Jordy Blog

Sweet Syndication – ConnectBlogs is Reborn

The aforementioned new version of ConnectBlogs.com rolled into production last night. It will be a process of ongoing improvement, but I’m really happy with what we have now. I think a lot of people will find it to be a valuable resource, and I personally hope it makes the Utah business and tech communities a little smarter and a little tighter. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Note: I’ll soon be posting some guidelines for people that want to be (or remain) syndicated there. It’s basic stuff: a clean and relevant feed, no ads, no offensive content, try to stay mostly on topic, etc.

Note 2: I’ve already started syndicating a very non-comprehensive list of Utah business bloggers that I personally like to read. If you are one of them and for some reason don’t want to be syndicated, just drop me a line and I can remove you right away. I’ll be personally contacting each one to make sure it’s OK.

Note 3: Some of the people that were posting on ConnectBlogs.com won’t have their old posts show up for a day or so while I work out some glitches. Nothing to be worried about here. :)

ConnectBlogs (Version 2)

I apologize that I haven’t posted in a while; I’ve been pretty busy with a number of things: my day job as website manager at Overstock, a lot of website contracting and consulting work in the evenings, my usual slew of volunteer projects, and most recently (and notably) setting up the new version of ConnectBlogs –which is not live yet, but should be very soon.

ConnectBlogs will be moving to more of a syndication model, which I believe is more in line with what the Utah blogging community (myself particularly) expected. So in addition to the current “resident writers”, the upcoming version of ConnectBlogs will encourage Utah bloggers to post on their own blogs and have their content aggregated based on how they tag (or categorize) it. ConnectBlogs will be an ad-free gesture to the Utah business and tech communities. We’ll get your content in front of a lot of people, and we’ll also provide plenty of backlinks.

So if you’re a Utah business or technology blogger and would like be included in ConnectBlogs, drop me a line with your name, URL, and feed URL (if you know it). There are some basic (and yet unpublished) rules on what and who can be syndicated, but I think most people who read this will qualify.

Just When I Thought Google Hated Me

I don’t know about you, but my PR was showing as a 1 forever. Not that it really matters since I’m not really selling anything here, but it was kind of annoying. Why wouldn’t Google satisfy my ego like it does for everyone else? (Actually, it was more like, “I don’t suck that bad.”) The crazy thing is that my blog feed page had been showing up at a PR 3 all along, but that made no sense to me, unless Google was using my Google Analytics traffic to determine which of my pages were important –which is very possible. I get a lot more hits on my feed than my regular pages: probably a combination of having savvy readers and a really ugly pic. :)

Still, I suspected (since my content is so darn good) that if I was not unconsciously breaking some cardinal rules, then Google must be was just toying with me using cached data from different data centers. Since I’ve now instantly jumped from a 1 to a 5 doing hardly anything, I think it was the latter; but there’s no way to be sure –it’s just too much of a black box. Being a little opaque plays to Google advantage since it keeps blackhatters from gaming the system. I like that because it makes search result more relevant. But I’ve determined that Google’s antics are enough to drive anybody crazy if they’re trying to use PageRank as any sort of validation measure. Here at home, I’m still showing up at a 1.

So I wish I’d seen this Future PageRank Tool a little sooner. I don’t know how long my PageRank was limboing in Google purgatory, but my big jump tells me it was a while. The Future PageRank Tool basically queries a whole bunch of Google data centers for you, so it’s like the Google Toolbar, only reliable. Had I used it a few months ago, I may had saved myself some counseling. :)

By the way, for those of you who don’t use the SearchStatus plugin for SEO, it’s basically the Google and Alexa toolbars combined and on steroids. If you’re still wallowing in IE sadness, the SearchStatus plugin is yet another reason to use Firefox (YAR2UFF) . Perhaps I’ll highlight the many merits of SearchStatus in some future post, but for now you’ll just have to take my word for it.

So wanna know if Google loves you after all? Check out Future PageRank. If it turns out that Google really does hate you, then take comfort in the fact that “Future PageRank Tool” is somewhat of a misnomer; it really only sees the present. There’s still hope for you and Google in the future, and even there weren’t, MSN isn’t that bad… Lots of people like butterflies… We call them “lepidopterologists”, or more comonly, “weirdos”.

New and Marginally Improved

I’ve finally switched my blog theme so that it’s no longer one of the defaults. This new theme isn’t mine from scratch, but I did do some significant CSS tweaking to make it my own. There’s still work to do, as always, but I think it’s presentable. At least check out my sweet pic. It’s good for a few laughs.

BTW, I hope you all read my blog via some kind of feed syndication. I’d hate to think that people have been manually checking the Jordy Blog everyday to see if I’ve posted. That could get disappointing fast, especially lately. :) To stay on top of your feeds, I recommend Bloglines, but there are a lot of good readers out there, including one a co-worker wrote that emails you your feeds daily. Try it and let me know whether you like it or we should cease being friends. :)

Category-Specific Feeds in WordPress

Most people don’t know this, but WordPress automatically builds RSS feeds for specific categories. So if you wanted to syndicate only “tech” stories from the Jordy Blog, you could use this feed:

http://jordy.gundy.org/wp-rss2.php?cat=3

To view which id you could use for a category-specific feed, just click on a category and see what is listed in the address bar. If you don’t see a number, the blogger is probably using a non-default permalink structure (which is good for SEO purposes by the way).

(If a WordPress blog has nested categories, a feed of a parent category will automatically grab any stories belonging to child categories, so there’s no need to classify a story in multiple categories of the same lineage –the most nested applicable categories will do. That also means that there there’s no need to subscribe to a child category’s feed if you’re subscribed to the parent.)

Another cool trick is that you can syndicate several categories at once, and WordPress is smart enough to give you only one instance of each unique post (even though a story might be listed in two or more separate categories). For example, here’s how you would syndicate just my Technology and Business categories:

http://jordy.gundy.org/wp-rss2.php?cat=3,2

No dupes!

But there are several reasons why you might not want to syndicate by category:

1) Category syndication is a little tricky, and you’re lazy.

2) Most bloggers don’t know that the feature is available, and if they do, they know that almost no one uses it. They are unlikely to cater to your needs, categorizing and nesting appropriately, etc. And if they ever move their blog, they’ll likely not redirect category-specific feeds.

3) Category specific syndication means you might miss out on some cool content (especially on the Jordy Blog).

Overall, category-specific syndication is mostly handy for blog aggregation since you may want to syndicate several people’s views on ‘X’, but don’t really care about ‘Y’, and ‘Z’. But since most people aren’t aggregating blog feeds, most people don’t care.

Do you?