by Franky Branckaute on December 7th, 2009
Translation strings for WordPress 2.9 have been frozen. This means that no new changes other than bug corrections will be made to 2.9 anymore and we can expect a Release Candidate (RC1) anytime now.
The WP Core team is in Orlando, discussing the future of WordPress, the 3.0 branch and WPMu merge, and possible changes to the WordPress.org site after Matt filed a report of WordPress.org specific Trac tickets. An update about their decisions is expected today or tomorrow.
What do you think, can we expect WordPress 2.9 before Christmas? If you have been using Beta2 or update daily with the newest nightly build, how has your mileage been?
I have not experienced any problems on any of my sites.
Categories: WordPress News
Popular Post Conversations
by Regnard Raquedan on December 7th, 2009
One of the reasons blogging rose to prominence is because of the inherent recency of its content. No longer were people going to wait for the end of the day for a well-researched and well-written article to appear on the web, but a couple of hours would be enough.
There’s really no debate that blog posts should come out as soon as possible, but as as blogger, how concerned should you be about the shelf-life of your blog posts?
I got inspired by a little nugget of insight I saw in Twitter. I read that social media stories have a half-life of 69 minutes. That means that the popularity of a story posted in social media sites gets halved approximately every hour. Doing the math, by the time the day is approximately halfway through, your blog post would have disappeared into obscurity. Imagine that.
Of course there are other variables that come into play, such as the popularity of your blog, the audience you are catering to, and the “hotness” of the topic or issue, but nonetheless this gives bloggers the motivation to write for The Now—meaning write content that people will find relevant, interesting, or useful in the short term.
By blogging for The Now, bloggers cater to the increasing demand for new information and addressing the shortening attention span of the netizens.
Categories: Blogging Tips
by Karlo Licudine on December 4th, 2009
Plurk, one of the top micro-blogging services, has just opened up its API to developers!
Yep, you heard it right! Plurk’s official blog, Plurk Labs, announced the news today with much excitement.
As Plurk grows, the demand for different set of tools, applications or features to complement our product has also increased. While some of those requests are later added into our social platform, we fully aware it would be impossible for us to implement everything by ourselves. Our users love Plurk passionately and we love them back just as much. So if someone’s mom wants to read her Plurks from her kitchen microwave, she should be able to (provided someone else already wrote such application using our API).
For all those people scratching there heads on what API is, here’s a quick explanation: API means Application Programming Interface. By opening up Plurk’s API, developers can be able to make applications that can use Plurk’s features, data, etc.
Imagine what people could do with Plurk now its API is open. How about the ability to embed our plurk timelines on our blogs? That would be sweet!
Interested developers can head on over to http://plurk.com/API for the full documentation.
Categories: Microblogging
by Franky Branckaute on December 4th, 2009
The wait is finally over and Expression Engine 2.0 has finally been released by EllisLab more than 18 months after being introduced at SXSW 2008.
I personally have not had time yet to extensively test the new release but expectations are very high. In the past I have called Expression Engine the best self-hosted blogging platform on this site and am certainly looking forward to compare the new version to WordPress which I have come to love enough to use daily and customise for almost all projects, but often I have preferred the ease of EE 1.6.x when tailoring sites.
But First Things First.
The newly released EE2.0 PB (Public Beta) comes with a price and a new pricing structure:
- Freelancer: $99.95
- Non-commercial License: $149.95
- Commercial License: $299.95
Although Expression Engine 1.6.8 Core still available is, there is no free Core version for EE2.0, instead EllisLab offers a 30-day free demo download. It certainly is a daring move and although many labour has gone in the release (more than 2 years), one can only wonder if EllisLab is cutting of the ever shrinking community and pricing itself out of the market. In a sector with as main competitors the free and open source platforms WordPress and Movable Type, this bald move must be admired. When Six Apart announced a change in licensing structure in 2004 WordPress almost single-handedly won the market and some years later SA announced a new opensource version of MT, which was released end 2007 but MT had already lost its position as market leader. Is EE headed for a similar obscurity?
