Tag: blogging

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Weblog Tools Collection recently spotlighted a WordPress plugin to automatically tweet old posts. It seems like a good way to bring attention to a site’s archives, as long as it’s used sparingly. The frequency can be as high as once an hour, which IMO is a good way to lose all your followers, but one post every few days seems like it might be reasonable and even interesting.

I’ve already got a setup in place to show a “flashback” post on the front page, but most of the blog’s traffic seems to come from searches these days. Every once in a while I’ll happen to look at the front myself and say, “Oh, yeah, that was a good one!” and post a link on Twitter or Facebook.

This new plugin posts automatically, and picks an article at random. That’s helpful, because it can find old posts that I’ve forgotten. On the downside, because it’s random, there’s no quality control. It could just as easily pull out something completely inane that was funny for about a week five years ago as it could dredge up a forgotten gem. And there’s always the risk of promoting “Happy New Year!” in August — which is exactly what happened when I tested it on Speed Force.

You can filter out categories, but I think it might be more useful to filter on tags. Sure, it can take a while to go through the archives tagging posts that you feel are worth a second look, but it would certainly improve the signal/noise ratio with this scheme. Even better, there’s a lot more you can do once you’ve tagged your “classics.” Highlight them on archive pages, list some of them in the sidebar, build an index, etc.

Hmm, this might be an interesting project at some point.

Update (August 23): Well, I’ve disabled this for now — on both blogs — because of the lack of control. I’d rather forget to post “Hey, remember this?” than have it clutter up people’s accounts with old linkblogging digests or something similarly pointless. When I have time, I should work on that classics project, both tagging posts and hacking on the plugin.

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I’m not sure how long BlogExplosion has been around, but I joined back in 2004, so it’s been a while. The idea is pretty simple: bloggers want people to read their sites. So, convince them to read other people’s blogs. It’s built around a system that lets you surf from member site to member site, earning credits for each visit that will bring other people to your site. There are also various games that either generate credits for you or get you to visit member’s sites.

It’s an effective way to get traffic. I’m not so sure it’s an effective way to get readers, but I’ve kept up a modest participation because it doesn’t take much effort. And who knows, maybe some of those people will stick around longer than 30 seconds.

About a year ago, the site was in trouble. There weren’t enough volunteers to approve all the new blogs being submitted (spammers love this sort of place!), and spammers took over the forums. A concerted effort by members managed to get a new admin assigned. The admin cleaned up the forum spam, fixed some site problems, granted approval access to more volunteers, and things started to improve for a while…

Well, things haven’t been that great lately. The lone admin has been gone since October. New blogs are again backlogged, and spammers are returning to the forums. The owners seem to have vanished into the ether. Meanwhile, I’ve noticed traffic from the site has been way down. Burning through credits takes a lot longer than it used to, and not only does it take three times as long to cycle through the “Blog Rocket,” but I get about half as many visits from it as I used to.

Today, I logged in to shuffle things around, and started getting PHP and database errors. Some pages would load, but without data. No blogs available to surf, none on the blog rocket, my credits and banners are gone, etc. The forums are still working, and the few people still around are lamenting the same problems.

Since there’s no administrator, and the owners are MIA, I’d guess that no one’s around to fix it. (Unless it’s purely a hosting issue, in which case they’ll be fine.)

It may be time to let go, and watch BlogExplosion drift off into that great server farm in the sky.

UPDATE (Feb 24): It looks like BlogExplosion is not dead yet. The errors are gone, site functionality seems to be mostly back to normal, and — most amazing — an admin posted on the forums. (Though from the comments, I half-suspect it’s a sysadmin from the hosting company, rather than BlogExplosion themselves.) Needless to say, I won’t be holding my breath for a resolution, but who knows? The site could pull through.

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I found a comment in the spam folder for Speed Force that, on first glance, looked like an actual, relevant comment…to a different post. It was a coherently-written paragraph about how someone had “considered getting a second Captain Cold” action figure to customize it, but it was posted to an article about stalled miniseries. The author’s name and link were obvious spam, though (seriously, “watch full movies” is the best you can do?).

My first thought: They’d copied the text from another comment on the site. I’ve seen that happen before, but usually it’s comments on the same post. A search through existing comments didn’t turn up any matches, though.

So then I did a search on the rest of the web, and found the original comment on a review of an Atom Smasher toy.

