Edit: This applied to my old blog. I’m just leaving it here for the sake of posterity.Â
Hello everyone. I usually ruminate all deep and stuff on here, but I figured that I would take you on a guided tour of the various doodads that reside in my toolbar. I blame Cam!
The first and best add-on to my blog. It allows me to catalogue my books and let everyone else know what I’m reading via the highly customizable blog widget. I have mine set to show the five most recent books. Alternately, you could set it to show a random list or a list of books with a certain tag. (Tagging will be explained in the next section) A free account allows you to catalogue up to 200 books.
Del.icio.us Tag Cloud
Tagging is all the rage these days. If you’re a geek, anyways. Quite simply, tagging is a way to categorize information. I tag every one of my blog posts with descriptive words which I then bookmark on del.icio.us. The Tag cloud I have allows you to see which tags I’ve used most often: Bigger fonts=more frequently tagged. If you click on the link in the Cloud or at the bottom of any post, it’ll take you to a page where you can view any and all other posts of mine that are tagged the same. And from there you can easily click “Popular” to see what other things out on the Web have been tagged the same way. Careful not to get lost in cyberspace!
This technology allows me to keep track of the comments that I make on other people’s blogs. The sidebar widget also allows anyone reading my blog to see where else I’m reading and commenting. It’s a good step to making the blogosphere a little more two-way and relational. Sorta.
Site Feed
I “burn” my site feed through FeedBurner. If you register your site feed with them, it makes it really easy for people to add your site feed to a news reader. Essentially, any site with a feed can be subscribed to via a feed reader. I use Google Reader to automatically check who has made recent blog posts instead of having to check all the different blogs. Click on my site feed and it should help you figure out what’s what with feeds and such.
This has the most “fun” factor I’d say. Register your site with them and they’ll give you a daily map of where in the world people are visiting you blog from! Pretty cool! If you happen to be viewing it today, you’ll see nothing because I just signed up for it. Come back tomorrow!
Thus concludes the tour of my uber-geekiness. I hope you endured the ride.
5 responses to “Uber-Geek”
my husband is such a nerd.
Your husband is such a nerd. But I think it’s great. =)
Matt, isn’t it nice to have a little bit of control? Some clear lines, a great colour scheme, and a customizable sidebar. If only we could extend this kind of organization to the rest of life.
Predictable is attractive in a weird way.
Matt, I echo Jac on this one…….
How on earth do guys like you and Cam stay current on all of this shit? Seriously. How do you do it?
But………
It was a good and useful post. I might look into the library deal for my blog.
Cam: Yeah, control is nice. But the terrible thing about technology is that you begin to believe that you should be in control of all of your life. Submission is so out of control.
Tony: I picked up all of this stuff from looking at other blogs. I see something I want and I say “I want that” and then I figure out how to make it happen.