Table of contents for What works for me

1. What works for me – Part 1: the basic tools
2. What works for me: WordPress Plugins

This is the first post in a series that will look at various elements of blogging, and what I’ve found to work for me. This is hardly a comprehensive list about blogging, or a best of the best list. It’s simply stuff that I’ve tried, that I’ve had success with. It may not work for everyone, and there may (and in many cases are) probably better options or solutions. But hopefully this will prime some discussion and I look forward to feedback and letting others know what works for you.

The Blogging Platform

WordPress is my tool of choice. I started on Blogger and it served me well for a very long time. But 2 years ago I got to the point where I needed functionality that just wasn’t available in Blogger. Blogger has since added quite a bit of that functionality, like categories for example. But because of the hundreds of plug-ins available with WordPress, I don’t think Blogger can ever really catch-up at this point.

Now with WordPress there are two options, a hosted version called WordPress.com and a version you host yourself. There are advantages to the hosted version. The big 2 as I see it are:

1. It’s free. It costs nothing. No hosting costs are required. No domain needs to be registered. It’s completely free and not a bad route to go if you’re unsure of how committed you are to this blogging thing.
2. You don’t have to know anything about programming, or maintaining a web site. It’s all taken care of for you. The software is updated automatically as new versions come out. It’s all handled for you which definitely has an appeal in terms of time, and expertise.

Still, I use the .org version. I want control over everything, including access to all the great plug-ins that exist. I also want control over back-ups and control over my content into perpetuity.

Now mind you, I’m not a web expert. I have some programming experience, but none of it is with PHP – the language that WordPress is coded in. And even with that limited knowledge I’m able to get by.

As for the cost, that is really pretty minimal because there is lots of cheap hosting out there.

Hosting

I currently use Dreamhost (aff link) and have been very satisfied for the last year and a half. There is more bandwidth and storage than I’d ever need, plus I can host multiple domains and subdomains. And most importantly the price is rights. I pay $100 a year and there are numerous codes to get you discounts. For example, typing in BBCHEAP will result in $50 off your order.

I’ve had pretty good success with uptime and customer support and only experienced one extended downtime. There have been some rare, short 1-2 hour hiccups but those are more a nuisance than anything else.

A nice feature of Dreamhost is the ability to 1 click install a number of software packages, including WordPress. And if you use the 1 click install option to set up your initially, you can take advantage of it for upgrading your blog as well. This further reduces your need to know anything about running a website and allows you more time to focus on writing.

Prior to Dreamhost I used Cornerhost. Cornerhost was a much smaller company, and I enjoyed the individual attention and being able to IM with the owner of the company when I needed help. However, with the small size of the company (basically 1 guy) it led to some very extended downtimes with very little communication.

Domain Registrar

There’s some value in having your own domain name from the start of your blog. It’s easier for people to remember the name, and a name without a blogspot or wordpress in the address can help give the blog an identity of its own. Not to mention there’s some SEO juice from a domain name that contains the same words your site is about.

I’ll admit it, I was a sucker for the Super Bowl commercials and use GoDaddy. I don’t really know how much differentiation there is with registrars, but I’ve been happy with Godaddy. The interface is easy to use, and the prices are competitive.

Feed management

I love Feedburner and use the service to manage all my feeds. What I love the most is that it provides stats on how many subscribers you have, and what feed readers they use. There are also stats to show you which items are clicked through most frequently.

It also incorporates email subscriptions giving some of your less tech savy readers an option.

Other features make it easy to change the appearance of your feed and add feed flares such as the ability for people to email posts or see how many comments have been left on a post.

Blog editor

While I often use the built in editor in WordPress, sometimes I get tired of toggling between various windows as I write a post. So I also use Scribefire extensively. Scribefire is an add-on for Firefox that splits your browser window in half. You can drag text from websites in to the editor, and be looking at the various pages while you write. It’s a great, and most importantly free, tool that enhances my blogging productivity.

So these are the foundation elements for me when it comes to blogging. I’d love to know what others use to set up the foundation for their blogs. The next article in the series will look be WordPress specific with a listing of the plug-ins I love.

I love working with databases, and data, and especially baseball data. I thought I was pretty good at it, which is why when a book called Baseball Hacks by Joseph Adler came out a year ago I figured that I didn’t need it. On a whim I decided to get it a couple weeks ago and now I’m kicking myself for not getting it sooner.

Already it has helped me to get all of the retrosheet event files into a database for manipulation and inspired me to take on a new project for this season. The book contains information on spidering websites for data, working with the resulting files, and getting those into a database format.

This book isn’t for everyone. If you’re a blogger that doesn’t really do the stats thing, then you won’t see a lot of value. Also, if you don’t have any programming or database experience it will probably prove overwhelming. All of the code used in the book is made available, and the programs I haven’t altered have worked fine. However after reading this book you won’t be a programmer – although it may inspire you to learn more.

