Bye Bye Bloglines - sob

Sad to hear that Bloglines will be shutting down its servers, just over a week away, on 1 October 2010.

I've used Bloglines as my primary blog reader for some years. Sometimes a simple uncluttered interface can be so much easier to use than something that tries to do all the bells and whistles.

Unfortunately this blog, or at least the counter of subscribed readers is going to take a hit with bloglines shutting down. Around half of my subscribed readers (22), at least according to feedburner stats, use bloglines to read this blog.

So dear readers I would appreciate it muchly if you were able to transfer their subscriptions over to another blog reader. Thanks to a recommendation of a friend I am trying out Google reader. This link shows you how to download your subscriptions from Bloglines and upload them into Google reader, so you don't have to go entering all your blog subscriptions in again.

Another option is to subscribe by email. If all else fails put this into your blog reader.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/JoeHendren

Since Bloglines came along all those years ago, it is clear that blog readers have fundamentally changed the way people read blogs. While they certainly make it more convenient, I suspect they are one reason the smaller blogs do not get as many visitors as they used to, and don't attract as many comments. I am comparing the situation to when I first started blogging over six years ago now, and even saying that I feel old. Despite this I suspect the advent of blog readers has increased readership overall.

Another change, which I am not sure is for the better is that some blog readers have presented only the first few lines of a post as a teaser, rather than the entire post. Some blog owners have adopted this format so that readers are forced to click through from a blog reader to the site to read the entire post. In some cases this may be motivated by wanting to keep their visitor count up. Personally I find all these click throughs annoying - if I want to read something I want the entire post on screen thank you very much. Sometimes I don't bother reading blogs that force me to do a click through to read anything. Even Public Address!

It is also possible this 'teaser' culture has encouraged people writing on blogs to structure their posts more like news stories.

Be interested on peoples thoughts on these blog related ramblings. Also interested to hear what other blog readers people use, and how they find them.

Currently AFK

As some may have gathered I am currently AFK - away from keyboard.

I do intend to return near the end of this month when I have regular internet access again.

In the meantime, I am pleased to be still receiving interesting responses to this post.

See ya soon.

This blog is now five years old

This blog is now five years old. I don't think I will be in trouble with the Ministry of Education if I do not enroll my blog at school, even though it has reached the age it should start compulsory education :)

Sitemeter Hits since May 2, 2004: 42876
Hits last month: 932

I know by the standards of some blogs these numbers are small, but I am happy being in the little leagues. I know I could get much higher traffic if I changed format to a high number of short postings, instead of blogged down long ones. I don't intend to, as I see no point in being a news service - there are plenty of websites that cater for that. Instead I saw more value in reflections and analysis after the immediacy of the news had died down, as I don't think this is something the mainstream media do particularly well. So I aim to write the kind of things I value myself, in the hope there a few more people in the world who value the same kind of thing.

Comments and feedback from readers is welcome :)

PS: This post is a little late as I had a fun weekend at the MayDay celebration at Blackball on the West Coast - 101 years since the famous miners strike. Yeah, I know, most people would head along to the 100th anniversary instead :)

Joining the blackout

For more information on the reasons behind the blackout please click here

40,000 hits

This blog clocked up 40,000 hits on 30 January 2009. I started this blog on the 30th of May 2004.

Also did some spring cleaning of the link list. Some more to do but that will do for tonight.

Possible lack of bloggage

Tonight I am getting on a plane to the Philippines. Officially its a work trip, but I have extended my stay in order to meet some more of the locals and see a bit of the country. Looking forward to travelling again. Last night I began to remember all my quirky backpacker travelling tips, learnt while on the road in Europe a few years ago.

I hope to do some travel related writing while I am there, but I do not know how much time I am going to have with access to a net connection. I will let you know when I am back :)

test post

Is blogger publishing correctly?

No recent posts due to internet issues

I haven't been able to post as much as I would like recently due to internet issues. Over the weekend my internet went from being slow to non-existent.

I hope to get it sorted soon.

I'm still here, honest

Hiya, apologies for lack of bloggage recently, normal transmission will resume soon. Most likely when I have completed moving into my new flat this weekend.

Happy Birthday Blog - You are 3 today

Sitemeter Hits since May 2, 2004: 20618

On my first anniversary I reported hits of 2527.
On my second anniversary I reported hits of 12741

So on a year by year basis, numbers are a little down on last year - I blame full time employment!

