An Eclectic Mind

Making it easier to get the content you want.

One of the problems with this blog — at least as far as blogging experts are concerned — is that it covers too many topics. Blogging “experts” agree that to have a “successful” blog, it should concentrate on just one topic. That will attract people interested in that topic and keep them coming back for more, since it’s just what they want. A while back, I tried this by spinning off all the book support blog posts to a separate blog — Maria’s Guides — and leaving the rest behind here. I changed the name of this blog to An Eclectic Mind to help communicate the fact that there’s a lot of topics covered here. I refuse to spin off each major topic to its own blog — at least right now — because there’s so much overlap in the topics and because I simply can’t be bothered managing more than the 5 or so blogs I’m already dealing with. So this blog covers all kinds of things, from flying to photography to life in a tiny desert town to travel to politics to…well, you get the idea.

Finding Content with Categories and Tags

I’ve made content easier to find by embracing WordPress’s category and tag features. Categories are broad topics, tags are narrower ones. For example, you’ll find Flying as a category, but you’ll find helicopters, airplanes, airports, aviation, helicopter video, etc. as tags. The idea is that if you’re interested in flying but don’t give a hoot about helicopters, you can click the airplanes tag and zip right in to content that discusses airplanes. (Don’t expect much; I’m a helicopter pilot.) You can find all categories listed in the sidebar’s category list and all categories assigned to a post in the post’s footer. You can find the most popular 75 tags in the sidebar’s tag cloud and all tags assigned to a post in the post’s footer. All posts have at least one category; all recent posts have at least one tag.

(You can also use the Search box in the header to find content on the site, but even I don’t have very good luck with that. Too many results. This blog has nearly 2,000 posts and unless you’re looking for a topic with a very unusual word — for example, “cauliflower” — you’ll likely come up with more results than you’ll want to wade through.)

Which brings me to the real topic of this post — getting the content you want delivered right to you.

Using RSS to Subscribe to Categories or Tags

A friend of mine who is always sharing aviation photos and videos by e-mail recently discovered my “nosecam” helicopter videos. I create these by fixing a POV.1 video camera to the nose of my helicopter when I go flying. The resulting video can be tediously boring or extremely interesting or somewhere in between. I take the best videos, process them a bit, and put them on Viddler, a video sharing site. (And no, I really can’t explain why I don’t use YouTube. I should probably rethink this a bit if I want the videos to be seen by more people.) Once online, I usually create a blog post with the video embedded. Those are categorized Flying and tagged helicopter video.

Now WordPress has the incredible ability to generate an RSS feed based on any category or tag. The formula for creating the feed URL is very simple:

• For a category on this site, http://www.marialanger.com/category/category-name/feed/rss where category-name is the abbreviated name of the category. You can get the exact category name by looking in the address bar after clicking the category’s link in the sidebar. So the RSS feed for the Flying category would be: http://www.marialanger.com/category/flying/feed/rss
• For a tag on this site, http://www.marialanger.com/tag/tag-name/feed/rss where tag-name is the abbreviated name of the tag. You can get the exact tag name by looking in the address bar after clicking the tag’s link in the sidebar. So the RSS feed for the helicopter video category would be: http://www.marialanger.com/tag/helicopter-video/feed/rss

Of course, knowing in RSS feed URL is one thing, but using it is another. You’ll want to put this URL in your feed reader. If you don’t have one — or don’t even have a clue what I’m talking about — check out Google Reader. It’s a pretty popular feed reader that starts you off with a complete explanation, with video, about RSS feeds and how it works. Perhaps some of the more knowledgeable folks reading this post will share their favorite readers; I’m not big on feed readers and do all my feed reading from within Apple Mail.

Getting Helicopter Videos by E-Mail

Now back to my aviation video friend.

After looking at a bunch of my videos on Viddler, he e-mailed me and asked me to include him on my mailing list to be notified when new helicopter videos come out. Well, I don’t have a mailing list. I’m not one of those people who sees something cool on the Internet and e-mails it to half the people in my address book. In general, I don’t like to receive e-mails like that, so I certainly don’t like to send them.

But I realized that there were probably a few people who were interested in the videos, had no patience for RSS, and couldn’t be bothered manually checking this site periodically. So I whipped up a Feedburner subscription feed specifically for the helicopter video tag. Folks who want notification of the latest helicopter videos published on this site delivered directly to their e-mail in boxes can subscribe using one of the following methods:

• Enter your email address:

  Fill in the form in the box to the right.

