No Runny Eggs

Friend of NRE and AFP-Wisconsin director Mark Block has finally joined the land of the blogging with Do The Right Thing.

Revisions/extensions (9:17 pm 3/22/2008) – I could have swore I added Janet Evans’ In the Race earlier, but apparently my memory is starting to fail me. Mea culpa.

First things first, I do have to point you to Neocon News. I know I’m already pushing well against the number of blogs one can keep track of, but, much like potato chips, I just can’t stop.

I’ve also done some rearrangement of the sidebars, adding a few politicians I back as well as a stat for the FeedBurner feed. I’ve tried to solve the slow load of the StatCounter counter by reinstalling the code, but it doesn’t seem to be helping right now. Sorry about that.

Revisions/extensions (12:41 pm 3/11/2008) – Now that Neocon News is back up, I added a bit from that site. I also threw in a couple of parting thoughts.

I probably should just do a revision and extension to yesterday’s piece on the 10 reasons blogs don’t succeed, but since John Hawkins decided to do a fresh post on it, and because I’ve got too much to stick in a revision, I’ll do so as well. Before I get to the meat, I recommend checking out the sites John highlighted today; after all, linkage is the currency of the blogosphere (no, that phrase isn’t mine; my hazy memory says it’s Sean Hackbarth’s).

I guess the initial post was fortuitous timing on John’s part. One could definitely use it as an explanation of how relatively insignificant blogs are according to Harris Interactive, which released that survey late yesterday.

I probably should have been clearer yesterday that “success” was “potential financial success”, not simply being around for a few years. Billiam from View from the cheap seats reminded me in yesterday’s post that most of those that blog do so because they simply want to vent. That’s good because I remembered something that Mark Cuban said at BlogWorld last year; if one isn’t drawing 1,000 hits a day, it doesn’t pay to even try to monetize the blog.

ALa at blonde sagacity makes much the same point. Simply put, do it because you want to. Things are too crowded right now to expect a huge audience, but if you put in your time, you’ll get an audience.

Neocon at Neocon News has a few words of encouragement for the bloggers-to-be. Yes, it can get daunting to provide a fresh perspective by the time you sift through your feed reader, but in the main, the blogosphere is not a “good ol’ boys club”. That reminds me; Drinking Right is tonight, 7 pm at Papa’s Social Club (7718 W Burleigh in Milwaukee).

Kate at small dead animals adds an 11th reason blogs fail – too much vulgarity. I try not to swear, but sometimes my inner Rottweiler/AoSHQ takes over, and I unleash Hell. I generally try to not have that show up on the feed, but each new version of WordPress tends to scramble the hacks I use to bury the vulgarities some. Besides, Ace, the Emperor, and Bill Quick have made names for themselves with a “few” choice words (not that I recommend it; the market is pretty much full-up).

I’m definitely violating Robbie Cooper from UrbanGround’s Rule 2A about not blogging about blogging right now. Oh well; I’m probably also violating the interesting rule (again), but sometimes this has to be done.

If I were a better blogger, I would have gone back to Charlie Sykes‘ old Rule of Five at some point here yesterday (unfortunately, the WTMJ archives for April 2007 got wiped, so the original post got lost). While most of those I know do read more than the 5 blogs Charlie said he read at the time (I’m somewhere north of 150 blogs in the reader) there still is a valid point to the rule. One has to be pretty good and consistent to be read regularily because there just are so many hours in the day.

There’s a couple more suggestions I can add. Don’t make your home page so busy people can’t follow it or load it quickly. There is a certain elegance to simplicity of design. Besides, some people are still on dial-up, so huge graphics will kill the load speed.

Unless you’re doing advertising, please offer full-text feeds. While in many situations you won’t know how many people are viewing the feed (I’ll plug FeedBurner because it does track that), most people keep up with blogs through feed readers, and most feed readers do not offer the option to bypass the excerpt without an additional click.

(H/T – Allahpundit)

56% of those surveyed by Harris Interactive say they never read political blogs. There’s also a few other eye-popping numbers, at least if you can trust the pollsters after their collective performance thus far this year:

– The over-62 crowd is actually the most-likely to read political blogs at least several times a month (26%), with each younger age group less-likely to read them.
– 76% of those that read blogs at least once a week read less than 5 political blogs, with Republicans most-likely to read 5 or more (26%).
– 69% of those that read blogs at least once a week didn’t comment in the week prior to the poll. I can definitely believe that one; it’s closer to 85% here.
– On the accuracy question, while pluralities of all 3 political groups (Republicans, Democrats, and Independents) believe blogs are about as accurate as the mainstream media, only among Democrats is there more respect for the MSM’s accuracy than for the blogs’ accuracy. 32% of Dems belive the MSM is more-accurate and 21% of Dems believe blogs are more-accurate, while the split among Republicans is 14%-37% and among Independents is 19%-36%.
– Even with their distain for the blogs’ accuracy, more Democrats see blogs as more valuable than the MSM than the other way around (26%-24%).

I have no idea why I didn’t do this before now, but since that right column isn’t quite overloaded enough, and because William Teach is that damn good, please add Pirate’s Cove to your rolls and readers.