In my first post I looked at the 2004 decision of the Government to raise the parental income thresholds for student allowances. I showed, using budget figures to back me up, that Labour were not being as generous as they wished to appear, as these changes were accompanied to significant cuts in elligibility for student allowances, such as the removal of the ability to apply for independent circumstances on the basis of supporting yourself through work for two years.

I found it quite interesting to look back on this post, especially in the context of the interest free loan policy. In 2004, I called on the Government to face the fact that significant amounts of "student debt" was never going to be paid back - its good to see interest free loans - as this is a recognition of this policy reality. I also note that there has been a change in Minister.

Yet after over 7 years of a Labour dominated government there has not even been an attempt to come up with a better means testing system, let alone a universal allowance. So no Jordan, the call for universal allowances is not a call for more middle class subsidy*, because the current means testing does not work. Well heeled parents are able understate their income if they happen to run a business. Have a rich parent who left your family years ago and has never given you a dime - no allowance. Fair? No.

The number of students actually recieving an allowance has continued to drop while Labour has been in Government. Given many of the current Labour front bench spent years in the 1990s making political mileage out of National's means testing system when they were in opposition, one might have thought they actually might have done something about it.

Oh that turned out a bit longer than expected!

* Working for Families, with its high thresholds is a much more significant example of 'middle class subsidy'. It also doubles as corporate welfare for underpaying employers.

20,000 visitors

On Monday evening this blog saw its 20,000th visitor. Someone on an Xtra connection who appears to have clicked on a direct link to my post explaining how raising the drinking age will only raise the hypocrisy.

Apologies to blog for failing to mark an important anniversary earlier!

Switch blogger

I was putting off upgrading to the new blogger software in case of problems, but tonight the new blogger claims to be out of Beta and insisted I make the switch. If you spot any obvious issues please leave a comment and tell me.

Apologies for the lack of posting of late. I have been juggling being busy with work and getting myself settled in a new city. A lot of the busy around work is self inflicted, but I am really enjoying my job (well 95% of the time) and feel I am doing stuff that is worthwhile. I hope things settle down when I get myself into my new flat - next step is to find a flatmate who wants to live in Onehunga.

And thanks to all the new blogs that have linked here in the last month or so. Linkage is on its way soon.

May Day 2006: Join the Left Wing Conspiracy

As a way of marking International Workers Day I can now announce I have joined the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy.

Yup the title is ironic, as a real conspiracy would have to be more than a collection of RSS feeds of left wing blogs from different parts of the world. Still it is good reading nevertheless :)

Actually most of the blogs appear to be Canadian based at present (not necessarily a bad thing!), but I would expect the conspiracy to become more 'vast' as time goes on.

So if you currently write a blog, and you are not, as MyBlahg put it, a 'clownservative' you should consider joining the conspiracy!

As the NZ blogsphere appears to be quieter this year, most notably among the left, I intend to help attempt to remedy this by making more linkage with left wing blogs overseas. So the emergence of the VLWC is indeed timely and welcome :)

Cellphone etiquette II : I bet the Dom to it

On Thursday 10th of November I made a post about Peter Dunne's insensitive use of a cellphone during Rod Donald's funeral, after Dean Peter Beck had politely requested that all moaners ensure their cellphones were turned off. It was a little scoop I came across after attending Rod's funeral in Christchurch.

Today the Dominon Post includes this in its (offline) diary section (hat tip Frog).
"Though he’s no friend of the Greens, United Future leader Peter Dunne made a point of going to last week’s funeral service for party co-leader Rod Donald, with whom he apparently shared a devotion to the cellphone. His was heard to chirp repeatedly in the minutes after Cathedral Dean Peter Beck had made a point of requesting that morners turn them off."

A good example of the Dominion Post being quick to the news - only a week behind New Zealand blogs :)

Today does not exist

A little experiment. Will Blogger allow me to post on September 31st? Can I make a post on a day that does not exist?

Update: Bah, no it doesn't - that extra day would be useful - it would raise the number of posts per month ever so slightly :)

Life and Death in the blogsphere

Over the past month a number of authors of established blogs have decided to give up blogging, while a number of new blogs have sprung up out of cyberspace. While Xavier of About Town has decided to give it a break, I do hope he springs up again on another blog sometime in the future.

