Archive for the 'Blog Tools & Technology' Category

Casey Jones, you better… watch your feed

Published by Dock on June 21, 2008 in Blog Tools & Technology, BlogBurst Nuts & Bolts and Troubleshooting. 2 Comments

The modern world giveth, and the modern world taketh away. We clearly live in an era where the ubiquity of computers brings new experiences to a greater and broader base of people all over the world. Unfortunately, not all of these experiences are good ones. A disturbing new trend involves hacking feeds, and appending a thoroughly un-subtle collection of less-than-savory links to someone’s feed. Perhaps the most unpleasant aspect of this is that unless the blogger in question is looking at his or her feed output, this can go entirely unnoticed.   

So, yes - go ahead and look at your feed’s output. Now. 

If you spot the problem, my advice would be to start de-activating any plug-ins or add ons one at a time, and see if that changes the feed. (You’ll want to save any changes you make, and then refresh the page with which you’re viewing the feed each time. Yes, it is somewhat annoying - but so is getting hacked!) 

If that doesn’t rectify the situation, you’ll almost certainly want to talk to your blog platform’s support folks. If you’re an intrepid sole proprietor, responsible for all aspects of your blog and web hosting, well… you may have your work cut out for you. 

Did I mention that it’s always a good idea to make regular back-ups? If your blog gets so deeply hacked that you have to start fresh, you’ll be very glad you have backups. You’ll be equally sorry if you do not. 

While I’m talking about feeds, I would like to mention Feedvalidator, and specifically its use alongside Blogburst. When looking at your feed, there are a few methods by which you can have a gander at it. You can generally open it in a new browser window (and I think all browsers now will format it for you such that it doesn’t look like XML, but is readable) or you can use an RSS aggregator such as Google Reader. 

For general purposes (like seeing if the feed is broadcasting at all) either method is fine, but for discovering whether your feed is Blogburst-compatible or not, those methods are lacking a bit.   Browsers may or may not show you the full feed (Firefox seems to enjoy truncating the articles in its own way) and RSS readers are specifically built to digest the widest variety of feeds - feeds that can vary wildly in quality.

Google Reader in particular is incredibly forgiving and omnivorous in that regard - good for reading feeds of questionable quality, but very bad for diagnosing problems, as it masks problems - by design.  Blogburst syndicates feeds out to major publishing sites - so we really cannot afford to take in feeds that may not be well formed.

Blogburst is therefore rather unforgiving as RSS syndicators go; this is to prevent a feed of questionable structure from, say, taking down a major web site by displaying a malformed feed. (Believe me when I say that this scenario is very “exciting” in a bad, bad way.) 

Feedvalidator is a tool that’s just as strict as Blogburst is. If it passes muster at Feedvalidator, it is almost certain to work in Blogburst. It is very easy to use - pop your feed URL in the single text box, hit one button, and there you have it.  My favorite thing about Feedvalidator is that not only will it show you any problems that it finds, but it also will (via links, line by line!) give you suggestions as to how to fix the problems. 

Feedvalidator really is one-stop shopping for feeds, and I rely on it rather heavily. If your feed ever becomes problematic, I highly recommend Feedvalidator - it is very likely to show you the way to fix it. Give it a shot! I know you want to…  

Blog Restoration and Maintenance

Published by Dock on May 22, 2008 in Blog Tools & Technology and Blog Writing. 2 Comments

How did I let this happen?

The Mustang sat in a sorry state. Years of neglect hung heavy on the once-glorious sheetmetal; once eluded through great care, rust was now peeking through paint in the usual places. Dry rotted tires had long since ceased to hold air, door and hood hinges popped and moaned with any movement (as I winced with mechanical sympathy) and worst of all, I could detect that small mammals of the North Carolina piedmont had made several small homes within the confines of what was once my pride and joy. The only rent paid was empty seed husks and a variety of nesting materials.

This was my task - to bring this Mustang back from the brink. And your task, as a blogger, is to prevent your blog from falling into disrepair - much as I failed to do with the car. I can assure you that the old saw is unfortunately, and quite expensively, true - an ounce of prevention is very much worth a pound of cure.

A fresh coat of paint

One of the more obvious ways to make your blog look factory fresh is with a new color scheme - and unlike the old Mustang, it won’t cost you a thing. I’m sure that you’ve visited web sites or blogs that looked dated - or worse, were actually painful to look at. Take a moment to assess your blog’s color scheme critically, and ask yourself if you’re happy with it. Make sure that it has enough contrast between text and background to assure easy reading. I prefer tight palettes (for instance, a color scheme that has only one or two colors and their variants to work with - like dark brown text on a light tan background) and that also avoids chromatic extremes. You actually can have too much contrast, in my opinion, so go for mid-darks and mid-lights. The very worst thing you can do is juxtapose a high-saturation red against a high-saturation blue. It shimmers horribly! Avoid.

