Posts tagged: BLOGS

It’s now official: right-minded people hate those little “Blog me, digg me, add me to your feed baby!” icons attached to blog posts. References:

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/93-its-the-content-not-the-icons
http://mezzoblue.com/archives/2006/10/10/mooching_20/
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000587.html

Maybe I’m part of the problem. I avoid the Nascar-style decorations, but I do have text links at the bottom of each post that cover three such sites. My links are tasteful, of course – no icons, just gray text. Faster than a bookmarklet, even, since you can use them right from the front page of the blog. But I do feel mixed about them.

Like every other web site/service/app/community/thingy that allows individual user contributions, there’s spam on Delicious too. The perp I came across today was “mcloan” – check the page out for yourself – and there are many more. Fred Stutzman has a good post on the subject, and I came across an exchange with naive Delicious spammers on Brian Dear’s weblog from last year.

But what’s Delicious/Yahoo doing about this? Where’s the Craigslist-style “flag this user as a spammer” button?

Suzanne Stefanac’s new book, Dispatches from Blogistan, is out. She’s a Well pal and you may have seen her name in the comments here. I haven’t gotten my hands on the book yet, but Suzanne’s blog gives an excellent taste; the glossary entries are particularly worth browsing. Good luck with it, Suzanne – try not to check your Amazon sales rank more than three times per hour!

Joel Spolsky (who started his career at Microsoft as a manager on the Excel team) has been writing some recent longer blog posts on a MacBook Pro in TextMate using Markdown. He describes the process in a recent entry. He calls it a “surprisingly good experience.”

He goes on to gripe about anti-aliasing quality (FWIW, that’s explained here), and beachballing from dropped wifi connections (which I’ve never experienced, maybe it’s an early Intel thing?).

Feedback sent to Technorati today:

Please, I beg you, kill those talking “SitePal” ads. I keep my PowerBook plugged into an amplified speaker setup all day, and when the “Pal” begins talking after having been displayed for X seconds (without me so much as mousing over it, I’m pretty sure), it’s heinous. And embarrassing if anyone is within earshot.