The Airing of Grievances: Bloggin’
To proprietors of link farms and sites that just re-post feeds: I don’t care that you copy entire posts from me but please stop sending trackbacks and pingbacks. You’re just noise on Al Gore’s Internets and I have no use for you. Buy an ad if you want a link back.
Glenn Reynolds: Dude, every time I post over at No Silence Here, you link to it. It’s clear you like reading what I say so just go ahead and add SayUncle to your reading list and send a few more links my way. I could use the increase in ad revenue.
To random bloggers: Somehow, your feeds update every hour or so. And all it shows me is the same post over and over. Either your blogging software automatically re-sends your feed every hour, or you’re updating spelling/grammar throughout the day. Well, stop. I only want to read a post once unless it’s updated.
To Sean Braisted: Dunno what you’re doing, but every time you post a new entry, your feed updates the last 20 posts. So, I think you’ve written a few essays. But, instead, there’s one new post and 19 old ones.
Coming up with shit to write every day is hard. Hence, more linky than thinky lately.
In addition to Terms of Use and an Email Policy, I need to come up with both a linking policy (long and short: I link to who I read) and a privacy policy (I won’t give out any info unless it’s on request of a lawful court order).
I still don’t care about your cat.
It’s frightening that using the phrase small dicks in a blog post will lead to a significant increase in traffic.
December 11th, 2006 at 11:59 am
If you ever figure out why some blogs do the “feeds updating every hour” or “all feeds updating when there’s a new post” thing, let us know. That drives me nuts, too. I sometimes stop reading blogs when I get tired of dealing with the 20 new posts mess.
December 11th, 2006 at 12:05 pm
And on that note, I just realized that this always happens when you don’t come up with creative titles. The TN Politics blog, eg, does a “daily dose.” And every day when he calls it “daily dose,” my reader has to rename the other daily doses, thereby rendering them new.
But I guess that’s a flaw of the newsreader as much as of the blogger.
December 11th, 2006 at 12:43 pm
My cat cares about you.
December 11th, 2006 at 12:51 pm
Even though 2.0+ WordPress has a great preview feature, I sometimes can’t see the glaring spelling or grammar mistakes unless it’s published. Sometimes It helps to set a future publishing date and then preview it using administrative privileges, but I’m guilty as charged.
I hate when people do that shit too. WordPress really needs a “minor correction, do not refresh the feed” feature.
Until then, I’ll only do minor edits within the first 30 minutes of publishing, or after it’s aged a few weeks.
When others do this spellcheck-throughout-the-day thingy it annoys the crap outta me too.
December 11th, 2006 at 12:59 pm
Yea, my dream feed aggravator would do this, it would cache the text of the feed, it would scrape the page itself for photos, it would flag when a post was updated (It’s always fun to show/blog about the MSM when they change a story without issuing a correction) caching both copies. It would even scrape the comments too. Then it would allow you to transfer the cache to an ebook reader for casual offline reading.
December 11th, 2006 at 3:26 pm
I may have to switch to another setup…ever since I went to Blogger Beta, my feed has been messed up.
December 11th, 2006 at 3:42 pm
I recently learned that NetNewsWire has a statistics viewer (Bandwidth Stats) that can show you various metrics for each feed you subscribe to, including “200s,” which indicate how many times in the current session it has downloaded the whole feed rather than “304s” which are incremental downloads. (Other feed readers may have this option, too.) I’ve found that, for some of the feeds that were generating a lot of extra downloads, subscribing to an alternate version of the site’s feed seemed to make some difference. I’m in no way an RSS expert, though, so I can’t elaborate much more than that.