I’ve transferred Conversations with Dale (CwD) from my homegrown blogging system to WordPress. And I’ve split it into four blogs.

(more…)

Due to popular demand, I’ve added an Atom feed for full entries. I’ve also added an Atom feed for summaries.

I will continue to publish only summaries in the RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 feeds.

Jack Vinson, in a recent article expanding on my thoughts about automation, lamented, “Now if we could just convince Dale to provide a full web feed [in his RSS feeds] instead of the brief teasers.”

Someone else (I forget who) gave me a similar nudge many months ago. That makes two nudges in 17 months of blogging.

I publish only the excerpts in my RSS feeds because that helps me to “see” all of you, to know that you’re out there reading what I write. My web server logs what pages people visit. When your feed reader tells you that I’ve posted a new article and you click the link to read it, my web server notes that. Every day I look at the logs to learn what pages are being visited. I don’t know who is visiting, but I know how many people are visiting each page. I care about that little bit of information. It helps me to “make contact” with you, if only in a very small way.

If I were to publish the full articles in my RSS feeds, I would lose information in two ways. First, my RSS feed is a single page that includes my ten most recent blog articles. When your feed reader reads the feed, my web server logs a visit to that single page. That would give me little information about what entries you read.

Second, feed readers are automatic. They read my feed once per day, or several times per day, or once per hour. If I were to notice a jump in the number of visits to my RSS feed, that might mean that a whole bunch of people subscribed. Or it might mean that one of you configured your reader to check my feed once per hour instead of once per day. The visit count for my RSS feed tells me very little about how many real people are out there.

So my “excerpt only” feeds give me a teeny tiny bit of information. And that information is important to me, because it gives me a teeny tiny connection with all of you. I’d miss that if I didn’t have it.

I’m aware that by publishing only excerpts, I make things less convenient for those of you who subscribe to my RSS feed. And I care about that.

I try to make sure that the excerpts are not mere teasers. but are themselves informative. Most of the time I try put the main point into the excerpts, to help you decide whether you’re interested in reading the full article.

I revisit this issue from time to time, especially when someone nudges me. Consider me nudged.

Two months ago I moved Conversations with Dale (CWD) to a new address: http://www.dhemery.com/cwd/index.html.

When I moved CWD, I configured my web server to map the old URLs to the new ones, so that your existing bookmarks and links will still work. As far as I can tell, I succeeded. Still, you may want to update any bookmarks and links you’ve created to Conversations with Dale, or to specific CWD entries or categories. To find the new URL for an entry, simply click on your old link. Your browser will show you the new URL.

For you folks who subscribe to Conversations with Dale through the RSS feed, the URL for the RSS feed is now http://www.dhemery.com/cwd/index.xml.

I’ve recently discovered two intriguing new ideas from the blogosphere: grid blogging and The Internet Topic Exchange.

Grid blogging
is when many bloggers blog about a single, predetermined topic on the same day. The first grid blog happened yesterday. Dozens (or more) bloggers wrote about the topic brand. My friend Johanna Rothman wrote about it twice, once on her “Managing Product Development” blog, and again on her “Hiring Technical People” blog.

As the day of the first grid blog approached, a number of people wanted to know how they could quickly find all of the blogs that were participating in the grid. Hal Macomber suggested that every grid blogger add the specific label “[grid::brand]” to the titles of their entries. That way, interested readers could search the Internet for “[grid::brand]” to find all of entries for the “brand” grid blog.

One drawback of search engines: They don’t update their databases every day. If you had searched for “[grid::brand]” yesterday, you would have found very few of the grid blog entries. Some people wanted to know how they could find the “brand” blog entries early, before the search engines had updated.

That’s where the second intriguing idea comes in.
The Internet Topic Exchange
is a centralized web site that categorizes blog entries into “topics.” It includes a semi-organized directory of topics and a list of all topics. If you’re interested in photography, for example, you can look at the photography topic to learn who has been blogging about that. And if you have an RSS reader, you can subscribe to the topics that interest you, and be notified whenever someone blogs about them.

The grid bloggers created a category called grid_brand, and a number of gridders posted links to their blog entries. People who had subscribed to the topic were notified immediately that someone had written a new entry about branding.

The Internet Topic Exchange is, as far as I can tell, still in its infancy. The directory of topics seems incomplete. The list of all topics lists the topics in some arbitrary order (definitely not alphabetical). And some of the topics have puzzling names:
c_o_o_l_e_s_t, for example. What with those underscores? Or
amazon_and_ebay. Why lump Amazon and eBay together?

If the topics in The Internet Topic Exchange were cleaned up and managed well, I think it would be a very handy tool for bloggers and blog readers.