Over the past week or so, I’ve been experimenting with the daily blog posting function provided by del.icio.us. It seems to work pretty well, automatically creating a new post on this blog containing the links I’ve tagged that day. If you have a del.icio.us account and want to try using it, go to your Settings page, then select "daily blog posting" to create a new posting job. You’ll be faced with providing the following parameters for the job:

job_name: This can be any name you want.

out_name: The name you use to log in to your blog.

out_pass: The password you use to log in to your blog.

out_url: Described as "full URL of the XML-RPC interface for your blog" which, for this Wordpress blog, is http://www.afewgoodpens.com/blog/xmlrpc.php. I’m not sure what is is for the other supported blog software, but it’s likely that someone else has tried if for yours — so check the platform’s forums or other help pages. I found the correct URL for Wordpress, for example, on the Wordpress Codex. If you try to execute the URL, and get a message along the lines of "XML-RPC server accepts POST requests only" — you’ve probably got the right one to use.

out_time: This is the time of day that you want posts to appear, in Greenwich Mean Time. For help with Greenwich Mean Time, go here. So far, it seems typical that the blog posts appear within 20-30 minutes of the specified hour (and, no, refreshing the page repeatedly won’t make them appear any faster).

out_blog_id: I’m not sure what this one’s actually for, but I entered "1" and it worked. I’m assuming that if you have more than one blog that you access with the same profile and password, this number might vary.

out_cat_id: The category you want the blog posting assigned to. Note that this is a category number, not the category itself. In Wordpress, that translates to the id number associated with the category, which you can find by selecting Manage / Categories. In my case, the id number is 27, which is associated with the posting category "Internet Clippings."

That’s it! Easy!

Here’s a sample of one of my daily blog postings.

You’ll see that the entry was correctly categorized as Internet Clippings, and that the tags I assigned to the bookmark appear as del.icio.us tags at the end of each one. Clicking the tags takes you to all the bookmarks for the same tag associated with your del.icio.us profile. I might have preferred it to take you to everyone’s posts with that tag, since there are other ways to incorporate links to del.icio.us tags on a blog. Maybe an option to do that would be nice.

Any notes that you typed when you tagged the link also appear. There’s an unfortunate limitation of 255 characters for the notes, so what I try to do is clip a key sentence or two from the article that I think gets to its essential point. I’d like to include a comment or two of my own with each one, but I can barely take a breath that uses less than 255 characters, so I’ll have to wait until the next version of del.icio.us — which I think increases this limit to 1000 characters per bookmark — to do that. With 1000 characters, bookmarking and daily blog posting would become an excellent shortcut way to read and comment on articles and web pages, and simultaneously set them up to automatically post to your blog.

This is a very busy time of year for me, so tools like this that actually do save time but help me keep things like this blog moving are extremely useful. Too many time-saving technologies take on a life of their own, sucking up energy while giving only the appearance of activity and progress while you sit back and wonder why you don’t seem to be getting anything done. An effective technological tool is one that results in actual time compression, collapsing the time required to perform a series of tasks while achieving the same, or acceptably similar, results.

I’ve made a few site updates and learned some things in the process, so it seemed like a bit of sharing was in order.

First, you’ll now see "Print this" at the top of each article. The print capability is made possible by the WP-Print WordPress plugin developed by Lester Chan. It does a really nice job of formatting posts for printing, and has three configuration options that let you choose whether or not to include comments, images, and a list of all links referenced in the article. I looked at several other options before choosing this one, and I’m very satisfied with it. I use it personally when I’m writing a new article based on some previous content, since I find it easier to work from a printed version — especially in the case of some of my longer articles. If you’re a WordPress blogger and you want to provide your readers with print options, check out Chan’s plugin page  where there are several versions you can download.

Second, I’ve changed content in the far right side for my Flickr photos, so that you can now choose to view the photographs as slideshows like you could before, or can also view the related Flickr page as a complete collection. It occurred to me that some folks might not care for the slideshows, so this was a good way to link to the photo pages by collection rather than always defaulting to slideshows.