• Click this link: Subscribe to “An Eclectic Mind | Helicopter Videos” by Email

Either way, you’ll be sending your e-mail address to Feedburner. Feedburner will send you a confirmation e-mail to assure that you really want to subscribe and this isn’t an attempt by someone else to add you to the list. You will get that e-mail message almost immediately. You MUST follow the instructions in the confirmation e-mail message to complete the subscription process. If you don’t, the subscription will not start. If you can’t find that e-mail message in your in-box, check your spam filter.

Once the subscription is activated, you’ll get an e-mail message only when there’s a new helicopter video on the site. That could be once a month or it could be three times in a week. I tend to release them in batches.

I use the Feedburner service because it’s good. It does not generate any spam. Your e-mail address is not shared with others. I know this because I also subscribe to several of my own feeds, just to make sure spam isn’t going out with the feed content. It’s also really easy to unsubscribe from; just click the link in the bottom of the e-mail message you get.

Getting All Content by E-Mail

You may have noticed an E-Mail Feed link at the top of the sidebar on this site. That’s for all site content. If you subscribe to site content using that link, you’ll get everything, including the helicopter videos. If you’re only interested in the helicopter videos, unsubscribe from that feed and subscribe to this one instead.

I hope this long story (as usual) gives you the information you need to subscribe to the content that interests you most here.

BLog Technicalities, Flying, On Blogging blogging, helicopter video, web design, WordPress

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Site redesign is just about complete.

As I blogged last week, I was on the verge of updating my blog to WordPress 2.7 and a new theme. Less than 24 hours passed before I did both. I really couldn’t wait.

The new theme is called iNove. (I’m not sure whether I should pronounce that eye-nove or in-nove. If anyone has a clue about that, please do let me know.) I found it while putting together the exercises for my upcoming Self-Hosting a WordPress 2.7 Blog Essential Training course for Lynda.com and I pretty much fell in love with its simplicity. But what I really liked was the inclusion of an “east” and “west” sidebar, which makes it possible to put categories and tags in two narrow columns, side by side. A tiny bit of CSS tweaking to widen one column while narrowing the other and a bit of WordPress hacking to change the maximum tag cloud font size, and it looked just the way I wanted it to.

For the first time as a WordPress user, I’m making a special effort to utilize widgets for most of my sidebar content. This is a huge change for me, since I normally hand-code all of my sidebars. The good thing about this is that it limits what I can put in a sidebar without installing more plugins. And let’s face it: my old design was simply too busy.

Comments? Observations? Use the comments link or form for this post to share your thoughts and suggestions.

BLog Technicalities, Call Me a Geek blogging, design, web design, WordPress

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I really can’t hold myself back much longer.

WordPress 2.7 is out and it is an incredible upgrade. I really can’t wait to set it up on my blog.

Trouble is, my blog is also in dire need of a redesign. A friend mentioned that he wanted a blog like mine, but not so busy looking. I looked at it objectively and realized that I didn’t want one that was so busy looking, either.

This past week, while with the nice folks at Lynda.com, I got to play around with some new themes. I liked one of them so much, I want to install it on my blog.

But while I’m at it, I want to pare down the number of plugins and features that rely on them. I want to clean up my blog. I want it to be less busy looking.

And to do that, I need to start removing content.

All the old polls that weren’t working anymore have just been deleted. They’re gone. I’ll add a new poll feature sometime in January.

The guest book will be gone very shortly. I don’t need a guest book. It’s a spam magnet.

And do I really need so many categories? I can combine a bunch to narrow things down a bit.

Links? On a links page!

Recently posted, read, commented? Who cares?

So bear with me as I start paring down this site. I’m hoping to get the new look online by year-end.

If there’s any feature of the site you’d really prefer me to keep, speak up in the Comments for this post.

BLog Technicalities, Call Me a Geek blogging, update, web design, WordPress

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A few maintenance tasks completed.

If you’re a subscriber to one or more of the RSS feeds available for this site — including e-mail subscriptions via FeedBurner — you should be aware of a few changes I just made.

