Cycle Quark

Scott Eric Kaufmann is trying to experimentally measure the speed that a meme can travel around the internet.  I saw it mentioned in Political Animal. You can participate by linking to the original article. Kaufmann is tracking mentions in Technorati.

I was telling a friend about a posting on the blog, and I told him to look at cyclequark.wordpress.com. He thought I said psychoquark. What a great name for a blog. I should have thought of that. It would be too much work to move my stuff to psychoquark so I will leave it to some other to give the world a blog called psychoquark.

Technorati Tags: blogging

Bicycling season has started in earnest and kept me to too busy to much blogging. Once the weather gets good, I can be out on the road for 10-15 hours a week. Sometimes I think deep thoughts while I am on the bike, which I can write up when I get back, but mostly I just get too tired to blog. 

Also some of my blogging energy gets sucked up into blogging about cycling. 

Technorati Tags: blogging, bicycling

I checked my blog stats today and saw that they were relatively high for me. The most viewed post was A Year of Gmail with 10 views. The next highest had 3. I am not sure where the traffic is coming from. The post is from March so it is not in my feeds or on my front page. WordPress tells you what search terms were used to find your blog and none were gmail related. I searched "Year of Gmail" on Google and my post was listed first. Wow. However, I did not find anyone linking to the post.

Technorati Tags: gmail, blogging

WordPress.com has statistics on how many times a day a blog is viewed and they just added how people subscribe to the blog's feed. I have been running about 20-25 page views a day, but it fluctuates a lot. If post something about a story in the Washington Post, I can see my page views go above 40. Some Saturdays and Sundays it drops to about 10.

Now I see that around 10 people check my blog's RSS feed each day. There can be overlap between the two. Some RSS readers, like Bloglines.com, will actually show the entire content of the post, and not generate a page view. Mozilla Firefox simply lists the RSS feeds and you have to view the blog's pages in Firefox, so that would be counted under page views.

I know I have two regular readers from their frequent comments, but suspect that I may have as many 10 regular readers. I am starting to feel the pressure to produce.

Ginger Standing

Originally uploaded by cyclequark.

Just a test of flickr blogging. I got a Nikon D50 for Christmas. It has allowed me to catch the girl's pet rabbits in the act, which I never could with my old point and shoot.

Flickr has a blog this button which will create a blog entry with a link to the flickr photo and allow you to add text. If I ever take an interesting picture of something other than a rabbit, I will know how to blog it.

I have had trouble  connecting to  wordpress.com all day, so  it has been hard to post. If things stablize I will try to post tomorrow.

In my search for a powerful and flexible way to create blog entries, I have stumbled onto Writely which was recommended in Squash. It is actually an online word processor. It’s native format is html, so it seems like it could be a natural tool for creating blog entries. It supports hyperlinks which is critical for blogging. It has a spellchecker which is something that I miss from both Performancing for Firefox and the WordPress online editor. The spellchecker works fairly well. This entry is actually my first use of Writely. The one problem that I have seen is that you can type too fast for it.

Update from WordPress editor: The timestamp was screwy, so this post was not on the top after I made it. I assume it was a differnt time zone. I have fixed it so that it appears in the right place.

Technorati tags:

Blogging about blogging is perhaps the one thing that all bloggers have in common. Joel Achenbach has just made some discoveries about how other blog and get paid for it. He plans to take these ideas the ultimate extreme.

Technorati Tags: blogging

My blog reading has gone up noticeably lately. The types of blogs varies quite a bit. There are a few political ones like Andrew Sullivan or Political Animal, but I am not reading them as regularly as I did before the 2004 election. I am also reading science blogs, some software blogs, and I when I moved over to wordpress.com I found several interesting personal blogs. All of this blog reading requires some organization.

For most of my blog reading I have used Mozilla Firefox’s live bookmarks. This simply adds RSS entries to my bookmark folders for each feed. I have to navigate the bookmarks to the appropriate folder and then try to remember if I checked out that listed posts. Works fine if you are only checking out a few blogs.

I tried Google Reader when it first came out. This is web based so I can access it from anywhere. This is important since I check blogs from both work and home computers. When I check physics blogs at work, it counts as work. Google pulls in entries from all of my selected feeds and merges them into one list. One post is shown at the time. You can categorize your feeds so I can label Andrew Sullivan and Political Animal politics, while Cosmic Variance and Uncertain Principles can be labeled physics. You can add multiple labels to a feed so I could have a science label which would be used on Cosmic Variance, Uncertain Principles,and Pharyngula. Google reader pulls the post info into its inteface so you do not see the post as it appears in the blog, although you can always click through. I really do not like the all blogs mixed together view that is the default. The labeled view where I can see just my politics feeds or just my science feeds is better. My biggest problem is that Google Reader does not tell me when there are new entries.

I have used Bloglines.com for about two weeks now. It is web based like Google Reader. It displays a list of your selected blogs in a frame on the left side. The name is bolded when there are new entries and a count is appended. Clinking on the name brings up summaries in the right pane. The size of the summery is not consistent. I am guessing that they are using the original blog’s instruction on cuts. Like Google Reader, Bloglines reformats the post for its interface. You can then click through to the actual blog, if you like. The feature of bloglines that I like best is that I can immediately tell if there are new posts and in which blogs. However the counts do not always seem accurate. In particular I frequently run into the situation that Bloglines tells me that there is a new post when there really isn’t, so Bloglines best feature is actually buggy.

Just yesterday I discovered that Mozilla Thunderbird can track RSS feeds. I put in 22 feeds and started checking it out. The list of feeds appears in the account and folder display at the right. Feeds are bolded and have a count when there are unread posts available, just like Bloglines. Select a feed and the all of the posts will appear in the message index just like a list of emails. The title of the post, the author and the time are shown. For a multi-author blog like Cosmic Variance, that is a nice plus. Select a post in the index and that post is fetched. You can choose to have just a summary or take the default of the whole original post. The comments are shown if they are available. I like this feature a lot. On my laptop which has a wide screen I can have three side by side panes with the accounts and folders, message/post index, and the content.

Conclusion

I need to move beyond Firefox’s live bookmarks, and I am trying to decide between Bloglines and Thunderbird. Thuderbird would be the best choice if I always used the same computer, but I don’t so Bloglines will probably have to do for now.

Update: After finishing this article I found a massive list of rss readers at allrss.com.
Technorati Tags: blogging, rss