Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

My friend Zenchic writes about Wordpress versus Typo:

So, me? I’ll take Typo any day. Sure, it does about 1/10 of what WP does, but I’m okay with that. You watch, tags and live-search will be in WP 3.0. Even Wordpress can’t hide from Web 2.0.

But, I just can’t leave this alone. Let’s first look at Typo’s feature set, and see how it stacks up against Wordpress 2.0:

# Instant publishing, no rebuilding necessary

Check

# Comments

Check

# Built in spam protection

Check–via the slick Akismet

# Textile and Markdown and Smartypants support

Check–via content filters

# Ping / Trackback

Check

# Categories / Tags

Check–tags can be enhanced with plugins

# TadaList, del.icio.us, Flickr, 43 Things, and Upcoming.org syndication

Check–but with third party plugins

# Ajax based live search and commenting

Check–with plugins. See the K2 theme.

# Ajax based comment moderation

Check? You don’t need to moderate comments in Wordpress, usually.

# Fulltext search with live preview

Check–with a plugin.

# RSS2 and Atom feeds as well as feeds for comments and trackbacks

Check

# Comment feeds

Check

# Modern caching. Typo only creates the xml files when needed and serves static copies to your subscribers.

Check–Wordpress’s is better.

# Supported databases: Mysql, Sqlite, and PostgreSQL

Nope. I think WP is MySQL only…

# Easy to type permalinks (like blog.leetsoft.com/articles/2005/01/29/syndication-and-tada )

Check–totally customizable, too.

# Web based administration and posting interface

Check

# Migration scripts from MovableType 3.x, Text Pattern 1.x , WordPress 1.5x as well as plain RSS

Check

OK, so why are you using Typo, and why does it even exist? It doesn’t have any super-awesome new features….

I just finished watching the movie Cellular, which was surprisingly entertaining. It stars Jessica Biel, William H. Macy, Jason Statham, and the ever cute Chris Evans. The plot revolves around a woman who’s kidnapped, along with eventually her entire family, by crooked police officers trying to bury a tape of them robbing drug dealers. Tied up in the attic, she manages to call a random boy who decides, on a whim, to help. I’ll just drop the recomendation along with a few snapshots:

I need a charger!

Uh oh–they’re cops!

On the hunt

The knight with a cell phone

The phone

Anyway, you can read more on IMDB if you’d like.

My recent DVD ripping guide was featured on digg.com, a popular technology news site. The site is user-moderated and run, and purports to be soon more popular than slashdot. Unfortunately, a traffic analysis does not bear that out. Despite achieving 1254 diggs to date, digg has not brought substantially more traffic to my blog:

There were only 7.2 thousand visits the first day, with traffic rapidly falling, for a grand total of around 10,346 new humans who, as a result of the article, visited my site. This would be considerably less for a less popular article on digg.com! Google Analytics also tells me they visited 1.3 of my pages per human, which means that maybe as many as one in three of the digg visitors clicked to another one of my pages.

The worst of it: money and return rate on advertising. Check out the following earnings overlay:

There was a little rise in earnings, but not really enough. Lesson learned: digg visitors are stingy, and I should put pop-ups on for visitors from Google, Slashdot, Digg, etc.