Hello folks.
I’ve been pretty busy the last couple weeks, but I managed to find time to edit and upload another episode of the Mindcast, and do a little poking around the format to see how I could improve it a little. First, I found the absence of clear hyperlinks a nuisance, so now they appear with underlines. Then, as i was investigating what’s going on at the server end of things, I noticed a couple really cool things.
The first one was, since I switched to a more sensible permalink presentation that organized the peralinks to the posts by year, month, and title, rather than sequential order, i can now tell how many people read each post. Apparently, having permalinks that end in “/?p=221″ doesn’t get counted by my host’s tracker as a page, just a general hit. “/2007/08/26/website-refit-update/ gets counted. Now i can have a better idea about what people are reading. Which leads me to the next discovery.
Almost 5,000 people read my post about opinionated scientists! Phil Plait is directly responsible responsible for a good chunk of that, but indirectly, a bunch of other people helped popularize that post. i found that 3,500 people came over from StumbleUpon, one of many “social bookmark” sites. For those who don’t know about them, as I am learning, they are sites that allow people to post links to news, blog posts, podcasts, images - whatever - and bump them up or down depending on how good they are. So if someone writes something really good and it is submitted to one of these, the hundreds of thousands of visitors to those sites can rapidly vote them up and increase readership. Its a good way to find good tings to read, and readers to read your stuff.
Think of them like a news website like CNN or MSNBC, or even Fox News websites, but where headlining news is selected by the collective opinions of the readers, not CNN editors, MSNBC editors, or dittoheads, respectively. It’s one of the many things that fits in under the vague but current concept of “Web 2.0.”
I set about to add some social bookmark links, but getting a lot of them together looked like some work. I checke out the code at ScienceBlogs and at Bad Astronomy, and it looked complicated to get them all together and looking tidy.
So I found a good plugin for wordpress that supports a whole bunch of social bookmark sites, (except slashdot…) and makes a tidy little strip of buttons that appears along the bottom of my posts. It could also display on the bottom of each post summary on the main page, but I thought it looked too cluttered. So now, if you have signed up for some of these sites, or want to, you can click on the corresponding button beneath the post, and submit it - makes it a lot easier for people who want to spread the word. If you don’t know what each button is, simply hover your cursor over the button and it will tell you. I weeded out some of the less popular bookmarking sites that the plugin includes - so if you regularly visit one of them and want a convenient button - let me know and I’ll see if I can add it.
So if you want to Spread this Inoculation (and others), click away! (If you can think of a better slogan, let me know in the comments)