Finally, as my friend Audee notes in her comment on my article about Zoo Atlanta, I’m now sending my site through FeedBurner and have incorporated various "feed flares" at the bottom of each article. You can also now subscribe to my feed by e-mail, and subscribe to posts and comments. I’m still experimenting with some of the flares as well as the advertising, so different elements may come and go as I check out some of the sites I’m now encouraging people to submit my articles to.

I did discover, unfortunately, that there is a known issue using FeedBurner with Yahoo! web hosting. Attempts to use my old feed URL, which was:

http://www.afewgoodpens.com/blog/feed

should automatically redirect to the new FeedBurner URL:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/afewgoodpens

but it doesn’t, and displays a "document has moved" error which points to the old feed URL (going nowhere, therefore). As you can see from the description of the problem on the FeedBurner forum, there is no solution available yet. I found that this meant two things for my site.

First, if anyone was subscribing to my feed with the original URL, it would no longer work. If you’re one of my subscribers, and that happened to you … my apologies. Had I realized this was happening, I would have posted something announcing the change first.

Second, my account on services like MyBlogLog and Blogcatalog needed to be updated. MyBlogLog uses the feed URL to fetch new posts to display on its site, so I had to update my account to point to the FeedBurner URL. Easy.

Blogcatalog, however, uses RSS autodiscovery to locate a site’s feed, and that was a bit of a problem since autodiscovery tried to use the old feed URL — which should have redirected to FeedBurner but did not. I don’t really understand how all this works, but I’ve concluded that the WordPress code normally handles the redirect, yet something about Yahoo’s hosting prevents that from working normally. I ended out adapting the RSS autodiscovery tips  and modifying WordPress’s header.php file with the FeedBurner URL hardcoded. Hardcoding like this is never the best solution, but it will hold me up until a permanent fix becomes available.  In any case, it appears to have worked; my account page on Blogcatalog was reporting an error finding my feed, but has since updated to show a successful discovery and also shows the FeedBurner URL as the feed URL.

Got a headache yet? I do … this stuff never seems to just fall into place quite right, does it?

I’m a little disappointed that this is another quirk I’ve run into that’s specific to Yahoo! web hosting and their WordPress implementation. While I have to be fair and say that I’ve never had a problem with my site or its availability at Yahoo!, site performance and availability is but a minimum requirement for a web host these days. In my opinion, Yahoo! oversold their hosting service to newbie WordPress bloggers like myself by making it so easily available, by implying that they would update the WordPress installation but never doing it, and by nearly running from the room screaming if you call their  support line and even use "WordPress" in a sentence. They could have a kick-ass blog hosting service, if they’d just make an effort to actually support WordPress users — something that might even make then unique in the industry. Are you listening, Yahoo!? Call me, let’s talk about it….

Oh, well, enough about that … the weekend’s here and Atlanta weather is supposed to be sunny with temperatures in the 60s … what could be better than that?

From Brad Feld’s blog Feld Thoughts comes word that Newsgator is now making all of their feedreader software products available free of charge.  Feld explains Newsgator’s reasoning in this article, and provides several links to related articles by Newsgator employees as well as links you can use to download the products or get more information.

I’ve used both Newsgator Online (which has been free all along) as well as FeedDemon (which used to cost 30 bucks annually) for over a year now, having switched to the Newsgator products from Bloglines. I’ve never regretted the switch at all, and both the online and installed versions of their readers are fast, full of useful functions and navigation capabilities, and just fun to use.  And they synchronize with each other, so you can keep up with your reading from any computer anywhere, and either tool will always know how you handled your feeds with the other.

I also use Newsgator Online to build and maintain the My Blogroll and My News pages for this site. You can read more about how to do that in these two articles:

Creating a Semi-Automatic Newsgator Blogroll on Your WordPress Blog

Spreading the News

Check out Feld’s article, poke at the links a little, and give Newsgator a try. You can even subscribe to afewgoodpens just to see how things work!

