Blogging Tools

My “Blogging Software is Revolutionary” Rant

On Saturday I gave a presentation at Northern Voice (a Vancouver-based blogging conference) about blogging software and how it can and should be used for building Web sites are more than just a blog, or perhaps look nothing like a blog.

The session was podcasted here, and I’ve pasted in my talk outline below. The site we built during the session is here: http://bloggingworkshop.com/. Enjoy!

Not Just for Blogs

I think blogging is revolutionary. I think this because it is capable of building community and relationships, of informing, of entertaining… but when it comes right down to it, the thing that I think is so mind-blowing about blogging is the software. That, and the price of that software.

I started making Web sites in 1994. At that point, and for a long, long time, the vast majority of Web sites were built by making HTML files, potentially hundreds and hundreds of HTML files.  My first job was with the L.A. Times Web site, and when we wanted to change the design in any way - from the wording of something in the navigation to the color of the links - you did it on a file by file basis. Every single page had to be opened, changed, saved, and then put onto the Web server again. Needless to say we didn’t do a lot of little changes.

As the Web evolved, so did the software solutions. If you were a big Web site company with a lot of money, you hired people to build you something better: a database-driven Web site. With a databased site you could build pages as they were needed. At the L.A. Times that meant that when someone clicked on a link for a news story, the database found that story, pulled it out, and plunked it into a template. The ground-breaking thing for the worker bees was that there weren’t individual files sitting around anymore: if you wanted to make a change to the site design you made it to the template and the next time someone looked at a story, boom, they got the new template. It made things easier for the developers and that in turn made things easier for the site’s visitors, because the developers could then spend time on other stuff, like content. It made other good stuff possible, too, like search, like archives, like content sorting by category.

That was what you did if you were a big company. If you were a little buy, or an individual, and you didn’t have the big bucks to spend, you still had masses of HTML files sitting around, and things like search were really out of your reach.

Then along comes blogging software.

What is blogging software? Well, at heart, it’s a database. You put the content in, it goes into a database. When it gets displayed, that content is dropped into a template. Sound familiar? This is why so many blog sites look the same from page to page - the home page looks just like a permalink page, except for the content of the actual blog posts. The templates are the same.

And most blogging software came with bells and whistles: search, archives, RSS feeds… it was all built in. You didn’t need any special expertise to set it up, and with a lot of blogging software you could get started in minutes. Best of all was the price. What the big companies spent hundreds of thousands on, you could get for free with Blogger. Even the blog software that did cost money was relatively inexpensive. For $200 or so, you had everything you needed.

As long as what you needed was a blog, you were set.

Well, my big message today is that if you invest some time and learning, you can make a blog software work for more than a blog. You can build any Web site using blog software, and if you do it right, no one will be the wiser.

Let’s look at some examples of what I mean. (A little caveat, I’m going to show you mostly business Web sites because those are the kinds of Web sites I’m hired to create, but the principles are the same whether you have a “brand” or not.)

Thomas Paul Fine Art
http://www.tpaulfineart.com
Rejuvenile by Christopher Noxon
http://www.rejuvenile.com
Truthdig
http://www.truthdig.com
Mani’s Bakery
http://www.manisbakery.com

Blog software can really revolutionize the maintenance issues for a web site, and make it easier to redesign (a reality we can’t ignore) as well, but that doesn’t mean every web site needs to run off of blog software. Small web sites with mostly unique page layout won’t be able to make easy use of blog software.

But any site that needs to be easy to update (perhaps by multiple people), has some standardization of presentation, and can work with a template approach.

Is it easy? Well, yes and no. Get the right blog software, and have the right know-how and it’s not a big deal. But if you aren’t willing to learn some code and invest some time… it’s hard. There are people you can hire to set up a site for you, that’s for sure.

Now, the components of blog software: usually you have:

• publishing interface
• admin and setup stuff
• templates

I’m showing you pMachine’s Expression Engine, but many different kinds of blog software can be adapted for this kind of site. It’s important to choose blog software that gives you access to the templates! Wordpress.com isn’t going to do, and only the Typepad Pro level will work for you. If you can find software that can handle multiple blogs, so much the better. The reason I really love EE is that each “blog” can be customized, and because of all the extra components—mailing list, poll, photo gallery, forum module.

