Beam me up Scotty

As we boldly go where no blogging service has gone before, it seems we don’t have enough power! As in electricity to physically power all of the new hardware we have. I asked if hamsters on wheels would help things out but they seem to think the power requirements are even beyond that. It’s not an issue, because we’re not one thousandth of one percent to the capacity of our existing servers, but I’m personally looking forward to firing up the new hardware, so I imagine some of you might be anxious too. I will keep everyone updated on this WordPress Power Saga 2005 as it unfolds.

Movable Type Demo

They just said if I blog about MT there’ll be a prize.

They’re making a lot of bold claims, they just said it is the “most used blogging platform in the world” and it has the “best community and support in the world.”

Now they’re showing the video that shows a demo of upgrading. Upgrading is now much simpler. New feature: System Overview. (It’s really hard to see the screens because my the screenshots have small text. I’m getting older, maybe my eyes are getting bad!)

Comment spam – “silent data loss, big management burder, no way to know who’s building your community.” Spam is spam. “Movable Type 3.2 is the only blog platform with a junk folder” where it automatically deletes things after a while. Comments have a virtuous cycle.

“You can post from Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Word.” Favorite of Mena Trott: Context-sensitive search. You can customize the interface. Integrates into tools you have now. “No need for scripting.” Use Golive or Dreamweaver.

“Most important reason: best support in the business.” Brand new user manual and prints on demand. Manual allows comments from bloggers. (Why not just use a wiki?) Help ticket system integrated into application. “We’re realising it next week.” “Blogging platform that’s ready for business.”

The prize is the first three people to post about this demo get a copy of Hacking Movable Type. I just posted but I’ll leave the copy of the book for someone who needs it more. Jay Allen has hair now!

Presentation Feedback

Matt at BBS

First I wanted to thank everyone that came out terribly early in the morning at 8 AM for the WordPress presentation, espescially in light of some of the great parties last night. Don’t forget to email me if you caught me right after the presentation and gave me your business card, as that way I’ll be sure to reply.

Here’s some of the feedback I’ve been seeing, I’ll update this post throughout the course of the day as feedback shows up on Technorati and Feedster and in the WordPress dashboard. If you have a post I’ve missed please leave a comment.

Some photos from Flickr:

Photos by Kris.

Internet Explorer Schwag

I’m a Firefox/Flock guy at heart, but Microsoft just gave out this really nice bag that’s perfect in every way except for the Internet Explorer logo on the side. 😉 I don’t want to be shunned at the geek meetings and dinners, so I’ll probably stick to my current setup, but if I got a bigger laptop I’d probably use this bag. They also attached a CD with IE 7 beta on it, so that’s pretty interesting. I may try that out on my computer at work.

BBS: Building Traffic: Posting Isn’t Enough

Dave Taylor and Robert Scoble are arguing about feeds. Full feeds vs. partial feeds, connectors and readers, ads vs no ads. Bob Wyman is saying partial feeds don’t matter, because you should be putting as much effort into your partial feed as into your full feed, don’t auto-generate excerpts. (Like most blog software does automatically. WordPress allows custom excerpts.)

They’re recommending going to geek dinners and networking events. Robert goes home with a stack of business cards and visits each site to see if anything is worth talking about.

Robert: Another thing I do is link to everything in the industry. The more inclusive you are the more authoritative you are.

Whoops

I have a meeting at CNET I have to head to so I’m actually going to miss the parts of Dave’s session where he talks about Blogger and Typepad and “Smart Blogging Techniques.” I’ll update this post with links to people who did blog it when they surface on the search engines.

BBS: Definitions and Explanations

Dave Taylor is doing a fairly good talk, though I disagree with much of what he’s saying. (But most of the points he’s getting at are good.) However some human error I lost my first 20 minutes of notes, so I’m going to restart in the middle.

“Home pages don’t matter.”

“The design of my site doesn’t matter because more people read my site through RSS than coming to my site.” Design obviously matters, you need to get people to subscribe first!

Pings and Trackbacks. Pings are something that blogs do that make it worth blogging. Search engines tend to be slower, 2-4 weeks. It’s a fundamental problem with search engines. Sometimes content that used to be there isn’t anymore. Pinging is when your blog tool notifies certain other index sites. “Technorati and Feedster and others will all be crushed when Google and MSN and Yahoo release their RSS search engines.” Instead of you having to wait passively for search engine spiders to come to you, you now actively have a tool that let’s your content get out into what’s called the “blog oh sphere”. (No mention of Ping-O-Matic?)

How many know about what Meetup is? “I blogged about that.” About how the CEO notified all the members. 75 minutes later the CEO of the company was on my site responding to it.

Trackbacks, “interesting concept, very poorly implemented, but a lot of people talk about it.” Trackbacks are spammed to death. “I turned off trackbacks 9 months ago.” (He really should talk about Pingback, I get the impression he may not be up to date on blog technology.) He’s showing a comment spam email, looks like he’s running Version 2.63 of MT.

(Problem. Earlier he said he preferred partial feeds, but most of the search engines won’t index his content if it’s not in his feed.)

We’re taking a break now, I’ll publish so I don’t delete everything again. 🙂