Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Those of you who have been here before may have noticed a small change in the appearance of this blog. Ok, a large change. For about five years, almost since I started blogging, I’ve been using a blogging host provider called Blog City. BC has served me very well over the years, but it was time I moved on.

I originally chose BC when there weren’t any really mature blogging platforms, and BC had just as many if not more features than many of its competitors. Also the idea of setting up my own blogging software and having to tweak it at that time, while not a big deal, seemed like enough of a nuisance to at least be a factor in my decision.

Over the years, BC came out with new functionality, new widgets, and whole new administrative platforms. The amount of personal attention was also great. They are still a good choice for a segment of the blogging or potentially-blogging community.

Still, there are a few things that have motivated me to move to Wordpress, and I finally made the jump, after lots of prep work on the back end over the last month or so. I am still a relative newbie at Wordpress and will be continuing to add new content and functionality, tweaking the look of things, etc., etc., over the next few weeks or even months. But I believe with this new blogging software will help motivate me to get back into the rhythm of blogging, even if it’s just to post a link and a short paragraph here and there as I come across something interesting and want to share my thoughts.

For those of you who don’t know much about blogging, Wordpress is an open-source application that one can install on a huge number of hosts out there. You can easily take your entire blog, save it to your local computer, then reimport all that content on a new host if you decide to go from one to another. The software stays the same. The software is also very easy to use, with lots of customization via “plugins” and “themes” to change the look and add functionality. There are lots of these available for free, plus you can program your own if you are so inclined, or just tweak the ones that are available. Some of these plugins are extremely powerful, adding very significant new functionality. Since the software is open-source, it will never go away due to a company going out of business or switching tactics, and becuase it is so popular, your data is in a format that can be imported into many other software platforms if you ever choose a different one. And if it isn’t now, chances are that some developer will create a migration tool for such a huge market.

Its popularity as well as the open-source nature of WordPress ensures many advantages, as well as a few small burdens which other blogging platforms, especially ones that do your hosting for you as well, do not. For anyone with technical savvy, such software is a pretty obvious choice, although like I did five years ago, you might decide on a solution that avoids the added work of installing and configuring such software simply due to time constraints and a busy life. WordPress does have a fully-hosted version as well, similar to Blogger and Blog-City, and like the others it comes in both free and paid, more premium versions. If you ever want to get a feel for these different software platforms, the best place to start would be to create one of these free accounts on the various choices and play to see which one fits your style best.

Ok, well, maybe not exactly, but more or less. At least that’s my fervent hope. As readers here may have noticed, I have not posted an entry here in over a year! That is a long time to go without blogging, especially for someone who tended to post not every day, but at least a couple times a month in most months, and often more than that.

2007 was a busy year for me personally. My daughter turned two, and rapidly demanded more attention as she became totally super-mobile as well as agile enough to climb tables, leap tall buildings, or at least cushions with a single bound, etc.

I also started a new job in 2007 where I’ve been kept very busy. Previous jobs have almost all had some serious downtimes, especially the job previous to my current one. The business at work means I’m sometimes working late and/or on the weekends. Since many of my previous jobs were for government contracts where you really couldn’t work overtime, this is definitely different!

But the blogging bug has been gnawing at me for a while. I’ve actually been keeping my writing going by participating in a number of discussion forums, and a recent reply to a message asking me if I was a professional writer (incredibly flattering to someone who’s never had a piece of writing printed other than a couple of college paper editorials!) has given me that much more motivation to get this thing back on the tracks again. I really want to put some thoughts down here and there if only in a paragraph or two. Unfortunately - or perhaps fortunately for some of my readers - the long tomes you may encounter by viewing the archives here probably will not occur again, or only on very rare occasion. I’m going to attempt, however, to at least start scribbling down a disjointed thought or two on a more regular basis - well, hell, on ANY basis – and we’ll see what happens.

I did feel like I needed to write SOME kind of intermediate message, though, explaining my absence for over a year, so here it is.

It seems like more and more bloggers are using traffic exchange services. I myself have been using Blog Explosion for a month or two now, but have been seeing more traffic exchange sites pop up, so I thought I’d try them out and report my first impressions (no pun intended, har har).

