blogs – Something Odd!

Mixed feelings Clearing Out my Feeds

I started to use Netnewswire in the last few months. I didn’t do much with it until a few weeks ago when Feedly made the headlines about their AI protest control thing.

I learned they have an exporter so I exported the OPML file of my feeds and there were so many of them. Netnewswire slowly started filling in the posts and surprisingly, considering the lack of attention I’ve paid my feeds in many years, it found plenty of posts. My unread count sat at over 10,000 posts at one stage.

Still, there are far too many where the last post was in 2009 or 2012. A few were still blogging in 2019. Yet more announced they were moving from Blogger or WordPress.com to their brand-new website at some custom domain that is now sadly a spam trap for unwary visitors. The long abandoned blogs are a deep dive into history. They celebrate events that happened oh so long ago. The sites are frozen in time.

I have to say, it was sometimes lovely to read the musings of a lost generation of writers. They’re either offline or now on Facebook or one of the other walled gardens we humans seem to love. I was going to list some of the blogs that are still updated, but it turns out there are quite a few of them. You’re probably familiar with most of them. Matt, XKCD, Laughing Squid, and Simon are some of the more famous blogs I have followed for many years.

Here’s a few you might not know. Feel free to middle-click and open them in a new tab. Go on, have a look.

And oh, there’s more! I’ve also come across some incredible photo blogs that I used to love visiting. I would always wonder how they managed to capture such breathtaking photos. And there are so many WordPress blogs too, with a wide range of topics and interests. I haven’t had the time to go through all of them yet, but being on Mastodon has taught me that it’s okay not to keep tabs on everything.

One feature that has been a game-changer for me is the “Today” smart feed. It shows me updated feeds, and just by scanning through it, I can quickly see which sites are still very active. It’s helped me realize that I don’t need to follow some overly busy sites any more. It’s been a freeing experience, letting go of the need to keep up with everything and instead focusing on the feeds that truly matter to me.

Also, “Mark All as Read” is very liberating.

A screenshot from Netnewswire showing the right click menu and "Mark All as Read" is highlighted.

BTW – I’m still blogging (after all this time) here (of course) and on inphotos. My last post there is the 840th daily post in a row. I gave a talk to Blarney Photography Club recently, showing some photos from Automattic meetups over the years. I found a bunch of old photos I wanted to publish. That’ll explain the American photos that went up recently!

Google remembers they own Feedburner

Google sent out an email today to Feedburner users with the ominous subject, “Upcoming changes to Feedburner”.

It’s Google so my first thought was that they were about to shut it down. No, it’s not quite that bad, but they are shutting down parts of the service.

Starting in July, we are transitioning FeedBurner onto a more stable, modern infrastructure. This will keep the product up and running for all users, but it also means that we will be turning down most non-core feed management features, including email subscriptions, at that time.

This blog and my photoblog each have email subscribers through Feedburner. If you are reading this through one of those emails come visit the site and scroll to the end of the page. There’s a “Subscribe via Email” form you can use to join the 9,145 others who read whatever it is I post here. (How is that number so large? Is that accurate? Reply here please if you are one of them. It’s WordPress stuff you’re looking for isn’t it? Sorry, I haven’t been posting much about that in a long time!)

If you’re reading this through a Feedburner URL and I know there are a few of you out there it might be safer to use https://odd.blog/feed/ instead. You know, just in case Google kills it off. I know it’s unlike them to do that but you never know.

Google Takeout doesn’t include a “Feedburner” directory either. I must export the Feedburner stats and take a look at them. Here’s the tiny graph they show you. Look at that in 2010. Whoah! It’s all been downhill since then. If you’re still reading this blog since then, thank you. I really appreciate your attention since you now have Twitter and Facebook to distract you.

The Irish Blog Awards in Pictures

As I may have mentioned once or twice before, we were at The Irish Blog Awards on Saturday night. Here are a few photos. They’re after the jump because there are 70 there and I’d hate to see them load every time someone loaded the front page of my site!

Gallery of shots from the photowalk to come tomorrow. Possibly over 100 shots in that. I do like to take photos don’t I?

BTW – Please Photoshop Grandad above. What’s he saying? Two example to follow ..
Continue reading “The Irish Blog Awards in Pictures”

Skimming the web

The way I see it, there are three stages to web browsing:

The web is new. You visit the blogs of friends and colleagues every day. You use Gmail or Yahoo mail and check in on your favourite sites a few times a day.
It quickly becomes tiring visiting websites every day that may not have any new content. You discover feed readers and play around with a few of them. You find that Google Reader is a pretty good one and you start subscribing to every single interesting blog or feed you find.
Not long after you suffer feed fatigue. There are just too many blogs. Too much noise, too much chaff. You discover Stumbleupon, Friend Feed and Twitter (I’m ‘donncha’ on each of those if you’d like to subscribe/follow!). Now the feeds or sites you read are recommended by your trusted circle of friends. You’ll still dig into your feed reader but it seems to happen less and less and that unread items count keeps going up and up.

