Liz wrote a post on why do givers not ask to be paid, something that I’ve been wondering this last week or so. I’ve received lots of thankyou emails and comments over the years on this blog from users who have been helped from the posts on this blog. I’ve also read other blogs where people have mentioned that they have made some money from donations on their website/application purely by having a donation button on there. After all if you don’t make it easy for users to donate or even ask them, then it’s unlikely they will.
Therefore I’ve been considering putting something like a paypal donation button on the blog posts so that if a post has helped someone then maybe they would like to donate. If it’s possible I’d like to only put it on pages where users have been referred by Google or other search engines. This way regular users who read the blog via the web wouldn’t get the donate button, rss readers wouldn’t get it, but those who I’ve really helped by providing answers would get the button on the page.
I’ve previously not put something like this on the website as it has always been my personal record of solutions that I have come across in my daily life and I like to help other people – getting the thank you emails and comments make my day (and they still do).
So what do you the readers think of this idea? Do you think I’m selling out or do you think it is a good idea? How many of you click the adverts on this blog already? (Some already do as I make a little money from adsense but not much).
Kristen got a book out of the library, No one cares what you had for lunch, which has 100 ideas to use when you get bloggers cramp and can’t think of anything to write about on your blog. Ideas range from “Find the objects of your affection” and talk about it to “Blow your budget” – what would you spend 10 million dollars on? Ironically I opened the pages at random and the topic was “Dig in” – what makes your mouth water – talk about your perfect meal……
I’ve been invited to join the Friends In Tech team as a blogger which was a nice offer and an honour to take up. I’ll still be posting over here but will have some content on their site too now.
My first post was about the firefox upgrade to 1.5.06 and an easy way to get extensions to work afterwards.
Mike McBride was also invited to post and his first post is about having an appreciation folder in your email client.
If you read either of our blogs you will probably be interested in some of the other Friends in Tech blogs and their podcasts.
The Blogroll is back. Not sure why it got confused but after removing it, copying the code into a test.php which worked fine and then copying the code back into the MT template, it’s all worked fine again.
It’s great as there are a couple of blogspot blogs that don’t seem to have an RSS feed, but I can get notification that they have been updated via this mechanism – it also enables Kristen to read the blogs without an rss reader too.
Not sure how long it has been going on, but it looks like blogrolling is having some funnies with the links. For some reason blogrolling sends the html with single quotes around the parameters in the a tag. Something is escaping the single quotes with backslashes so the urls get broken. Anyone else noticed this and know when it started happening?
I signed up for a beta invite to cocomment this morning and got an invite code a couple of hours later. Unfortunately it doesn’t work in MovableType (yet) but it does work in WordPress and blogger. I’ll start using this to track most of my blog posts on the web when possible. I did find that the default installation of redirectremover extension screwed up the bookmarklet (and also screwed up my url123.com bookmarklet too) so disabling that made it all work properly.
Blogging has hit the mainstream when an ad at the cinema advertises mycoke.com where you can have a blog (and do other stuff) on the coke site. I was quite amazed that this was shown on an ad, but then again the film we went to see was a sci-fi one, Aeon Flux, so I guess Sci Fi people enjoy blogging?
The film was pretty good with some nice special effects although there were a couple of moments where it dragged on and I almost fell asleep! It is similar to the matrix but not as cliched and thankfully they didn’t do that bullet stop motion thing.
A couple of my workmates have been pointed towards this blog when they need technical data that I’ve come across in the past. We were also discussing the need to let other techs know when our tools subdirectory is updated with new content (such as the mbsa visio plugin mentioned in the previous directory). I mentioned that a blog was needed and we thought that we could use one of the notes blog templates that is out there. We then thought that it would be a good idea to use the blogging facility within sharepoint as we do not have much experience with the software and this would give us real world experience in using sharepoint AND having an internal (and possibly an external) blog at the same time. Hopefully this will get approved next week and we can start to use it. Now I just need to find a RSS reader for Lotus Notes to read peoples updates. (We were originally going to use the KnowledgeBase discussion template within Notes but that doesn’t notify us whenever there is new content like it is supposed to do)
Tomorrow (Fri) is Absoblogginlutely’s second birthday so we gave it a birthday cake
The Brother in law,Dave, is in the background. We then discovered that pumpkins are made of magnets
(No we weren’t drunk when we took these photo’s and it was actually Katies birthday yesterday – hence the “cake”)
It’s taken them long enough, but google now have a dedicated blog search which seems to be pretty uptodate. It didn’t take them long to index the content of Absoblogginlutely at all. It will be interesting to see how long it takes before this gets added to the main google site (shame this isn’t an option for it to be added with their personalisation features) and also to see if they add other features similar to feedster. If they keep it like it is at present then they will do well – Feedster seems to be bogged down with all the features they keep adding but (in my experience) are very slow to fix problems with claiming feeds etc.
Thanks to John Hesch for the headsup