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 »

 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 »

I pretty much stopped using my browser’s bookmarks a long time ago. Coincidently, this was right after I discovered Del.icio.us, I was having a little trouble keeping them in sync, and the fact that I could keep them somewhere on a web service was the tipping point.

The only disadvantage is that you can’t access them without the Internet. But really, if I don’t have Internet access anyway, what do I need the bookmarks for?

I just found this Firefox Add-on which lets you use those same bookmarks in your browser.

Note: This Add-on will disable the Del.icio.us buttons add-on, if you have it installed already. Don’t fear though, the buttons are also included in this add-on, their functionality has just changed.

After you download and install the add on, a setup wizard magically appears. (Clicking on any picture will open the original size image in a new window).

After Clicking Next, you are shown your logged in username, if you are logged in, and prompted to either log in as a different user or create an account.

The third screen gives you the option of importing your current Firefox bookmarks. I didn’t actually have any that I wanted, but I chose to import them just for the benefit of anyone reading this.

Once you click next, you have the choice of using the easy import, or the custom import. The custom import allows you to import all of your existing bookmarks into del.icio.us, and give them all the tag of “imported”. Using the custom import, you can also have the add on search your existing bookmarks, and only import those which are not already in del.icio.us.

After installation, you will notice the addition of the Del.icio.us toolbar:

As I mentioned in the beginning of the article, the del.icio.us buttons have been replaced with buttons that, although appear the same, have different functionality.

This button brings up the bookmark sidebar, which has now been hijacked by the add-on.

Although the “Tag” button still performs the same task, the dialog window that appears is exactly that, a dialog window instead of a pop up.

Now, I have posted enough screen grabs for 1 post, so I’ll just say that there is a lot of functionality in the del.icio.us sidebar, and it is much easier to find bookmarks than using the del.icio.us site.

References:

Del.icio.us bookmarks FireFox Add-on

What others have wrote:

Bookmarks are for Sissies - Incoherent Mumbling

Posted in FireFox, Browsers, Add-Ons 2 Comments »