Technology Burner Technology Burner

I have so much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving… healthy and exceptional children, fantastic friends, and a dream job. As for my blog, the person I owe the most thanks to is YOU! Here is a list of commentors on my blog (in order of number of comments!). Your engagement in this blog is the driving force behind the quality of content that I try to put here day after day.

I did some analysis of my blog this weekend to look for a correlation between my search engine results, my most popular blog posts, the posts with the most comments, and the posts that actually resulted in revenue due to consulting or speaking engagements.

There was no correlation.

One of the plugins I love to run on my blog is Brian’s Threaded Comments. It allows for communications to be nested, organized and very easy to read and respond to. I’m not sure why the logic hasn’t been pulled into the core of Wordpress, though.

As I viewed the source of my pages, though, the plugin added quite a mess. The plugin inserts both Javascript and styling tags to get it to work. The problem is that inline styling and javascript can increase load times because linked stylesheets and javascript files can be cached once by the browser.

Mixxers are chatty people and getting chattier every day. And no, we’re not complaining, this is a good thing! So we’ve come up with a few new tricks for managing—and rewarding—comments. And of course, it wouldn’t be a Mixx release without a few other goodies, too. There’s a lot to talk about, so lets get to it:

Comments

I haven’t ever done a ‘head to head’ comparison of a blog post written with a date and one without a displayed date. Over at DoshDosh, I noticed that they have dates on comments, but the date is no where to be found in the post itself. I believe this is a better approach than my blog, where I have the date very evident in both the URL and with a date graphic. I just can’t turn the clock back now without doing a lot of work!

Business and technology moves at such a rapid speed that a blog post that is one year old may no longer be applicable today. If I see a few blog posts on a topic, I’ll often select the freshest date in the pack and ignore the others.