TheGeoffRe(y)port

Haven’t quite resolved the big question posed in the title there at this stage, but for the moment I’m giving Twitter a fair dinkum go. It’s taken me a fair while to work out whether or not I really care about Twitter - but after having had fun playing around with Instant Messaging and Facebook status messages for a while, I figured it’s my new chance to be hilariously funny on a micro-type level. So for the time being (at least) feel free to subscribe to my Twitter RSS, or just check out my Twitter page. You might also have noticed the “Geoff is currently” widget on the right hand side, which is obviously being fed by twitter too.

Anyone else using Twitter? Good? Bad? Indifferent? I’d be interested to know.

It’s simple, and worth knowing. Hat tip to Kingdom Journalism

Google Reader has just taken the jump from being a purely online feed-reader to providing functionality that allows me to read any of my 2000 last Google Reader subscription items without needing to be online. It does this through what is ultimately a browser plugin: “Google Gears”. Once you install the Google Gears plugin - you get a little green download icon on the top right of your Google Reader, and you can download all your latest feed subscriptions.

Google Gears sounds like it’s bigger than just that, but this is possibly the coolest thing about the feed-reader that was already well and truly my favourite going. It might just convince you Bloglines laggards to make the switch.

Heard an interesting thing on Radio National last night (yeah, I know, what a fuddy duddy), about the AIDS epidemic in Africa. The part that intrigued me (more than the other parts that just made me want to cry) was that they described the fact that South African President Thabo Mbeki was thought to have been strongly influenced towards denying the link between HIV and AIDS because of the prevalence of AIDS-denier propaganda on the Internet, and specifically in Google rankings. Which had me pondering: what responsibility does Google have for the influence of their rankings on issues that can (indirectly) influence the mortality of hundreds of thousands of people? Just a thought - let me know what you think back.

As a result of a) having Virtually Paul tell me that he only finds out about cool blogging tools from me; b) realising that I haven’t actually written a Tech post in a long, long time and c) seeing that Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger Group Writing Project is up and happening, I thought it only fitting that I make a top 5 of my favourite tools for blogging with WordPress.

1. Akismet. That counter on my sidebar doesn’t lie: I really have had more than 5 and a half thousand spam comments blocked. In the time I’ve been running the blog, I’ve only had 3 or 4 comments incorrectly blocked (and Jaclyn, if you’re reading, you were one of them: Sorry!) and it’s remarkably rare that a comment spam will get through the spam blocking wonder that is Akismet. I love it

2. Mint. Sure it actually costs money (practically nothing), and it might not quite cover all my stats-nerd needs, but Mint is quickly becoming my tool of choice for statistical analysis. Mint specialises in giving a really nice quick look at how things are travelling - there’s a nice overview of everything I’m interested in all on the front page. It makes me happy. And any gaps in my statistical nerdy needs are met by my love of……

3. FeedBurner. FeedBurner are a perfect example of what is quickly becoming a Web 2.0 dictum: do one thing and do it the best. Feedburner look after RSS feeds. They do all sorts of cool things with it, optimising it for browsers, putting helpful links at the bottom of the feed, and importantly for my aforementioned statistic addiction - tracking subscribers and hits on the blog. FeedBurner is only really made useful because they have a ripper little plugin which automagically forwards all the hits to my regular feed addresses (http://www.geoffreport.com/wp/feed/ or a derivative of that) to my FeedBurner feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/geoffreport ) without me needing to touch anything. Gotta love that!

4 . Google Reader. I’ve mentioned this in the past, but it really does make my blogging world a happier place. I’m currently monitoring 138 feeds, and that can only happen because it all goes in centrally to the Google Reader interface. It’s also a source for what I think is probably my most under-utilised feature: the starred post feed and sidebar widget where I link through to interesting things I’ve come across in the blogosphere. If I don’t find it in my Google Reader, it doesn’t go in there.

5. Google Analytics. I know, I know, I’ve now got three places that I’m listing statistic services, but it’s MY favourite top 5 after all, so you can all just put up with it. Analytics is cruddy at trying to pick up the here and now stuff, which Mint is much, much better at, but Google Analytics is an absolute wonder at looking over historical data - particularly now that I’ve almost got a year’s worth of data in there. So I can have a look at how the traffic spike for one Problogger writing project versus another, or how many people read the “going out” announcement versus how many read the “engagement” announcement. It gives a stats junkie way too much to do.

