All posts by Mitch Mitchell

I'm an independent consultant in many fields, so I have a lot to share.
Blogging

Commentary On A Comments Post

23 Comments

I was reading a guest post on Problogger titled 8 Reasons You Might Not Be Getting Many Comments, and as I read it, I identified with a couple of them, and found that I kind of disagreed with the other points. I figured I’d comment here rather than there, mainly because there are already 111 comments on that post, and I applaud the writer of the post, Charlie Gilkey, on responding to comments on his post, something you don’t often see guest bloggers going back to do (y’all need to be cautious of that).

1. Your Posts Are Too Long

If we set the bar at 500 words for what’s long and what’s short, I’d have to say that, based on my own blog, it depends on what someone is talking about. For instance, over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had a few posts that were longer than that, and most of them got a pretty good response. I’ve also written a few short posts, and one of those only got a couple of comments.

I believe as long as you’re not droning over one thing without adding something new to it here and there, long posts are just fine. People tend to gravitate towards one or two lines they really like anyway if you haven’t bored them. And, the post Charlie wrote on this topic was pretty long, and it got 111 comments; case closed.

2. You Haven’t Asked Them to Comment

This one is interesting. If I asked at the end of every post “please comment”, I’d sound desperate. Actually, every once in awhile I do ask people what their opinion is, and I think that’s actually his point here. If you’re writing something pretty technical, you won’t get many comments, but if you offer an opinion, like I do here and there on this blog (kind of like this post), then asking people what they think makes sense.

3. They Don’t Know What To Say

This one seems obvious, and in this case there’s really not much to comment on because there’s nothing you can do to encourage those people to comment.

4. They’re Doing What You Told Them To Do

This is where we talk technical. One of my posts from awhile ago was talking about how to get Google Desktop to index Thunderbird. This is still one of my most popular posts, and it still gets comments. It never got the amount of comments close to how many people have read it, but it got some, and I know it helped a lot of people. I guess this is just something you have to deal with if you’re going to try to help people from time to time.

5. They’re Chasing Links On Your Blog

Here he’s talking about internal linking, saying that people will go off and follow your internal links to other posts without commenting on the original post. Do those people comment on the old posts if they follow it? I think this is an acceptable risk, because we all would like some of our older comment to be read, it’s great for SEO, and I think people who care will make sure to comment on one or both or multiples as they see fit.

6. They’re Following Your Social Media Trail

This is an intriguing idea, and I’m not quite sure I believe this one. I doubt there’s a single person who follows my blog and me on either Twitter or Facebook who doesn’t comment. What I have seen, though, are people who subscribe to the email not commenting, instead writing me directly. I’m not sure I believe this one at all.

7. It’s Hard For Them To Comment

Hello! He’s speaking to, and for, the choir, or at least me on this one. How many times have I written about making it easy to comment on your blog? How many times have I castigated Disqus and Intense Debate and the like for wanting me to subscribe so I can see responses to a comment I’ve written? Heck, sometimes it’s hard to find the link that allows you to comment. And there’s a new trend where a few bloggers have some posts they’ll allow you to comment on, and others where they turn it off because they don’t want to hear your opinion on their opinion. Not sure where I stand on that one in general, but I know those are usually the posts I want to comment on, so I just don’t subscribe to those blogs because it’s irritating to me.

8. You’re Posting At The Wrong Time

Once again, I have decided to take this one with a grain of salt. I have experimented this concept of posting at different times, and what I’ve realized is that it just doesn’t matter. It seems the email feed goes out late in the afternoon or evening anyway, and Twitter has folks on it 24/7, so there’s always an audience that’s seeing your post when you’re not around. Maybe 4 years ago time made a big difference, but not anymore.

And that’s that. Be sure to read Charlie’s post entirely, and of course I’d love to hear your thoughts on my commentary on that post. See, I’ve asked you to contribute! 🙂

Personal

Some Quick Hitters For A Sunday

17 Comments

In less than an hour, the United States hockey team will take on Canada for the gold medal, and yet I wanted to get a post out before then. So, this is one of those posts where I’m going to talk about a few things on my mind, without any consistent theme. Stay tuned.

Let’s talk about the hockey game first. I don’t normally watch hockey. If it’s the NHL professional league, I will watch it if I’m at someone’s house, or if it’s the finals and possibly the final game of the year. I don’t know almost any players anymore, especially since the New York Rangers started playing bad hockey after winning their last Stanley Cup. I used to be a Boston Bruins fan when I lived in Maine as a kid, but once you can’t watch your teams play anymore, you sometimes tend to move away from those teams. I’m glad I still get to see a lot of Boston Red Sox games; I hate the Yankees!

Anyway, whether you care about hockey or not, this is big. The United States versus Canada, the two best teams in the world, are vying for the gold medal. When the U.S. won last week, we had a mini Mardi Gras party in the states, and we’re hoping for more of that today, even though Canada is favored. Hockey is supposed to be their game, like curling, which Canada did finally win the gold medal for (men’s team at least; not sure how the women ended up). This is interesting in that it pits professional teammates against each other while they’re representing their countries. Should be a lot of fun as the Olympics is finally ending its two week run.

