I've just upgraded this blog to Movable Type 4.26. It's largely a bug-fix release, but if you encounter any problems, please drop me a line.
Recently in Admin Category
"Moderation in everything," my late mother used to say, somewhat ironically given how much unused wool and unpainted china she left behind. But, like many clichés, it has a deep element of truth, as I've discovered by disconnecting somewhat from my normal blogging-twittering-photographing lifestyle. A quiet weekend with friends and family, as well as a rather sobering visit to my parents' grave (to check the newly-placed gravestone with Mum's name added) have helped put many things back in their proper perspective, and that's valuable.
The one big danger of social media, I think, is also its strength - its ability to connect you with like minds. If you don't move outside the tight circle of people just like you, you can start seeing things in a distorted way, leading to a bubble mentality. This is one reason I value being married to a social media sceptic. Perspective is important, and sometime you have to step back to get it.
I've yet to open my feed reader, which is likely to be a place of horror and despair after 5 days away from it, but I'm glad I took the break.
Sorry for the unannounced silence, but I'm back in business.
The one big danger of social media, I think, is also its strength - its ability to connect you with like minds. If you don't move outside the tight circle of people just like you, you can start seeing things in a distorted way, leading to a bubble mentality. This is one reason I value being married to a social media sceptic. Perspective is important, and sometime you have to step back to get it.
I've yet to open my feed reader, which is likely to be a place of horror and despair after 5 days away from it, but I'm glad I took the break.
Sorry for the unannounced silence, but I'm back in business.
I've got a week-off, and out of respect for my wife, having a break and the nature of what I'm doing, I'll be taking the week off this blog as well.
But worry not! I have lined up an interesting miscellany of my colleagues to guest post through the week to come, to give you a whole range of interesting perspectives on B2B journalists making the transition to the digital world. I'm looking forward to reading their stuff when I get back. I hope you enjoy it as much.
If all has gone well, this blog is now running on Movable Type 4.25, which was released yesterday.
The key new feature is Motion, and here's a video which explains it:
All, being well, this blog should now be running on Movable Type 4.24, the latest version of the software, released last week.
And talking of outside services, Facebook Connect is here! You can use your Facebook account to sign into this blog to comment by clicking "sign in to comment" and choosing the Facebook Connect option. It should both grab your userpic and push your comment into your profile on Facebook - but it's still a beta plugin, so we'll see...
While doing that, I made a few other changes:
- Userpics on comments are bigger! They also have little icons on them to show if the commenter is using an outside service like OpenID, Livejournal or Vox to sign in. If you don't want to use any of the sign-in services, but want a pretty comment icon, get a Gravatar.
- People using outside authentication service now get the "subscribe to comments via e-mail" option. Should have done that ages ago, sorry.
And talking of outside services, Facebook Connect is here! You can use your Facebook account to sign into this blog to comment by clicking "sign in to comment" and choosing the Facebook Connect option. It should both grab your userpic and push your comment into your profile on Facebook - but it's still a beta plugin, so we'll see...
Apologies to those of you subscribed to e-mail notifications of new entries here. You'll have been hit with a couple of dozen notifications of old entries over the last couple of days. I've found the solution to the issue, and it should be a problem no more.
Sorry.
Sorry.
On the whole, it's been a pretty good year for One Man & His Blog, despite the trying personal circumstances I've been through. My RSS subscribers have comfortably doubled over the course of the year (although I have had to watch my World of Warcraft blog match and then exceed OM&HB's subscriber count...), and page views have more than doubled, which is all good.
Usually, my highest traffic month is December, with the Le Web posts grabbing loads of traffic, but in 2008, September actually gave me the most traffic, thanks to a combination of Lehman Brothers going down, a kid pretending to be Gordon Ramsay and my final disillusionment with 3's mobile broadband (more about all three below). The ethics of travel journalism also played their part, garnering me the most comments on any one post.
The top 10 posts this year:
- Mobile Broadband: Testing 3's 3G Dongle - earlier in the year, 3 gave me a 3G mobile dangle to test with my laptop. The results were mixed, to say the best, but somehow that post got some serious Google juice and has had three times as much traffic as any other post on my blog this year.
- RBI to be divested by Reed Elsevier - the post where I acknowledged the sale-that-never-was, and linked to reactions by colleagues. At least one of those reactions was later pulled.
- Why Media Gets Community Wrong - a popular, and much linked-to post about the mainstream media's attitude to community. I still like this post, but it's a shame I keep having to reiterate the point that community isn't a place on your site, it's an approach to publishing.
- Lehman Brothers Collapses - my brother's employer went down, and an SEO-friendly headline brought me a shedload of traffic as a result. I was on the front page of Google for "Lehman Brothers Collapses" for a good while. An object lesson that quick posting, intelligent headlining and great links can bring good traffic. My brother's fine, by the way. He has another job.
- Young Gordon Ramsay - without doubt, RBI's most successful viral. A foul-mouthed young chef takes his mother to task. This generated a little controversy within the company, but it drew the traffic.
- After Max Gogarty: Rethinking Mainstream Media Blogging - Guardian employs cocky young thing, who fails to understand blogging. He gets commented off the site, and I try to create something useful from it...
- 3 Mobile Broadband: Rural Failure - again the Google brings me people interested in how disappointed I was with my 3 Mobile dongle.
- Hard News Journalism - a video of a drunken journalist, claiming to be plagiarising. What's not to love?
- 4 Things Journalists Can Learn from the Lacy/Zuckerberg Interview - Sarah Lacy does a poor interview of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. I try to be constructive. My picture of her on stage at 2007's Le Web still got more traffic...
- When Mainstream Media Blogging Goes Bad - More Max Gogarty. The one hit wonder that keeps on giving...
So, what can I learn from these traffic figures?
- Speed matters. Getting good content up quickly in response to current events draws traffic.
- Follow up. Sometimes your second post on a topic gets more traffic than the first.
- Be constructive. Give good links, or good learning points, and your post has legs.
- Be really, really negative about products you're sent to review. ;-)
I've just finished upgrading this blog to version 4.23 of Movable Type, a security update that was release last night.
All seems well but, as ever, if you see any problems, please drop me an e-mail.
Inevitably, of course, Six Apart releases a security update less than 24 hours after we finish upgrading all our versions of MT at work...
I'm busy upgrading the plumbing behind the site to Movable Type Pro 4.2.
Apologies for any oddness over the next few hours.
Apologies for any oddness over the next few hours.
Due to family issues, I'll be taking a short break from this blog.
See you in a week or two.