• Blog Name and Description. I finally figured out how to update the blog name and subscription for my main feed. For as long as I can remember, it was using the old “The official Web site…” name and tag, which I dumped over a year ago. I tweaked a FeedBurner setting to customize it. You should now see the blog name, An Eclectic Mind, and current tagline.
• Deleted feeds. I just deleted to category-based feeds from my FeedBurner setup. Maria Langer | Flying and Maria on Blogging have been removed. There were very few subscribers to each of those feeds and I didn’t think they were worth keeping on my FeedBurner account. I’m trying to simplify many aspects of my life these days and that’s just some of the minutia involved. Category feeds are still available, although I won’t be emphasizing them much in upcoming changes to my blog.
• Deleted e-mail subscribers. If you attempted to subscribe to my feed via e-mail but never got an e-mail message with content, it’s probably because you never responded to the confirmation message that was sent to you from FeedBurner. There were a bunch of you in the list. Since I maintain a “no spam” policy, I didn’t think it was appropriate to send an e-mail message to remind you. If you subscribe to this blog’s content via e-mail, please remember to complete the verification process. Again, e-mail subscriptions are guaranteed spam free and are the most convenient way to get new content delivered to you when it’s available with no more than one message a day. Want to subscribe by e-mail? Click here. You can always unsubscribe when you get tired of reading me.

If you have absolutely no clue what I’m talking about, you need to read this: Feed 101.

BLog Technicalities, Call Me a Geek e-mail, RSS

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How time flies.

Yesterday, while I was busy working — yes, I do work, too — I missed a major milestone in my writing life: my fifth anniversary as a blogger.

I latched on to blogging very early. I saw it for how it was originally intended, as a “Web log” or journal. I’d been wanting to keep a journal of my life and thoughts but could never stick with it. By blogging these things, I put it out there for feedback from others. With an audience, I felt a good reason to write these journal entries. I kept it up.

For five years.

I started blogging on October 15, 2003 with an offline blogging tool called iBlog. I’d use it to compose blog entries offline. When it was time to publish, iBlog would generate all the HTML necessary to create all of the pages for the blog. Publishing was time-consuming, especially as the blog grew in size. It was published to my .Mac disk space and co-existed with my Web site.

In 2004, when I went up to the Grand Canyon to fly helicopter tours, I found it necessary to start a new blog so I could blog from my laptop. This was a shortcoming of iBlog and it soon drove me nuts. Later the same year, I found a way to synchronize my two blogs back into one.

In August 2005, I discovered podcasting. I set up a podcast using Blogger (of all things). Maria Speaks was born. I podcasted quite regularly for a while, but have since let things slide. I hope to pick up podcasting again soon. In the meantime, I discovered AudioFeed Creator, which automatically translates all of my blog posts — including this one! — into an audible podcast feed.

In December 2005, I finally saw the light and switched to WordPress. While I was brave enough to install it on my own Mac OS X Server — and even got it to work! — server problems convinced me to move it to a hosting service. It’s been there, running smoothly, ever since.

All this time, I’d been blogging about whatever I felt like. This included the kinds of “days in my life” posts you find here, as well as how-to articles I wrote for the readers of my computer books. But in November 2007, I decided to split off all the computer articles into their own blog-based site called Maria’s Guides. There was a lot of technical tasks required to pull that off without 404 errors, but I think I did a good job. Sadly, I’ve been neglecting Maria’s Guides a bit lately. I’d rather think — and write — about other things.

That brings us pretty close to today. My blog continues to chug along on the Internet, with me at the helm. I enjoy the ability to say what I want in a forum where others can read and comment on it. I enjoy the interaction with most (but admittedly not all) readers. I find it amazing when certain posts become extremely popular. For example, “Flying At Lake Powell” has been read nearly 19,000 times since it was written in April 2006 and “Cynical Humor” — which is based on content sent to me by a friend — was read more than 2,000 times just the other day. Other blog posts have resulted in a chain of comments which add valuable information to the original post. “The Helicopter Job Market,” which has been read over 18,000 times and has collected 75 comments so far, is a good example.

So yesterday, with no fanfare at all, the fifth anniversary of my first blog post came and went. If it weren’t for a recent reader comment that my blog is “as big as the Grand Canyon,” I would have forgotten this milestone completely. But the comment made me think.

It should be big. I’ve been at it for five years.

BLog Technicalities, Days in My Life, On Blogging blogging, podcast, WordPress, writing

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