Someone had gone looking for a site with a similar topic (comic books about super-heroes, action figures made from super-heroes), copied text from there, and pasted it onto mine…and yet they hadn’t bothered to match up specifics (like pasting it on a post about action figures or Captain Cold). So it’s not quite as sneaky as the one who followed a link in my post and pasted in text from the other page, but it’s pretty close.

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I use the Broken Link Checker plugin on this blog and on Speed Force to find broken or moved links. In addition to helping you manage them in the admin interface, it can also assign formatting (as a CSS class) to mark them in your posts.

Cool! Readers can see that the link is broken before clicking on it!

But what’s the best way to label the links?

The plugin uses strike-through by default. You are marking something that’s gone, but strike-through usually means the text is being crossed out. That’s fine for a link in a list, but something like “Catering was provided by MyNiftyFoodCo” implies that the name of the company is wrong, not that the website is gone.

Just making something italic or changing the color doesn’t work either, because it’s arbitrary. Nothing about an italic link (which could be a title), or a random other color, suggests that something might be missing.

What I’ve come up with is to reduce the contrast on broken links. It combines two familiar schemes:

  • High contrast for new links and low contrast for visited links.
  • “Graying out” inactive items in software.

So here, I’ve got bright blue for new links, darker blue for visited links, and broken links as black (well, very dark gray), the same color as surrounding text. I’m keeping the underline in place so there’s still some indication that it’s a link, but it’s not as strong as the label for one that’s still functional.

It’s still not ideal, since color is the only difference, but it should cause less confusion than the strike-through.

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At this point, the only (useful) official word from Amazon as to why thousands of books with LGBT themes disappeared from search results over the weekend is the “embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error” statement sent to Seattle Post-Intelligencer and other sources, also mentioning a number of other categories impacted. This article also has the unconfirmed word from former Amazon employee Mike Daisey that it was a matter of user error where someone mixed up some tags while working on the site, and the change just propagated globally.

Before Amazon finally spoke, tehdely posted an interesting theory that it might be might be astroturfing or a Bantown-style troll, deliberately pitting Amazon against the LGBT community to watch them fight each other for the lulz. A writer at Feministing asked her editor to call up Amazon and was told that it was not a glitch, but an automatic policy to hide “offensive” search results. Patrick Neilsen Hayden attributed it to bureaucratic incompetence.*

Now, some thoughts:

1. If this was intentional, on anyone’s part, it was both wrong (as discrimination) and stupid (as bad PR and as throwing away potential sales). If it was unintentional, it was still stupid.

2. Amazon really dropped the ball on PR. They should have responded much sooner (yes, it was a holiday weekend), and with something more detailed than “It was a glitch.” Something like, “We’re sorry, it was an unintentional error and we’re trying to fix it” would have gone a long way toward preventing the outrage from spiraling out of control. And we still don’t have anything more detailed than “ham-fisted cataloging error,” or (as has been pointed out) an apology to the authors and communities affected.

2a. And seriously, you’re an internet pioneer: use the Internet. You have email, you have official Twitter accounts, you have a space to put messages on your home page. Use them.

3. Twitter demonstrates that the internet is now fast enough and ubiquitous enough that people can develop a mob mentality without actually being in close proximity to one another. This includes not just people whipping each other into a frenzy, but people taking more permanent actions (deleting accounts) based on incomplete information.

4. No matter how many times something has been debunked (i.e. the “hacker” who claimed to have hacked the site), someone will see it who hasn’t seen the response and repost it as true. (You’d think I would have learned this from comics discussion forums by now.)

5. Canned responses from customer service are not authoritative statements of company policy. Half the time they’re not even answering the question you asked.

6. There are really two issues: (A) Adults-only books are being hidden from search results. (B) LGBT books were being misclassified as adults-only.

7. Combining #5 and #6, when a CSR monkey answers A, that’s not an official statement of policy on B.

8. Removing adults-only books from sales rankings is a dumb way to hide them from search results. Add a flag and let the user choose whether or not to include them like Google, Flickr, etc.

*The second-paragraph links were originally in a separate post, in the form of a collection of tweets. I’ve since combined the two into a single post.

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It looks like the campaign to reclaim BlogExplosion is working! The efforts to bury the forum spam have brought new members into the site, and earlier this week a new administrator appeared on the forums, banning over 55 accounts used by spammers and deleting 13,000 spam posts. This morning, the banner approval I’ve been waiting for since August finally went through.

Things are looking up!

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