Originally uploaded by thetejon

I hate the "I'm sorry I haven't updated my blog" posts, but I'd like to point out that I actually do have a really good excuse (Pictured at left).

Anyway, my excuse loves to look at herself in the mirror while she's being changed. I'm not sure what she thinks she's looking at, because I don't think she really has that self-awareness. But any time she's awake, not eating, and not screaming, I'm happy, so at this point I don't care.

People keep telling me that the six week mark is where it all turns around and gets easier. We're almost at three weeks. I have to say that, while I love my daughter and still can't believe she's real, the first few weeks of parenting are hard. I wasn't really prepared for this. It's cool, though. At least I have a photo subject that doesn't (can't) run away.

I posted a little while ago about my attempts to optimize my blog for search engines. I think it's working.

Take this example. This morning, I linked to an article on Prince of Petworth about a new restaurant opening in Columbia Heights, CommonWealth Gastropub.

Now, PoP is a near-deity in the greater Columbia Heights/Petworth/Logan/Shaw area. It's a good blog. I read it regularly.

I, on the other hand, am a relative unknown who complains too much.

PoP went to an early preview at CommonWealth and took pictures, then wrote an article about the experience.

I linked to the article, and offered very limited commentary.

Now, go do a little Google search for commonwealth dc gastropub. you will notice that item seven is my post.

The first item from PoP is item 23, and it's not even a link to the most recent article.

So, on one hand, you have a good blog that did some real journalism. On the other, you have a blog, where half the readership was at the author's wedding, that just linked to the real journalism. But I show up first on Google.

I've been re-added to the DC Blogs Live Feed and Blog Directory. I suppose that means I have to write something about DC. If you're interested in DC blogs, they have an extensive list, so you should go check them out. Or ask them to add yours, if you have one.

My friend with the marketing background has a new blog, and he's weighed in with his side of the full- or partial-text RSS feed discussion.

It is possible that I will upgrade to Drupal 6 tomorrow. If so, there may be some changes and some downtime for the site.

Or maybe I won't get around to it, and there will be nothing. But I thought I'd warn everyone paying attention, just in case.

Edit to add: No upgrade today. Didn't get a chance. Maybe next weekend.

I have a friend with a background in marketing. He's the one who sent me the Comcast complaining article. We've been talking about marketing and the internet.

The two of us come from completely different perspectives on how we consume content online. I've just introduced him to Google Reader and the concept of subscribing to an RSS feed. He seems to be enjoying it, and even shared an article with other people on his GTalk buddy list.

I complained to him that he shared a link to a NYTimes article that didn't have the full text in the RSS feed. This is a pet peeve of mine - I read almost no websites that don't offer full-text RSS feeds.

Techdirt talks about how full-text feeds are better. Feedburner does, too. But NYTimes.com doesn't do it. Are they stupid? I don't know.

A little Googling suggests that there's a lot of disagreement on whether or not a partial-text feed drives more traffic to the site. That is, if you have a feed that doesn't show the full article, do more people actually click through and come to your site, where you probably have ads? Or do most people (Like me) just skip it?

Techdirt makes the point that the real bulk of your traffic comes not from your regular feed subscribers, but from them sharing it with their friends or on their blogs. Things get passed around on the popular sites - when something hits the front page of Digg, it's probably going to show up on a lot of other popular sites. That can generate way more traffic than you'd ever get from your subscribers themselves, even if they clickthrough on every RSS item.

My friend says that NYTimes is not dumb, and they've probably researched where they make their money, and decided that partial feeds are the way to go. I'm less inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt, but I realize that the way I consume content is not the way everyone does, and I'm probably in the minority. We may be a growing minority, but NYTimes doesn't make its money on what people will be doing in 10 years.

I will always provide a full-text feed. But I don't make my living with this blog, so I have the luxury of doing what I want rather than what might drive more clicks.

I can't bring him around to my way of thinking, though. But I'm still working on it.

I wish someone had told me you had to enable the Blog API module before you could use all the cool blogging tools like Flickr's "Blog This" or Firefox plugin ScribeFire. I tried setting up both, and kept getting unhelpful errors. It looked like my username and password were wrong. This was frustrating, because I was sure my username and password were correct.

After significant Googling, I finally found a helpful explanation. And now it works perfectly. You can see the previous post, which I sent straight from Flickr.

So, hopefully now this page will be one more Google hit explaining that, if you want an external site or application to access your xmlrpc.php file, you'd better turn on the Blog API module.

I don't remember exactly when I started this blog, but tomorrow is the second anniversary of the earliest post still in existence. That's a long time.

I wrote a lot more about stuff in the news when I started. Maybe I should go back to that. I had more time at work to find things to write about then. Now I actually have to do work when I'm at work. It's really tough to find time for my hobbies during the day.

So, here's to another two years. Or more.

For those of you who read the site via the actual front page, rather than the RSS feed (Which, if Google Analytics and Feedburner are accurate and I'm reading the numbers correctly, is about 1/3 of you), do you ever look at "What I'm reading" on the right side of the page?

These are things I've come across on my RSS feed that I find interesting, but don't really have anything to say about.

I'm going to keep sharing things there regardless of who's reading, because I know at the very least, Mike looks at them on his Google Reader, and sharing them takes virtually no effort on my part. But I was curious if anyone looks at them, or has maybe found a site they didn't otherwise know about through them.

A bunch of hits on the last post, especially for a Friday night. It looks like people are watching stuff tagged with "Drupal" or "SEO" or something like that.

Anyway, at the advice of the commenters, I've replaced trackback with pingback, which requires less (no) effort and still accomplishes that two-way link between me and anyone who happens to link to me.

I also tweaked my robots.txt file.

So, we'll see what happens. Now I just have to keep writing things that people find interesting. Or, you know, start.