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Category: Fun With Blogs

VirusHead in Space, part 2

VirusHead in Space, part 2

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The VirusHead blog has been beamed into space five times since last September.

Blog in Space ranked 7th in SherpaMarketing’s 2006 Viral Hall of Fame.

I’m tickled that VirusHead is cited as a “nationally influential blog.”

This campaign is proof that if you blatantly appeal to bloggers’ egos and desire for more traffic/attention, they will in turn happily link to you. And if your offer is appealing enough, where a few influential bloggers go the rest will virally follow.

Yes, I think it’s a terrific idea, and it showed how viral marketing can really work. I love the idea of the blog being transmitted into space. So I don’t mind (much) being portrayed as the “typical” blogger, irresistibly attracted to shiny graphic objects.

In fact, here’s another, just for the fun of it… (grinning)

Playing with WordPress Plugins

Playing with WordPress Plugins

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I’ve been playing with a variety of plugins for WordPress. I’ll be nice and not list the plugins that I don’t like. These are the new plugins that I’m actually using:

  • The most useful one is Google Sitemaps (Arne Brachhold). It creates an automatically-updating Google-compliant sitemap of your blog with a built-in configuration page for your administration panel. Excellent!
  • The WordPress Akismet comment spam filter works really well, but I wanted something at the gate too. Even scanning the hundreds of daily attempted posts was depressing. Peter Keung’s Custom Anti-Spam plugin is a simple word image generator that has stopped the spambots cold, at least for now. The image isn’t very difficult to read, unlike some, and you can customize the pool of words to display – which is kind of fun. And of course, I’ve still got Akismet for backup if that fails.
  • I am very fond of the Kill Preview plugin (Owen Winkler). It seemed a simple thing, but there seemed to be no way to turn off the preview when you’re writing a post. This did the trick.
  • Mullet (Jonathan Broom) produces the “long-tail” listing of post titles at the bottom of the page. It lists only posts that aren’t already on the page – much better than just having the “Previous” link – and you have to love it just for the name.
  • Sociable (Peter Harkins) automatically adds links to popular “social bookmarking” sites. Mine doesn’t have Technorati listed yet, but it looks like it will be added soon. You can change the configuration to include as many (or as few) as you want. Hover with the mouse if you’re not familiar with the icons. It’s such a viral thing that I can’t resist. I have it on the single post pages, so you’ll see it if you look at comments, but I decided not to have it on the regular blog home page. That would be a little too much, I think.
  • I have installed and tested, but not actually started using, Anthony Girasoli‘s Get Recent Posts plugin. It lists the most recent posts, by content or excerpt, but for only one specific catagory. I’m thinking about using it to make a dedicated page for the JW posts.

There are some other plugins that I’ve already been using, of course. Here are my faves:

  • Recent Comments List (Jared Bangs) is on my sidebar. It lists recent comments in descending order, arranged by post title. It shows the name of the commenter, and links to the comment.
  • One year ago (Borja Fernandez) shows titles of your posts from… um… one year ago, although you can change it to X years or posts ago.
  • Ultimate Tag Warrior (Christine Davis) is what I’m using for the tags at the end of each post, as well as the tag cloud at the bottom of the page. It has a lot of options, and I like it, but I still haven’t figured out how to make a tags page that would list all the linked tags.
  • WP-Amazon (Rich Manalang) makes it easy to search for and add items from Amazon to my posts. I do that occasionally, sometimes more for the image than anything else. Configure it with your Amazon associates id. Who knows? You might earn yourself a free book or two.
  • WordPress Database Backup (Scott Merrill) is a convenient way to backup the blog and download it. I’m not entirely comfortable with database administration, and this gives me peace of mind.

Comments? Criticisms? Suggestions?

Zoomie

Zoomie

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They didn’t have a grey and white kitty, so this is as close as I get to our kitty Zoom. Zoomie here will play with the cursor. Click the “more” button to get a treat for him – hold it close and he’ll take a wee bite at a time. Click on him and hold to pet him. If you have speakers on, you’ll hear him purr. Very cute little blog toy.

adopt your own virtual pet!

Hee-hee.

The real Zoom adopted us – I think he was a kitten tossout in the park. He is the sweetest cat I’ve ever known. He chirps and mutters to me, and asks permission to jump in my lap by touching my shin very gently with his paw and blinking at me.

I haven’t been able to get a good photo of him yet. He’s always on the move, hunting and exploring and zooming around. He’s very very shy of anyone except the three of us.

There is a big dark grey cat that terrorizes him a bit, but the opposum leaves him alone.

TTLB Graphs, Technorati Issues

TTLB Graphs, Technorati Issues

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Today I’m a Slithering Reptile in the TTLB Ecosystem. The descriptions are cute, and very humbling! I was an “insignificant microbe” for a while when I first had the blog. I was a “Flappy Bird” for less than a day once – I think that’s the highest up I’ve gotten.

In addition to the regular blog stats, The Truth Laid Bare now has graphs of incoming links and outgoing links (by frequency). Here’s my most frequent incoming links graph:

Who Links to VirusHead

(larger, interactive version)

These things are great, but I’ve been having some technical difficulties with both TTLB and Technorati.

The main problem is that both TTLB and Technorati seem to slow down the loading time of my blog, freezing it for a wee bit while the scripts do whatever they do. I’m not really sure how it works.

It would be great if faster-loading solutions were implemented. I’m not sure what I can do on this end. I did try a WordPress plugin to speed up the loading time of TTLB with some kind of cache, but it doesn’t really do anything that I can tell.

Also, I can’t view the Technorati site with Firefox. It doesn’t appear to process the style sheet at all. When I go to the site, I have to open IE. Even then, the site loads very slowly. I can’t tell whether it is more to do with my own settings, or with their site.

The last problem is about my own settings, I’m sure. On every computer but my own, I can see the Technorati image and links on my sidebar. Here I don’t see it, either in Firefox or IE. I’ve played with settings for my firewall, antivirus, spyblaster, and everything else I can think of, but it just doesn’t show. Is it considered a malicious javascript?

Suggestions welcome.