blogging

Blogging anniversary

About one year ago I have installed Nucleus CMS and started blogging seriously. I haven’t missed a day. Every day during the last year I have posted at least one article. Sometimes I have posted as much as twelve!

I have learned a great deal about a number of topics. Mainly, of course, about blogging technology. I went from a total newbie level. I remember now how hard it was for me in the beginning to get ideas for postings. Than it became a routine. My writing got better. My vocabulary increased. Soon I had to introduce categories to maintain some order with the posts. Than I’ve learned about comments and comment SPAM. Than RSS feeds and blogrolling. That was really an eye openner. Than were trackbacks. Than a whole bunch of social software.

Daily blogging did wonders to the popularity of my website. I have jumped up in ranking tables of Google quiet a bit for a number of keywords. My posts were linked to from a number of high profile websites. My audience grew several times during this year. I am now getting about 1500 people daily. More than half of these are returning users.

My relationship with the Internet changed as well. It became closer to me. I became more open. I have learned myself better. I’ve got a better understanding of people on the Internet. I’ve discovered communities around topics that I have never thought existed.

Overall, blogging during the last year gave me much more than I ever thought it could have. I will surely continue the practice.

Blogging is officially in the mainstream

I was suspecting that blogging is getting more popular than some people want it to. But today I got two reasons to belive that blogging is officially in the mainstream now.

The first reason is my mother. She usually tries to stay as far from technology topics as I try to stay out of business discussions. Today though she was aksing me all about blogging. We spend about two hours talking on the subject with me giving her an overview of the general concepts as well as the demonstration of practical side with LiveJournal. She was very interested. She made a whole bunch of schemes and notes in her notebook (the paper version). I have a strong feeling that she will join the blogging world in the near future.

The second reason is “Cosmopolitan“. If you were living under the rock for the last few decades, “Cosmopolitan” (or “Cosmo” for short) is one of the most popular magazines for women. It covers a broad range of topics modern women may be interested in – fashion, sex, travelling, housekeeping, getting married to a rich guy and stuff like that. From time to time one can find technology articles in “Cosmo”. They are usually on a very basic introductory level, but deep enough for a number of women to go out and try things. The latest issues of “Cosmopolitan” has an article about different ways of communicating in the Internet. It talks about emails, instant messaging (ICQ, MSN, etc), forums, and blogs. While emails and instant messaging don’t surprise me at all, blogs do. Not only it shows how to use LiveJournal (LiveJournal is one of the most popular blog services in Russia thus it is very logical to find an article about it in the Russian edition of “Cosmopolitan”), but it introduces readers to some parts of netiquette and terminology.

All of these lead me to believe that blogging is interesting for way too more people than I could have thought. Some people are in such a need of a diary software and means to share their thoughts and experiences that they are ready to overcome technology difficulties and laziness. Who would have thought of this five or ten years ago?

LiveJournal pictures

LiveJournal has succeded in building a very large community. Lots and lots of blogs are started every minute at LJ and lots and lots of these blogs get updated every minute. Reading through these might be a very time consuming and pretty boring process though. Just to get an idea of how different are LJ users and their interests consider checking the last 30 pictures posted to LiveJournal. Every time you refresh that page, you get a different set. This a really cool time and bandwidth killer…

Feed on feeds

Feed on feeds is a free software (GPL) that mimics BlogLines functionality.

Many people are afraid that BlogLines will get evil, commercial or both and they will lose one of the most handy tools ever. Feed on feeds is supposed to solve the problem by providing all the functionality in a free package. One can download the tarball and install it on own server. Since it is written in PHP with Mysql backend it is extremely easy to modify and enhance. It is still a bit rough around the edges, but it will quickly get there, I am sure.

Discovered via this post.

Technorati profile

Technorati is yet another peice of social software. It works very much like del.icio.us, but is more oriented towards your own posts, rather than bookmarks to someone else’s sites.

Since my blog is already monitored by Technorati because of other people submissions, I thought that it would be a good idea to claim my site. In order to do that I needed to either place a permanent link to the JavaScript which or just post a link to my Technorati Profile. Here is another link to Technorati Profile just because I used to have more than one domain for this page.