83 Lines
Trevor Turk put together a WordPress theme using only 83 lines of PHP and 75 lines of CSS. That’s pretty amazing.
And pretty.
I’m using it here as my theme for a very long time to come.
Yes, I love it.
Here We Go Again (Moving to Tumblr)
After Posterous’ non-cool move with affiliate links, I’ve decided to move my blog over here to Tumblr.
I’ve had this blog on WordPress.com then a self-hosted WordPress plan for a long while then over to Posterous, a few static page iterations and now here on Tumblr.
I’m tired of moving it, so let’s hope this one sticks. Based on Tumblr’s past moves, they seem to be in this business for more than just quick bucks or exponential (spammy) growth.
I like that.
So, we’ll see.
Now I just need to figure out how to get all that content off of Posterous and over here. Looks like it might take some API spelunking.
Great Review of @Posterous
Years of building and maintaining my WordPress blog have resulted in my learning a lot about WordPress and getting a lot of grease under my fingernails. Weeks of using Posterous has resulted in a media-rich blog with several posts per week. Tell me which service is more powerful.
via suntimes.com
I started using Posterous primarily as a photo-blog back in September of ’08.
However, it’s transitioned into my full time personal blog as I’ve changed up the samharrelson.com domain into a static landing (pointer) page.
Posterous solves so many problems for me.
Thanks to Andy Ihnatko for the great review affirming my love and thanks to the Posterous team for a fantastic product that has renewed my love of posting.
1,000th Post
“Now, with the blogs, you can share your thoughts with up to 10 people.”
This is my 1,000th (published…a few dozen never saw the light of day, thankfully) post on CostPerNews.
CPN went live on Nov 1, 2006 and I had no idea where it was going (and still don’t). 19 months later (at an average of 52 posts a month), we’ve hit the magic 1k mark.
I knew in October of ’06 that I wanted to have a place where I could write as frequently or infrequently as I wanted and cover the emerging web2.0 space and the connections I was (and still am) seeing with traditional affiliate marketing. I came up with the name while mowing the lawn that Fall and ran inside to register the domain before I forgot. Luckily, I didn’t forget.
I can honestly say that this little blog has been the most important vehicle for my own personal brand and business, helping me to get into doors that wouldn’t have been opened otherwise and helping me to get to know some pretty incredible people along the way. If you’re wondering if you should start a blog, take it from me… yes.
So, thank you for being there and listening to my crazy ramblings about Twitter and Tumblr and RSS and open source over the past couple of years. I’ve sold this blog, quit this blog (twice), re-acquired this blog and redesigned it (at least 10 times). And here we are again.
I’ve grown a lot with this place and I look forward to growing even more with the next thousand posts.
Many thanks all!!
Sam
Disqus Trackbacks
Yay!
Our long international blogging conundrum is over.
Disqus FTW!
Disqus Blog » New: Enable Support for Trackbacks in Disqus: “Go to the Configure tab and scroll down to General Settings. Check the box and let it do its thing. This is our support for standard Trackbacks. More fun Linkback implementations still to come.”
However, this only works for the JS plugin, not the API plugin. Sorry, Jangro (seriously, head over to Jangro’s blog to see why that matters to some).
What Happened to Affiliate Bloggers?
Last Spring, it seemed as if the world of affiliate marketing would be saturated with bloggers. BUMPzee was riding high and everyone was trading links, trackbacks, comments and bumps.
It was the short lived golden age of affiliate blogging.
Don’t get me wrong, there are still some great places to read about affiliate marketing such as Shawn Collin’s AffiliateTip Blog, Scott Jangro’s blog, Linda Buquet’s 5 Star Blog, Mark’s 45n5 blog, Zac Johnson’s blog, ReveNews as well as many others that I’m surely leaving out. There are some great new blogs such as Trisha Lyn’s blog, but things don’t feel the same.
However, last year it wasn’t uncommon to get 10-15 “bumps” on a thought provoking post from BUMPzee that made you feel as if something unique was happening in the affiliate blogging space.
And it wasn’t uncommon to see many new and interesting blogs popping up addressing real affiliate marketing issues. Maybe it was BUMPzee’s influence? Maybe it was the market boom last year?
It just doesn’t feel the same.
What happened?
Magnify Publisher Simplifies Blogging
Magnify.net is releasing a very exciting new WordPress and MovableType plugin aimed at making it easier for bloggers to find and include images and videos into posts.
Basically, the plugin integrates easily and nicely into either a WordPress or MoveableType install and allows for a blogger to include a keyword relevant image or video to be embedded in a post within a few seconds.
As most bloggers know, finding relevant images or video content for a post can consume a great deal of time and often lead to frustration. So, the Magnify Publisher program definitely solves a much maligned problem.
Magnify Publisher searches through popular video sources such as YouTube, Metacafe, Veoh, Blip.tv, Google Video, AOL Video, RedLasso and a number of others. At the moment, Flickr is the only available image search source but Magnify CEO Steve Rosenbaum tells me that this will soon be expanded.
Here’s an example of the video search and embedding feature:
And here’s an example of the image search and embedding feature:
Perhaps most compelling is the ability to also directly and easily incorporate webcasts into a blog post. So, instead o recording a video on a webcam then uploading that video to YouTube then grabbing the embed code then embedding that code into a WordPress blog, a blogger can simply press a couple of buttons and instantly get their webcam video embedded into a post.
Here’s an example:
These are very innovative features from the Magnify team and definitely needed improvements to the current paradigm of blogging. When I spoke with Steve Rosenbuam today, he mentioned his ardent belief that popular blogs of the immediate future would be those that best blend the visual, video and text components of content creation rather than those that just focus on one specific medium.
Magnify’s Publisher plugin goes a long way in supporting his idea.
Disqus Now Has Seesmic Integration
Disqus continues to make blogging more enjoyable.
Now, you can enable video comments through Seesmic integration with Disqus. To turn this on, just head to the Configuration tab on the Disqus dashboard:
Give it a go in the comments if you’d like to test it out (you’ll see a “Record Video Comment” option).
I’m still not sold on the general concept of video commenting, but I know that some people prefer firing off a quick video rather than typing out a response. While I’d rather type out comments on most blogs, I do see tremendous value in encouraging people to participate in whatever way they feel comfortable.
Hats off to the Disqus (and Seesmic) team for making blogging fun again.
Todd Crawford’s New Blog
Affiliate Marketing Legend award winner and all around good guy Todd Crawford has a new blog…
Todd always has a unique perspective on things going back to his days with CJ, so definitely tune in and subscribe.