Even though my posts here have been, ahem a little thin on the ground since our Tennessee road trips a few months ago, I’ve been active on twitter and I’m now blogging professionally for the Haxor Network since the beginning of this month. Please, do have a look at Mac Haxor and Linux Haxor and vote for my Mac and Linux tips! Ogle at the sexy lady screenshot. Sign up for the rss feeds etc etc.

If you’re interested in being paid to post, or guest blogging for the Haxor Network, Pavs is still searching for contributors, so head on over and express an interest in the comments. The site gets over 15,000 page views per day, so posting there is a great way to raise your profile!

Although I’ll be posting shorter Mac and Linux tips and news articles at least twice a week for the Haxor Network, I’ll continue with travelogues, martial arts commentary, opinion pieces, personal productivity items, and the occasional more in depth article on computing here at Azazil.

Twitter for those who don’t get it

Much as I had vainly cast aside the notion that I just didn’t get it the whole while, everything finally clicked for me when I started following people who were referred to by others I was following. @bynkii posted a tweet for the benefit of @flargh, so I followed @flargh and so on. Before long I was watching a little network of people commenting about their day, and about each others’ days. People weren’t casting their 140 characters into the void without reason after all, there was interaction!

With hindsight, my problem was that I had been thinking of Twitter as blogging in the small. But with no followers, there was no-one to read what I was writing, and thus nothing to engage me to take part in it actively. Twitter isn’t like blogging at all it’s more like instant messaging… if I had set the @Replies setting in my twitter profile to “show me all @replies” sooner, I would have certainly noticed these little pockets of conversation and started following the people being addressed. And some of them would have reciprocated. And I would have being taking part instead of watching, bemused.

Twitter for those who do get it

And now that I have some followers to read my tweets, and occasionally tweet back at me about them, I not only mention the minutiae of my day to the annoyance of everyone else who doesn’t get it yet, but I take part in conversations with other people who are following me. It’s kinda neat!

Now that’s all very well, but I want to incorporate my part of the twitterverse into my online life. I want to build my blog readership by tweeting when I put up a new blog post. I want to build my twitter followers by engaging my blog readers enough to be interested in what I’m comment about with other like-minded people at twitter.

I thought I’d found a great way to do all of that (and more!) with [Alex King]‘s WordPress [Twitter Tools]. I have it set up to automatically tweet new blog posts on my behalf, and to collect summaries of my tweets into daily posts. Except that having my blog posts drowned out incessant trivia and my half of various out of context conversations is more likely to drive you, gentle reader, away from my blog that to turn you from a twitter don’t get it into get it over a few days.

The problem is that twitter conversations are essentially throw away, and don’t generally have enough substance to generate further blog comments. Essentially they don’t belong in a post. I think what I really need is a way to show my last handful of tweets in the sidebar. Any pointers much appreciated!

Over the next few days, I’ll delete the Twitter daily summaries, and search for a wordpress rss widget to integrate into azazil, so as to try to pique your interest in Twitter. I might even write a post to try and persuade you to sign up for a free account and follow me at twitter. I’m one of the many people who will reciprocate the follow bit on anyone that follows me, especially as I’m now painfully aware that twitter just doesn’t click until you reach a critical mass of followers to pull you into the never-ending twitterverse conversation…

Round 1

WordPress 2.2 now bundles it’s own implementation of sidebar widgets, which clash with the sidebar widgets implementation in K2 based themes. After upgrading WordPress, I went to the admin pages to upgrade the SQL tables only to be met by a fatal error before the upgrade button even appeared on screen.

3ColumnK2 takes a severe beating, barely able to stay on its feet when the bell rings… Round 1 to WordPress.

Round 2

I found and installed Disable WordPress Widgets plugin, designed to work around this very problem. Of course I would need to get to the plugin management admin page of my installation to activate the plugin, but since everything is displaying fatal errors right now, it’s hard to make any headway.

3ColumnK2 finds a new lease of energy and rocks WordPress2.2 with a plucky rally, soon paying for its overconfidence and forced back against the ropes to take another brutal assault. Round 2 to WordPress.

