visnum
When one door closes, another opens.
A New Visual
May 20th, 2007 by Osman S BoruteceneBlogging is hard. Doing a custom template for yourself from scratch in WordPress is harder.
I have completed most of the job. There may be portions of my website which still does not function. Please do me a favor and leave a comment to this post if you encounter anything that doesn’t work.
By the way, this blog is going to be the new home of my other blogs in english. I have some other blogs about sex and relationships, clinical psychology and alternative treatments, web design and development and several geeky stuff, etc.
I have recently decided to unite them under one. This is the address.
Some parts of the new template still needs a little fiddling. Thank you in advance for your patience.
It’s Robert Scoble’s Birthday
January 18th, 2007 by Osman S BoruteceneRobert Scoble is 42 today and Loren Feldman is the first to celebrate his birthday. Here is my birthday present to Robert, it’s a new word: Scoblenvy.
Even The Shortest Essay Is Not A Blog Post
January 15th, 2007 by Osman S BoruteceneI have been thinking on a project that involves some minor information design. I suddenly caught up by the idea of what is a post and what is an article. This reminded me of a blog post of Dave Shea.
I think a blog is news source regardless of what is it about. It may inform you about that the blogger saw this movie and has slept with that person, etc. It’s a news source that can tell you that the blogger person has written a new article, but its not the article itself.
Therefore, Wordpress has the static pages feature. So that the user will be able to both blogs about this and that and then also writes articles, or essays in whatever kind of nature.
Just a couple of cents in a break.
Robert Scoble Is One Clever Guy
January 6th, 2007 by Osman S BoruteceneNowadays, I see posts about Robert Scoble and his blog and his job and his nearly everything here and there. These posts mostly talk about Scoble’s views on certain products that he writes up in his blog. Others are simply hate propaganda against Robert Scoble.
I don’t specially like or dislike Robert. I just think that he is a clever, special guy who likes to initiate discussions in a provocative fashion. His provocativeness is a must as a journalist. And yes, he is a journalist. He does interviews. He does it well, I think.
His provocative posts are generally about comparing two or more products or services. For instance, once he questioned whether Apple imitates Microsoft. There have been 230 comments under this post so far and he made people to come out and talk. Okay, I know that topics like Microsoft vs Anything can be quite intriguing at times but he has the ability to achieve more buzz than an ordinary Microsoft vs. Oranges and Apples kind of comparisons.
Another nice post to play with from Scoble was about why United States will remain dominant in tech. He claimed that United States will remain dominant in tech because Iran and some other countries mistreat their citizens. Robert Scoble knows very well that there are lots of countries on earth that are coming really close in competition on tech. I don’t think that his claim was sincere. I think he just knows how to make a buzz.
For a last example, I will mention his post about how Microsoft is gonna edge in on Google. I am sure that Robert is joking here completely.
Now, more important than all this is how and why people react to Robert Scoble. I feel disturbed by the hate propaganda that some bloggers carry out against him. I just don’t understand why they keep reading him if he discomforts them by his posts.
There must be something else, some other reason that some people hate Scoble and keep reading his posts. This isn’t just a love-to-hate situation.
My opinion is that those people don’t have the guts and the mindset to post like him. I think that is jealousy. Most people that blurbs about Robert Scoble blurb about him just because they think he gains and earns by something they cannot achieve. Those people cannot make something on their own, they feel needy most probably. Or at least, they cannot see the buzz he creates and they forgot that Robert Scoble is a journalist. One of his provocative posts was about comparing Windows Vista and Mac OS X. He needs this to do his job. He needs to and must podcast about odd things sometimes. That happens all the time, all day long with a whole press and media.
Anyway, my suggestion to those suffering from the Scoblenvy: Go try and create your own buzz and content. You are free to add any interesting content to your blogs. Do it and try to make it better than Scoble, then come and blurb about why Scoble makes no sense.
By the way, among the negative comments blurbs about Scoble, the oscar has to go to Yuvi who is a 15 year old Geek wannabe from Chennai, India. He is a VB and C# guy, but is trying to expand his horizons. He is the best representative of people who like to blurb about Robert Scoble.
update: Another post from Robert Scoble that drive people crazy. Now it is iPhone. Well, another reason why I think that Robert Scoble has a playful cleverness. There are many people out there, important names who blog about the iPhone recently. They write down very decent things, evaluating iPhone and the future of Apple, swot of opponents etc. but none of them get the attention that Scoble is getting right now. This isn’t Scoble’s way, that’s just what we call “social psychology” among academic jargon.
Creating Purposeful Home and Landing Pages
January 6th, 2007 by Osman S BoruteceneI recently added something to my home page. The addition is a little information on what this web site is about.
I have done that because I noticed the fact that even blogs have to identify their home pages. When users land on to any post or page from search engines like Google, there is a purpose there. The visitor reads the page, gets the information she needs and that’s it. However, if she clicks for the home page, than there must be some additional information where she is and what this place is all about. Briefly, of course.