It must also be said that the standard license fee has increased with $50 for normal users. To make the platform more appealing for developers and designers there is a new Freelancer license at $99.95. One of the biggest differences when comparing EE to WordPress is the availability of plugins and the new license structure is not bound to help the Expression Engine community.
That said, I am looking forward to play with EE2.0 over the next 30 days before I decide whether I want to invest in a license for something I can have freely somewhere else. A license I mainly need to continue playing with the platform and promote EE as a viable and (hopefully still) better alternative.
It will be sad if the license structure will seal the future of EE as I would love to see more choice and more viable alternatives to WordPress. I secretly hoped that EE2.0 would become open source like other platforms but who am I. Now I must play with EE, I only have 30 days!
Can you imagine replacing WordPress with EE? What impact would it have on your business, especially when running several blogs?
Update: Expression Engine 2.0.0 PB released (yes version 2.0.0).
Categories: Blog Software, Blogging News
Tags: Expression Engine
by Franky Branckaute on December 4th, 2009
Site speed is a big issue for Google and consequently the search giant has updated and improved the Google Analytics tracking tag for faster loading times. The new tag has multiple advantages:
- Faster tracking code load times for your web pages due to improved browser execution
- Enhanced data collection and accuracy
- Elimination of tracking errors from dependencies when the JavaScript hasn’t fully loaded
With loading times rumoured to be one of the determining factors in search results in 2010 it is highly recommended to update your analytics tracking code
The new tag is immediately available to all Analytics users and further explained at Google Code. The structure of the new code can be found here. There is no doubt that most Google Analytics plugins for blogging platforms will be updated over the next days.
Categories: Blog Statistics
Tags: Analytics, google analytics, Statistics
by Karlo Licudine on December 3rd, 2009
In their on-going effort in making the web faster, Google has just recently announced an experimental Webmaster Tools feature called Site Performance which shows how your site performs in terms of loading time and gives suggestions on how to make it more faster.
You can access this new feature on your Google Webmaster Tools account, under Labs > Site Performance. In this section, you are shown a performance overview of your whole site. It displays the average page load time, which refers to the amount of time it takes the entire page to fully display on your browser, as well as a comparison of it against other sites.
Site Performance tool in action showing the speed of one of the sites I handle.
Aside from the performance statistics, there is also a section called Page Speed Suggestions where it gives you suggestions on how to optimize the pages on your site. This feature is powered by Google’s Page Speed tool, a powerful program that runs a number of diagnostic tests against a web page, and analyzes the page’s performance according to a number of general page performance “rules” that are known to speed up page load times.
Since the Page Speed Suggestions evaluates only a few example pages from your site, you have the option to download and install the Page Speed FireFox Add-on which let’s you evaluate any web page and immediately get the result. (Important note: You need to have the FireBug FireFox add-on installed first before installing Page Speed).
Page Speed FireBug add-on showing the performance summary of BloggingPro’s homepage
As you can see on the screenshot above, Page Speed lists down suggestions like caching, gzip compression, optimizing CSS, and many more. Thanks to this, we can now be able to know where we should focus our attention on when we want to make our blogs load faster.
To learn more about the Site Performance Tool, go here. To learn more about Google Page Speed, go here.
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Categories: Blog Statistics, Blogging Tools
by Regnard Raquedan on December 3rd, 2009
No one is questioning the speed of technology today– what may be innovative today may be junk tomorrow (or worse, junk by lunch time. ) Blogging is no exception.
One of the impending casualties of the blogging space obsolescence is live blogging. Yeah, there was a time when people blogged real-time in their respective blogs and kept updating one single post in rapid succession to cover an event. A couple of years ago, as blogs were slowly gaining prominence, live blogging was the apex of covering an event live via blogging.
But due to the emergence of microblogging and platforms such as Twitter and Plurk, live blogging is on its way to extinction. Microblogging is fast and automatic, making the process of constantly updating a blog post cumbersome and clunky. Add to that the proliferation of third-party sites and apps that support micro-blogging, live blogging can be officially be considered a dying art.
