This week I made some minor changes to the blog, expanding that right sidebar so that I could fit the Blog Rush Widget on it. I also re-arranged some ads and the other widgets. Visually it wasn’t much of a change.

I’m not sure what happened, but this week I joined a whole slew of web services. Jango, Last.FM, Rescue Time, and Clicky Stats.

Of course, WordPress 2.3 comes out today, so that should eat up a little of my posting time this week.

The Mumbler has been on me to start using tags, and ultimate tag warrior, but I have resisted. I guess one of the big features in WordPress 2.3 is tag support. Although it will require a theme update to support it. I seem to find that sites view my categories as tags, so I’m not terribly excited about that feature.

We’ve started having some cooler weather lately, which reminds me that Winter is coming up. Time to get my Jeeps Winterized, and get my house ready. I’ve heard that during the Summer, there is a slump in blog readers, so I’m curious to see what happens in the next couple of months when it comes to my readers.

Posted in WebServices, Updates, Web Tools, WebSites, WordPress, Themes 4 Comments »

Well, Art has been going a little crazy with his blog, but it looks like he’s finally done. While he was gone on vacation, his router at home decided it was going on vacation too. Which made all of his web sites inaccessible.

What’s worse is that the web sites didn’t know this, and they just thought no one was visiting. Their anxiety over this caused many long term effects. Don’t worry, Art arranged therapy for them, went out and put a new theme on them, and everyone is feeling much better now. I think the final product is very nice indeed.

Unfortunately, I don’t see my beloved tag cloud.

Speaking of tag clouds, I noticed it when first launched, but Phil placed the new  Amazon “Product Cloud” over on Tech Fires. Amazon introduced a number of new widgets recently, and the product cloud is one of them. Of course, you have to be an affiliate, Amazon uses the term associate, to use them.

If you are an affiliate, you should check them out though, some of them look pretty neat. I joined Amazon just so I could recommend books when I write about them, but these new widgets are so snazzy that I may just have to put one up.

Of course, adding widgets isn’t the only thing that Phil has been doing, Scott from My Thermos has joined him in writing his “Rapid Fire Reviews of Hot Technology. Between the two of them, they did 23 posts just in the past 5 weekdays. That’s pretty impressive, especially considering they both have their own blogs, and hold down day jobs.

Hooray! It looks like Pearl is back to her regular posting habits over at Interesting Observations. I didn’t realize it, but it was the Smiley faces anniversary Monday. At least the emoticon smiley face.

Personally, I have been pretty busy this week, so I haven’t had that much time to read my RSS feeds, and less time to leave comments. To make matters worse, Scott sent me an invite to Jango, which is pretty cool. He also sent me an invite to Rescue Time, which has been pretty stable. Once I have more time to play with them, I’ll write something up.

Posted in Affiliate, Random, WebServices, widgets, WebSites, Add-Ons, LinkLove 38 Comments »

Amazingly, the changes didn’t take long, and everything went smoothly. I’m still going to be changing the adds in the right sidebar some, just because they look so tiny now.

Now, although I increased the size of the right sidebar, I didn’t change the left sidebar. The page is now a humongous 965 Pixels wide. I didn’t think there would be too many people out there running their displays at anything less than 1024 x 768, so I figured it would be OK.

Even if there are some poor souls out there running at 800 x 600, they would still get the content, just some of the sidebars would be cut off.

Does that big sidebar look goofy? I think it is a little strange, but I didn’t think it was too bad. Let me know.

Posted in BlogNewsandUpdates 2 Comments »

AKA: Yes it’s broken, but that’s on purpose.

 I am going to be adjusting the theme here for a little while. Ever since I added that BlogRush Widget, I have needed to adjust the sidebar size. Unfortunately, to do that I had to change the size of other web site elements as well.

I have (hopefully) worked out all of the bugs on my testbed site. Now all I have to do is make the changes on the live site. So for a little while, things may start to look strange. I’ll post again when I am all finished.

Stay Tuned.

Posted in BlogNewsandUpdates No Comments »

 You may notice that at the bottom of all of my posts, I had a section titled “Also on Port 16″. Believe it or not, I was generating those by hand.

Let me tell you, that started to be a huge pain.

Last night I installed the “Related Posts” Plug-in, and it’s terrific. In the old days (read: Yesterday), I would publish a post, and then I would have to go and edit every single related post that I had, and add a link back.

Then, I would receive a flood of emails asking me about link backs, from my own posts. I always delete these, which also takes up some time.

With this plug-in, I get this handy dandy list of posts, and I don’t have to do anything.

I was worried that I wouldn’t like what the plug-in pulled, but I am really happy. The related posts are, well, related. Cool huh?

The downside is that I was up last night removing the manually entered related posts section on each and every post. If you happen to see any posts which have two “Also on Port 16″ sections, please let me know.

Who cares about related posts?

Well, I do. If you have a blog, then you should too. You see, I have two types of readers:

- Regular readers - I define them as those who subscribe to my RSS feed or actively check my site for updates.

- Accidental or Transient Readers - Those who either come to my site from search results, Digg, StumbleUpon, or referrals from other blogs.

I greatly appreciate my readers, but I prefer regular readers. So my goal is to turn the transient readers into regular readers. Then regular readers into fans, then fans into addicts, then addicts into cult memebers, and finally, cult members into …

Well, you get the idea. I want you to keep coming back. I want you to tell your friends and family, I want you to tell strangers, I want you to tattoo “Port 16 Forever” in a heart tattoo on the back of your head.

Anyway, I noticed a long time ago that if I had a blog story which sent a lot of search results my way, the new visitors would look at that page, and then be on their merry way. Never to look at my blog again. My cries of abandonment were loud and unending.

But ever since I started placing the related links, as well as the “recent posts” section on the side bar, I keep a number of those readers. Instead of looking at one page and running away, they start reading more and more, and then maybe, just maybe, they subscribe. No one has had the tattoo yet though.

If any of you have the tattoo, send me a picture and I’ll post it.

Posted in Add-Ons, Blogging, WordPress 2 Comments »