One of the pleasures of the weekend is catching up with the lo-fi librarian This Week’s Useful Tools. It's stuff that in general I find really useful, and always find interesting to have a look at, and I'll certainly confess that I sometimes pinch the things that she's found and add them to my own 'I want to...' weblog of Web 2.0 resources. If you've not taken a look at her weblog I'd thoroughly recommend it.
Anyone else noticed that Bloglines is really playing up? The first that I noticed was when a colleague emailed me to say that some odd stuff was appearing in my Bloglines listing for my 'I want to' weblog with things that I hadn't done. Then I saw that in Twitter there were various postings attributed to me which weren't mine - they came from the blog of 'The London Paper'. I just checked Bloglines again this morning and saw that Ian Snowley seems to have a bunch of the same entries in his listing, but when you go to his weblog (as with mine) the entries are not there.
The only other common element that I can see is that mine, Ian's and the London Paper all have Typepad accounts, so maybe that's the one causing the problem instead?
Anyone else seen anything similar?
News from the Blogger in Draft blog - users can now schedule posts that will automatically publish at some point in the future. Great if you're under one of those annoying press release deadlines that you're not supposed to break. However, don't be too excited, since you have to log in at http://draft.blogger.com/in order for it to work.
This has come quick on the heels of the Blog List function they offered a few days. Nice to see new functionality coming online - although I don't use it myself any longer I still find Blogger a great training tool.
ebuzzing. This works by advertisers briefing bloggers on their product, and setting a price for an article. Blogger then writes piece, submits it and when it's approved, posts it and gets the filthy lucre after a month. Sounds like rather too much faffing around to be honest. If I'm posting about something I want to write about it there and then, it's brand new and interesting - the longer it gets left the staler it becomes.
Still - if you're interested take a peek. And of course, if you want to pay me to advertise your product (IF I think it's good enough!) let me know! :)
The Blog Readability Test. What level of education is required to understand your weblog? Apparently mine is 'high school'. Is this a good thing or not? How is this conclusion reached? What does this tell me other than the fact that it's Friday? I have no clue.
Now here's a puzzle, and I'd be very interested in your feedback and thoughts on this. My very first weblog, imaginatively entitled Phil Bradley's Blog was first written in February 2003, so I'm coming up to 5 years of blogging. Which is interesting, but not the point of this posting. I stopped writing it in December 2005. According to Bloglines it still has over 200 subscribers! Annoyingly, that's more than Bloglines reckons that I have for this one. (And that's ok, cos that's not an accurate figure).
How lackadaisical can people be? Or have they just abandoned Bloglines? Or don't they ever check their feeds? And, if they were interested enough to subscribe in the first place, why weren't they interested enough to move across to the new version? (Before you ask, I did SIX posts to tell people it was happening, so it's not like they didn't know about it.)
Should it in fact matter? Actually, it probably shouldn't, and I should be fussing about more important things, but curiosity is a terrible Mistress, and I wanna know! More importantly, short of contacting as many of them by hand as I could (and I'm not that bothered!) does anyone have any good suggestions of getting these folks across from the old to the new?
Intute has started a new blog - the Intute Blog. The blog will be most relevant to staff in UK universities and colleges who are interested in the use of Internet resources in education and research. Intute is run by a national network of academic subject, Internet and information specialists from UK universities, who will use this blog to post news, views and reviews about Intute services and the use of Internet resources to support higher education and research.
Apparently I am the TypePad Featured Blog for October 9th over at TypePad. I have no idea why, but I'm sure it's all very nice, so thank you TypePad! :)
I probably don't need to back up my weblogs, because Typepad should be doing that job for me... but just what if? So I was interested to see a post from Brian (Kelly) talking about using Vox to back up his Web Focus blog. Looked simple, so had a go. The result is: Phil Bradley’s blog - Phil Bradley’s Blog on Vox. Really easy - logged into my Vox account (which I'd only ever used once), imported posts from the main weblog and my humour/silly weblog Frivolity (by the way, if you've not seen it, take a look if you want a bit of a laugh for a few minutes - if I'm not being serious I can be quite funny though I do say so myself) and that was it - done and dusted! Recommended and thanks to Brian for the idea.
Weblog.com – Create your FREE blog now!. Nice little resource that uh.... allows you to start blogging in seconds. It looks very like Blogger, right down to the templates, so it may be a useful alternative, particularly if you are into the whole training people on creating their own weblogs. Thanks to the ever useful lo-fi librarian for this one, and who continually churns out stuff that is incredibly useful and that I don't find anywhere else.
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