Before I get into the particulars, I thought I’d write a bit about the phenomenon in general. When I first heard about these services, I was a bit dubious. I thought it was simply a way to artificially get your hit count up. These sites employ a mechanism whereby you are forced to keep a site in your web browser for a certain length of time, after which you can click to go to another one. Each visit is added to your “credits” and these credits can be spent in a number of ways, but the most likely would be to have other members be directed to your site as part of their building of credits.

The cynical view is that it’s easy enough to just hit the advance button, switch to another browser window or tab (or to another application), and then just come back after a little while and go to the next one, thus making it so that you spend a very minimal amount of time yet credits that translate into visits for your site. While this is certainly possible, and I’ll admit to occasionally doing this myself, more than not I often see a site that has something interesting on it and I find myself reading and even commenting on it. These are blogs that I would never come across normally because they aren’t famous and don’t necessarily talk about one of my primary interests. When I do skip over blogs, it’s normally for a few specific reasons. One is that I’ve already read it. Another is that I have absolutely no interest in the content. And a third is that sometimes my attention span isn’t what it should be and the blog entries are long essays.

Another part of these services is a referral system. If you refer someone to one of these services, you get a small fraction of the credits they earn. And if they refer people, sometimes you will get credits from them as well. But I will tell you that of all the people I’ve referred (6 so far) I’ve gotten a total of credits equal to about what I would create on my own in a half a day, so it’s not like you’re going to just sit back and earn lots of hits for free. Even those who have been referring people for a long time will still benefit much more by simply surfing themselves.

So, for the most part, I think it’s a tool that can aid everyone involved not just for hits to one’s site, but for an actual exchange of real viewership. I often come across the same blogs I have before, but this is fine because they often have new content from day to day. Sure there are probably people who abuse the system and don’t really read anything, but from reading about other people’s experience, it seems like many people read a significant amount of the blogs they come across while building their credits.

Ok, so what are the various traffic exchange services?
Blog Explosions: This was the first such service I heard about. I joined a couple of months ago and so have the most experience with this one. I’m not sure if this is the first such site, but it may be the first geared specifically to bloggers. Your site must either be a blog or a service for bloggers. The sites I’ve come across have ranged the gamut politically and in subject matter. Many are simple diaries, but lots are about politics, current events, technology, medicine, you name it.

The site is loaded in a frame on the bottom of the browser window (actually it takes up most of the window), and the top frame includes links to bookmark the site, ban it from your future viewing, rate it, comment about it, report it to Blog Explosion if you feel it violates their guidelines, etc. You can also toggle filters for whether you want to see blogs that may have profanity as well as blogs that contain music backgrounds. Finally, a separate add banner appears that will, if clicked, direct you to another site entirely. Banners allow each member to draw people to their site who have a specific interest in what they are advertising, as opposed to just having people come to your site by random circumstance, so the thought is that the person will have greater interest and be a potentially more “valuable” visitor.

In order to advance to the next blog, you have to click on one of the numbers in an image that contains a bunch of numbers scattered randomly. Once you actually start surfing (and every time you move to a new blog), a counter starts timing down from 30 seconds to 0, after which clicking on one of these numbers will produce a credit (actually half a credit in this case). Each credit you earn will mean that Blog Explosion will direct one person to your site. The mechanism works pretty well, but it also is somewhat easy to look at the number, put your mouse over it, and wait for the timer to go down and click. Most of the other sites use this method, although one, Blog Clicker, uses something a bit better.

Finally, in addition to earning credits by surfing, one can get gifted credits randomly while you surf. Most of the time these are 2 or 3 credits, but they can still add up. Occasionally I’ve gotten these 10 or even 25 of these “mystery credits” and once I got a whopping 50! That would have been 100 sites visited! On average they probably account for 10-20% of the credits I’ve earned, I think, but this is just a very rough estimate based on my all-too-faulty memory! Oh yes, and can also buy credits with actual money, if you so desire.

Because Blog Explosion was probably the first and is still the most popular of these sites, it can sometimes take a while for them to approve your site or banners. Some of the others don’t require approval, but Blog Explosion has decided it wants to make sure everything you are putting in front of its members’ eyes is up to spec.

