Initially I gave the plugin a cutesy name: SlaptiGooglePR. This was somewhat informative and tied into the title of my high tech site, Slaptijack. I felt the name was clever, but still indicated what the plugin did. After nearly two years of service, I decided that it might be helpful to rename the plugin to something more descriptive. I noticed that the plugin did not rank very high in the WordPress Plugin Directory’s search results for common terms like “pagerank” or “google pagerank.” In the end, I decided to simply call the plugin the Google PageRank Tool.

Honestly, the tool hasn’t been a huge hit over the last two years. There have been over 2,000 downloads, but nothing to write home about. What I have noticed, though, is that the act of changing the name tripled the average daily downloads!

So, what’s in a name? Maybe more than you thought.

To be honest, this is probably a personal issue. I’m sure plenty of folks are wildly interested in the boring, mundane stuff that makes up the bulk of daily life. Personally, I’m not interested in who is having doughnuts for breakfast unless there is something really interesting about it. Eating doughnuts at midnight in front of the Alamo is interesting, eating doughnuts at your desk is Thursday.

With this in mind, I’ve come up with the following three step plan to fix my microblogging experience.

1. Be Interesting.
   OK, that’s a pretty tall order. Still, if you’re going to rant about something, you better be ready to walk the walk. So, from now on, I’m going to work hard to only update Twitter / Facebook when I have something interesting to say.
2. Accept all friend / follow requests.
   The only way to improve my microblogging experience is to find more interesting people. That being said, this step is pointless without the next.
3. Drop boring people.
   Let’s face it, not everyone is interesting to everyone else (or anyone else, really). So if someone is clogging up the stream with a bunch of crud, they’ve got to go.

So, that’s the plan. Feel free to add me on Twitter or Facebook and let’s see how things go. If you agree with my thoughts on this or think I’m a total idiot, drop a comment below.

Oh, and by the way, I had frosted strawberry pop-tarts and a coffee for lunch.

Unfortunately, if you are using the Allowed Sites feature and forget to ad (pun intended) your latest project to the list, you are going to be missing some revenue. This happened to me recently, and I just rectified the problem. As I see it, you have two options:

1. Add your new site into the list and go about your business.
2. Disable the Allowed Sites feature and hope no one does something that upsets Google.

One annoyance with Allowed Sites that might convince you to disable the feature altogether is that impressions / clicks from proxy servers and translation services (including Google’s own services) will not generate revenue for you. In order to keep that revenue stream viable, you need to check the Allowed Sites settings frequently and make sure you add legitimate sites.

• TweetDeck – I tried several desktop Twitter apps before finally settling on TweetDeck. Some folks seem put out that TweetDeck runs via Adobe AIR, but that seems to make cross-platform development work in this case. Other than an extremely user-friendly interface, TweetDeck has the ability to group users and show their updates in separate panes. This allows me to focus on my “priority” users while still scanning updates from everyone else I follow.
• twitterfeed – Let’s face it, there are a lot of people that just don’t like RSS readers. I user twitterfeed to publish links to my posts in Twitter. This gives my non-RSS readers an opportunity to learn about my new posts without using an RSS reader. A side benefit is that it gives readers another forum to discuss my posts thus expanding the community.
• Twitter Karma – I use Twitter Karma to see who is following me that I’m not following. Conversations are two-way, and I don’t expect people to follow me just to hear my side of everything. Twitter Karma allows me to see who I haven’t added to my follow list, and who I’m following that isn’t following me.
• twidroid – This is my newest Twitter tool. twidroid is a Twitter client for Android. In my case, that means my T-Mobile G1. I’ve read some complaints that twidroid crashes frequently, but I haven’t experienced that problem.

What Twitter tools do you think are essential?

Since I can’t do the translations myself, I have two options:

• Pay someone to do it.
• Have a free service do it automatically.

I wish I could tell you that Slaptijack makes so much money that hiring a team of translators makes all the sense in the world. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. The trickle of money that comes in is enough to pay for hosting, but that’s about it. Clearly paying someone to do the translations is off the table.

I could probably automate the translation of web pages via something like Google’s Translate service. I think it makes sense to actually translate the pages rather than just offer a link to a translation service. That has the advantage of putting the site into search engines in multiple languages. The drawback here is that machine translations can be notoriously bad. My worst nightmare would be having a translation service insult my readers! Perhaps some sort of disclaimer on each page informing the reader that this page was automatically translated would ease the pain.

Is this even worth the effort? Last year, the top three non-English speaking countries to hit Slaptijack (and their relative percentage of visits) were Germany (3.1%), India (2.6%), and France (2.3%). It’s worth noting that all three of these countries have a fairly strange English-speaking contingent. Therefore, perhaps it would be more productive to harness some of those countries that don’t have a strong English background?

If you were going to translate a technology site into another language, which would you choose?

Photo by dog madic.

Long ago I abandoned date-based archive links on this site. If you are looking for some of my past blog entries, you’ll have to do it by category or tag. I think that you’ll have better luck finding what you’re looking for that way.

More recently, I decided to seriously cut down on the screen real estate dedicated to date-based archive links on my tech site, Slaptijack. Previously, I was using monthly links, but after two years, that was getting a bit overwhelming. Instead, I decided to cut down to just yearly links. I still don’t think anyone will use them, but I need something in that spot for now. (Perhaps I’ll drop a tag cloud there instead…)

To put some meat behind my suspicion, let me refer to Slaptijack‘s usage in 2008. Last year, the site received over 122,000 pageviews. Of those, only 509 were of the monthly archive pages. That’s less than one half of one percent. Does it really make sense to provide all those links for no reason?

After updating to WordPress 2.7, a strange problem popped up. Instead of updating the draft that contained my bookmarks, Postalicious was creating a new draft everytime it ran (hourly). This had the effect of creating tons and tons of new drafts.

So, I’m in touch with Postalicious author Pablo Gomez in the hopes of getting my situation resolved. If that doesn’t work out, I’ll be in need of a new plugin that can do what Postalicious was doing for me.

By the way, Delicious has a feature that will automatically create blog posts for you. That would be acceptable if I only wanted to publish bookmarks to one blog. Unfortunately, I want to publish bookmarks to separate sites, and maintaining two Delicious accounts for this is unreasonable.

(I decided to stop by Ma.gnolia and see if they had a better option. Unfortunately, it appears their site has suffered a major meltdown.)

Anyway, just a note. Enjoy your upgrades.

I noticed earlier today that a Korean website was linking to one of my Prism posts on Slaptijack. I ran it through the Yahoo! Babelfish translator and learned a few things.

• The site is called “Ever GreenTime~, To be big blow is that.” I have no idea what that means.
• Apparently, the link to Slaptijack is related content, but I read “Relation Contents” as “Relations Content.” Needless to say, I doubt that my first impression of Mozilla Prism are going to help you in the bedroom. But you never know…
• Either Yahoo! Babelfish sucks or translating from Korean to English is very hard for computers. I’m willing to believe the latter.