How to get your weblog known

Today I got an email from Sonny. He asked me the following:

Hi Michael,
My name is Theron Parlin (or just Sonny for short) – I’m very new to weblogging, (I just put my site up two days ago) and I was wondering if you could tell me how to get my site “out there” so other webloggers can check it out and such? I saw your tutorial on trackbacks and found it to be very helpful! Also, if you know of any good weblogging resources that would be great as well.
Cheers,
-Sonny
https://www.theronparlin.com

Go check out Sonny’s site. He’s a computer programmer and a fireman, what a combo.
The first suggestion I would give is to read a few books. Rebecca Blood wrote The Weblog Handbook and it’s great. Paul Bausch, Matt Haughey, & Meg Hourihan wrote We Blog and it has lots of good advice as well. They’ve thought about this a lot more than I have. Best bet is to buy a copy and read what they have to say.
That being said, here’s my advice on getting your weblog known.
1) Make good content – This is absolutely the most important thing. People read weblogs for good content. While ‘what I had for breakfast’ and ‘friday five’ are fun, they don’t do a lot to interest people in coming back. Write entries that you know something about. People appreciate learning new things and if you provide them, they will come. Most people found my site by reading one of my stories like the USB Cup Warmer or the Tivo Extraction HowTo.
2) Write regularly – I’m not saying post every 2 hours, but if you go a week or two without posting, people will stop checking in with you. Every 2 or 3 days is fine if you are posting good stuff. Delivering regular content is what makes people come back again.
3) Link to other people – Links are the currency of bloggers. When you find something interesting you want to share when reading someone else’s site, be sure to link back to the person you found it from. Use trackbacks as well. Almost all bloggers check there referrer logs and know when someone is linking to them. They then go check you is linking to them and find you.
4) Leave comments on other weblogs – Bloggers like comments and appreciate getting them. If you leave comments on other weblogs, people will link back to your site to see who you are. This doesn’t mean comment everywhere for this purpose alone. Try to add good, valuable comments and people will look to see who you are.
5) Keep your blog design simple – Many bloggers fall for the temptation to add all kinds of bells and whistles to their site when they start. My suggestion is to keep things simple in the beginning and focus on the content. Make a good design and look, but avoid the addition of every possible feature. New visitors should find it simple to read and locate info on your page.
These are my main suggestions on getting a new weblog going. Your mileage may vary. The world could be full of people that like flashing weblogs about breakfast.
Good luck Sonny and welcome to the Blogosphere.

Sunday Catchup

Nothing big this weekend since the Auto Show.
Looks like Len is starting to get his blog on… Congrats to him as part of the MER team!
Speaking of MER take a look at Susan’s site, she’s at the JPL discussions about the mission and is blogging the speakers. Great work.
Also, the Mass Digital Gallery has great animations of the whole mission. Truly impressive.
Thanks to Andy at Waxy.org, I heard that there’s a new radio station in LA at 103.1. I need to give it a listen on the way to work tomorrow. Hopefully, there is no witty morning DJ.
Funny coincidence: Squidly writes about trying Abelour a’bunadh scotch. Guess what I bought last week? Yep.


Lastly, check out the Videolan VLC media player. The thing rocks. It plays all kinds of media and even DVDs. It can even handle AC3 audio.

LA Car Show 2004

James, Joseph, and I went to the LA Car Show today. Thanks to the tip from Moxie, we picked up $2 off coupons and headed to downtown LA.
I’m not a huge car fanatic, but the Show was a good time. I got to look at, sit in, and touch almost every car made.
Here are a few pictures…


One of the concept cars had WWII style nose art on the steering column. Cool.

Interesting cut-away engine. You don’t see that every day.

A cut-away of the Toyota Prius Hybrid car.
Can you tell I’m an engineer? I like the insides more than the outsides.

Me in a new MR2. I got to sit in many cars, I wish they had the keys in the ignition.

Spinning Bling Bling
The most outrageous car I saw was the Maybach. The car is basically for being driven around in while you sit in the back in a recliner. Completely over the top.