The bulk of the book talks about PERL and MySQL. Neither are areas I have much experience with, but there was enough there that I could make sense of the scripts, or take them and adapt them to Visual Basic where I have more familiarity.

I haven’t even reached the 2nd half of the book where the author talks about using R to perform a host of interesting analyses.

If plowing through retrosheet files is fun for you, I think this book can be a great addition to your library. The value as a blogger is that you could come up with something unique that could attract attention to your site.

In the past I went one of 3 routes. The cleanest was probably to mark up a table using HTML. However I always find this to be time consuming and just a pain. But the display of the data was always crisp when I was done.

Another alternative was to dump the data into notebook, line up the columns, and then paste it in between some PRE tags. This was easy, but it didn’t always render so nice. The tabs would display differently between Firefox and IE and if the table was too wide it could kill your layout.

The 3rd option was make my table in Excel, and then screenshot it and turn it into an image. This is too bad but it requires a whole additional step of trying to get a nice compact image file. It also is a pain for those time you realize that you made a mistake. Editing it means doing the entire process again. Plus your readers can’t really manipulate your data on their own (this could be a good or a bad thing).

But with Google Spreadsheets everything is much easier now.

1. Importing: You can do all your work in Excel like you probably already have been. But now when you’re done you can import that file into Google Spreadsheets. You know have the information online and you can still do many of the manipulations you need to. You can also export it back to Excel if the need strikes you.
2. Portability: You now don’t have to be at your computer to work with your files. You can do it anytime you’re connected to the internet. Like maybe those time you publish a post at night, go to bed, and get to work only to realize you’ve made an error. (but you probably aren’t blogging at work now are you:-))
3. Distributability: You can publish your spreadsheet in a variety of formats. Available options are PDF, HTML, embedded HTML via iframe (great for displaying in your posts-more on this in a minute), and CSV. You can make it available to everyone to view, or specify people who have editing rights.
4. Collaboration: It’s great for those group projects. Specify the other authors, or readers, who you’d like to add to your work. It tracks all the revisions (which you can subscribe to an RSS feed of) in case you need to roll anything back. Another form of collaboration is instead of posting only summary data, you can make it all available. Your readers may find new things in the data that you might have missed. Or other bloggers might pick something up giving you link-love back.
5. Embeds: Under Publishing Options select HTML to embed in webpage and you can specify the range of cells and the size of the iframe. Just drop it in your post and you’ve got yourself a no muss-no-fuss data table.
6. Dynamic: Have you ever thought about providing some sort of feature but figured it was too hard to maintain – like say a table of payroll information? You get it all built, and then it changes. Well if you build it in GS, updating becomes a breeze. Not only is it easier to manipulate in a traditional spreadsheet than in HTML, wherever you’ve linked or embedded that spreadsheet will automatically reflect the edits.

Google Spreadsheets, Excel

As someone who struggles with the display of content, Google Spreadsheets has become a great way to spend more time working with data, than having to format it.

The site helps to manage all the conversations occuring across the blog world. In addition to aggregating various posts, it also sorts them and displays the results in tag clouds. The options that are currently in place are by player and by team.

The site also takes the hot topics and groups them into discussions. For example, it has gathered all the posts related to the Arroyo for Pena trade and for the Alfonso Soriano situation.

It also make it easy to identify what are the most popular topics and players.

As for what it means for bloggers, it could mean additional traffic and new readers. It should also be another source of information. With the tracker, you can select teams or players to track, and subscribe to the resultant RSS feed.

Right now the site is in beta, but it already looks to be pretty much fully functional.

tag cloud

Stats are updated in a not-quite real time fashion. The stats are updated once an hour. This is to help improve performance, and prevent it from being bogged down. While it isn’t the very real time of Sitemeter or Statcounter, it is much improved over Google Analytics.

Another nice feature is that Metrics also tracks outbound links (Sitemeter also just started doing this) so you can see how visitors are leaving your blog.

It is definitely worth checking out, and the sign-up process is a breeze. You enter a little bit of information, and install a code snippet in your footer, and you’re ready to go. One thing I’d caution is that if you require email addresses for commenting, don’t make your stats publicly viewable. On my sites, I require email for comments, but don’t display the emails. In Metrics, the commentors email is displayed and I can’t imagine you’d want to open your commentors to potential spam.
performancing,sitemeter

This tool isn’t new by any means, but I’m not sure how many are using it.

When using the acronym in new browsers, like Firefox, the tagged item is displayed with a dashed underline.  When the reader hovers over the underlined text, a full description appears.  Here is how the VORP example from above would be implemented:

<acronym title=”Value Over Replacement Player”>VORP</acronym>

To see other examples, or to practice it yourself, try the Tryit Editor.

On a related note, I think it would be great if ArmchairGM created a Firefox extension allowing people to easily to post stories (like a BlogThis or Add to Del.icio.us).

For podcasters you can now find out how many times people are downloading your podcasts.
rss, feedburner