For this demo, I’ve chosen one of the templates that EE provides and I’m going to customize it. First, let’s deal with the Admin side and set up our publishing interface:

• Edit the blog preferences
• Set up custom fields
• Put in a sample post
• Set up categories

Next, let’s get rid of stuff in the template we don’t want.

And finally, let’s substitute a few things in the blog software code.

Voila!

Trackbacks, How I Hate Thee…

After a weekend offline (gasp!) I return to a Monday morning wading through the email notifications that I have a trackback on my blog. 178 of them. Of those 178 trackbacks, only one was a real trackback. I’ve been pondering turning off trackbacks for about a month now, mainly because it’s irritating to have to download and delete all those email notifications, not to mention the impact of the spam on the blog, but then that one real trackback comes along and I think, “Well, see, they are useful.”

So, I’m trying something new this week. My blog software (Expression Engine) allows me to randomize the trackback URL. Up until now, I’ve had this turned off, for no particular reason. This morning I turned it on, and I’m hoping it makes some kind of difference for me. Here’s what it does:

A random code number will be added to the end of each Trackback URL displayed on your site. This code will be stored in the database. When a Trackback is received the code must match in order to be accepted. This feature works similar to the Captcha feature in the comment preferences. It’s purpose is to prevent “throttling”. Only one trackback per code number will be accepted.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Movable Type on Yahoo! Small Business Web Hosting

Blogging company Six Apart announced today that the Movable Type blogging tool is now available pre-installed to Yahoo! Small Business Web shoting customers.

Costs start at a $8.01 a month (discounted from $11.95 for six months), and users are promised 24-hour toll-free support.

You can read all the details here.

Change Blog Software and Lose RSS Subscribers?

I was cruising through my blogroll today, catching up on reading blog posts and removing some blogs I haven’t been reading lately, when I realized I was still subscribed to Robert Scoble’s old RSS feed. In October, Robert migrated to the WordPress platform. Migrating a site to a new platform is a big job, and frequently one fraught with problems for blog readers. For instance, permalink URLs are often no longer valid. Archives are sometimes lost. Sometimes photos get stripped out… it all depends on how well the migration goes. One things always changes, however, and that’s the RSS or Atom feed URL. This means you need to migrate all your RSS feed subscribers to the new feed. You can see in this screenshot of my Scobleizer subscription through Bloglines, that Robert says he had 9,000 Bloglines subscribers—and more than a month after his reminder to subscribe to the new feed, he still has 8,292 subscribers to a now defunct feed. (OK, now he has 8,291, because I took myself off that feed.)

Frankly, this is alarming. Are all those people subscribed to the new feed? Are folks just not reading Scoble? (Oh, come on, everyone reads Scoble religiously, right?) Or did they, like me, subscribe to the new feed and forget to take themselves off the old? Whatever the reason, it’s likely that Scoble has lost a certain number of readers simply because he made a technology change.

There is a workaround solution for this—setup your feed with Feedburner. You’ll get a feed in all the many RSS/Atom flavors, and a Feedburner feed URL. Change blog software and, as long as you update Feedburner, your users won’t have to do a thing to continue reading your words o’ wisdom.

Of course, it would also be nice if blog software developers (at least those producing the kind you install on your own server) came up with a common syntax and location for the feed URL, so that switching to a new platform had a little less impact, but I suppose ensuring better compatibility with a competitor’s product isn’t necessarily a great business strategy.

Typepad Outage Hits 13 Hours

The popular hosted blogging service Typepad has been largely unavailable for 13 hours now. There’s a fair amount of foaming at the mouth (see here, here and here) occuring within the blogosphere—bloggers don’t like to be without their personal diary or business communication tool for extended periods. Many say that this failure is one in a string of service issues with the service.

The latest Everything Typepad blog post about the situation indicates that a primary disk system failed during maintenance last night, and that they are restoring backup copies from two days ago. Even for blogs that are back up, comments are as yet unavailable. This means lost blog time, lost blog posts, and lost interaction with readers. I have a fair amount of sympathy for Typepad; working in the technical world means suffering through these kinds of unpredictable and unrecoverable hardware failures, but then again, I’m not running a Typepad blog I depend on being available on a daily basis.

In ”Buzz Marketing with Blogs for Dummies,” I spend quite a bit of time walking through the pros and cons of using a hosted blogging service—one that runs on a blogging company’s Web servers—as opposed to installing a blog software package on your own server. Chalk this one into the con side for hosted blogs.

