blogging

Google Reader recommends

Imagine my surprise when I looked at “Top Recommendations” area of my Google Reader today and found … my own blog over there.

Yes, I know that these recommendations are based on the feeds that I read. But still! Is it the time to celebrate the recommendations technology, which recommended me to me over a gadzillion of other blogs? Or maybe this is a day of Ultimate Technological Silliness, when Google, a search company that forgets nothing, somehow arrived to the conclusion that I might not be reading my own blog? These questions remind me of a “half-empty or half-full glass of water“. I guess a lot depends on the personal perspective…

Can you handle the popularity?

Looking around the blogosphere, I see more and more bloggers who work really hard on promoting their sites. They optimize their themes for Google, submit blog to all sorts of directories, share links to their best content via social networks, microblog, and comment all around the web.
Well, that’s all fine. But here is the questions – can they handle the popularity?

I’ve been thinking about it before, but it came all to me suddenly yesterday and today. One of my recent posts got submitted to reddit.com and it somehow it went through to the main page of the site, and from there got aggregated via RSS to a lot of other places. Within 24 hours, my blog received more than 20,000 views. Compared to an average day, which brings much under a thousand, that’s a lot.

This sounds like a dream come true for any blogger, no? Well, it is, sort of. But. Consider the other side of the story, which is not so obvious from the first glance:

My hosting company handled the spike really well – no complaints or disconnections. Not all hosting companies are created equal.
Commenting form on my blog was broken at the time of the spike. It was down the whole spike duration.
There were about 500 comments posted in the reddit.com thread.
I’ve received almost 100 emails.
When commenting form got fixed, I got another dozen or so comments, plus another SPAM wave along with it.

If you imagine for a moment all that coming upon you in the middle of the working week, you’ll see a problem. Who and how should respond to all that?

I’ve spent half a day today talking with my hoster about the commenting form. Gladly it got fixed (the problem was session misconfiguration on the hosting company side). Then I needed some time to respond to all those emails. In the meantime I quickly reviewed and approved all comments in the moderation queue. That pretty much ate my day, together with some things I managed to slide in at work.

Later in the evening, when my family went to sleep, I actually read all the comments and responded to a few. I also read through most comments at reddit.com . Can I reply to any of those? Nope. That’s out of my resources. I can’t handle all the traffic that came in.

Can you? What will happen to your server if you’ll get digged or slashdotted? How can you moderate all the comments? How can you handle replies? What about comments at other places – blogs, forums, and social networks that brought you in the traffic? Do you have any moderators on standby? Do you have any monitoring setup (Google Alerts, coComment, etc) for remote discussions about your content?

If you aren’t thinking about those things while promoting your blog, you are in for a big surprise…

RFC 1855 : Netiquette guidelines

More and more people spend more and more time online. I wish more and more of them read RFC 1855 which covers netiquette guidelines. This document is more than 10 years old, but most of the points that it discusses are as valid today as they were back then. Some are even more important today than they used to be. Another good thing about this RFC is that it has theoretical directions combined with some practical advice.

A good rule of thumb: Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you receive. You should not send heated messages (we call these “flames”) even if you are provoked. On the other hand, you shouldn’t be surprised if you get flamed and it’s prudent not to respond to flames.

Reading this document won’t make you wise enough to avoid all the mistakes of online communications, but it can seriously minimize them.

The art of the argument

Paul Graham wrote yet another excellent essey – “How to Disagree“.

The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and increasingly they do—in comment threads, on forums, and in their own blog posts.
Many who respond to something disagree with it. That’s to be expected. Agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing. And when you agree there’s less to say. You could expand on something the author said, but he has probably already explored the most interesting implications. When you disagree you’re entering territory he may not have explored.

He then proceeds with identifying a hierarchy of disagreements. In his view, the forms of disagreement are:

DH0: Name-calling.
DH1: Ad Hominem.
DH2: Responding to Tone.
DH3: Contradiction.
DH4: Counterargument.
DH5: Refutation.
DH6: Refuting the Central Point.

Paul’s post reminded me of something – a course of formal logic back in college. One of the things that course covered was a list of fallacies, which are often used in arguments either intentionally or not. Of course, the complete list of fallacies is much longer and will take more time to memorize and understand. But, if you wish to win and rule online (and offline) arguments, you should at least get familiar with those.

Paul organizes hist list of disagreement forms into a hierarchy. He says:

Indeed, the disagreement hierarchy forms a kind of pyramid, in the sense that the higher you go the fewer instances you find.

It would be nice to see a similar, hierarchy organization for the longer list of fallacies. Which ones are the most frequent in online discussions? Which ones are easier to create and why? How to recognize and respond to them?

WordPress 2.5 up and running

I have just upgraded this blog’s WordPress version to recently released 2.5. I waited for this moment for a long time. WordPerss 2.5 brings quite a few improvements such as better administration (new interface, tag management, easier uploads, improved post editor), speed improvements, security enhancements (prepared SQL queries, password strength indicator, better hashing for passwords), and more.

But, as always, I was a bit worried about the upgrade path. My blog uses a heavily customized theme, plenty of plugins, and resides on a web host to which I have very limited access. It also contains more than 4,000 posts and numerous comments and attachments, which makes bakups and restores a lengthy process.

Now that I’m done with the upgrade and everything seems to work just fine, I have to say that this was the easiest upgrade so far. I didn’t need to fix one single thing. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Everything just went through OK and simply worked.

Oh, and the new WordPress is every bit as good as it was promised and expected, and even better than that. I love the new administration. The Dashboard is much more useful now and makes more sense even out of the box, not to mention all those plugins which will appear in the next few days. I like the way the post editing has been modified (although I am still waiting for a better date picker). Especially nice to see how easy permalinks editing has become (forget the old slugs, now you have the full URL in front of you). Media management (uploads) is indeed much improved with some extra functionality, such as progress reports, multiple file uploads, thumbnail management, galleries, etc. Also, there is a way now to manage tags, which were getting out of control. In short, it’s great!

A big thank you is due to everyone who made this release possible, so – Thank You. And, for those of you who are waiting for something to upgrade, wait no longer!