Simon Willison’s Weblog

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40 items tagged “blogging”

2007

Blogmaker, a free blogging app for Django (via) “Blogmaker is a full-featured, production-quality blogging application for Django. It supports trackbacks, ping and comments with moderation and honeypot spam prevention.” # 7th December 2007, 1:04 am

Ideas rot if you don’t do something with them. I used to try to hoard them, but they rotted. Now I just blog them or tell people about them. Sometimes they still rot, but sometimes someone finds them useful in one way or another.

Edd Dumbill # 4th September 2007, 12:21 am

How Top Bloggers Earn Money. Interesting numbers on BoingBoing, I can has Cheezburger, TechCrunch and more. # 17th July 2007, 11 pm

2006

An open letter to Mike Arrington. Former co-editor Mike Butcher’s take on the demise of TechCrunch UK. “Citizen Kane 2.0”. # 16th December 2006, 12:19 pm

2004

The dangers of PageRank

A well documented side effect of the weblog format is that it brings Google PageRank in almost absurd quantities. I’m now the 5th result for simon on Google, and I’ve been the top result for simon willison almost since the day I launched. High rankings however are not always a good thing, especially when combined with a comment system. A growing number of bloggers have found themselves at the top position for terms of little or no relevance to the rest of their sites, which in turn can attract truly surreal comments from visitors from search engines who may never have encountered a blog before.

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2003

More blogmark tweaks

I’m up to 110 blogmarks now, and from my point of view they’re the single most useful feature I’ve added to this site in a long time. I’ve modified my day archive pages to show the blogmarks added on that day, and I’m considering adding them to individual entry pages as well so that an entry is displayed along with the blogmarks added while that entry was at the top of my blog. The idea there is that I could aim to blogmark “related items” for the top entry, although obviously unrelated sites would end up in there as well.

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Blogmarks

This entry was going to be another list of links, together with a note about how much I really needed to set up a separate link blog. Then I realised that it would make more sense just to set one up so that’s exactly what I’ve done. I still need to implement the archive but it’s getting dark so I’m posting this and heading home.

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Blogging with AppleScript

Les Orchard describes an intriguing blogging tool built with AppleScript that posts links to a weblog when they are dragged on to a special folder on the OS X desktop.

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2002

Syndicated further reading recommendations

I frequently find myself reading something on someone elses blog and thinking “that’s interesting, and it fits in well with XXX that I read the other day”. I often end up blogging a link to both just to satisfy my need for completeness. Wouldn’t it be interesting if there was some standard for formalising this kind of further reading recommendation? I’m not sure exactly how it would work (it would almost certainly be XML based but I don’t know if it would require a new format or integrate with an existing one) but it could be an interesting avenue to explore. I think it’s a significantly different problem to the ones solved by XFML (external shared metadata) and Pingback for it to be worth committing some thought cycles to. Any ideas?

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Meg on blogging

Meg Hourihan: What We’re Doing When We Blog. It’s a curious fact of blogdom that many bloggers blog blogging—why they do it, what it is and why it’s so important. I feel Meg has nailed it with this article—blogging is defined by the format, not by the subject matter. She also makes some insightful comments about why the blogging format works so well:

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