Blog Clicker: this site is a bit newer than Blog Explosion, but has many of the same features. The main difference that I see is that instead of waiting for a countdown and then clicking on a number, one instead gets no indication of such a countdown, but after presumably 30 seconds, 3 images appear along with a worded instruction to click on the image that corresponds to the word. For example, one will see an image of a car, a bird, and a fish, and the instruction “Click on the bird image.” I think the fact that there’s no way to tell how soon the image will pop up is very helpful in encouraging you to look at the blog. You know the saying, a watched pot never boils, so just waiting with no indication of progress it can often seem way longer than it actually is. The other thing that Blog Clicker does is to actually move the frame that contains the functional buttons or links from the bottom to the top of the page in a random way. This means more work to figure out where it is, which is a downside for people looking for quick hits without much work, but it also, I think, helps encourage people to read more, since they will at least be getting something out of the time that they will undoubtedly be spending with the interface. This Site is no longer available.

In addition to being able to buy credits outright, Blog Clicker actually has subscription plans where you can pay $5-10 per month, and in return you are provided with credits as well as better “surf ratios” (more impressions of your own site per credit), better referral percentages, etc.

Unfortunately, many of the sites I visit on Blog Clicker are ones that I’ve seen before on Blog Explosion. This is somewhat predictable as many Blog Explosion users (like me) have posted about Blog Clicker. I think as time goes on many bloggers will migrate to one of these services primarily based on how much they like the interface, features, etc. While it’s certainly possible to have multiple services up and constantly switch between them, ultimately it’s a bit defeating after an hour of clicking around if all you have to show for it is a bunch of credits. Personally I would at least like to feel like I’ve read something interesting in that hour and not just mindlessly be hitting links, but that’s just me.

WolfSurfer: WolfSurfer is also fairly new, but not as new as Blog Clicker. It contains many of the same features as the others, but its main difference is that it doesn’t just cater to blogs. Unfortunately, this makes the site basically into one big ad. After surfing for just 15 minutes, it seems that 90% of the sites I come across are not blogs, but sites for you to buy something - cheesy stuff like online gambling, how to make money, multi-level marketing stuff, promotional services, etc. The other odd thing is that unlike the other services, I’ve gotten pages repeated after a very short period – maybe 5 minutes. I think the shortest period I had gotten something repeated on Blog Explosion was 6 hours, and that was after viewing a least a hundred other sites. But who knows, maybe WolfSurfer will begin to attract more bloggers and they can eventually drown out the spam-type stuff. One advantage to joining is that for those who are using it for traffic exchange, especially because real content is so underrepresented here, your blog should be noticed and read much more than on a site that has tons of others already. Or at least that’s my hope!

Blogazoo is a very new service that caters to blogs, of course, and has similar features to the others. It’s countdown is only 20 seconds and visible, but the actual link to advance (you have to pick the right color or number), only becomes visible once the countdown is complete. So far, most of the blogs I’ve seen on Blogazoo are ones I haven’t seen on other sites. The downside is that for the moment, Blogazoo isn’t fully operational, but is getting there. It has some features that also distinguish it from others, including a Personality Ranker (a kind of public profile page) which is supposed to help increase the popularity of your blog and a way to tell viewers your RSS feed so they can not only bookmark your blog address as with other services, but also subscribe via newsreader. It’s still a little rough around the edges compared to the other services out there, but being so new it’s really too early to tell what the potential is, and being so new, of course, means that people who sign up now have the potential for building up a decent number of referrals under them. This site is no longer available.

Traffic Troll: This site is similar to WolfSurfer in that it is not geared specifically to blogs, and has more of a concentration on earning actual cash payments (for referrals mainly). The types of sites are by in large similar to those found on WolfSurfer, which is either an advantage or a disadvantage depending on how you look at it. This was the only service amongst the ones I’ve mentioned where the clicking does not involve figuring something out. You just click on the “Click Now!” link once it becomes visible.

