Tag Archives: Blogs and blogging

Bloggers and the 2012 GOP Convention

Yes, there may be a lot of infighting among the GOP candidates and their supporters. Eventually that will all sort itself out and it will be time for the 2012 GOP Convention. Among the 50,000 or so visitors coming to Tampa will be a large group of Bloggers. I’m lucky. Tampa is practically in my back yard. Others coming to Tampa will be looking for some help.

Enter the 2012 GOP Convention Blogger Supersite. I am setting up this site to gather and share resources the attending bloggers might need. I urge you to visit the site and add it to your links, feed readers, etc. I would really appreciate it if you will visit the first post and add your comments and hit all the share buttons.

As I said over there, the first order of business is compiling a list of Tampa-Orlando area bloggers. Let me know if you fit that description. Soon, we’ll be looking for information about those coming to the convention.

Friends, 2012 will be a blur and August will be here before we know it. Help me spread the word today. Thanks!

Cleaning Up

I just completed a little project that was kind of sad — cleaning out my blogrolls. It is amazing (and depressing) that some very good blogs aren’t around anymore. It was also a bit telling regarding my housekeeping skills that there were a few blogs on the list that hadn’t posted since 2008. 2008!

There were also a few that have moved. Those links have been updated. The two I noticed were Bad Example and, a very recent move, Blogs for Victory.

All in all, I probably trimmed a dozen blogs from the rolls.

If you know of any blogs that I should add (including your own) leave a link in the comments. This would be a good time. I need to do something to keep busy (and to keep from punching holes in the wall).

Two Questions

I am serious about planning a blog get-together when the Republican Convention comes to Tampa in 2012, but I have two questions.

What should we call this thing? I’ve been calling it a Blogger Bash, a get-together, a party, all pretty generic. Suggest a name!

Who are the Florida bloggers? I know a few. I did go through an old blog list and was disappointed to see how many blogs on that list were inactive. Some hadn’t posted in months, a few in years. I know there are conservative Florida bloggers out there. Who are you?

Thanks for your help.

Comment Tech 101

A final bit of follow up to my two posts on comments — comment tools you can use.

There are dozens of plugins you can use to make your comments friendlier. A few of them I was already using. Others I found while doing my research. If you search the WordPress plugin repository you will find almost 800 of them. Let me try to break them down in to a few broad categories.

Editors

At it’s most basic, a comment box is nothing but a form to collect some information and to input the body of the comment. If a reader wants to add any formatting to the text that plain text box can make the process a bit difficult. There are quite a few plugins developed to allow commenters to add basic formatting such as bold and italic text, and to make creating linked text easier. The one I use is Comment Form Quick Tags. As you can see in the comment form, adding the proper html code is just a click of a button. Other helpers I use related to editing include Live Comment Preview which allows writers to see what their comment looks like before they hit send, and Editable Comments which allows those leaving a comment to go back and edit it for a predetermined period of time.

Control and Analysis

You want to be able to exert some sort of control over the comments, mostly to combat spam. Spam comments are the bane of most bloggers. There are innumerable plugins that deal with just that. Akismet and Spam Karma are two popular and wildly recognized ones. I also use one called Comment Timeout that allows you to close the comments automatically after a configurable length of time. Believe me, a lot of spam comments come in on post I wrote months or years earlier. One feature I like in Comment Timeout is the ability to keep comments open on posts that contain recently approved comments, keeping popular, active posts alive. You may also want to analyze the comments you get. There’s a plugin for that as well. I use Comment Analysis because I like the many pieces of information you can find, and even include in a sidebar widget. If you look in my sidebar you will see most of the things you can track, like the number of comments, the latest and most commented posts, and the busiest commenters. Used correctly, this also gives a little link love to those who take the time to leave comments. One tool I discovered while researching my post is one called CommentLuv. If your commenter has a blog with an RSS feed, CommentLuv will attempt to discover their most recent post and append it to their comment.

Follow Up

I like it when I have the opportunity to be informed when someone replies to a comment that I’ve left somewhere. Subscribe To Comments makes that easy. The comment writer just has to leave a valid email address and check a box to be able to receive notice when someone else has added to the thread.

My question to all of you is, what plugins do you use to enhance your readers commenting experience? I am always looking for new things to try.