Make Your Podcasts Earn You Money

It was perhaps inevitable that as podcasting continues to grow in popoularity, opportunities would be made to make money by selling them.

Enter BitPass, an e-commerce service designed to let podcasters sell their podcasts singly or as a subscription service.

BitPass Unplugged™ is a patent-pending, powerful new service that will allow podcasters ranging from hobbyists to mainstream media organizations to introduce à-la-carte and subscription pricing to podcasts. The service leverages the loyalty of a growing number of listeners who prefer to download music, audio blogs, radio shows and other content and have it transferred automatically to portable media devices for listening at the user’s convenience.

Actually, you can actually sell any kind of digital content with BitPass—think ebooks, image collections and software. It looks like the basic setup is transaction fee-based, so BitPass keeps a percentage of every sale.

There’s more info about BitPass’ announcement on Blog Herald and About.com. Maybe my Web surfing skills aren’t up to snuff today, but I couldn’t actually find any references to BitPass Unplugged on the BitPass Web site. Somebody help me out here.

MarketingProfs: 5 reasons to use RSS (for marketing)

1. Avoid spam filters

2. Make journalists happy

3. Improve your Web traffic

4. Monitor your online reputation

5. It’s easy (even for a non-techie)

RSS is a valuable tool, a new weapon to add to your arsenal and an efficient way to reach customers, partners, investors and journalists. It’s an easy way to communicate information to an interested audience.

 

You know the people subscribing to your RSS channel want your news, and you are providing that information in an unobtrusive, timely fashion. Because RSS is still a relatively new technology, you can still be ahead of the curve.

 

If 2004 was the year of the Weblog, 2005 is the year of RSS.

SkypeCasting made easy…let the ambushes begin

MSN Spaces to Launch

From an Online Media Daily article today:

MSN TODAY IS EXPECTED TO announce the official launch of the blogging service MSN Spaces, and the release of a new version of MSN Messenger, both formerly available in beta....MSN Spaces allows users to create semi-private blogs, viewable only by people on users’ contact lists, or public blogs, viewable Web-wide.

Gmail Bumps Up Capacity

Logging into Gmail this morning, I noticed that I have 1.5 GB of space instead of 1 GB. A little clicking revealed that Google is celebrating the one-year birthday of Gmail by increasing everyone’s storage space. This is great news for me, as I had used somewhere in the neighborhood of 750MB of space already. Got to do some archiving…

There are some other new features as well: rich text formatting, fonts, bullets and highlighting.

Thanks Google! I hope this isn’t an April Fool’s joke!

Google Movie Search Seems a Little Lost

Google’s new movie search is supposed to allow you to find movies just based on the plot, according to the Google Blog. They give the example of ship hits iceberg. But I tried some other easy searches, and their tool doesn’t work as well as you might expect from Google.

Here’s a list of ten Google movie searches that Google gets really wrong.

1. reclusive billionaire
2. ghost pirates look for gold
3. prostitute finds happiness
4. aliens attack earth
5. boy skips school for a day
6. family goes on vacation
7. man learns the true meaning of christmas
8. two old friends finally fall in love
9. magic genie grants wishes
10. that jesus movie
11. accountant breaks out of prison

If you can find other interesting examples, please share them.

ANT Video Aggregator

Heard from video blogging devotees Jay Dedman and Peter Bull during the Introduction to Video Blogging session today. They introduced the ANT video blog aggregator, a fun little tool that works like any other RSS reader. Subscribe to your favorite video blogs, and ANT will refresh and download new entries. You can then view the video files right through ANT. Very cool little app.

Map Your Blog

From Microsoft’s Chandu Thota, a blog mapping tool that lets you put yourself into country maps.

For more fun, visit Chandu’s BlogMap site and search on a city name to find bloggers geographically near you.

Bloggers Get Their Own Ad Sizes

Jim Kukral at BlogKits has gone the standardization route with seven new ads sizes designed specifically for blogs. Arguing that standard online ad unit sizes just don’t work for bloggers, Kukral proposes a set of sizes that work better for column-heavy blogs, especially those use the standard Movable Type or Blogger layouts.

