Thursday, January 1, 2009

Pieces of Things Housekeeping Forum


This post is a general forum related to general administration of the Pieces of Things blog.

23 comments:

Mr. Pony said...

Hey, does anyone have any objection to me going back in and cleaning up the keywords a little? I promise to leave in the big super-meta keywords that we've all been putting in to really get our point across, but there's some real data in there that I think I could tease out, and make our label cloud and cross-post navigation a little better. All opposed?

Galspanic said...

I wish you had done it without telling us, but hey.

Litcube said...

No objection here.

Ruby Tenneco said...

Yes.

Mr. Pony said...

* THIS COMMENT IS BORING. FEEL FREE TO IGNORE THIS COMMENT *

Okay, despite Ruby's objection, I went back in and tried to tidy up the keywords, just a little. You know what, though--there are just too many of them. So I narrowed my focus a little to just Japan. We talk about Japanese culture a lot, apparently, and it's not apparent in our Label Cloud or Related Posts (I know, OMG) because we use different keywords every time. Japan, Japanese, Insane Japanese, Awesome Japanese, etc. SO I went back and made sure that each post contained the keyword "Japan". Now it's, like the sixth most popular topic in out cloud! Who knew? Okay, so anyway:

1) If for some reason, there's some other topic that needs this treatment, let me know. I'm happy to go in and fix it.

2) When keywording, be inclusive. This will help your post rise to the top; be found, and read, should we ever get any readers.

That is all. As you were.

Fugu said...

Thanks for doing this, Pony! How about not getting rid of the unique tags though, such as awesome japanese. They are fun, almost part of the posts themselves, and add character. I would miss them. As long as posts include the main tag, the others can sit in the background, no harm done, and cheer the rest on.

And the lesser tags may actually be useful. Once the AIs take over and sort all our awesome posts on different unfathomable layers of awesomeness, we may find an underlying thread of awesome linking things together in ways we cannot yet comprehend!

Mr. Pony said...

I totally agree. As long as a "mainstream" tag is present, the point of tags is totally covered. the more unique tags add quite a bit of character to the post.

Of course, in this particular case, I fucked up, and converted both "awesome japanese" and "insane japanese" to "Japan". By the time I realized that this was unnecessary (as Fugu pointed out), and it made more sense to be inclusive and additive, it was too late.

We, our readers, and the AI God to follow us will just have to guess which posts about Japanese culture we thought were awesome, and which posts we thought were insane.

Litcube said...

I think the vast majority of Japanese culture I see on the Internet is both.

Galspanic said...

I'm fine with whatever tags, I just don't like tags being suggested, and supplanted in my label window while I type.

Mr. Pony said...

Then type faster!

Heeero said...

I kind of like it. It looks so lame when I put it in, but when Mr. Pony spiffs it up it looks pretty neat. Dare I say, refined almost.

Mr. Pony said...

DID YOU KNOW you can schedule posts? When posting, click the "Post Options" arrow, and change the date and time of your post. Enter a future date, and the post will go live on the site on that future date. Enter a date in the past, and the post WILL HAVE BEEN POSTED ON THAT DATE IN THE PAST!!! Or something like that. I'm not clear on the exact temporal mechanics involved in posting in the past. The future thing works, though.

Mr. Pony said...

"Just Saying" recently posted this link: http://lifehacker.com/5357742/move-from-blogger-to-wordpress-without-losing-google-rank.

I've often considered moving the blog to WordPress, because it seems like there's slightly more we can do there, but having only used Blogspot, I'm only familiar with Blogspot's drawbacks, and know nothing of WordPress'.

Does anyone have any experience using WordPress? What do we gain? What do we lose?

We already have our own domain that redirects fine to the blog http://piecesofthings.net--some douchepocket wanted $15,000 U.S. for piecesofthings.com). How else would this help us? I'm completely willing to do the conversion, if we think it's worthwhile.

Fugu said...

Why the search box on the right-bar-thing so high? there's one in the top bar on the left and neither of them work well to begin with. I'ma gonna move it back down. K? K!

Plus, I added something.

Plus, how would you guys feel about increasing the width? I'd feel good about it, btw.

Mr. Pony said...

Sure, neither of them really works, but they both don't work differently. I'm cool with expanding the width, but not by too much--the width of the current column makes the text very readable. Also, I have no idea how we look on a non-wide screen. Anyone?

Currently, our media width is about 475px.

I heartily endorse the other addition you spoke of. The man is the Light of Twitter.

Litcube said...

I'd trust Pony with the decision on whether or not to increase the width. Most folks are still on 800 x 600, right? I'm running 1920 x 1200.

Mr. Pony said...

Only 15% of our visitors have screens smaller than 800px wide, according to Google Analytics. While we could stand an increase in width, my concern is the readability of our column. Very wide columns of text are easy to get lost in, and discourage scanning. Scanability is the key to gaining new readers. Since our design is boring, that is.

Fugu said...

Understood about scanning. It's really no big deal, just that I tend to see a lot of black on either side of the screen. I was only thinking of maybe a few pixels. Maybe an even 500px? Or a fantastic 521? Most blogs I visit tend to be there or a little bigger. But really no big deal. It looks like it would take a bit of effort to fix the corners and margins and everything, so really, no need for just a few pixels.

For fun and reference:

io9 505
make 615
boingboing 525
lifehacker 500
gizmodo 500
geekdad 675
badastronomy 625
geekology 460
pinktenticle 475
neatorama 500

Mr. Pony said...

500's fine with me. Maybe we can mess around with larger sizes, too, or different main column/sidebar distributions. Ruby enlargened the main column last time, but I'll take a look when I have a moment.

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Fugu said...

After deleting a bunch of spam about penis enlargement, I have added a motherfucking captcha to post comments. Are we okay with this? It says this shouldn't affect blog authors. Become a blog author if you're not! I'm not sure what that means!

Mr. Pony said...

Any spammers wishing to become blog authors so you may post without entering the captcha, please post a valid email address here.

Heeero said...

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