Technology Tales

Bumping newly edited older articles in Textpattern

Whether this is intended or not, you can put a pre-existing article to the top of your website's Atom or RSS feed by saving it as draft while it is being modified before restoring its status to live again. This is handy when you have got permanent articles that you are enhancing over the course of time, and you want to give your visitors a reason to return and maybe even prompt search engines too. Though new articles will achieve this always, it's nice to see that older articles don't get lost in space either. While this may be a hack, I am using Textpattern for permanent postings, rather than blogging, so I remain well pleased to see the availability of the feature.

Suffering from neglect?

There have been several recorded instances of Google acquiring something and then not developing it to its full potential. FeedBurner is yet another acquisition where this sort of thing has been suspected. Changeovers by monolithic edict and lack of responsiveness from support forums are the sorts of things that breed resentment in some that share opinions on the web. Within the last month, I found that my FeedBurner feeds were not being updated as they should have been, and it would not accept a new blog feed when I tried adding it. The result of both these was that I deactivated the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin to take FeedBurner out of the way for my feed subscribers; those regulars on my hillwalking blog were greeted by a splurge of activity following something of a hiatus. There are alternatives such as RapidFeed and Pheedo, but I will stay away from the likes of these for a little while and take advantage of the newly added FeedStats plugin to keep tabs on how many come to see the feeds. The downside to this is that IE6 users will see the pure XML rather than a version with a more friendly formatting.

SAS Institute enters the blogosphere

To get to the blogs hosted by SAS Institute, all you need to do is go here. I have to say that there is quite a spread of subject matter ranging from the high-level business strategy offerings through to detailed snippets for SAS programmers. There appears to be a lot here for anyone interested in SAS and business intelligence. I must take a longer look.

Update: I have since discovered a central listing of SAS Institute RSS feeds. The list is well worth your perusal.

A penchant for strange decisions?

WordPress.com has retired its Feed Stats feature. While there might have been problems with it for some, I do find it a strange decision not to spend some time on it. After all, given the existence of Google Reader and its kind, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that more people read blogs with RSS readers than by going to the sites themselves. In fact, I peruse blogs more often with Google Reader than by visiting the websites themselves. It's enough to make me wonder if I could use Feedburner with this blog.

To follow on from this, I am beginning to wonder if that Automattic, the people behind WordPress.com, seems to be a quirky company that makes decisions that are questioned by its customers. After all, they did remove the post preview functionality from blog post editing screens, and that has generated numerous comments. On self-hosted WordPress, you can add a plug-in to correct this, but that option is not open to WordPress.com users. The answer that I got to a theme change request earlier this year adds to the impression, as does seeing a company having staff apparently work from home all over the world.

Automattic seems an unconventional beast alright; could that lead to their undoing? Though it is king of the hill with blogging world for now, there is nothing to say that will last forever.

Using blog widgets