Clicking Crazy: This is yet another of the more cheesy/cash-oriented exchanges with no restrictions as far as the type of site is concerned. The interface itself looks very similar to Traffic Troll, so my hunch is that they are owned by the same people or perhaps it is a similar backend application that is being sold to numerous companies? Whatever the case is, I may lose patience with seeing nothing but MLM schemes and similar schlock, but I can at least hope that some more legit stuff like blogs start joining and provide at least some respite…

In my relentless attempt to take over the world (as Dawn and Drew would say), I’ve started looking at this interesting Blogging tool called Blog Explosion. After signing up, you surf other people’s blogs and for each blog you can rate it on a scale of 1 to 10, add comments, bookmark it, or blacklist it. As you build up credits, they can be used to direct other Blog Explosion members to your blog - an exchange of eyeballs so to speak.

While good in theory, there are definitely loopholes. For example, while you have to do some manual stuff in order to surf to the next blog in line, and you have to wait 30 seconds in between blog viewings, there is nothing that forces you to actually read a blog. You could easily go do something else in a different browser window and then switch back.

That being said, I still think it’s useful. I have found a number of interesting blogs which I doubt I’d ever have noticed in my ordinary subscription to a handful of major (and a few minor) blogs. There are few if any “A-list” blogs, and hey, that’s a good thing, right? While it’s good to have a sense for those more popular blogs, part of the essence of blogging is getting to read stuff from people who are NOT major headline makers either in the blogosphere or in the mainstream press, and let’s face it, these two worlds are bound to start merging any day, if they haven’t already!

The other nice part of this is that it’s a pyramid scheme! Ok, maybe not quite that bad, but kinda. You can refer people and those people will contribute to your credits when they visit other blogs. Apparently there are five levels, so it’s not as bad as it could be, I suppose.

I’ve only been using this for a week or so, so I’m still not 100% sold on the idea, but it’s worth trying out at least. That’s what I’m doing for now – until the referrals come in and then I can just sit back and watch the profits roll in, yeah, baby! No, no, I don’t even expect to get any folks under me. But it is kind of cool that you can manually drive people to your site, even if they take one look at go off to play solitaire until my 30 seconds are up. Some people will actually find something of interest and may just stick around for longer – as I’ve done on not a small number of occasions…

Yesterday I wrote about the 2004 Weblog awards. There’s been some noise recently about this being organized by a conservative weblog WizBang. In an of itself this is not necessarily a bad thing. However, it just so happens that almost every single freaking winner of the 2004 Weblog awards has a very conservative bent. What this says to me is that this whole thing has been fixed, a sham. For Pete’s sakes, even the LBGT category winner is an avowed conservative, and this is from a group that leans heavily to the left. The only exceptions to this rule is the actual liberal blog category, the tech blog category winner Engadget, an the Photoblog category. Speaking of which it appears several of the nominees from the Photoblog category withdrew because they did not like Wizbang’s political affiliations. Frankly I don’t care about their political affiliations, but the fact that you can deduce a political slant going the same direction from 90% of the main “best of” blogs in these awards just does not sit well with me. I think part of it too is that I had not heard of any such complaints until today, a full day after the awards came out. I guess one may still get a decent varied list of blogs from the nominees, but at this point I’m loath to use this site for anything. Wizbang, when you hold the 2005 Weblog awards, you might want to make it a little less obvious by not making just about all your winners avowed conservatives. Yeesh!

Having only stumbled upon blogging less than two years ago, even then the number of blogs was overwhelming and so I picked and chose what I read carefully. My other two associated problems of being a slow reader and having a compulsion to keep up to date with everything I read, made it so that I was reluctant to look at lots of blogs. So I just don’t have the familiarity I should with some very popular blogs which, being a blogger, I probably should!

Luckily, there this is the second year that the Weblog Awards have been given out, based on votes from anyone. You can vote once per day from a given IP address, which doesn’t avoid cheating, but the ability to use bots theoretically hampers those who want to really stack the deck! Certainly it’s not a definitive list, and of course popularity doesn’t equal quality, but of course it’s a starting point and will probably be really helpful as a starting place for anyone new to the Blogosphere, and I for one am going to take this as an opportunity to expand the reading I do a bit, god help me!

