Today I woke up into a somewhat warm room, but my bed was warmer. So I hit snooze, I can afford five more minutes. Then I hit snooze again. And again. And again. Ok so it’s now been 30 minutes of snoozing in a warm bed. Fuck it, let’s turn off the alarm, I can be warm for another 15 minutes right? Yes, of course, but it turned into 45 minutes instead. Oops. A quick shower and clothing later and I’m already on my way to work.

Getting to work is a five minute walk for me. It was a cold morning, but a refreshing walk. I rather enjoyed it to be honest. But when I got to work something felt funny on my head, it was somewhat itchy and annoying. I go in to scratch it and … lo and behold, my hair had frozen solid. What the fuck?

But anyway, I’ve been reading Neil Gaiman’s Journal lately and I like it so much that I want to become one of those Neil Gaiman readers, so I’ve decided to write him this question:

Dear Neil Gaiman,

I’m not a crazy fan and have until recently not even known you existed. That was, until I saw Amanda Palmer’s webcam stream from a dinner with friends she did a while ago (I AM a crazy fan of hers, I admit). You seemed like a cool guy so I decided to check out your blog. This was the epiphany when I realised she doesn’t say the Google You song was written by an “unknown gamer”, but by “Neil Gaiman”. Why those two sound so similar I don’t know, probably because I’m not english.

Anyhow, I really like your blog and find it a delightful read. But seeming as how you write a lot more than just the blog and I’m becoming increasingly interested in reading your stuff, I was just wondering if you could make a recommendation on where to start? What would you say is your best work to reel in a new reader who has never had any contact with anything you’ve done?

So yep, I’m just gonna go ahead and submit that through his “ask Neil Gaiman” thingy and hope for the best. Or can either of you readers suggest something?

Tags: blog, life

This is a small howto aimed at small blogs, really small blogs when looked at globally, who would like to feel the love. So I decided to share what I learned from having recently driven a 840% traffic spike to my blog with a single entry and increased comment count from zero to 10. I know the comment bit isn’t much, and I do realise that traffic spikes aren’t exactly the kind of traffic people want, but hey, if you can get 10% of those people to become constant readers that’s still nice. If I manage that I will some day write a blog about how to do it.

If you’d like to wake up to a graph like that, keep reading, but beware if your traffic is already high this might not work and if it does will bring your server to its knees.

Catch the latest buzz

This is probably the single most effective way of getting a lot of readers to read your stuff. If you follow the right kind of people on twitter and in general keep up with the web you will soon find that there is a buzz about something, then it dies away. You want to write something about the buzz in the middle of it.

When something is buzzing people want to read as much as they can about it, they want the information. This is something newspapers have thrived on since the dawn of time, their whole business model is catching the latest buzz and adding in their own two worthless cents. It doesn’t matter if you write something of value, it doesn’t even matter if it’s good, people will read it.

Be opposite

This is perhaps the most surprising thing I’ve learnt. When I wrote about what Adobe AIR is good for the traffic spike was 150 people and there was a single comment. When I wrote about what it isn’t good for there were 400 readers over two days and more than 10 comments, that’s a THOUSAND percent more comments.

Obviously when you’re writing about something people in general hate you should write some positive things about it. The reason I believe traffic works this way is that people are more interested in reading something that goes against everything else they read or they just see the title and go “Meh, more of the same”. This also might be why conspiracy theories are so succesful, people give more value to anything that doesn’t follow the herd, but still manages to make a good point.

Make a good point

Whatever you write about, it’s paramount that your blog makes a good point. Don’t just sputter idiocy, but make an effort to write something people will connect to and will want to give others to read. If a reader comes in, reads your blog, and thinks they’ve wasted their time they won’t tell others to read it. But if you create something of value they’ll want to tell their friends and whomever.

Digg it

Digg is something I’ve always been neglecting as a silly thing that isn’t really good for anything. But it’s surprising to notice just what kind of power it has – even just being dugg 10 times will increase your traffic by a hundred people … and to many of us that’s a lot. On a similar note you should probably also tweet a link to your post and if it’s any good it will get retweeted and go at least a little bit viral.