Replacing the dearly-departed Still Spinnin’ Blog is Dan’s solo effort, The D Spot. Please fix your readers and rolls accordingly.

John Hawkins has the top 10 reasons. I’ll ignore the fact that I don’t do this for a living (or even any compensation whatsoever; no ads here) and see which ones I definitely fail on a routine basis (do note I’m not talking about Shoebox or the guest-bloggers):

1) They’re just not very good. Damn if John didn’t nail me. Most days, I’ll be the first one to tell you I suck.

2) They don’t cover interesting material. That speaks to the fact that I’m a boring person.

5) They don’t promote their work. That’s a big-ass failing of mine. I almost never send out promotional e-mails, prefering to let the trackbacks do the talking. I just don’t have that huge an ego.

6) They’re not consistent enough. They take days off. Oh, you mean like the break I took between the 28th and the 4th? Somehow, I got Shoebox as a co-blogger to take the pressure off.

I fail most of the rest of them as well. Oh well; it’s a good thing I don’t have a huge ego.

TTLB is slowing things down some at the moment, probably because the Bear threw on a whole heap of blogs, and that’s really messing up the whole works, from rankings (the widget had me as a rodent, the TTLB NRE homepage had me as a human, and the acutal rankings have me as a marsupial). I had to deactivate it for the moment.

Revisions/extensions (8:21 pm 3/9/2008) – A longer search gives the current problem as the embedded video, and it’s intermittent. Oh well; that’s the price of a multimedia blog.

I really have to roll through Technorati’s “Blog Reactions” more often. I found a couple of blogs that saw fit to add me to their blogrolls, so I best return the favor:

– Try 2 Focus
– Tundra Politics (side note; I probably wouldn’t have caught this one without Shoebox)

I should’ve done this months ago, but I’ve got a pair for your perusal:

– Gateway Pundit
– Wolking’s World

Those of you on BlueHost may or may not have seen an option in your CPanel page to “change” the PHP configuration. I highly recommend not using it to try to change your PHP version. I’m still on a PHP4 server, and I found that using the PHP5 engine does not send out pingbacks.

Well, except for the missing uploads, that is. If there’s anything still busted, let me know.

Revisions/extensions (7:46 pm 2/22/2008) – I wish I had figured out what went wrong with this place before I tried reinstalling WordPress, which blew up the uploads. Somehow the pretty permalinks got fouled up, which cascaded through the whole system, from the feeds to the comments. After doing a very hard reset of that, I got everything back working, including the nicer Filosofo Comment Preview.

R&E part 2 (6:50 am 2/26/2008) – Trying to pingback to an older test post.

I don’t seem to have comments working right now. I’m working on that.

Revisions/extensions (10:39 pm 2/21/2008) – I think I got things back to working, except for Filosofo Comments Preview. I’ve replaced that with AJAX Comments Preview.

R&E part 2 (6:52 am 2/26/2008) – Okay; pingbacks with PHP4 work. Now, let’s try with PHP5. Well, that didn’t work.

I blew up the wrong folder here, and all of the old uploads are gone. I was able to recover a few of them, but most are toast.

Sorry.

That’s the basic premise behind On Tap, a blog of three friends in Northern Virginia. Though Jim Geraghty, Cam Edwards and Marshall Manson have stopped their weekly drinks, they haven’t stopped the conversation.

There are so many good Cheddarsphere blogs, I can’t always keep up. I wish I had run into the the proprietor of Berry Laker, but I didn’t. Fortunately, Owen did, so I do know about him now.

Kevin Conrad, late of “The Early Spin” and now down in Atlanta producing one of the more-popular shows down there, The Morning Drive with Randy Cook, moved ProductionNinja off his brother’s web server (where I had it) and to its own place – ProductionNinja.com. Please fix your rolls and feed readers accordingly.

Apparently, there was a flaw in previous versions of WordPress that allowed a subscriber to assume more control over a blog than intended. For those of you with your own WordPress installations, please upgrade to 2.3.3 now. I do not know if this also affects stand-alone WordPress MU installs (Jim, you might want to check on this one), but those blogging through WordPress.com should be safe.

Also, if you’re running the WP-Forum plugin (I’m not), it is highly recommended you disable it until a major security flaw is fixed.

I’m sort-of encouraging Shoebox, a good guy who stumbled in on the last couple of liveblogs, to start blogging. While he doesn’t have a blog of his own (yet), he now has an open door here.

Please give him a warm welcome.

I don’t always get to have history on the rolls, but since Bill Quick is the man who invented the term “blogosphere”, and I’m feeling all historic today, it’s high time I added Daily Pundit (at least while I still have knuckles to type with).

For those of you who don’t know the definition of “moron” I’m using, it’s a regular over at Ace of Spades HQ. Today’s addition to the roll is Weasel Times and Stoat Intelligencer. Anybody who puts a pancake on Islamic Rage Boy’s head ought to be a regular read.

I’ve noticed I have a certain lack of Steves on the roll. It’s time to start rectifying that with Professor Stephen Bainbridge.

…this little blurb from Stephen Green’s liveblog would be on it:

Also, it’s true: Guys named Steve do the best liveblogging.