On a personal note, I was not nominated for any of the categories that I might have fit in, like Best Tech Blog, Photo Blog, or even Best of the Rest of the Blogs. I do, though, want to congratulate Engadget for being the top Tech Blog, which I think it really deserves, but also the close runner up, Gizmodo, which is a very useful and quite humorous edition to your tech reading. My friend, Eric McErlain, whom I spoke with at a white elephant party just this weekend, was hoping for a win in the Sports Blog category for his Off Wing Opinion. Unfortunately he was denied the title by Baseball Crank, and Athletics Nation somehow managed to hold onto an incredibly small lead to make Off Wing third. Congratulations are due to Eric all the same, for even getting this far in the very crowded category of Sports Blogs.

You would think that having been blogging for over a year and using a Treo 600 and before that a Sidekick I would have caught onto moblogging already. Perhaps its because I don’t go on a whole lot of trips and when I do go on trips I often bring my laptop and can post blog entries.

For those unfamiliar with the term, “moblogging” is short for mobile blogging and involves posting blog entries, often with images, but not necessarily, from your mobile phone, which is much more portable than even a laptop. Then again, taking pictures on your digital camera, downloading them to the PC, then emailing them, especially if you normally take them in RAW format, can be a very time-consuming process that works against the whole idea of blogging while on travel.

While I’m sure people have been doing this for a few years now (that is sending images and blog entries from their phone), it really hasn’t caught on until this last 6-12 months due to camera’s on phones either not being very good, or not even existing! In fact, my Color Sidekick’s camera, even though it was much better than the old one on the Black and White Sidekick I had initially, still produced a pathetically bad picture. It was only when I obtained my Treo 600 a couple of months ago that I had at my disposal a camera that I could actually bear to look at its 640 x 480 images (0.3 megapixel). Even so, they are pretty darn small and poor quality compared even to my first 1.3 megapixel camera that I got back in 2000. Suffice it to say I can’t wait until then next version of the Treo comes out which rumor has it contains a real 1 megapixel camera. I would be happy with just a half a megapixel (or 800 x 600), but I’ll take a full MP, as long as it doesn’t seriously tax the processor. I’m just afraid that pushing up the resolution too much may require many more seconds to record an image, thus making it hard to take very many pictures in a given period of time, so you could miss out on a bunch of great shots. A secondary issue for some may be the text entry process. Most phones are horrible at this and it will take you forever just to write a sentence. More specialized devices with keyboards like the Treo, the Blackberry, and the Sidekick, have keyboards that allow for much easier typing, although still not as easy as a full-sized keyboard.

In any case, after getting my Treo and starting to explore the wide world of applications out there, I came across a category of blogging tools. I tried a couple out, but didn’t get all that far. The ones I tried out really only let you send plain text and maybe upload an image, but you couldn’t submit html which would allow you to create links. Of course, I’ve only played with a couple of these, so I still need to do a lot more searching. In the mean time, I heard about these moblog sites that are specifically set up for mobile blogging. I found probably a good half dozen of these sites and culled this number down to a couple that looked like they were nicely polished, slick, and had lots of features and which you didn’t have to pay for – or at least there was a free account option in addition to payed premium account options. Those two moblog sites are Buzznet and TextAmerica.

My idea was to pick one and take pictures on my recent trip to North Carolina and send the pictures. Of course, things were just too busy before the trip and during to figure out which site would work best, so I ended up just deciding to take a few pictures and then wait till I got back and had a bit of free time to explore these sites more. Now that I’m back, that’s just what I’m doing:

