Tag: blogging

Put the full text in your blog feed and Ill read it

Techdirt: Why Full Text Feeds Actually Increase Page Views (The Freakonomics Explanation)

Full text feeds makes the reading process much easier. It means it’s that much more likely that someone reads the full piece and actually understands what’s being said — which makes it much, much, much more likely that they’ll then forward it on to someone else, or blog about it themselves, or post it to Digg or Reddit or Slashdot or Fark or any other such thing — and that generates more traffic and interest and page views from new readers, who we hope subscribe to the RSS feed and become regular readers as well.

I hate partial text feeds. It’s very true that I am much less likely to read an article if I have to click through. And with so much content on the internet, much of it pretty decent, there’s a good chance that I can find something else just as good as what you wrote.

I ‘m looking through my RSS reader, and there are hardly any feeds that I read regularly that don’t do full text.  Uniwatch doesn’t, and I frequently forget to read it.  The Hardball Times doesn’t, and I only read articles there where the subject line is intriguing.  Almost every site I read every day, including the above-linked Techdirt, has a full feed.

And look – here I am, blogging about something that they wrote at Techdirt, proving their point.

Maybe I should have said this before I did it

I just installed a WordPress plugin that forwards the default WordPress RSS feeds to a brand new Feedburner RSS feed, which allows me to track not only hits to the site, but people who just read the RSS. Now, that may only be me, but now at least I’ll know.

Anyway, if you experience problems with the feed, let me know. It should be a transparent change for any of you subscribed to the feed.

There are no hot moms here

In June, I have 30 hits from people who have Googled “hotmoms” and found this post. Okay, fine, I know people look on the internet for porn. NB: There is no porn here. There is plenty of porn on the internet, and I don’t feel the need to contribute any more.

_Edit: I can’t believe no one caught that I wrote “don’t feel the need to contribute anymore” instead of “any more”. I certainly am not claiming to have previously contributed to the vast collection of porn on the internet. I guess my mom and my wife must not have read this post yet.  Both of them would have caught that. _

Anyway, what I find strange is that Google Analytics tells me that, of those 30 visits, two are RETURN visits. Now, I suppose it’s possible that the two returning visits are people who have otherwise seen the site, happened to be searching for “hotmoms”, and decided to see what Complaint Hub had to offer on the subject.

But I prefer to speculate wildly and assume that two people have searched for “hotmoms”, found my site, and then searched for it again and returned. I’m sure they were disappointed both times.

Sorry for the downtime

The main site, complainthub.com, and the site to submit your complaints, submissions.complainthub.com, have been down since this weekend.  Sorry about that.  My hosting company upgraded from Rails 1.1.6 to 1.2.3 and forgot to tell me.  Thanks to Mo for pointing it out.  No thanks to Dreamhost for not telling me.  Actually, they’re a pretty decent hosting company.  If anyone is looking for hosting, let me know, if I refer you I get money.

And the submission site is still down.  I don’t know why.  I’ll try and get that fixed ASAP.  And by ASAP, I mean when I get around to it.

On Blogging

I feel like I’ve been neglecting this blog lately.  That’s probably because I’ve been getting more traffic to From Harvard Street, and that makes blogging more interesting.  It’s always nice to have people reading your stuff, and maybe doing some commenting.  Harvard Street is tied to a location, and right next door to the 2nd “bloggiest” neighborhood in the country according to outside.in, and so there are tons of people looking for local DC blogs.  All this blog has going for it is me bitching about things.

As a brief aside, I cooked a delicious dinner tonight.  Tilapia sauteed with some olive oil and garlic, a little pepper and oregano, served on top of homemade black bean salsa, with steamed cauliflower on the side (The wife LOVES cauliflower).  We had a really nice bottle of wine that she bought me for Christmas, and we’ve been enjoying the nice weather with all the windows open.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about consolidating the two blogs.  Mostly I’ve been using this one for general thoughts, and the Harvard Street blog for things related to DC.  I’m not sure if it really makes sense to keep them separate.  On the other hand, it’s probably a huge pain to take a wordpress blog and a typo blog and combine them.  I’m sure there’s a tutorial somewhere, but I’m also sure I don’t feel like doing it.

So, as usual, I’m rambling.  To summarize, the additional traffic I’ve been getting at the other blog has made me focus more on it than this one, and I’m not sure how I feel about that.  Thanks for reading, though.

How do people find me?

I’ve seen this done at other blogs (like Minor Tweaks), and I’ve always been fascinated with it, so here are the last ten search strings that brought people here.
* test scores at odds with rising high school grades
My opinion on this isn’t too well informed, but I don’t think I said anything ridiculous
* coca cola engiva berry green tea
* coca cola engiva peach green tea
* enviga too much caffeine?
* how much egcg should i take?
Looks like a lot of people are coming to read my lukewarm but honest review of Enviga, a bunch of links to the lies Coke tells about it, and my unconfirmed and possibly libelous claim that artificial sweetener causes cancer. By the way, the answer to “how much egcg should I take?” is none. Get up off your fat ass and exercise like a normal person. Just because it’s from China and not some lab in Idaho doesn’t mean you should take it.  And yes, Enviga has too much caffiene.
* bitching and complain about wife
I just want to state for the record that I do not bitch and complain about my wife. References to my wife may appear in complaints of which she is not the subject.
* achilles rupture blogs
This one’s for you, Gayle.
* baroody
You think that was him, Googling his own name?
* “internet explorer is the devil”
* internet explorer is devil
Sweet.

Things are getting back to normal

A little while back, I moved this blog to a subdomain, breaking RSS feeds, and confusing the spam robots.  I’m happy to report that my spam comments are back up to the numbers they were at before I moved the blog, which I suppose means that people have more or less figured out that you have to come to the blog subdomain.

I haven’t been posting much lately because I still don’t have internet at home, and I can only spend so much time doing this at work.  I have to say that because my team lead reads this.  In reality, I spend at least 6 hours a day working on Complaint Hub related things.  Just kidding, Andy.

Anyway, word from the condo association is that Comcast may be out as soon as tomorrow to install something or other, which means that we should be able to make appointments to have cable/internet hooked up on Thursday.  This is excellent news.

So, I hope that, by next week, I will be online at home, and everything will be right with the world again.

Look at me, being helpful

Complaint Hub » Blog Archive » Things every guy should know

Anyway, every guy should know basic garbage disposal maintenance. You never know when your wife will spill half a can of Quaker Oats in her purse on the way home from work, then dump a penny down the disposal as she’s cleaning it out.

Awesome.  Someone found this entry searching Google for “remove penny from garbage disposal”.  I hope I helped him or her out.

I love looking through my referrals and search term results.  It would be even cooler if I had more visitors.  But it makes me happy that searching for “whatever” + “complaint” often brings people to me.