Fortunately, most blog software makes it incredibly easy to swap between themes and palettes, or create your own - or rely on the creativity of others and grab widely-available additional themes. It is worth experimenting with - you’ll probably find something that you really like, and I’m sure your readers will like it too.

The radio doesn’t work

Something I see far too often is a feed that stops broadcasting. This can happen for a few different reasons, but sometimes the feed just flat-out breaks. Don’t take it for granted that your feed is working correctly - check it every so often by opening your feed URL in a browser window, and check that it matches your blog’s actual entries - particularly the most recent. Probably the most common cause of feed breakage is using MS Word to create your entries, and copy-pasting them in. MS Word has special characters that are widely known to break a feed. Simply put - don’t do that! Find a less “feature-rich” editor to write your entries in. You’ll be glad you did.

Too many gaudy aftermarket parts

As I accumulate gray hair on my chin, my enthusuasm for aftermarket add-ons of dubious quality and taste has, fortunately, diminished. The Mustang looks best as it did when it left San Jose in 1965, with just a smattering of vintage hop-up parts for a bit of spice and speed. The underbody lighting kits, radical suspension adjustments and bass-drunk subwoofers, I will leave for the current generation of “tuner” youth to explore. More often than not, these bolt-ons are a waste of money as they tend to diminish the overall function of the vehicle.

With so many plug-ins, add-ons, and other flashy bits to add to one’s blog, it is tempting to throw caution to the wind and build your blog to the hilt with “added functionality.” However, caution is required. Nothing is worse than having a bunch of add-ons on your blog - and then, having one of them break your blog or feed. It greatly complicates diagnosis, and more often than not, your friendly tech support agent will tell you to strip them all off in order to properly assess the situation. (I know, because I used to be one of those support folks.) My recommendation is to avoid the temptation to go hog wild, and only use a minimum of plug-ins and widgets. Easier said than done, I realize, but your blog will be far more trouble-free for doing this, and you’ll have far fewer updates to chase.

You are updating your blog software and plug-ins… aren’t you? I sure hope so, otherwise…

Someone broke in and trashed everything

Fortunately no person has ever broken into the old Mustang (aside from minor damage from the rodentia) - however, I can’t say the same for my hated Celebrity. The Celebrity was the automotive enthusiast’s equivalent of a lonely, gray exile - boring from all angles, dreadful from behind the wheel, and unreliable too - just to pour salt into the wound. I figured the rest of the world viewed the car with the same sense of pitiful worthlessness that I did… imagine my surprise when I returned home one day (after a walk back from the university campus) to discover that someone had broken in and scattered my belongings all over the yard. The thieves took nothing of value - except my peace of mind.

Unfortunately, in this day and age, there are far more ways to break into your blog than there were ways into my old beater car. Luck isn’t enough. Belief that your blog isn’t worth breaking into isn’t enough. Security requires vigilance and a bit of work - but it beats discovering that your blog has been exploited, and (in the worst case) it beats regretfully deleting your blog and starting over, if the corruption of your blog is too extreme.

Fortunately, by updating your blogging software and plug-ins regularly, you substantially increase the chances of successfully fending off an attack with relatively little work on your part. There are also some decisions you can make regarding the ways in which you handle links, comments, and other things that can also make a difference - and your blog’s platform almost certainly has some sound advice on its support pages or FAQ regarding best practices and things to avoid. It might sound like a hassle but it beats having to pull your blog back from the brink, using back-ups.

You, of course, are regularly making back-ups… right?

Show and shine

If you take a little time every now and then to keep your blog’s software updated, make tweaks here and there, and keep the add-ons down to a reasonable level, you’ll have a blog that you’ll continue to enjoy (since it is much less likely to fall apart unexpectedly) and your readers will appreciate your rock-solid and consistent uptime. Maybe you can’t drive it to the Dairy Queen for the local show-and-shine, as I did with the Mustang this evening, but you will have pride of ownership just the same. You’ll almost certainly have spent far less money than I did, too.

Starting a Blog: Choose Your (Free) Software

Published by Tim on April 25, 2008 in Blog Tools & Technology. 10 Comments

You’ve rolled up your sleeves and you’re ready to start a blog. You’ve picked your topic — say, portraits made out of food — and you chose a blog name (FoodFace?) You’re ready to type away.

But wait, you need a place to blog, don’t you? That’s what this post is about: Good, free blog software.

In the world of free blogging software (aka “blogging engines” - vrooom!), two stand above the rest: Blogger and Wordpress. Both are “hosted,” which means you just visit a Web page to blog instead of having to downloading and install anything.

Blogger

Blogger is owned by Google, and you can tell a lot about Blogger by its home page: it’s simple, clear, and friendly.

blogger.gif

Signing up is easy — in fact, everything about Blogger is easy. Blogger gives you basic options to customize the look of your blog by picking from some 16 templates, and you can rearrange the basic elements like your archive links around your page.