Round 3

Noting that the fatal error is just a symbol clash in wp-include/widgets.php, I logged into the host server and systematically renamed the symbols causing the errors, returning to the admin dashboard page to be greeted with a fresh symbol to rename and a new fatal error each time. Several symbol iterations later, the WordPress Dashboard finally rendered in my browser.

Not to be downtrodden, 3ColumnK2 fights back gaining a little ground with each volley. It looks like WordPress2.2 hasn’t got any tricks left, and is starting to look a little shaken when the bell rings. Round 3 to 3ColumnK2 by a nose.

Round 4

Having carefully saved a copy of the unedited wp-include/widgets.php, I enabled the Disable WordPress Widgets plugin, and restored the copy. Returning to the upgrade page, I was able to successfully complete the SQL table upgrades and have a fully functioning WordPress2.2 running my hacked 3CK2 theme.

WorPress2.2′s legs are looking a bit shaky by now, when 3ColumnK2 sneaks a lucky left-hook through WordPress’s defences dropping him to the canvas. Winner by TKO: 3ColumnK2.

Conclusion

Azazil is now running properly (or at least, no worse than before) on the latest security patched release of WordPress, and feels a little snappier for it on my client. The speed of the site is really bothering me now though, so I’m going to start ruthlessly cutting back on the modules I use, in an attempt to squeeze some responsiveness out of the server. If there’s anything you’re especially attached to, let me know in the comments and I’ll move it to the back of the line for summary execution. ;-)

A good proportion of you, gentle readers, don’t use RSS or email subscriptions to read my articles, and since I’m currently ruminating on how to improve your experience when visiting this site, I do want to supply some means of getting in touch without leaving an off-topic comment. Enter Plugoo, an IM flash application newly embedded into my sidebar. Not only will it queue messages for me when I’m offline, but I can answer you in real-time if I’m online :-)

I plan to leave it in place for a few weeks to see how it works for me (and you!) before I decide whether to make it a permanent addition to the site. So, why not try it out and say “hi!”…

First of all, I’m struggling to capture what azazil.net is actually about. Curiously, my most popular posts by far have been my aging Pocket Diary Moleskine Hack post, which gets around 25% of all the traffic to my site (!!), and Getting Things Done Digitally. I could certainly post some interesting updates on how my system has evolved since I wrote up what I was using back then, and GTD is still at the core of how I manage my productivity. But, even though I’m sure I could write about GTD in particular, or personal productivity in general ’til the cows come home, I don’t care to be the little voice lost among the ravening hordes of already established blogs in the same niche.

On the whole my posts to Azazil have been totally eclectic over the last 6 months since I seriously picked up my posting rate, which I rather enjoy, but I think is now holding back further growth of the blog. I haven’t decided yet whether to start a new personal blog to run in parallel so that I can tighten the focus here on Azazil.net, or indeed where to make the cut between subjects suitable for posting to a refocussed Azazil.net and subjects more suitable for a new personal blog. If I keep posting here in the same eclectic style rather than start a second blog, I think that it is important to come up with a branding that captures all of the subject areas I like to write about… and I don’t yet know what that might be.

As a start, I thought I should list the subjects that I’ve either posted about frequently, or would like to write about more often, and then stare at the list for a few days to see if I have a flash of inspiration about the niche (or niches… no need to be too heavy handed here) that I’m already in, and try to build a brand around that. If the inspiration doesn’t arrive, I should at least have a better idea of which subjects I can keep here, and which I should move to a new home.

