Holy Shmoly! » blogging

The death of blogging, again

Donncha O Caoimh — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 20:11:36 +0000

One of the videos from The Irish Blog Awards celebrated the repeated demise of Irish blogging.

Darragh Doyle and everyone else did a great job with this video. Check out Award winners, lots of great blogs there!

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How not to advertise a blogging event

Donncha O Caoimh — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 15:48:56 +0000

Don’t search for your event topic and spam the blogs you find.

At least make the effort to look up the blog author’s name and send them an email. I would have gladly plugged Kinsale Arts Week if they had been polite. Big Bad Fail.

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The Irish Blog Awards in Pictures

Donncha O Caoimh — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 22:16:18 +0000

As I may have mentioned once or twice before, we were at The Irish Blog Awards on Saturday night. Here are a few photos. They’re after the jump because there are 70 there and I’d hate to see them load every time someone loaded the front page of my site!

Gallery of shots from the photowalk to come tomorrow. Possibly over 100 shots in that. I do like to take photos don’t I?

BTW – Please Photoshop Grandad above. What’s he saying? Two example to follow ..

by Twenty Major (you had to be there!)

by Grandad himself!

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Do you read any Irish blogs?

Donncha O Caoimh — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 16:06:46 +0000

If you’re not Irish or living in Ireland, can you name an Irish blogger that you read on a regular basis? (Besides me of course!) And more importantly, why? Is it because of their niche, or is it their witty and insightful commentary?

I ask this because Kathy Foley blasted Irish blogger Twenty Major’s new book and proceeded to question whether the Irish blogosphere had anything to offer the world. Has the land of saints and scholars become a land of consumers without giving anything worthwhile back?

I haven’t read Twenty’s book so I can’t comment on that but I do not agree with her assertions regarding the Irish blogosphere. If you’d like to find out for yourself, here’s an easy way to immerse yourself:

The Technorati top 100 Irish blogs as maintained by Justin Mason.
Irishblogs.ie aggregates almost all the Irish bloggers out there.
Gastronom.ie is a food blog aggregator for all you foody types.
The Irish Blog Awards blog links to all the nominated blogs and winners each year.
And finally for the photographers there’s Pix.ie’s explore page and of course the Ireland and irishblogs tags on Flickr.

Happy reading!

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I'd rather be blogging

Donncha O Caoimh — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 10:08:13 +0000

What is your most precious commodity? Mine is time. That’s why I’d rather be blogging than twittering.

85 great photography sites suggested by the readers of DIY Photography, including my photoblog. Thanks for the link!
Mark celebrates the 25th birthday of the Commodore 64. Is it that old? Wow.
More: Wired Gallery, Interview with Jack Tramiel, Apple rejected by Commodore? (phew!)

With no money to build thousands of Apple II machines, Wozniak and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs both approached Commodore with the Apple II. “Chuck Peddle from Commodore came to the garage and he was one of about three people we showed the Apple II prototype ever,” Wozniak said.
Mark welcomes MTOS. (sort of)

PS. almost forgot, Alan Whelan of Trocaire emailed to ask me to mention their ethical Global Gift campaign to help, “poor families around the world this Christmas.” While we’re on the topic of Christmas charity, by supporting Bothar you can help send cows to needy families. A bizarre item on the radio a few days ago involved a reporter accusing Bothar of keeping poor people poor. He reasoned that Bothar need poor people to operate. Weird stuff.

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Verify your comment

Donncha O Caoimh — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 09:20:10 +0000

Verify your comment

As a final step before posting your comment, enter the letters and numbers you see in the image below.

This test is used to prevent automated robots from posting comments.

Oh dear. How many times have I clicked submit on a Typepad blog comment form and moved on to the next site only to accidentally come back hours later and discover the CAPTCHA waiting for me?

I don’t think I’ve lost a comment yet, but they could have put the CAPTCHA on the same page as the comment form. If that’s impossible, the comment form should warn the visitor that a second page needs to be filled out. It’s not rocket science.

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The most prolific commentators of June 2007

Donncha O Caoimh — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 11:51:02 +0000

Short and sweet, the people who left the most comments on my blog in June 2007 are:

Thank you guys for participating!

It doesn’t take much to get to the top of that list, but I will delete or ignore comments from people who I feel are just taking the mickey and leaving one or two word comments!

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Why blogs are better #368

Donncha O Caoimh — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 17:29:16 +0000

How else could I get on to Google Finance’s page on MSFT? It might be gone by the time you check it, but click the thumbnail for a screen capture. My boss at Tradesignals.com would have given his right arm for exposure like that!

Did I get many hits from there? Only 9 so far, but it was pretty cool to see that url pop up in my referrer stats!

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Dofollowing links in comments and trackbacks

Donncha O Caoimh — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 10:39:25 +0000

I’ve just installed the Do Follow Trackback and Do Follow Comments plugins so now the links in your comments and trackbacks will be ~~stalked~~ followed by Google and any other search engine or service that know about the rel='nofollow' link attribute.

It’s not a completely free lunch though. Any spam comments will be deleted, legitimate comments with spammy urls will have their URLs mangled. Check out this comment and this one. Those _ characters in the urls make them pretty useless.

There are 7,457 comments on over 4,500 posts here. That’s a lot of URLs to get some PR loving.

The change is active here on Holy Shmoly! and In Photos dot org.

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Welcome Dublin!

Donncha O Caoimh — Sun, 13 May 2007 17:51:06 +0000

It’s now easier than ever to use Google Analytics thanks to the interface revamp it’s gone through. Michele had the scoop yesterday and I’m very impressed. From your dashboard you can drill down to various aspects of your website’s traffic.

One of those is a clickable map of the world that eventually led me to the following map of Ireland. That’s a lot of traffic from Dublin, but it’s probably something to do with the way Internet traffic in the country is routed. That, or the fact that a quarter of the population live there. Welcome Dublin people to Holy Shmoly!

A few days ago I listed the keywords people use to visit my site but now it’s easier to find that information and dig deeper into archived traffic stats. Inside the new Analytics interface, go to “Traffic Sources” where you’ll find “Top Traffic Sources”. Click on the keywords for pretty graphs!

Update! Some people aren’t happy with the new upgrade. Chris Silver Smith thinks it’s a downgrade from the old interface.

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