Weblogs have become more sophisticated than an index page that spits out the 10 most recent posts - people are even using them for real corporate ventures… and they want control over their data.

With the advent of WordPress 2.5, I got to thinking about blogs, posts, XML and the present state of things. Now, there’s galleries and enhanced shortcode tags, excellent in themselves, but necessarily ad hoc improvements, bolted on where feasible. Continue reading »

There are good reasons to use Feedburner - and, depending on your circumstances, sometimes reasons not.

Feedburner republishes (burns, as they have it) a RSS feed in more powerful and useful form - it’s the same basic content, with added extras.

Reasons For

Statistics/Metrics
It’s the quickest way to find out how many subscriptions a given RSS feed has. Note that this isn’t the same as unique users. WordPress plugins do exist for this purpose, and if that’s all you want, then no reason not to use them.

Continue reading »

This story still with a strong question mark to it - but it makes sense that Google should be thinking towards it, all part of the plan to get a near monopoly on text links (if not all ads) on the web.

Feed readers often don’t support the graphical ads which a lot of advertizers prefer - but text ads in RSS, feedvertizing, whatever you want to call it just hasn’t taken off.

Text ads in feeds receive so little attention from readers that Google, which pursued its own trial, abandoned the experiment.

In three years time you’ll have the choice - send your visitor stats to either Google or Microsoft-Yahoo, or both.

The question of category versus tag has recently been raised here - with particular reference to the fact that Technorati treats a category as if a tag - a good pragmatic real-life solution that saves all that previous messing about with links rel=”tag” - and whether the distinction should be sharpened.

So what should be a difference between ‘category’ and ‘tag’? If it were a perfect world, with perfect semantics… It’s fairly simple…

A category is an element in a hierarchy - with parents and children. This is the old way, the Open directory method, they know their place, the feudal method maybe.

In contrast, tags are designed to be mixed and matched on an equal basis, search for blog+wordpress+anything and get new and exciting joins. Tags are democracy, social collaboration, del.icio.us, and dare I say, socialism. In posh language, tags create a flat taxonomy.

Boring XML bit

And if and when XHTML 2 arrives, with its proposed navigational lists, (the nl element), it’s foreseeable that one solution might be that the list element label would equal the present usage of ‘category’ and any associated meta would be the ‘tags’.

<nl>
<label>Category</label>

<li href=”http://www.myblog.com/permalink/”>

<meta property=”tags or even dc:tags??”>

comma, separated, tags,

</meta>

Mypost title

</li>

</nl>

And then, presumably, another document to give rules for categories….

It’ll be a whole new semantic ball game when meta can go in the body of an XHTML page - and doesn’t apply to the whole document… even WordPress will be affected.