Philonoist.net

I found an excellent WordPress theme in Gentle Calm, modified ever so slightly using kuler. While I imagine many of you read Philonoist via RSS (regardless of “Read more” link or not), it’s nice to have a site design that’s minimalistic, clean, and well-colored. Stop by if you have a moment.  

I’m late to the whole analytics game (thanks for opening my eyes, Boris), but I’m curious as to who reads my blog. I’m a little sick of the stat spam clogging up my hoster’s stat package, and a combo of Feedburner* and Statcounter should be more than enough crunching to fuel me.

What really interests me is the “Read more…” tag. Now that the recent WordPress upgrade now supports enforces it when you write the tag into your post, I’m sorely tempted to use it to get folks to click-through to my site. Not that I have ads or revenue here, but just to gauge of reader activities. (In other words, StatCounter and FeedBurner are driving my content decisions, and not the other way around. I want to track what you do. No different than anyone else out there.)

I’m not sure readers want to click through, especially those folks using GReader. My own GReader habit tends towards reading posts in GReader (except for Salon and NYTimes, which are of high enough interest to get me to show the original.) I know for a fact that I read xkcd and alwaysBeta substantially more than User Friendly and free Economist.com articles simply because the former are reader friendly and the latter are not. I’ll star and save an interesting looking post that requires a jump for later consumption, but I’m not likely to go and read it. For me, GReading is a strictly in the moment thing: once I close Google Reader, any and all posts I’ve digested go the way of the buffalo.

If I understand correctly, the idea behind the more tag and summaries is to be nice to users: keep the small posts reader-accessible and the longer ones well-summarized and behind a jump. So, for now, I think I’ll keep the “more” tag out of my posts, unless I hear strongly otherwise.

What do you think? Should blogs include “more” tags in their RSS feeds?


PS: You’d be my hero if you read this on the old blogware feed and change to the feedburner one.

Technorati Tags: Google Reader, FeedBurner, StatCounter

After reading Brian’s & Boris’s tech musings this morning at alwaysBeta, two amazing tech revelations happened to me.

The first was that I learned a nifty hack already included in Better Gmail, a free extension from the folks over at Lifehacker. Like Brian, I’m a big user of Gmail and Google Reader, and speed is the key to my interactions with these products. So imagine my surprise when I found (after sticking my wireless mouse in my pocket and moving locations) the right-click conversation preview option, as below:

This is by far the most useful thing I’ve found in Better GMail: it’s bound to the “v” key (easy to remember, analogous to show original in GReader), it marks the item as read, and it’s smart enough to usually make itself the right size. One minor issue is that it doesn’t have an option to view images in preview, but that’s a pretty minor thing.

The second came about when I tried to take some screen caps for this post: I’ve long been tired of doing the PrintScreen->Paint/Photoshop/Gimp->Crop. SnagIt 8.2 is a great product, but it’s expensive: nearly $40 for a tool that I don’t/won’t use all that often. There are some okay open-source alternatives out there, but nothing that works quite as well as SnagIt. But surprisingly, TechSmith, the company that makes SnagIt, gives away an older version of the product (7.2.5, available from OldApps). Apparently, this is for readers of UK’s .Net Magazine, but putting in the US as an option works. Make sure you remember the name you use for the sign-up: the product key is bound to it.

I absolutely adore neat stuff.

Technorati Tags: screen capture, lifehacker, gmail