But before we say “good riddance” to live blogging, I believe it can still have a place in the blogging ecosystem. Remember that one key limitation of microblogging is the number of characters (e.g. Twitter’s 140 character limit). Live blogging is essentially free from this constraint. Another is the multimedia aspect of live blogging, such as the ability to post audio and video streams into a blog post.
Live blogging may not be hottest thing right now, but I believe it still has a use in specific situations to keep it from becoming completely obsolete.
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UPDATE: Nah, I change my mind. Live blogging is dead.
Categories: Blogging Sense, Microblogging
Tags: blogging, Microblogging
by Regnard Raquedan on November 24th, 2009
Perhaps five years from now, the issue of typography would have been solved already– that is, web designers and blog template designers will be able to select any font of their liking and use it on the fly. (This is probably when the font-face property has received wide-spread support)
But that’s probably five years from now. Today, we have to be contented with a handful of fonts to use in blog and web designs.
There’s probably a dozen fonts out there and there are three that I think should be worth considering:
- Arial – A can’t miss font that has good readability and people are already quite used to this. This is the same font that Google uses, and majority of computers carry this font.
- Georgia – This seems to be the font of choice when it comes to serif typefaces. This is because the alternative is Times New Roman, which looks dated and has very little character
- Verdana – Very similar to Arial, but I think this has better character width. This works well with bigger line heights and a good match for templates that utilize larger screen resolutions.
Your blog’s font can help your readers scan and read the content better. Better take a little time to find out which ones look good and help your readers. 
Categories: Blogger Tools
Tags: tips
by Regnard Raquedan on November 20th, 2009
Ask a marketer about social media and they will sing praises, especially with the attention blogs, micro-blogs, and user-generated content apps are getting in mainstream media. But ask a marketer what’s the one thing that they will make them pause about going forward with social media and they will probably say “There are no credible metrics readily available.”
Well, that type of reply is not unfounded. I’ve talked to a lot of marketing folks and they say that they would be more comfortable if there was a data source on the metrics of social media sites like blogs. This is perhaps borne from the orientation of the senior marketing executives’ reliance on Nielsen for media data on traditional media.
Why are these metrics important? These numbers are needed to justify the effectiveness of the campaign and determine the Return on Investment (ROI) of marketing activities. Of course, when it comes to ROI, the higher the better.
So, how do we answer the age old question of where to obtain readily available metrics for blogs?
These days, it’s not that hard because most blogs install analytics tools like Google Analytics to collect data on basic stats about the blog. If these analytics tools are not installed, it’s easy to install them. Things get iffy when it comes to industry-wide data because there’s still no universally accepted source of data. (Well, maybe Google will make something like this in the future.)
Just remember, metrics are important to measure performance with quantitative goals. But If you ask me, you can be a successful blogger without wrapping yourself around the numbers.
Categories: Blog Statistics
Tags: blogging, tips
by Regnard Raquedan on November 18th, 2009
A few years ago, when someone asked the ideal length of a blog post, the common answer would sound like “between 400 to 600 words.” Now, when you ask someone the same question, the reply would fall between 200 to 300 words. This seems to be the case of “The Shrinking Blog Post.”
Now, why is this seemingly happening? I have a few theories:
- The Micro-blogging Effect – Twitter introduced a new level of brevity when it comes to writing interesting content. My guess is that since people want instant gratification in content, readers are now slowly expecting the same about blogs– say what you want to say in the least amount of words possible.
- “Sharability” over Stickiness – Slightly related to the first theory, my general observation is that people are more into sharing content. And I think sharing is really a “volume” activity in the sense that you gain credibility by sharing often, even if the quality is passable at best.
- Economics – For professional bloggers and writers, there are schemes where the author is paid based on the number of words in the article. Perhaps this is a response to the financial crisis that started a couple of years ago.
- The Public’s Trust in Experts – While I believe social media does open the gates for new experts, there are a few experts whom the general public trusts and these experts often have “The Word” on certain topics. This credibility gives them the privilege to post long, but rare articles. This situation leaves people to be often have to rely on high frequency of posting to elevate their reputation.
There may be other reasons, but the case of “The Shrinking Blog Post” may not be cracked soon.
Categories: Blogging Tips
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