If you want to see what Blogger blogs look like in action, go to Blogger.com and click on some of the recently updated blogs and those “of note” at the top of the page — this gives a good idea of what you get.

blogger2.gif

Wordpress

Like Blogger, Wordpress is free and hosted. When you visit the Wordpress home page, you can see that there’s more going on here; and that’s because there’s more going on with Wordpress. This software gives you many more options for customizing, including pages and pages of design templates to choose from.

wordpress2.gif

It also comes with a host of useful add-ons and features like a spam blocker for your comments, easy-to-place tag clouds, search boxes and the like, and notification when other Wordpress blogs link to your posts.

Note that Wordpress also offers a downloadable version of its software. The free blogging engine lives at Wordpress.com while the software lives at Wordpress.org. If you’re like me, you will type the wrong one many, many times in the course of your blogging life.

How To Choose?

Both of these tools are state-of-the-art and include functions like RSS feeds and what-you-see-is-what-you-get text editing.

My first recommendation is to look at blogs hosted on Blogger and Wordpress and see which has a design “feel” that you like (be sure to look at several from each).

Next: do you want simplicity over all (Blogger)? Or do you think you’ll want to fiddle and tweak and have room to grow (Wordpress?)

If you still can’t decide, you can always start with Blogger and then at some later date suck your whole Blogger blog into Wordpress (a nice feature indeed).

If you have opinions about these, or other, blogging tools, please leave your thoughts in the comments!

Happy blogging…

Wordpress has upgraded - have you?

Published by Dock on February 9, 2008 in Blog Tools & Technology and General. 6 Comments

Looks like Wordpress has upgraded their platform again - 2.3.3 is available. As this is a “point release” (2.3.2 to 2.3.3) then this release is meant to fix bugs, and security issues in particular.

 

Wordpress has this to say about it:

 

WordPress 2.3.3 is an urgent security release. If you have registration enabled a flaw was found in the XML-RPC implementation such that a specially crafted request would allow a user to edit posts of other users on that blog. In addition to fixing this security flaw, 2.3.3 fixes a few minor bugs.

You can find more information about the upgrade at the Wordpress download site for your convenience.

 

If you’re curious as to the benefits of upgrading (or the pitfalls of not upgrading) you can find that at the Blogger Resource Center.

Keep Your Blog Software Current

Published by Alex on November 8, 2007 in Blog Tools & Technology. 10 Comments

Most bloggers are in the game to write about issues and share ideas that matter to them, so it’s no surprise that many self-hosted blogs are a version or three behind the officially released and supported versions. Upgrading blog software isn’t exactly fun, and it takes time time away from starting and contributing to discussions around the Web, but it is important to stay on top of changes to your blogging software, and it’s easier to do than ever. So, why should you stay up-to-date?

Security

Most new releases include code to patch potential security holes in complex blogging software. The last thing you want is someone finding a chink in the armor, gaining access to all of your hard work and destroying or hijacking it. As someone who neglected the software and paid the price, I can tell you that cleaning up after a crazed hacker-kid is not a fun way to spend an evening.

Most point releases (2.0.1 or 1.3.9 etc.) are typically released to fix bugs, with security issues at the forefront. So, even if you aren’t willing to commit to a major new release, you should jump on new point releases quickly. Major releases often include security fixes as well, but it’s rare for a major release to include a security fix that isn’t also released for the previous version. For example, if version 2.5 is released by a software company, odds are good that 2.4.X will come out at the same time, solely comprised of security fixes.

Features

The other key reason to stay up-to-date are the new features bundled into a release. Often times the little features have a really large impact. For example, improvements to spam detection may not seem like much, but good software will let you focus on writing instead of weeding your comments, that can translate into a lot of time.

Every blogging platform has different ways for you to stay up to date. For example, there is a great plugin for WordPress that makes it easy to upgrade the software within your browser. A lot of Web hosts also provide built-in install and upgrade functionality, via services like Fantastico.

If you take a little bit of time now, you can save yourself some heartache later, and you may even find some fun new tools and toys that will make writing for your blog even more fun.

Building a Great Blog with WordPress

Published by Beth on June 2, 2006 in Blog Tools & Technology. 4 Comments

We usually shy away from posts that simply link to other content on the web, but when something comes along that we think might be useful to our blog partners it’s time to call forth the power of the href.

Tim Ziegler, web designer and author on Webmonkey, not to mention an Austinite, writes a great article on using WordPress as your blogging platform. We don’t have a preference for WordPress over any other blogging platform here at Pluck, but if you are on the WordPress platform, or thinking about using it, then this article is for you.

Enjoy your weekend and stay tuned as we will have some more product news for you next week (hint: a long awaited reporting request).