I’m back to using WordPress for now. This is nothing against Habari. I’m just not ready for it. I spent several hours for a few days trying to get things to work the way I wanted them to. The Habari community was extremely helpful and I wouldn’t have gotten as far as I did without them. My thanks to them. I just felt bad constantly asking for help. I’m not a coder. I manage to get by. I also had to constantly modify themes to get them to work (or to get them to work how I wanted them to work) and to look right in various browsers. I’m still excited to use it, but it will probably be a bit before that happens, not because their product isn’t stable, but because I’m not. ;)
Tag Archive for: Websites
Dmondark in #habari did me a huge favor and ported the wordpress audio player plugin. That was essentially my last major hurdle I had to overcome in order to switch to Habari. I already have an install up and running with all my blog posts and plugins. Everything seems to be running smoothly. So, this weekend, I may be moving the blog from WordPress to Habari. If I do move, I’ll have a new feed address, so make sure you stop by the site to get the new address so you can update your feed readers.
I really hate websites that only offer a part of their post in their feed. I know why they do this. They do this so you have to visit their site in order to read the rest of the story. The more visitors they get, the more money they make. Here’s the problem though. The reason I am subscribing to your site is that I don’t find it useful enough to actually take the time to visit it. Most of the articles are a waste of my time but there are a few shining nuggets in there that made me want to subscribe. Whenever I subscribe to a feed and realize that it’s a partial post feed, I immediately unsubscribe. Why? Because I know I’ll never click on the link to continue reading the post. I don’t want to visit your site, that was the point of subscribing in the first place and making me visit it isn’t helping your cause. So for all you people out there that insist on making people visit your site just so you can generate a few extra cents of ad revenue, is it worth it? You’ll lose people like me. Who knows, I might have become a regular viewer of your website if you hadn’t driven me away by not providing the full text of a post. That’s been known to happen with me before.
For the past couple weeks my traffic has been down drastically. I can’t figure out why. Some days it’s down to a third of what it once was. Other people have also mentioned how their traffic seemed to be down. Then I noticed that I didn’t seem to be reading as many feeds as I usually do. Usually every hour I have about five new updates from various websites and blogs. Up until yesterday I was lucky if I saw five for the day. Then something happened. Yesterday my feed reader exploded. In the hour and fifteen minutes I was doing after school tutoring, 28 new feeds hit my reader. In the five minutes it took for me to get home from work another ten hit the reader. I probably received another 20 or so last night. When I woke up this morning I had 32 feeds waiting for me to read. I don’t know if there was a problem with Google Reader or if it has anything to do with people’s traffic being down. I do know that strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
There is something I don’t quite understand. Maybe someone can explain it to me. A few months ago Google gave IMAP support to Gmail. Everyone was happy to have this sought-after feature enabled finally. In my opinion, it was a few years too late. I never use desktop mail clients anymore (except when I was working for a technology company and we used Exchange). For something like Gmail, I just don’t see the point. The only thing I use a desktop email client for (and I use Thunderbird for this) is to back up my Gmail accounts. I don’t send mail from Thunderbird and I don’t read mail in Thunderbird. Maybe I would use a desktop email client if I used a different email service. I like Gmail’s interface too much to do that though.
Recently, Newsgator released their popular NetNewsWire and FeedBurner desktop RSS clients for free. You no longer have to pay for them. Again, I don’t understand why people would want to use a desktop RSS client. Sure, it can synchronize all your feeds so even if you aren’t at home it won’t give you the same feed as unread over and over. But you know what else does that? Web-based feed readers, such as Google Reader. Why download something to read when you could just as easily open up your browser to read it? Chances are, you’re already going to be on the net anyway.
Another thing I never understood was using things like Microsoft Live Writer and other such desktop blog publishing software. Why work with desktop software to publish to your blog? I know a few people who do that, but for me, writing in the administration of my blog software is perfectly fine. I don’t need to write my post in a piece of software that wasn’t even specifically designed for the blog engine I use.