Others that came close to making the list are Adsense, but I haven’t made a penny off that yet (although it’s getting there), or ScribeFire except that I’m still getting used to using it, and not that sure that I love it as much as I’d hoped that I would.

Had a few queries regarding the relative nakedness of the site yesterday. For those of you who didn’t visit - I was participating in “CSS Naked Day“, an annual event in which you take away the CSS Stylesheet from your website in order to prove that you’ve got a site that is well structured and beautiful. See the CSS Naked site for more details. You’ve missed it for this year, but you might at least get an idea of what I’m talking about.

I’ve braved it and upgraded TheGeoffRe(y)port to Wordpress 2.1, which has been relatively pain free, although it’s not been completely seamless (always clear your cache). But if you see any problems, email me at webmaster>>AT_SYMBOL<<geoffreport.com

or, more accurately, not. My iPod has returned, in the form of a brand new one. They might have taken a while to get it back to me, but I couldn’t be much happier now!

Seems like the times are a changin’, and I’ve recently replaced a few of my ol’ favourite techie tools for some newer, shinier ones. And given that someone out there voted for more tech posts, I thought I’d give this a go.

From Bloglines to Google Reader

Bloglines has been good to me. It introduced me to the idea of a web-based feed reader, which lets me keep track of over 100 different blogs at a time. Bloglines improved my blog-reading capabilities enormously. But it started to get annoying. Click on a blog with lots of unread posts and you feel like you need to read them all then and there, because they’ll disappear otherwise. Google Reader, however, gives a huge amount of freedom. I can read the posts now, leave them for later, read the one that captures me now and mark it as unread if I didn’t quite finish. It’s too easy. Plus the fact that the ability to export my subscriptions from Bloglines as OPML and into Google Reader without losing anything, made it a no-brainer.

Plus I’m really enjoying having this “Starred Posts” thing happening. It took a little bit of fiddling around, because Google outputs the feeds as Atom 1.0 or something (which my little feed widget can’t handle), but a little bit of feed conversion magic from FeedBurner and the whole world can see the posts I found interesting. Which brings me onto my second transition…..

From Locally Managed Feed to FeedBurner

For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, my “feed” is a little text document that pretty much allows people to keep updated with what I’ve posted recently. You “subscribe” to the feed with a tool like Google Reader, or Bloglines (if you’re a little bit backward) and hey-presto, you can find out as soon as there’s something new posted. ANYWAY, because plenty of you people know this already lots of people subscribe to this feed, and it’s entirely possible that lots don’t even visit the actual blog any more, they just follow along in their feed reader. (If you are one of those, I’d love to hear from you, but you might actually need to get out a bit and visit the site)

So there’s a chunk of these type of people, and I don’t have anyway of working out who they are, short of manually checking through thousands of lines of log files, which isn’t quite my idea of fun. At least I couldn’t until now. FeedBurner lets you host your feed with them, and they take record all sorts of fun statistics on how many people are subscribed, what kind of reader they’re using, basically everything I could want to know about my feed. It’s great fun, and just adds that extra little something to the whole blogging stat-watching experience. There’s even a Wordpress plugin to automatically re-route all my old feed traffic to the new feedburner feed!

From Firefox 1.5 to Firefox 2

Firefox is dead, long live Firefox. Well, not quite. But the shiny new, recently announced Firefox 2 is a gentle step up from the previous version. It’s a pretty little thing, seems to run a whole lot gentler, less crashy, and when it does terminate unexpectedly (including when your laptop battery runs out), it just magically returns you back to where you were - including data entered into forms. It’s a pretty special little doo-dad, certainly beats the pants of the equally new Internet Explorer 7, and it’s making my life much better all round. If you haven’t downloaded it yet, you’d best get onto it.

iPod to…… silence

Not all is happy in GeoffTechLand. For the past 15 days, my iPod has been out of action. Fortunately it was still (just) under warranty. Unfortunately, since it got sent in, it’s taking forever for them to ship me a replacement. Once they do though…. it’ll be back on the music train for me!

Just because I was sick of seeing the same layout every day, and mostly because I came across this brilliant new Wordpress template (see the link in the footer for the creator), I thought I’d have a bit of a try out of something completely different. No guarantees that it’ll stay - although my feeling is that we’ll go with it for a while. And have a bit of patience if things shift around a bit - still sorting out the little fiddly details. So leave your nasty, “I’m never coming back here again while you keep this design” comments after the tone.

Beep.