Entropy

Slashdot is chatting about how writers are finding the pressures of (pro) blogging to be too great. The New York times talks about how bloggers are under constant pressure to release a stream of content, all the time.

Michael Arrington, the famous TechCrunch blogger, is quoted saying

” ‘I haven’t died yet,’ said Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog. The site has brought in millions in advertising revenue, but there has been a hefty cost. Mr. Arrington says he has gained 30 pounds in the last three years, developed a severe sleeping disorder and turned his home into an office for him and four employees. ‘At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen. This is not sustainable,’ he said.”

Related articles

• Amalek Asks: Will Luke’s Blogging Kill Him? [via Zemanta]
• Is blogging so stressful that it should be considered “a young man’s game”? [via Zemanta]
• In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop [via Zemanta]

Every time I upgrade my Firefox 3 beta all my plugins stop working, and I’m almost always certain that there is no real reason aside from the version shift - there are no relevant changes etc.

The most critical of these is my new favourite blogging tool, Zemanta. As I’m sure you’ve noticed there have been no posts for 2 days because of this

So here’s how to force plugins to work on new versions.

Step 1: Nightly Tester Tools

Nightly Tester Tools is a plugin for Firefox (that will install) which allows you to do a few nifty things, one of which is force plugins to be compatible. Go download it now!

Step 2: Restart Firefox

This is a step on its own because it can be tricky. After installing Nightly Tester tools I had to use the Tools->Addons menu and tell it to update it and restart again to get it working. But, worry not, it is possible to use this on beta5. Do whatever it takes people.

Step 3: Use the Tool

Once you’ve got your nightly tester tools installed (you can tell as your titlebar will include a Build number), its time to enable Zemanta (or your other plugin).

Go into Tools -> Add-ons and select the extensions menu. Right click on Zemanta and choose to “Make Compatible“. Now restart Firefox; when you come back you’ll notice your Zemanta is running once again!

Step 4: Other Apps (Optional)

Note that you can do this for any plugin - be careful though because there are changes between versions. I can tell you that Zemanta runs fine on beta5; but other plugins might not - although to be honest its very unlikely in my opinion when we’re almost RC.

Related articles

• Zementa Brings a Semantic Layer to Your Blog [via Zemanta]
• Zemanta - Content Suggestion for Bloggers [via Zemanta]
• Experimental Wordpress 2.5 support [via Zemanta]

Zemanta is (currently) a Firefox plugin which throws your blogging into overdrive - it automatically suggests and inserts images, links, related links and tags into your blog posts in (currently) WordPress (even 2.5), Blogger and TypePad. Oh, and we love it.

Functionality

Zemanta works exactly how you’d want it - without any changes to your blog, no extra plugins, no settings - it inserts itself in the page and automatically gets suggestions.

After every 300 characters (or when you click it) Zemanta goes off and does its thing, finding images suitable for your content (from Flickr, Wikipedia etc) and related articles for you to insert. As I’ve said, this is all content based and works very well - have a peruse around the latest posts on the site to see some examples.

Once it has a set of data, you can click an image to have it automatically inserted into your post (formatting included), links to have the text in your page its discovered sent to their homepages (very snazzy) and articles to fill in a nicely formatted related articles page.

Functionality Gallery

Support

The Zemanta support staff and systems are both great. I recently queried (on their blog) WordPress 2.5 support and within hours there were comments here, on Entropy, explaining that it should work shortly. Zemanta automatically updated itself and my WordPress 2.5 began to work later that night!

See for yourself: The Post and Zemanta’s Blog.

Coming Soon

As if the functionality thats currently there wasn’t enough; Zemanta has also published a list of features that are coming soon! Correction: these are feature requests (which we hope will come soon

• Browsing through images and articles.
• LiveWriter plugin (this was massive)
• Zemanta logo at the bottom of posts being optional
• More links to different sites (apart from Wikipedia)
• Ability to prefer your old posts and blogs from the blogroll
• Spanish, German, Swedish, Chinese, Arabic, Hindii and other languages support
• Cleaner and nicer HTML we insert

Related articles

• Zemanta [via Zemanta]
• Rich blog content at the click of a button - Zemanta has gone live! [via Zemanta]
• Zemanta - Content Suggestion for Bloggers [via Zemanta]
• Trying out Zemanta [via Zemanta]

We’re officially rolling WordPress 2.5 now folks; so far the only down side is that my Zemanta has stopped displaying (it obviously doesn’t roll 2.5) and I’ve just discovered the rich text editors link popup is broken . See more on the release at these blogs –

• Dougal
• Photomatt
• westi on WP
• WordPress Blog
• Lorelle
• Weblog Tools Collection

If you are at all interested in having a popular or successful blog you’ll need statistics; and even if you aren’t its great to know who your users are and what they enjoy and dislike. Below is a review of various WordPress statistics plugins, with their pros and cons.

Before you start, some things you should know:

1. Ratings are not based on features alone. They take into account what you might use the plugin for, and how well it achieves that task!
2. I have left some out, let me know if I should include them. Specifically I chose to leave Reinvigorate out as its in an endless beta, and lately my stats don’t even update.
3. I haven’t included every single little feature of every app; if I’ve missed an important one let me know.

Read more »

 

If your a blogger or an aspiring blogger I’m sure you’re interested in making either the big bucks with your blog or simply a little something extra on the side. If so, then this is the guide for you.

In this guide, I will explain various different ways of getting passive income through your blog - by this I mean earning money off the users and pages you have without actively doing anything aside from blogging.

Sections

1. Apply For Programs - apply for the right advertising programs, in the right way.
2. Optimize your blog - using plugins, smarter techniques and more you will increase the search engine friendliness, RSS reach and general effectiveness of your blog as an advertising platform.
3. Correct Use - use advertising in the most effective way possible. Correct placement, sizing and more will help you to succeed.
4. Get Known and Get Statistics - get more hits on your blog, increasing your worth, and report on your changes.
5. Final Words

Read more »

Good news all ! You can stop the mails complaining - I’ve put the two themes I made for WordPress back up on the site; you can download/see them here.

Lifehacker has a great greasemonkey script to add filtering support to your Google Feed Reader, with full regex support (if you go that way).

“automatically highlights any items in Google Reader whose contents match any word in your matchlist. The script’s filtering does not remove posts from Reader, so you won’t miss any content—you’ll just have your attention drawn more closely to the matching items with the highlighting (though clearly a toggle option to truly filter matches would be useful). Google Reader Filter is free to install, requires Firefox with the Greasemonkey extension”

Whats the best way to read and to distribute your RSS? Lifehacker currently has an article for reader discussion and has linked to a site which has 14 Other Ways to Use RSS Feeds.

Undeniably RSS is one of the best things that has happened to the web after email. Not only has it made browsing a lot more productive, convenient, fun … you name it, but it has also introduced a number of new ways to interact with content that we could never have imagined before. While you’re most probably already familiar with the idea of RSS feeds and Feedreader (No? See this video) , there are several other ways you can make use of feeds.

If you’re looking for Contempt (the WordPress theme), its no longer hosted here but at Blogah!

Contempt Theme