Here are the new blog specific ad sizes from BlogKits:

150x50 IMU – (Blog Sidebar Mini)

150x100 IMU – (Blog Sidebar Full)

90x130 IMU – (Blog Sidebar Mini Tower)

Blog Entry Rectangles and Bars – Built to fit within blog entries.

335x 50 IMU – (Blog Entry Bar)

335x 25 IMU – (Blog Entry Slim Bar)

450x 50 IMU – (Blog Entry Rectangle)

450x 25 IMU – (Blog Entry Slim Rectangle)

You can see a sample BlogKits ad-enabled template using a standard Blogger layout here, and also on the BlogKits blog itself (a Movable Type blog). Of course, custom-designed blogs can continue to use the standard online advertising sizes, or create their own. It will be interesting to see whether these catch on; much will depend on whether advertisers think they can get their message across effectively with these shapes and sizes.

TrackBack Spam Alert Backgrounder: What is TrackBack?

Spammers appear to have discovered TrackBack in a more significant way today. Discussion on the Moveable Type professional developers mailing list is full of folks monitoring how trackback spam is growing and how to stop it. I’m going to post my thoughts on that issue, but thought I should explain trackback first.

What is TrackBack?

If Google is any indication, TrackBack is something that bloggers like to explain to each other a lot. Bloggers also like to refer new users to Movable Type’s documentation, which is intensely detailed and MT-specific, and frankly a little hard to get through. So, perhaps you’ll allow me to take a stab at it:

It’s a three-part technology, and when all three parts work together, it’s a method of automatically notifying other blogs that you’re linking to them. The whole process is something like this:

1) I write a post and link to you.

2) My software tells your software what I did

3) Your software lists my new post on your page.

It’s that simple.  Now, let’s look at the three parts a little more closely.

Part 1: TrackBack Autodiscovery

This is a chunk of code that you put on a Web page (if you use the default templates, it’s there, take a look) that specifies, in an XML computer-y way, how anyone can access your site’s TrackBack system.  When I include links to you in one of my blog posts, my blog software fetches the content of those links for hints about TrackBack URLs.  This, incidently, is why publishing a blog posting that has a bunch of links in it, takes a long time.  Your software is examining all those pages to see if there are TrackBack URLs it should be doing something about.

Think of it this way: Autodiscovery is like putting your snail mail address on your site in a way that your clients address book can automatically sniff out.  That would be pretty handy, wouldn’t it? (Actually, that would be really handy. Would someone go do that, please!)

Part 2: TrackBack Ping

OK, so regardless of whether your software discovers the proper URL, often you can go to the page yourself and there’ll be a little text there that says “The TrackBack URL for this entry is..."  You can enter this in your blog post entry in the field that says “Pings.”

<musing>Personally, I think this is why most people don’t understand what TrackBack is.  A TrackBack URL is primarily a notification URL for the other blog, not a URL that delivers information to you, the site’s reader.  This is the opposite of how most URLs that you’re familiar with work.  Programmers don’t blink twice at URLs that require data from you, but regular Web users think of URLs as things that you type into Netscape or Safari, and in this case, it’s a different beast.</musing>

A TrackBack ping is a message sent by YOUR blog software to someone else’s blog software, via the TrackBack URL.  Your software is sending details about your post: its title, its summary, its URL, stuff like that.  The other site then stores that information and says “Thanks!” (or maybe “Error!” but we won’t go there).  The ping is complete.

Part 3: The Result

Now what?  Most people allow trackbacks because they want to display, on their own page, the list of people who have “pinged” them.  But strictly speaking, this isn’t covered in trackback.  This is more of a “I’ve got some data that’s interesting, when and how should my software display it” question.  Most people list the trackbacks they’ve received below their comments, and when a new ping arrives, their post pages are rebuilt.  I personally think talkbacks are a little more important than comments and should go first; ultimately, though, you might choose just to look at them yourself on a private page, or through your blog’s admin interface.

In theory, this system, and the resulting display of who’s pinging who, makes the blogosphere a more closely knit, up-to-date, egalitarian place.  Because if I write a post that debunks you, and you allow trackbacks, people reading your post will see that I’m refuting you.  Transparency, truth seeking, openness, etc.

However, spammers may change that… check out the next post.

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This blog is the companion Web site for "Buzz Marketing with Blogs for Dummies," a book for business professionals looking for advice and solutions for business blogging by Susannah Gardner. In stores now!

 
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