Comment Envy

Hi. My name is Jim and I have comment envy.

Hi Jim.

I love writing here at bRight & Early as well as my other blogs. It’s fun, it keeps me informed and engaged, and it’s a way to express my self and sort out the thoughts that run through my head. And while I do write, in small part, for my own benefit, I wouldn’t do it in this public way if I didn’t want to reach out and engage a larger audience. I believe this is true for many non-professional bloggers.

That being said, there are two things that are “Pay” for bloggers who don’t make a living doing this — Links and comments.

I may discuss links some other time, but today I want to talk about comments. As I said, I have comment envy. I would love to have the type of commenters that Ace and Wyatt (to name just two) have. That leads me to ask, what is it that causes some sites to have more comments and others have fewer? Is it the post, the site, or something else? Have at it (where else) in the comments.

The End Of Blogrolling

I noticed this in my feed reader this morning.

We’re aware that there is an issue with BlogRolling blogrolls causing some browsers to display a security warning.

There’s nothing really wrong with BlogRolling itself but the way we connect your blog to the sites in your blogroll makes some security algorithms think there is.

If you find yourself in this situation, we recommend you remove the Blogrolling code from your site.

We’re probably going to be shutting the service down soon. We’ll post more information here and on our Twitter account (@blogrolling) as we decide on next steps.

I had BlogRolling here at bRight & Early for years, but removed it a while back when they were having a different issue. When I first started this blog getting your site added to someones BlogRolling list was one of the premier ways of getting some link love. But, like a few other blog must haves in the early years (Is Rob ever going to fix TTLB? And is Technorati useful anymore?), BlogRolling’s time may have past.

I know that several sites I frequent are having the issues described. Most of them have disabled BlogRolling. So, what to put in it’s place. WordPress has dozens of blog roll plugins. Which one(s) do you use? What are your favorites? Have at it in the comments.

Playing Catch Up

After my out of touch week, I am about through playing catch up. I’ve waded through pages of email, spam, and a very full feed reader, performed maintenance on my various blogs (including all the spam registrations at The Regiment), watched some football, hockey, and three out of the first four hours of 24.

I have to watch the fourth hour before hour five tonight. And speaking of hour five, be sure that you join the crew at the best 24 site anywhere — Blogs.4Bauer.com. Make sure that you remember to join us for the Season 8: 8 pm to 9 pm liveblogging event.

One of the other things I missed were two episodes of bRight@Night. I’ll take care of that immediately following Jack. More on that later.

Now, on with the show.

Weblog Awards Canceled

The 2009 Weblog Awards have been canceled.

It is with a great deal of regret that I must inform everyone that The 2009 Weblog Awards are canceled.

Unfortunately the resources required to handle the load of voting (nearly 1,000,000 votes in 2008) could not be adequately provisioned. Even if the servers and bandwidth required appeared today it would be at least a few weeks before everything could be ready for voting.

It is sad, but understandable, why Kevin had to cancel the awards. I hope that the issues can be worked out to start them again in 2010.

1,502

One Thousand Five Hundred and Two. That’s the number of pages in the Bogus, er Baucus “Health Care Reform” Bill. Health Care Reform is in scar quotes because the bill is not about Health Care nor Reform. It is about power. Government power. If there were a truth in advertising law that applied to legislation the title might be the “Government Power Grab and Intrusion Into Health Decisions” bill. Whatever.

The PDF is here.

It has been suggested that the blogosphere look at the bill in small pieces. There is a site (that I don’t have time to track down right now. Someone in the comments?) that has suggested that you take the last three digits of your Social Security number and analyze that page. Of course that suggestion was made before page count came in at a grand and a half.

Here is my suggestion: For the first two numbers take your birthday and divide by two. Round down. For example, if you were born on the 1st the first two numbers would be 00. If, like me, you were born on the 26th the first two numbers would be 13. For the last two numbers take a look at my sitemeter counter. As I write this the last two numbers are 50. I will be reading page 1350. Get it? Good.

Now, leave a comment and let me know what page you will be examining. And please spread the word. We need (at least) 1502 of you to do the work the legacy media will either not do, or not do well. Are you up to it?

(h/t to Don Surber for the PDF link)