Buzznet – So far, Buzznet is free, but will supposedly be unveiling a paid service in the future which will affect what they offer for the free account. Their interface to me is a little more intuitive and it’s less JavaScript-intensive which just means that I might be able to access it via the web browser on my Treo as opposed to TextAmerica which might not work. Their user pages (where your photos show up) look a whole lot nicer than the default you get with (the free version of ) TextAmerica. The one problem I’ve had with Buzznet so far is that it seems to be slow, both when you go to their site, but more importantly in actually posting images. When I posted a test image to both sites via email, the one TextAmerica image came up immediately whereas I had to wait a couple of minutes for Buzznet to display it. Then I tried a couple more and nothing happened! Eventually – like 20 or 30 minutes later – I got replies from Buzznet with some error messages, but then when I checked the images were finally visible. Another downside is that Buzznet only allows you to post 10 images per day and 200 per month (for now), The other not so great thing about Buzznet is that there’s very little in the way of support. They have an FAQ and some help information on some of the screens, but this doesn’t amount to much. There are no support forums or a support page, or even an email for support. This is really important in my opinion and a company that doesn’t set up a support infrastructure to help their users and for their users to help each other is, I think, shooting itself in the foot. The one thing that makes Buzznet usable for me, though, is that they let you syndicate your content very easily. They provide feed files in a bunch of different formats and also provide a JavaScript tag that just lets you embed the content. Here, though, we again come to the weakness in not having adequate support info: apparently you can customize how your content is formatted where it’s being syndicated, but there’s no information on how to actually modify the feeds or the JavaScript. Nevertheless, the default is decent enough that I have added it to the right side of my blog here. If you don’t see it, scroll up or down a bit and you should see the last 5 images from my Buzznet moblog (I’ve only put two in so far as of this writing). You can click on these images to get a title and more detailed description. What I would like to customize is just to be able to include the title with the image here on the right…

TextAmerica – TextAmerica seems to have a lot of strengths where Buzznet is weak and visa versa. As mentioned, the initial image I posted came up immediately after it was sent. The main pages and the admin pages are very slick looking, but individual moblog pages seem very plain in comparison. For some, this may actually be preferable, but not for others. Unlike Buzznet, TextAmerica has extensive help information in their user guide. In addition to this they have an FAQ, and moblog hosted by their technical support person which includes updates on features and fixes as they are made. Finally, they actually have someone you can IM with questions to get immediate help (although when I looked this screen name was not logged in. The free service comes with 25MB of storage, enough for at least 500 small images, and a lot more if they are compressed enough. Unfortunately, going up one level to the paid service will jump you up to $7/month. This provides a bunch of additional features, twice the storage and additional bandwidth. The main thing that I wanted to do, though, has eluded me so far with TextAmerica. They say on their FAQ that there is code available that will let you syndicate your moblog, but they don’t provide it there and a search in their userguide also turned up nothing, so for now this pretty much eliminates TextAmerica as far as I’m concerned, but I am going to try to get in touch with them to see if I can get this code from them to syndicate here.

There’s something else that these sites offer for some people which is just as important as the functionality of posting your pictures – a community. People get to link to each other, label themselves as friends of another user, comment on their entries, etc. - genuinely picture-sharing sites. While definitely an interesting function, and very useful for some, it isn’t really something I want to use it for. I have a blog here at blog city and do all my writing here, so why have another just for photos? My inclination is to basically stick to one host for everything. I know people who have blogs, Livejournal journals, moblogs, and more where you can find their various kinds of content. To me, though, it’s a lot easier if I have a central place to go to for everything and I think easier for others as well. So why would I then go to another service for moblogging? Well, while Blog City, my blog host, does have SOME of the functionality of a moblog. I can email text entries from my phone and have the show up in my blog. I can also email an address at Blog City with an attached image and it will show up in my photo album. But unfortunately so far you cannot post an entry with both text and an image in it via an email with an attached photo and some text, which is what you would need to emulate the functionality of a moblog. I’ve contacted Blog City and as usual they were very receptive about the idea, but who knows how hard it is to implement and thus when (or if) it will. All I know is if it is offered then I can actually ditch the separate moblogs and use Blog City exclusively, which would be a whole lot simpler!

As you can tell, I am still really feeling my way through this whole phenomenon, and I may be missing a lot of things that some moblog veterans out there may be shaking their heads at. All I can say is – please correct me! Anything that I don’t have right, or that’s incomplete, please enlighten me (us) as to what the real deal is. If you have additional suggestions or corrections, I want to hear them!

Update: I finally got ahold of the TextAmerica support person via AIM and they said that syndication was only available on “upgraded” (read paid) accounts. Free accounts do not provide this, so I think it looks like Buzznet for now unless I come accross another moblog host that was previously unknown to me that provides even more for free…