and start skimming from the top. And the blog-o-sphere continues apace, weaving its own curiously compelling tapestry of news, insights, discussion, and often overwhelming coverage of larger events, and it makes me a bit nostalgic (if such could be said for something that I’ve only been away from for a couple of months).

In any case, these changes have made me see my own works from a fresh perspective. I’ve decided, for now, a fancy blog theme is not important. A lot of bells and whistles are not important. I just want something simple, maybe even too simple, that I can use as a framework to build upon.  To that end, I have chosen a theme that is fast and doesn’t waste a lot of time with CSS. I’m hoping with its limited potential for distracting eye-candy, it will also help me to focus on content.

I do need to figure out how to show the number of comments a post has on the front page though.  That’s a big omission.  For now, you can click on an article title to get to the comments (if there are any).

I don’t know if there’s still a lot of you out there cheering Scribkin on, or even just patiently (or bemusedly) waiting for a new post to appear, but if you are, thanks. I’ll try to write here at least every weekend.

Update: I figured out how to add a comments link. Time for a nap.

I’ve been criminally lacking on updating this blog since taking a writing position at ReadWriteWeb. I admit it. But I do have an idea about the direction I want to take this blog, and hopefully, if I keep plugging at it, people will find it to be useful.

However, I’m mostly writing this today for two reasons:

1. To figure out if writing a post will ‘reboot’ my broken FeedBurner feed into working, and
2. To gloat a little about just how much I’ve been blogging over at RWW recently.

Of The First Part

So, starting with the Google FeedBurner issue.  I have no idea what it is, and I honestly haven’t had much time or motivation to futz with it recently.  I suspect it is similar to something that happened to Louis Gray recently (which you can read about here), but I’m not sure at all. If I view the RSS feed in Mozilla, I get something that looks like this:

But if I look at it in Chrome (which strangely has absolutely NO support for viewing RSS feeds), I get this:

So, I’m not sure what’s going on.  I’m going to post this, and if that doesn’t fix it I guess I’ll go into the Feedburner "hit it with a hammer" section and see if I can knock something loose.

Of The Second Part

They’ve been keeping me busy over at RWW. Generally, three posts a day, every weekday. That’s 15 posts a week, and I’ve been doing it for several weeks now. There’s actually a handy little RWW link that lists all the posts I wrote, and the number of comments on each.  So, that’s awesome. 

Plus, week I went to SXSW Interactive on a press pass, and that was a total blast!  It was so amazing to finally meet everyone that I have been reading and following in online, I forgot about blogging at all until a couple of days in. Sorry, RWW.

Update: I figured out the RSS feed issue.  It was a plugin called GooseGrade.  Updated the plugin and the feed is fixed.  Yay!

I’m all about trying out new social services, applications and tools. I love learning about a new product and getting around inside it to figure out its capabilities and features.

Perhaps recognizing that fact, Mike from Chat Ventures contacted me recently and offered to let me beta-test a new WordPress plugin they were developing called Qwidget.

What is Qwidget? It’s simple. Think of it as a easy yes/no poll box that’s been pumped full of social media goodness. On the surface, you will see a simple question, to which you can (without registration and hardly any thought) answer yes or no. Your answer is recorded.

Next, Qwidget offers you the chance to register (in the widget, it’s free and quick, you don’t even leave the site) and provide more details about why you chose your answer. Also, you will see other comments from other folks on the same question.

Notice that I did not say anything about the other folks having answered the question on this blog! In fact, Qwidget keeps a keyboard-based library of questions available for all Qwidget-enabled blogs to choose from. This means that blogs with the same sort of content (and resultingly, the same sort of questions) will be able to pool their discussions and answers via Qwidget.

Although still in beta, I think Qwidget has a ton of potential and I’m proud to be one of the early beta-testers of the service.

So, I will put my first poll question at the end of this post and I invite you to at least click yes, no, or maybe. If you are reading this article in your news reader, hop on over. My site doesn’t have ads so you don’t have to worry about making me 1/100th of a cent.

If you really like the way Qwidget works, and you run your own self-hosted WordPress blog, feel free to contact me at the information provided in my sidebar or visit the Qwidget ‘get this’ link and fill out the form expressing your interest in the beta.

In the past week or two, I have been playing with a number of new toys that promise to tie the social networks Twitter and FriendFeed to my blog a little more tightly.

TweetSuite

First, there’s TweetSuite by Dan Zarrella.  This is a err.. sweet little self-contained plugin that makes your WordPress blog aware of the Twitterverse.  There are four main components that make up TweetSuite:

1. A tweet this button that can be floated in the upper-left or upper-right portion of a blog post.  Very similar to a Digg button.
2. An area below the post that tracks tweets about the article and lists them, complete with the optional ability to include a re-tweet button next to them.
3. Four fun Twitter-related widgets that can be dropped in the sidebar: Most, Recent, Last, and Favorite Tweets.
4. Last but not least, TweetSuite will optionally update Twitter when a new entry is posted.

I am not so invested in Twitter that I can tell if TweetSuite is catching all the Twitter buzz surrounding my entries.  It did detect one tweet on my last entry and a couple more on older posts.. but that’s one of the reasons I’m writing this post!  To see if it works.

FF2Disqus

Second, I am using a cloud-based app called FriendFeed-to-Disqus (or FF2Disqus).  This little utility is by Carter Rabasa, the guy who wrote Twitter2FF, a handy utility for synchronizing your Twitter and FriendFeed friends.  Anyway, this web app isn’t a plugin, and in fact hooks in to FriendFeed and Disqus, so it isn’t specifically bound to WordPress blogs at all!

What it does is monitor a service on FriendFeed (say the RSS feed for your blog) and utilizes the Disqus API to push any new comments on the relevant entry in FriendFeed to your blog entry.  So in effect what this does is bring the comment activity back in to your blog.

There have been a rash about this utility and the value that it brings to blogs and FriendFeed.  I have to admit that I share a few reservations about deploying it full-time on my blog.  But I decided, I would jump in with both feet and see how everything turns out.  Hopefully, everything will be great.

Final Note

I have disabled Glenn Slaven’s excellent FriendFeed Comments plugin for the moment in order to avoid redundancy.  But don’t think I don’t like it – far from it!  If FF2Disqus doesn’t work out I’m going straight back to using this plugin!

I installed the MediaRSS WordPress plugin today.  Hopefully that will mean that the picture that I included will show up in FriendFeed and other places that support Media RSS extensions.

Media RSS extensions allow one to describe different types of media, such as embedded music and video clips, directly in an RSS stream.  These extensions are technically optional, so traditional RSS parsers can safely ignore them.

Tonight, I got a SMS message from Disqus on Twitter.  The tweet was pretty succinct:

Disqus for WordPress 2.03 released.: This release includes trackback/pingback and pagination support as we.. http://tinyurl.com/5z98kh

That was enough for me!  Disqus’ lack of PingBack support in WordPress was really something that I missed, as you can probably tell from this article’s title.  So, without wasting another minute, I followed the link to the blog entry, and downloaded the new version of the plugin, 2.03.

And, I’m happy to report that it does indeed support trackback and pingback support!  I’ve included a screenshot below.

Disqus TrackBacks

Thanks for your hard work, Disqus team!