Update: I just wanted to add a link to this post by Nick Bradbury, the creator of FeedDemon, highlighting some of the differences between using a desktop and a web-based feedreader. As Bradbury points out, one of the great strengths of FeedDemon is the way it functions as a full-featured browser, allowing you to switch from reading feeds to visiting web sites instantly within the same session and windows. I originally used the online version more than the desktop version, but have recently switched, preferring the speed and flexibility of the desktop version when I’m on my computer at home, and typically using the online version only when I’m on a computer where I can’t install the software locally.

This week is turning into a very busy one for me, and even though I haven’t had time to respond properly, I did want to acknowledge a few folks that have left comments on my site or sent me e-mails. Most of my evenings this week will go toward working on a research proposal for my Exploring Place: History class, for which I’ve decided to study the history of and community that has developed around Oakland Cemetery, which is near my home. I spent most of Sunday afternoon on a guided tour of the cemetery, then went back as evening set in to take some (like, 150) pictures. I hope to wade through the pictures also over the next few days and get them out on Flickr. Anyway, I didn’t want anyone to feel like I was ignoring them or disregarding the time they spent contacting me, so here are my shout-outs and link-backs:

Chef Tom: Thanks for the Le-Le-Lemon Cheesecake recipe. I picked up the ingredients tonight and will be making it tomorrow night, to serve at a dessert-party for my best friend’s 50th birthday on Friday. I think it’s going to be excellent!

Karen: Thanks for the e-mail; I’m glad you joined BlogCatalog and I look forward to neighorhooding with you. I also wanted to mentioned that I read your article Peter the Great…Right Brained Learner? — and I think it’s great.

Morgan: Thanks for you interest in my writing and my studies; as well as for your e-mail reply and kind offer to help. I’m sure I’ll take you up on it, and please do keep an eye on my site and comment any time.

Cooper: Thanks for the provocation… heh heh heh … and your comments on War as a Spectator Sport (Part One). There will be a Part Two, down the road a short spell (next week, probably) and we can continue the conversation.

Jon: Thanks for your comments on War as a Spectator Sport also. It’s interesting how differently we see the photographs, and I’m sure I’ll write about that in the second part of the article. Subjectively, of course. Great site you have, and I really like your writing. Between the waking and the dream was pure pleasure to read. Oh, and thanks for the book recommendations; I will look for “The Psychology of Music” but may pass on Bloom since I’ve read parts of it and may not care to invest any more time in it … ya know what I mean? 

Kukuh: I got your e-mail and the draft article and took a quick look at it. Fascinating stuff; will be glad to help if our schedules mesh okay. I’ve sent you a message on BlogCatalog.

Bye for now!

… well, not programming exactly;  we (meaning: I) have spent way too much time on that today as it is. However, I have gotten the load time on the home page of this site way, way down … from about 16-18 seconds to a pretty consistent four or five. Considering that there’s still a lot of content here, that’s pretty good. I might as well confess that the main thing that motivated me to do this was that I was getting annoyed accessing my own site, which is a pretty strong indicator that my visitors might have felt that way too.

So navigating here is a little different now. The Newsgator blogroll and news headlines are each on their own separate pages: My Blogroll and My News, and there are navigation links from the header and from both sidebars — plenty of places for you to click to get there and take a look at the work of some very fine bloggers. My Blogroll links will take you directly to site home pages; My News shows excerpts from some of the most recent articles in each category, all with links you can click to read more. If you’re interested in links or news only from a particular category, see the “My Blogroll” and “My News” listings in the sidebar, from which you can go directly to that category.  You can use your browser’s back button or click the category heading to return to the home page.

More on this later perhaps, but I should mention that belonging to the BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog communities is introducing me to a whole lot of new and extremely good blogs and fascinating people that I probably wouldn’t have found otherwise — but I’ve not yet added them all to my Newsgator feeds so they don’t show up on the new pages. I think I’m still trying to figure out the best way to pull all these resources together in one place (or a few tied-together places); or at least, trying to figure out the best way to spend my time between newsreaders, blogging communities, social networks, stumblingupons, diggs, twitters, and a few other things. Still, I’m comfortable with the idea of just jumping into all these activities and sorting out the priorities as I go along. If you’re reading this, and you’re a blogger, and you haven’t joined BlogCatalog or MyBlogLog, please do so, and let’s connect.