Here’s the list, in no particular order:

• Productivity
• Personal Growth
• Travel
• Living & Working on the Move
• Martial Arts
• Programming & Open Source
• Gadgets & Technology
• Apple Macs
• Music
• Movies I’ve seen, Books I’ve read, Beer I have drunk
• Life Commentary

Is there anything here that would leave a hole in your life if I stopped posting about it? Anything you’ve found interesting, but wish I’d get into more depth? Anything you wish I’d just shut up about already? All advice greatfully received… otherwise I’ll have to just sit here and wait for that inspiration to arrive. :-D

I’m was so impressed with the fast response at DreamHost that I’ve negotiated a special shared hosting deal for Azazil readers. This is the Dreamhost, Crazy Domain Insane hosting, which normally costs $9.95 per month, with a one time $49.95 setup fee, unless you pay for one year in advance. The standard package includes 150GB of disk space, 1.5TB of bandwidth per month, both of which increase with every week that you hold the plan, plus one free domain registration. The first 250 readers to sign up using the promo code: “555” qualify for a whopping 500GB of diskspace, and 5TB of monthly bandwidth with 5 free domain registrations.

If you miss that offer, or alternatively if you’d rather save money than pay for a whole wad of diskspace and bandwidth that you don’t need, you can enter the promo code: “AzazilNetRocks” which will get you the Crazy Domain Insane hosting plan, for just $4.95 per month, with no setup fee.

If you’ve been thinking of getting into the blog business, you won’t find a better combination of excellent technical service, and great hosting features at anything like $4.95 a month. So, what are you waiting for, Signup Now – using this link to prefill the import fields, all you have to supply is your contact details, the domain name you want to register and payment for $59.40, which will buy you the domain and a years hosting!

It seems as though the Technorati Favorites Exchange has shaken things up a little, since the way stats are displayed for blogs at technorati has changed somewhat recently. At first I thought the favourite count had gone altogether, but it has simply been renamed as fans and moved over to the left sidebar rather than being quoted in the main statistics block. Interestingly, the link count statistics are now eschewed in favour of a nebulous new Authority rank. There’s no explanation of how this number is calculated at the moment, but I’m sure that will come in time.

And now for the big news: I’ve finally crept into the 100 Most Favorited Blogs list. Thank you all for the link love, I’ll go through the list and be sure I have returned faves later today. A key few participants in the exchange are already well above slashdot in the listings, so if we keep going it’s only a matter of time until we edge it out of the list altogether. :-D

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1. The “You Comment/I Follow” badge in the sidebar indicates that I’ve set up comments to let search engines follow the links back to your website. Normally, comment links include a “nofollow” attribute that stops this happening, but there doesn’t appear to be any sound reason for doing that so I’ve joined the movement to banish the evil “nofollow” attribute from your comments. So if you’d like a free link back to your site, just leave an on-topic comment here, and you’ll have your wish!
2. Now that I’m collecting a small number of comments on most of my posts, I’ve reinstated the “Top Commentators” list at the bottom of the sidebar. That means you will get a link back to your site from the front page of my blog if you are one of the top commentators for this site. At the moment, it’s really easy to get in the list too… just 3 comments ought to do the trick.

By the time I’d finished that exercise, another 60 or so had already piled up so I’ve decided to try out a challenge plugin for readers that comment without logging in. Since I’ve turned off the requirement to login for comment posting, I’ve been receiving far more comments (more than none isn’t tough to beat!) so I certainly don’t want to do that again. From here on in, you’ll either need to correctly answer the question “What year is it?”, or else register and accept the cookie that keeps you logged in on subsequent visits.

Now that I’m getting a reasonable number of comments, I’ve decided to turn the Show Top Commentators plugin back on too, so that regular commentators to the site are rewarded with a full link back to their site. For now, it shows comments for the whole year, but I’ll start resetting it monthly before too long.

If you find the challenge plugin annoying, or can suggest an alternative spam control plugin, please let me know in the comments.

Despite the apparent drop in links due to newly correct accounting, the favourites exchange is forging ahead exponentially now. Since the last update I’ve been favourited by another 48 blogs, leaving me with only another 20 to get before I hit the Technorati 100 Most Favorite Blogs list! Most of the participants in the scheme are also exchanging links, so I’ve gained more than 50,000 more places in the popularity stakes, bringing me suprisingly close to the being in the top 50,000. Considering that a little over a week ago this blog wasn’t even in the top quarter million most popular blogs, joining the exchange scheme has been the best thing I ever did.

If you’re not taking part yet, and you would like to get some easy exposure for your blog, follow the instructions in my original post to get on board!

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