The remains of the day

Every year people ask why I don’t take the family to the Rose Parade. Well, the Rose Parade is not some quaint little town fun, that’s the Doo Dah parade. The Rose Parade is an industry.
Going to the parade is an all night affair, even if you buy tickets for seats. Dragging my two daughters out for an all night campout surrounded by booze & coffee drinking freaks may be OK in about 10 years, but not now.
Just like in football, the best place to watch the Rose Parade is on my couch with the Tivo remote in hand to fast forward through the boring stuff.
Last night I went out to see a movie with James & Joseph (Paycheck, which was neither great nor bad, but a good movie.) in Old Town Pasadena, at ground zero of the parade. Besides the fact that most of the storefronts were boarded up like a hurricane was about to blow through town, here was the sight everywhere.


So if your living room looks worse than that, you’ll feel right at home on the parade route.

Poker Lessons

Happy New Year!
The blogosphere is awash in New Years greetings and resolutions. While I wish you all the best things in 2004, I am not going engage in the public resolutions thing.
I am gunna talk about Poker. Thanks to Brad, I got to play some poker on New Year’s Eve Eve. The games at Brad’s house are friendly affairs with a $20 buy-in and a $2 raise limit. Enough to make it interesting, but not enough for hard feelings.
I have a great time everytime I go. This session was no exception, even though I left $20 lighter than I arrived. 🙂
A few nice scenes from the gameplay…


Playing five card draw, deuces wild, Chris drew 5 cards to the derision of the table.
He pulled a nice set of three aces and took the pot easily.


Rich produced the rare and elusive straight flush.
Brad retired the deck and intends to mount the hand in a picture frame for preservation.


Here are a few lessons I learned:
1) Even when you have a full house, someone else may have four queens.
2) A flush is a good hand, but not a great hand, when playing Anaconda.
3) Don’t let the newest player sit to the right of the most experienced player.
4) Luck plays a big part of poker, don’t forget it.

The future of Style

At work, one of the things I’m working on is a better way for information to flow to people. Since the one thing I know they will have always running is their email client, we’ve developed a solution that uses RSS feeds and an aggregator that runs inside the email client.
This seems to work well and I’m pushing for more advancement in this area.
I was playing around with the new Atom feed and started wondering why it displayed the way it did. I talked with Yoshi at work and he and I looked at the XML a bit. I asked why the stylesheet wasn’t referenced. After thinking a bit, he explained that the style information was an attribute of just one type of content that could be syndicated via Atom. To call it out specifically was wrong since it didn’t apply to all types of content. He said there must be a way to point at the CSS in another way, but he hadn’t looked at the Atom spec much.
We looked at the Joi Ito post about including CSS info in a RSS feed. We weren’t sure if this was a ‘good thing’.
A bit later Yoshi emailed me the following:

After some research, it appears that this approach is invalid. I quote:
https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/links.html#edef-LINK
“This element defines a link. Unlike A, it may only appear in the HEAD section of a document, although it may appear any number of times. Although LINK has no content, it conveys relationship information that may be rendered by user agents in a variety of ways (e.g., a tool-bar with a drop-down menu of links).”

When I got home, I logged onto #joiito and started asking a few questions. I was soundly beaten up for suggesting that CSS and syndication even belonged in the same sentence. I argued that the layout and design of information was important. Mark Pilgrim, who’s opinion I respect, pointed me to his thoughts about Styles in syndication. He’s against it. I understand his reasoning, but I think the need remains. He suggested that style attributes be used instead of full CSS.
After putting the kids to bed, talking to the wife, and watching and episode of Angels in America with her, I headed back online.
In the mean time, Joi’s post went white hot with comments on the topic and Mamamusings made a great post about the topic. Anil Dash, always one step ahead, was mentioning this a year ago.
It appears that I stumbled onto the issue just as it is ‘being revisited’.
People on both sides make valid points. It’s good to be surrounded byt smart people.
My take is simple. For syndication to be truly successful, there must be a good way for style information to travel with the syndicated content.
The need for style info is more than wanting blue text instead of black text. For Atom to be more than a weblog tool and really shine as an information transfer platform, it needs to be capable of fufilling a range of needs beyond text & links. IMHO, Jason Shellen has a good proposal.

Let’s get this straight

Proper usage rules about weblog and blogging terms:
A weblog is the online, regularly updated presence of a person or group. Do not use ‘blog’.
A blogger is a person who authors the weblog. Do not use ‘webblogger’.
Blogging is what a blogger does when actively authoring for their weblog. Do not use ‘webblogging’.
The totality of weblogs and weblogs as a community is known as the Blogosphere.
Ignore this information at your own peril.