Molly Holzschlag writes about the Accidental Blogger Effect—what happens when you post something offhand that somehow ends up as a prime search result, leading to that offhand remark taking on a life of its own. I made a comment about how Another One Bites the Dust turned into a 3-year-long thread about Frosty, Heidi and Frank, but it occurs to me that the often-viewed Fallen Angel cover art I posted about last week is the same phenomenon.
Tag: blogging
Workaround
Or, yet another blog.*
Back when WordPress.com was announced—well, pre-announced, really—I signed up for info. Eventually I discovered it was going to be a blog hosting service. At that point it seemed kind of silly, since I already had too many blogs, so I didn’t immediately jump on the invite when I finally received it. I decided to pick it up after about two weeks, at which point I tried to log in and was told that the invitation expired in a week. Not that the email had said anything about an expiration.
So now, I’m trying out Flock, mainly to see what value it adds on top of Firefox. It picked up my Del.icio.us bookmarks fine, but for some reason the blogging tool just won’t connect to K-Squared Ramblings. It should work. It’s WordPress-based, after all. Maybe it only works with the 1.6 series (I’m waiting for a stable release before I upgrade), or maybe there’s some obscure setting—or maybe it’s just a bug in Flock. (Time to sign up for yet another Bugzilla account, too) Edit: I found the problem.
Well, WordPress.com and Flock have teamed up, so Flock users don’t need to wait for an invite or wait for the site to leave beta. And, miracle of miracles, not only did the invite expiration free up my reserved username, but no one else had taken it!
I honestly don’t know what, if anything, I’ll be doing with the blog, since I’ve got so much over at K²R and all my social stuff is at LiveJournal (when you’re extending a real-life circle of friends into cyberspace, you go where your friends go). I’m sure I’ll think of something to do there.
*This was originally posted at kelson.wordpress.com, but I moved it over here after turning that site into a photo blog.
Three Years of Blogging
It’s hard to believe, but it’s been three years since the first post on this blog. I still think of myself as being kind of new at this, but at this rate, we’ll be in the old guard. Or at least the new old guard. 😉
Topics have shifted around. It started out as a personal blog with Sci-Fi overtones, and slowly took on more of a focus on humor, comics and tech. Posts in the early days were divided 60/40 between me and Katie. These days it’s more 90/10, partly because we’ve both shifted a lot of the personal stuff over to LiveJournal. Strange photos started showing up very early on, making up what are now the Strange World, You Must Be Mistaken, and Signs of the Times categories.
The site started on B2 and moved to WordPress when the project forked.
Even the title is subtly different. It started out as “Ramblings,” with a “K²” icon to the left. After a while, the icon became part of the title, and it’s been known as “K-Squared Ramblings” for most of those three years.
According to the WordPress Dashboard, we now have 912 posts and 961 comments Continue reading
Too Many Blogs!
It seems like everything I sign up for these days has a blog attached to it. Slashdot has a journal feature that I’ve never used. K-Squared Ramblings is approaching its third anniversary. I signed up with LiveJournal just to read friends’ journals and ended up with a blog there. Spread Firefox gave me a blog. My Opera gave me a blog. I signed up for info about WordPress.com (reserving a username just in case), and it turns out to be — you guessed it — a hosting service for blogs!
The way things are going, I seriously expect Amazon.com to offer me a blog the next time I order a book.
Follow that link!
Making the rounds this week: IO Error’s critique of “nofollow”, the link add-on that was supposed to stop comment spam, but hasn’t even slowed it down. He suggests that it was never intended to: it was simply a sneaky way to lower blogs’ rankings in search engines.
Now, I don’t have a problem with the idea of being able to tack a note onto a link and tell Google not to treat it as an endorsement. But the way it’s been implemented in most blog software—blindly applying it to all links in comments—is overkill. Legitimate, useful, interesting comments should factor into the resource’s ranking, for all the reasons IO Error provides.
Where rel="nofollow" does help with comments is in devaluing the spam that slips through your filters overnight. If a search engine bot happens to crawl your page between the time the comment hits and the time you see it and remove it, nofollow will at least make the spam less effective. Of course, you only need it active for a day or two (depending on how often you check). Once you’ve cleaned the junk out, you want what’s left to get the rank boost it deserves. I’ve been using the No Nofollow plugin to do this since March.
In short, I don’t think that rel="nofollow" is a bad idea in itself. It’s just being used the wrong way.