Now if only I had time to check out Friend Feed properly. I find I’m skimming through the web these days. If I can’t scan a blog post and understand the main points of the page within a few seconds I’m gone. It’s a sad state of affairs.

If you’re time poor, how have your web surfing habits changed? (paradoxically, if you have time to comment here, you’re not that time poor. What a bind!)

Why blogs are better #368

How else could I get on to Google Finance’s page on MSFT? It might be gone by the time you check it, but click the thumbnail for a screen capture. My boss at Tradesignals.com would have given his right arm for exposure like that!

Did I get many hits from there? Only 9 so far, but it was pretty cool to see that url pop up in my referrer stats!

Knock! Knock! Hallloooooo?

Is anyone out there? Next time you come across a blog post without a comment, take a few minutes to stop and chat and leave some feedback. You’ll make someone’s day, I promise.

Blog meet Blook

In the grand old tradition of book publishing it seems that everyone has a story to tell and these days it’s getting easier and easier to get published. Whether anyone is reading or not is another matter.

This Sunday Times article on the Blookers book prize caught my eye the other day because it’s further mainstream acceptance of blogging as a serious source of writing talent. Unfortunately there’s plenty of dross out there too, some of which has spewed from these very pages, but I digress. The shortlist is sponsored by Lulu.com, a “self-publishing” company who publish on demand. It’s an easy way to get your work published and perhaps read.

[One blook] The Doorbells of Florence, has just been nominated for a new literary award, the Blookers. The shortlist, which was revealed last week, celebrates books that have sprung from weblogs or other websites.

This appears to be a growing phenomenon. It is only the second year of the $10,000 (£5,100) prize but the judges had to work their way through 110 titles.

Is your work worth $10,000? You’ll never know unless you try but the article does gloss over the difference between “publish on demand” and normal high-street bookshops who carry a ready supply of books. Don’t expect to see your Lulu books in Waterstones I’m afraid.

I’ve toyed with the idea of publishing my own photos but the closest I’ve got to publishing in a book was as part of the US book a few years ago. You may yet see them in print form shortly but I have to keep that secret a little longer!

Fellow Corkman Ryan contributed to Raw, a book by several Irish photographers. It can be purchased on Lulu. Robertto Grilli has some photos of the book too and it looks very impressive. Go buy a copy!

Who would you like to see published? I briefly mentioned her before, but The Swearing Lady should get a book deal. She writes one of my favourite blogs. A book deal is on her list to Santy and everything, and it’ll make her very happy and bring her writing to a whole new audience! Damien had the same idea this morning. Great minds eh?

Finally, what about fame and riches? Well, as a blogger you’re already famous, in your own mind anyway, but riches? I leave the last word to the author of “The Doorbells of Florence”,

“I’ve sold a grand total of 17 so far, not including copies bought by myself,” Losowsky admits. “I make £1.22 from each one. The Ferrari is on hold.”

Later .. as reported in various places, Twenty Major has got a book deal! Well done! Looking forward to seeing it in the bookshop.

Not everyone likes you

The best place to be is where people either love you or hate you. Not so great in inter-personal relationships but it’s super when you’ve got a product that you want people to use and maybe buy.

WordPress is there. There’s a vocal group of WordPress haters out there, but we’ve worked hard over a number of years to get to that level of hatred. It hasn’t been easy. On the other hand even more people like using WordPress. Thankfully someone would care if WordPress disappeared in the morning.

That’s why I’m envious of Twitter. In the course of a few months they’ve gone from being a darling of the blogging community to the nemesis of all things good and proper.

I predict that when teenagers discover Twitter the increase in txt speak will put off everyone else. Not that it will matter at that stage. Twitter will go on to become a global teen phenomenon much like myspace or bebo. Oh how we’ll gnash our teeth then. The negative feedback now won’t be anything like it will be later on! “Proper bloggers” might just ignore it but I doubt it. We They need something to bitch about and it’s an easy target!

I signed up there a few days ago but I’ve since turned off sms notifications and haven’t looked at my profile page in a while. If anyone mentions me I’ll know about it. Oh isn’t RSS cool?

Bite size entertainment

It’s rather sad that I prefer to click on the Dilbert cartoon feed rather than the one for the author’s site in my news aggregator.

After being offline for most of last week due to a dodgy internet connection I’m still playing catch up and trying to fill in the rest of my life too. I think we need cranial networking now so we can scan and read blogs in a timely manner. Or a world wide moritorium on blogging for a few days perhaps.

Blogging by Twitter anyone? If all the posts in my Bloglines account were a max of 140 characters I’d have them read in no time at all! Oops, I’ve gone over my allo