My sister and I have been engaged in a dialog about the merits of weblogs versus traditional Web sites and it’s evolved into a quite interesting discussion. She asks: “I still don’t see how a blog would be better for me
than a web site. I don’t see why a person would want to come to my site
often to see what I’m up to.”
A pal of mine who is a prolific writer but not so much of a techie asked me the following question: “I’ve just heard that feedster added a feature where I can automatically ping them when I have new entries for my Weblog. I use Movable Type daily, but I’m darned if I know how to add a new ping host to my blog configuration. Help!”
A technical wizard pal of mine asks: “I have all sorts of challenge/response barriers to comment spam on my Movable Type weblog, but occasionally someone goes through the work of identifying themselves and still leaves some silly spam comment. I want to delete it, but right now I get the email notification of the new comment, then have to log in to the administrative interface, find the comment, and delete it by hand. Quite a hassle. Isn’t there a better solution to this?”
More than once, readers have written to me, asking if it was possible to track an RSS feed from a Weblog or news site with a shell script. Sounds kinda wacky, but in fact, it’s a very good use of a shell script, as the following rather extensive entry — including source code! — demonstrates. If you’re a bit confused by the following, you might want to consider picking up a copy of my best-selling Wicked Cool Shell Scripts.
If you run a weblog (aka “blog”) you’ve probably already figured out that you can add Google Adsense to all your pages and make a few bucks from visitors (though don’t forget to read some of the many articles on Free Web Money that talk about ad placement, etc. Start with Improving your Adsense Click Thru).
What you might not have realized is that there’s sufficient traffic in the world of Weblogs that some new networks are popping up targetted specifically to the weblog-reading crowd.
This is a kinda tricky one, but it was based on some inspiration I got when working on my Real Life Debt Weblog: could I figure out a way to incorporate weblog data into non-blog pages? The answer is, yes!
For this experiment, I decided that I’d like to have a new sentence on the intuitive systems home page that always showed the two most recent entries in my intuitive life weblog…