Conclusion

Perhaps to many successful bloggers out there all of this seems a little straightforward and even silly, but there are a lot of blogs out there who fail at these simple things. The biggest issue many bloggers seem to fail on is being relevant and interesting, they don’t take blogging seriously you might say.

So if you want that traffic spike now and anon and would like to feel the love, follow these rules and perhaps if you follow them regularly enough those traffic spikes will come so frequently nobody will dare calling them spikes anymore.

Tags: blog

Today I resolved a bug lurking deep within the workings of my Chlorine Boards framework and I have twitter to thank. When I made a blogpost about how drug use is not abuse a person following me on twitter immediatelly picked up on the post, gave it a read, retweeted and wanted to leave a comment. But couldn’t. Immediately @OneLuvGurl tweeted to me about how she can’t comment.

We tweeted back and forth for about an hour about the issue when I finally just asked her to send me the comment and I’ll see what I can do. It turned out that it was indeed, as I feared, the comment’s fault. So I started poking around until I found what was wrong. The comment was too long … but how can this be? The darn thing isn’t very long at all.

Two hours later I finally found out what the issue was and was able to resolve it. It would appear that three, or was it four, years ago I’ve made a terrible design flaw – I decided to use GET requests for ajax instead of POST requests. Since GET requests have a limited length this was naturally a disaster waiting to happen and I’m surprised the issue could go so long without being noticed, but I’m glad it’s resolved and I’ve already updated all the websites running on Chlorine Boards with the surprisingly simple fix.

This event just goes to show how much more than just status updates Twitter has become and just how awful bugs can be.

Tags: blog, life

When I was redesigning my blog I had the marvelous idea of adding a reBlog widget to the sidebar on the left. The main reason behind this idea was that since my readers hopefully enjoy what i have to say they might also enjoy giving a glance or two to the things I read myself, seeming as how when it comes to authors of published works people are always interested in seeing where the influence and ideas come from. Therefore I decided to simplify this process for people and a conventional blogroll simply wasn’t enough.

Why it wasn’t enough, though, is a complex reason. Mainly I find them to be overly static, quite boring and rarely attracting any sort of attention. My reBlog feature on the other hand is useful to make my website a tad more dynamic, which is something google and other search engines love very much. it also serves as a simple way to be quickly involved in any buzz going through the blogosphere … also raising hits.

The most profound change in my life coming from adding reblog was that it suddenly made me realise how awesome feed readers are. I was probably wasting several hours daily on making sure I kept up to date on everything from slashdot to different blogs and more often than not I’d simply forget about a blog or two and then be happily surprised when I found them again later. This is why I promptly installed Akregator on my home computer and Vienna on my mac.

Vienna I don’t like so much, it’s better than others but I do have my qualms. Akregator is rather awesome though and now my life is simpler. So here’s to a simpler life via RSS feeds!

Tags: blog, feeds, improvement, life, time

Yesterday was the busiest Sunday I’ve had in a long while since usually I devote my Sundays to leisurely activities with my girlfriend. This weekend however the girlfriend went on a trip to Tirol with family and I seized the day (and night actually) to remake my blog – something I’ve been planning to do for several months, but never quite got around to.

So on Saturday I started working on the software part of everything, some modules needed an upgrade or two, a touch up here and there and certain things I had to develop from scratch. Ten hours later, at around three in the morning, that bit was done, time for shuteye. And then came The Sunday. Got up and almost immediately started working. Set up my scanner, scanned in my notebook, torn pieces of paper, torn up sketches and other stuff that I needed.

And so, at six in the morning, a full seventeen hours later, the blog was complete, uploaded and quite functional. This was the first time I ever achieved anything like this on such a short timescale, then again, usually the designs I have to implement are quite more complex and tedious to make work. However most of my time was spent creating the images needed. For example photoshopping scanned in pages of writing onto torn paper (you can see the result bottom left) was especially difficult since I had to figure out how to do it in the first place. It turned out quite well if I do say so myself.

Anyhow, over the next few days I’ll be making touch ups to the design here and there, perhaps ironing out a bug or two and essentially making the whole thing even better. Bear with me please.

Tags: blog, life, tired, work