Locally, our big story was last night for the Syracuse Orange vs. the Villanova Wildcats NCAA basketball game. Syracuse ended up with the largest on-campus home crowd ever in the nation, 34,616 people, and they crushed Villanova 95-77. They could be the number one team in the country come Monday; that would be something, especially since this team was barely picked to finish in the top half of the Big East conference at the beginning of the season.

I’m glad I wasn’t at the game, because I wouldn’t have been able to see replay after replay of some marvelous basketball. That, plus knowing what the roads had to have been like after all the snow we’ve had lately and many road closings; nope, I enjoyed it right where I was, camped in front of the big screen in the bedroom. That picture is showing what more than 30,000 people looks like in the Dome; wild!

On another front, I can’t believe I never heard from 101Phones regarding the commission they didn’t pay me. I did hear from Commission Junction finally, and wasn’t really happy with their response, but what can you do? I have dropped these people from any advertising, and I went to the site and delisted myself from them as well. Stay away, folks; if this is how they treat affiliates, your business is worthless to them. Even their Twitter account was canceled, if it was them to begin with. Man, I hate being taken advantage of.

That was something else I had to deal with last week. Imagine waking up and seeing a lot of trackbacks to your blog, and figuring out that they’re all your own posts on someone else’s blog.

That’s what happened to me, as this blog based in Egypt had come in and stolen 7 of my posts, verbatim and image wise, without attribution. That was the second time this month I’d had my content stolen, although the first time, supposedly, it was from a site in the British Territories (whatever that is) that was supposed to be something like StumbleUpon, only they took the entire post and didn’t tell anyone who wrote it. Even the ISP wouldn’t intervene on that one, telling me my only recourse was to write the company and ask them to remove the post, which they didn’t.

Man, I wish I knew how to report the ISP to someone for not doing their duty; that’s the problem in trying to overcome foreign companies sometimes. Anyway, the guy in Egypt finally did remove all my posts, so I commend him on that and won’t out him, although I did out him on Twitter when it looked like he wasn’t going to do the right thing.

Man, am I going to have to start adding a disclaimer at the end of every post so people who visit these guys will know they stole content? I haven’t seen a lot of people doing that, but maybe it’s the way to go.

And finally, let’s talk snow. Some of you, like Sire, have no real clue as to the kind of mess too much snow can cause. Here in the Syracuse area, we’re usually well prepared for snow, but Thursday and Friday were something else. It was a heavy, wet snow, which adds a lot of weight to the effort of trying to remove it. This was one of those snows where small snowplows, those on trucks your neighbor might have, actually got stuck in some places; now that’s wild. Thursday I was able to get to the snow before it got too high. Friday, however, my back wasn’t having it, and even with my wife home, in 20 minutes we’d barely made a dent in the driveway, though I made it my mission to at least get a thin trail to the street, just in case there was some kind of emergency. Many people missed work because large plows couldn’t get into their neighborhoods, and even if they could there was no place to put the extra snow. The thing about snow is that people sometimes disregard it, saying it’s just snow, but when snow is heavy it takes out more people over a larger area than any other natural disaster can. This last storm took out the entire East Coast; not even a hurricane does that.

Finally, it’s the last day of February, and I said I wasn’t going to post financial numbers anymore until I made at least $500 in a month. Nope, nowhere close to that, but I still hate that I’m not getting credit for that one affiliate sale. I need some free time to do some extra stuff, but it’s fleeting. I’m expecting March to be a great financial month offline, as I landed a short contract that will pay a lot of money in a short time, so that might bode well for April; guess we’ll see.

I hope everyone else has a great Sunday and last day of February; go USA!
 

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Personal

When Opera Isn’t Opera

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Friday night, I went to the Syracuse Opera production of The Flying Dutchman by Richard Wagner. I would say that I went to the opera, but that would be a misnomer, based on what they did to it.

Let me get this part out of the way. The singers were fabulous. The lead, Greer Grimsley, was spectacular in the role of the Flying Dutchman, and his counterpart, Peter Strummer, was also great. The leading female role was sung by Lori Phillips, as Senta, and she was fabulous as well, although, if it were me, I might have wonted more of a lyrical coloratura in the role, someone with a higher pitch, but that’s me.

The orchestra was also great. The conductor, Douglas Kinney Frost, is new to me, and though he did a competent job with both the orchestra and the choir, it seems that conductors might be doing something different these days than what I’m used to. Instead of being animated when the orchestra was supposed to be hitting accented notes, he would do it first, and then a beat later the orchestra would follow him. That was bothering me early, as I kept wondering if maybe he was off the beat in some fashion. Eventually I decided to stop looking at him and to close my eyes when nothing else was going on.

So, what was missing? The opera, that’s what. This was more of a choral version of the opera Flying Dutchman than an opera. It wasn’t a production. There were no costumes, no acting, no sets. Instead, they decided to do something they said was innovative. What they called it was a multimedia production. They got some Syracuse University students to put together video montages of, well, pretty much whatever they wanted to do, and they showed them on screens behind the orchestra throughout the performance.