A couple of lessons I learned from this last set of tweaks:

(1) if you’re an Amazon associate and are including Amazon links in your site like I am, watch out for the “Product Reviews” script. The script is new (I think) and provides a small window with product and review information when you mouse over an Amazon text link. It’s very nice, actually, I liked the way it looked and the images and info it provided — but I removed it from my site after numerous tests showed it was adding as much as three or four seconds to the page’s load time. Your experience may certainly vary, but I would experiment with that script before using it.

(2) If you’re modifying your WordPress templates …well,  don’t even think about changing anything until you’ve made a copy of the files you’re planning to change. I’ve always been obsessive about saving work-in-progress with tools like word processing and spreadsheet software, but for some reason haven’t been doing that with files like sidebar.php. Believe me, ignore this advice and just one time accidentally paste something on top of thirty lines of code and realize it just as it’s too late to stop yourself from pressing the save button … and you’ll wish you had that copy! It’s great to have nice, clean home pages … but not so great when they’re nice and clean because most of the content isn’t showing… yipes!

I’m going to be making a few changes to the home page of this site over the next day or so, so apologies in advance to anyone who stops by and notices some wonky behavior. I plan to move the Blogroll and My News sections out of the sidebars and to their own pages, with various links from the main page, to improve load times. Right now it takes as much as 16 seconds for the entire page to load on a DSL connection — which is way too long. I expected that would probably happen when I embedded the Newsgator blogroll and headlines scripts to begin with, but I wanted to watch it for a while and see how things went.

Here’s a nice article with some tips on speeding up your load time, where I learned about Numion’s Stopwatch tool — a nifty utility that can show you how long it takes to load any web page.  Another one I came across does a in-depth diagnosis of your page and displays optimization suggestions; it’s the Web Page Analyzer.

It was interesting to try the tools with several browsers, and see the performance variations. Firefox consistently came in as the slowest — by four to six seconds, sometimes more. Internet Explore was next, and Opera — which I just started using on occasion a couple of weeks ago — was the fastest by far, loading my main page nearly 50% faster than Firefox.  Firefox still rocks, though.

Stay tuned….

I’ve made an additional update to this site, adding headlines from my Newsgator Online feeds to the sidebar at the far right. Adding headlines is quite easy, and builds on the procedure I described in my article Creating a Semi-Automatic Newsgator Blogroll on Your WordPress Blog.

Instead of selecting the “Blogroll” function for the locations you have created in Newsgator Online, you select “Headlines.” On the Headline settings screen, you activate the headlines script with a click for “Check here to enable Headlines settings for this location.” You can then specify the number of posts to be displayed by the headline script and the maximum number of characters for each headline. I currently have mine set for 7 headlines per location, with 50 characters each, which I may tweak a little for appearance or clarity. Note that you can also alter the layout of the headlines by removing or rearranging individual elements, such as the date and time.

This will probably be the last significant change to the layout of my site for a while, since — as I mentioned here – my classes begin again in a few days, and I’ll want to shift my focus to writing content related to that experience rather than spending time on technical changes. But I did want to send out a little credit and thanks, once again, to Lorelle VanFossen: the idea of adding options for readers to leave my site while still following my interests came from a comment she made on Dawud Miracle’s article Why You Want To Link To Other Blogs. Lorelle wrote:

I love the fact that blogging is the only industry in which you get more readers by sending them away from your business…. If they like what they find when you send them away, they come back for more, and bring their friends.

Incredible. We’re changing the whole concept of marketing.

This observation has stuck with me since I read it, especially because I’m so fascinated by the ways in which blogging, social networking, and technological change in general are affecting individuals and their lives, opening up significant opportunities to pursue their passions in ways that were not available a few short decades ago. In addition to changing the whole concept of marketing, every time a blog writer posts a new article or opens another part of their life to their readers, they’re contributing to the radical cultural and social changes we’re all living in right now … and adding this new out-links to my site is my way of going along for the ride.