While I recognise blogs with a daily posting frequency do get read more widely and more often, I do wonder about how sustainable this is. Over a year a great number of things in a person's life can change, most notably the time spent in wage slavery employment, that can adversely affect the amount of time a person has to research and blog. Of course there are some very notable and worthy exceptions, such as DPF and No Right Turn, who have managed to post frequently without blogburnout.

Blogs are very similar to other publications such as newspapers and magazines - a great many start in a blaze of enthusiasm, only to run out of puff after a few editions. On starting this blog just over a year ago, I aimed to post two or three times a week - an average I have, by and large, been able to maintain.

I see little point in a blog that just parrots other blogs or the general media. Many of my postings are things I have been mulling about for a couple of days. IMHO the modern media too often falls into the trap of simply reporting a constant stream of 'facts' as they appear at the time, without analysis or contemplation, when such activity is often the key means of identifying the meaning and purpose of current events.

For me, blogging is a hobby that fits in well with my other interests. I find blogging a useful way to collect my thoughts on a particular issue, and speaking more personally, I use it as a means to fight an inbuilt perfectionism, a character flaw that makes it hard for me to write anything, even when I really want to. I sometimes use my blog like a public sketchpad - a couple of my entries I have extended into longer articles that have been published elsewhere.

So despite recent incidences of linkdeath elsewhere in the blogsphere, this blog is set to continue.

Don't blog at work, start a blog for your work!

Earlier this week Span posted on the ethics of blogging/reading blogs at work.

Myself, I have found a cunning solution to this quandary. Make a blog for your work!

As 'Resource Designer' at the Mental Health Education and Resource Centre in Christchurch, part of my job is keeping the website updated.

A month or so ago my boss and I were discussing ideas for the redevelopment of the website. He said he would like to develop an electronic newsletter for MHERC that would cover latest news in mental health, the latest books in our library, local information and 'informed comment' on recent research. I convinced him he could be talking about a 'blog', especially as the content from a blog could be easily reused in a newsletter sent out by email.

As far as I know we are one of the first NGOs/community groups in New Zealand to have a blog.
There is also some scope for further development. A number of people from my work are involved in a weekly radio programme on Plains FM about mental health, with a special focus on 'consumer' issues. People were enthusiastic when I mentioned it might be possible to have mp3s of the radio show downloadable from our website/blog. We now have the ok from Plains FM to do it, so its all go. Files are approximately 11 meg, so I am hoping people will not have to download the whole file before they can listen to it. Does anyone know if MP3 playing progs (such as WMP) will automatically stream (ie download while it plays) - is there a nice way to control this?

I guess it is it is good to be enthused by the stuff I am doing at work :)

Happy Birthday Blog

This blog is now one year old.



Sitemeter Hits since May 2, 2004: 2527
Hits last month: 667

Blog now over 2000 hits old

Big day for this blog on Tuesday. Over 100 hits in 24 hours, as the counter registered over 2000 hits since May 2 2004, for my website and blog. Over 250 hits for April already, making it likely this month will be a record.

Number of Hits Month by Month (2 May 2004 - 7th April 2005)

In October I moved from a Livejournal engine to using Blogspot. A very worthwhile move as you can see.

Treatise on value - what-a-yer

Commenting on the phenomenon that is blogsphere, Span is concerned that there appear to be more committed bloggers on the right than on the left. This is based on SageNZ analysis of the blog stats, separated by political alignment. Its interesting, but certainly not the final word on value.

Personally I am not too worried. Those on the right often emphasise quantifiable increases in production, often at the expense of quality. I suspect only a right winger would attempt to judge the value of blogs purely based on numerical posting frequency, site hits or comments received.

Sadly the State Sector Act 1988 judges our public service in a similar fashion, artificially in terms of 'outputs'.

I often suspect this emphasis of the right is driven by a simple form of logical positivism, which holds that if something cannot be measured it cannot exist or is not worth worrying about. It’s like reducing 'intelligence' to a score on an IQ test. It’s not a very effective philosophy of science, just as choosing a school on a basis of a league table is not very effective either.

Although I would like to post more frequently, I am not about to work in a blogging sweatshop where the arguments will fall to pieces like a cheap pair of shoes :)