Talk about distracting. For those of you who don’t know the story, it’s a tale of a ghost sailor who made a statement so bold that the devil decided he would have to sail the seas forever unless he could get a woman to give her true soul to him in love, and thus he and his crew cold finally die. This means you might expect that there would be some things in a video such as boats, maybe pirates, bad weather, etc. There’s one point in the opera where there’s supposed to be a feast, so maybe there would have been exhibits of food and the like.

Nope, none of that. Oh, there was some water, a tree once, someone pouring beer, and a mixer beating batter that eventually becomes a cake. Other than that, none of what they came up with had anything to do with anything that was in the show. That, plus they kept replaying some of these videos over and over. It was really distracting because above all of this was the translation of the German libretto, which also at times was confusing because when two singers were singing different lyrics at the same time, you weren’t always sure whose words were being printed above, and every once in awhile they wouldn’t put up any lyrics at all.

So, the opera was a mixed blessing at best. If they had done this entire thing without the video, I wouldn’t have been as disappointed. Not having the entire colorful production, I feel kind of cheated. There are pictures online of this production with some of these cast members, and in costume this would have been spectacular. As it is, I’m now a big Greer Grimsley fan, and I was elated to have the opportunity to tell him 30 minutes after the production ended how great I thought he was (I knew someone in the choir), then today at the mall, in Macys, I ran into him again and thanked him again for his performance.

Oh yeah, one more thing. For those of you who might not know the Flying Dutchman, I’m betting you know What’s Opera Doc; same music. Unfortunately, seems it’s against copyright to show you the cartoon here (really?), so here’s a live performance of the cartoon for you:


 

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Computing

Microsoft Updates; What The Hey?

18 Comments

Have you ever taken a look at the Microsoft updates that come to your computer at least once a week? I always take a quick look, although I’m not sure why since, with Vista, it came with the Genuine Advantage thing, so maybe I shouldn’t care what’s being put onto my computer.

But I do look, and most of the time I have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. For instance, last night, there were 5 updates awaiting me when I got home:

“Install this update to resolve issues caused by revised daylight saving time and time zone laws in several countries. This update enables your computer to automatically adjust the computer clock on the correct date in 2010.”

Okay, that one I easy understood, since last year they changed the dates for daylight savings time.

“Install this update to improve Internet Explorer 8’s JSON interoperability in conformance with the new ECMAScript, fifth edition standard.”

What the heck does that mean?

“Install this update to resolve issues with non-compatible applications for Windows Vista.”

I’m thinking it would have been nice if they’d told me which issues those were more specifically. Actually, to be fair, they did give a Knowledge Base article number, and if you follow that you see there’s over 200 programs it’s affecting, so maybe I should be glad they didn’t try telling me all of those.

“Both the Meiryo UI font and the Meiryo UI Bold font are included in this update. These new fonts let an application optimally display Kana characters in the Ribbon UI component and in other parts of the user interface, especially in areas where text area is limited.”

Part of me realizes I have a new font; not sure if I’m supposed to use it or not. The rest of it; no clue.

“Install this update to resolve issues caused by manifest expiration in AD RMS enabled applications. This update will fix any existing issues in addition to addressing any future application manifest expirations.”

Once again, huh? Even my spell check freaked out on that one.

Part of me gets it; these tekkie guys are trying to tell us something. They might have well written most of it in Sanskrit if you ask me. Maybe they should just say “download this update; you don’t want to know”, and being the sheep we are, we’ll just accept it and move on. It’s about as clear to us if they do that as what they’re telling us now.

I’m just feeling so stupid and inadequate now; I need cake.
 

Blogging

Why Do You Revisit Some Blogs And Not Others?

51 Comments

This is a relatively short post, especially coming from me. It’s a simple question; why do you revisit some blogs and not others?

I’ll answer this one first, though I know few people do what I do. I subscribe to around 200 blogs. I’ve been eliminating some over the past month or so because either they weren’t giving me what I needed anymore or their frequency was getting on my nerves. When I talk frequency, I mean posting once every month or longer; I’d already gotten rid of blogs that had 5 to 10 posts a day, as I realized that wasn’t just one person doing all the writing, and there was just no way to keep up with that kind of input.

I’ve also been deleting more blogs that use Disque or Intense Debate, as well as more Blogger blogs. If I’m not going to comment, and your content isn’t compelling enough to keep me reading where I want to comment, it’s time for you to go.

And yet, I’m still around 200. So, what keeps me going to them consistently? Each one of these blogs writes about something that interests me. Each one of these blogs has writers who are giving me something new and different and compelling and educational. They make me feel good, or they make me think, or they give me information I can use. I want that info, and I want to make sure I know where to go so I can receive it. So, I subscribe, and I enjoy.

No one hits a home run every time out; heck, I know I have some posts that get almost no one looking at it. Sometimes I wonder why, but other times I figure I’m just going to continue going for it because, after all, it’s all about writing and sharing and asking questions for me. And I truly am thankful to those of you who come back and check out what I have to say from time to time. I even appreciate those of you who pop in once then leave; at least you gave me a shot.

So, what keeps you going back to certain blogs for more?

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