Do this for your own good. The less confused visitors you have, the more user-friendly you will become (Master Yoda, 2007). Becoming more user-friendly is beneficial for your sites search engine optimization, results in more people bookmarking your site and increase overall quality of experience of your website or blog.
Saddam’s Execution and Visitors It Brings To Your Website
January 3rd, 2007 by Osman S BoruteceneI see that Saddam’s Execution Video brought great traffic to many web sites that blogged or posted the video of execution from youtube and google video. Some of those blogs and web sites are about daily news, political stories, catch-all news stories etc. It is very natural for them to seek for the newest and brutal and most graphical video of Saddam’s Execution in Iraq.
However, there aren’t only such blogs and web sites that published this video. There have been many blogs and web sites where two videos of Saddam’s execution was published. Both the formal one and the one taken with a cell-phone’s camera.
Those posts and articles and the video brought a considerable amount of traffic to those blogs and web sites. Unfortunately, not all of this traffic is beneficial to web site owners.
Well, if you blog for the joy of blogging and you like to see the increase in traffic after you post something new, and if financial gain or public relations of yourself and/or your company isn’t your concern, then you are fine. Go for it. You have every right to publish anything that is not illegal.
But if you are a problogger or responsible from a web site that makes money from advertising, or an online shop, then you must be careful about how you provide your website with traffic, especially via content you publish.
Hundreds of thousands of web sites benefited from the huge traffic that Saddam’s execution video brought to their web sites. Most probably, the traffic wasn’t targeted. I have seen many blogs and web sites that published this video regardless of their blogs main topic. If you are after increasing your traffic because you earn money from targeted text links, then this has no benefit to you. Apart from not being beneficial, it would also harm your consistency on your content and thus may result in less targeted traffic than before.
Now, those blogs and web sites that experienced a huge traffic thanks to Saddam are going to experience a considerable amount of decrease in their traffic, if their topic isn’t executions of dictators.
Worse than publishing the video is publishing the video without any comments or your own thoughts or feelings on the subject because you have became the same with hundreds of thousands of other bloggers. No difference. The video can be found anywhere on the web.
By the way, the same holds valid for people that use common popular keywords for increasing their numbers of visitors. I have seen many blogs that put every post into categories or tags like Miss Nevada, Boise State, Google, Jobster, Zune, Edelman. Those are the most searched topics on Technorati. Or they put keywords like “Madonna, Christina Aguilera, Harry Potter, etc.” in their meta tags. I am sure they have gain tremendous amounts of traffic with those keywords. However it brings also a guarantee to failure when it comes to targeted traffic and efforts about earning money from targeted ads. Those blogs and web sites are eliminated by major search engines when somebody reports them or simply automatically as robots get more and more developed each year.
Targeted traffic is very important in terms of online businesses and Saddam’s execution is just an improvement to the world peace, not an improvement to your pocket.
Why Not To Use Word
December 30th, 2006 by Osman S BoruteceneA must read short article for bloggers from WordPress.Com
Yet Another Technorati Annoyance
December 23rd, 2006 by Osman S BoruteceneI just made a search over Technorati for the word WordPress. There are many results just linking to “Hello World”, which is the default post of a WordPress installation.
WordPress Features Shadowed by Blog Usage
December 23rd, 2006 by Osman S BoruteceneWordPress is beautiful and functional content management system. However, due to its excessive popularity among bloggers, it is mostly seen as a blogging-only tool.
WordPress has native features for a static home page in it. For instance, a WordPress installation first looks for home.php which can be used as a front page. It only loads index.php if there is no home.php specified. Let me tell you what that means in plain english: You don’t have to be stuck with themes and templates that are prepared primarily blogging in mind. WordPress has a feature so called pages, that are apart from the blogging cycle. By using home.php, header.php, footer.php, sidebar.php (alongside with sidebar widgets or not) and several pages.php, you can easily use WordPress for your static web site content, for instance for your corporate web site or brochure-ware.
I won’t go into detail right now because there are tons of documentation on the web about how to prepare a home.php, how to prepare page templates for WordPress.
Why should I use WordPress if I am going to have just a static web site?
Because you will still benefit from hundreds of plugins developed for bloggers. Then you will also benefit from a great documentation. Furthermore, you will take the advantage of WordPress’ builtin editor, management panel, etc.
Why don’t you put together a tutorial for what you tell here?
It’s just a matter of time. I’ll try to provide one soon.
Annoying Technorati Search Results
December 9th, 2006 by Osman S BoruteceneI like visiting Technorati and look for what is hot. However, especially in the last couple of weeks, some bloggers abuse Technorati search results by both tagging their every single post with the most searched 15 topics in Technorati and using these as keywords in their posts. That makes it really difficult if something you really need to search is on Technorati’s popular searches list.
I am sure that the Technorati team is working on that and I hope they come up with a solution soon. A feature such as being able to vote for search results would be interesting and help build a cleaner better Technorati search.
Search
Pages
Archives
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- January 2008
- August 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
Feeds
Social Magic
Standards
