center of the miklb universe

It’s always kinda cool to see a “high profile” person using WordPress, so I’d thought I’d pass this one along.

Monday Morning CEO

For those not old enough, or sports fans, Stauback as teh quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys back in their hey day of the 1970’s. Looks like he’s a real estate guy now.

You can now return to regularly scheduled blogging.

So I figured out how I got all my traffic recently regarding the Kanye West story.  The Washington Post is adding a “See what Bloggers are saying” box inside the article, with a Technorati link.  I’ve gotten 40 hits from the Post article.  Quite interesting to see a national media outlet use Technorati in such a manner.  And so my experiment begins…

Stay tuned. 

So while looking at recent referals at my “other” personal blog, I found a german google search for miklb.  So of course I followed it, and found that my cooking site (link in sidebar) has been listed with blogshares.  I honestly have no recollection of doing it myself, and I see three people whom I don’t know picking categories for the site.  I’m perplexed.  I’ve seen the little button on several blogs, but didn’t really get it.  Anyone want to fill me in?  I guess its a “good” thing, but perplexing nonetheless.

I now have 4 “blogs”.  My first, more of a political rant type site, with some mixed personal type things thrown in.  I then started a cooking one.  I was afraid of mixing my left leaning rants in with dinner ideas.  Didn’t want to scare away my little old Aunt in Kentucky.  THEN, I started the WordPress “fan” site.  Now I have this one.  Granted, this one is sorta a test blog, but at some point, it won’t be beta, and we’ll know better of what can can’t be modified.  So the question lies, can you have too many?  Should I combine this one with the personal/politico, IF I can import a WP database at some point?  Whittle it down to three.  Might do.  I like the community aspects of wordpress.com.  I’m looking forward to what the final product looks like.

Noticed that wordpress.com now simply says MU, not 1.6 alpha do not use, or what ever it said.  Was that because too many people were starting to use the trunk on non .com sites, or because 1.6 is reaching beta?  We will see.  And when it is beta, which blogs to put it on?  Hmm.  Always changing.  Change is good.  Stay tuned.

It’s not a scrolling ticker in the admin bar , but the genuises behind wp.com have added some very cool community-esque features to the dashboard.(Thanks to daysies for the heads up) As the wordpress.com community grows, one can only catch so much in the site:wordpress.com feeds, so-o-o-o, now we can see who’s saying what, and  garnering outside attention.  Not to mention, it’s a sure way to get you blogging, who doesn’t want their blog on everyone’s dashboard?

I started a blog about WordPress a few weeks ago, and have finally gotten around to getting a domain for it.  It was my first attempt at importing a database, but using skippy’s plugin (the subdomain it was on, I couldn’t access the DB, now I have a full domain with full privileges) and podz’s instructions , it was a sinch. 

Regarding WP Station, the concept is simple, search out any new plugins and themes, be it new or updates, as well as general WP news, and compile it in one place, but simply links to the authors site, rather than the actual download link.  I personally like to visit new sites to see what others have done with WP, and this is a fun way of doing so.  I might add that I don’t neccesarily add everything I find, but if you want yours added, there’s a contact form at the site.  Hopefully you’ll find something useful while looking around.

Just noticed Matt and co. have implemented the modified admin bar.  I had suggested Matt Read’s wp-admin tool bar plugin, and it seems a modified version is now in use.  Very cool.  Lorelle provided a link to a feed of wp.com sites, but I’d still like a list of all sites, or better yet, implement something similar to the new feature at technorati, in which your blog itself is “tagged” allowing you to find blogs by content. 

So far, I’ve really only used the WYSIWYG editor, but I had several links I wanted to put in a post, and it seemed easier to simply use the traditional manner of posting a link (really, I didn’t understand the WYSIWYG editor until as I right this, just highlight the word you want to use as a link, THEN the link button “un-grays”.)  But you can type in the HTML mode, hit update, and it doesn’t immediately publish, it immediately updates the WYSIWYG editor.  Neat!  Now if I could tab from the title box directly to the text area, it would be even easier.

So I’ve been doing this “blog thing” for a little over six months, and I’ve been amazed sometimes what drives traffic to my blog. I made a small post regarding the discount and an announcement of 25,000 GM layoffs, and easily since that post early in June, it’s the single most popular post. I was also amazed how fast a post regarding Hurricane Dennis was spidered and drawing traffic. At one point, it was the #2 hit in a google search. Which brings me to my latest post. I didn’t see it, but while doing a standard national news browse, you know, NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times, etc, I found an article regarding Kanye West’s comments at the NBC fund raiser. That post garnered the single most amount of comments from what I’m sure are first time visitors, than any thing else I’ve posted. Not one of the GM surfers commented, good or bad. This, it had 5 comments within an hour and half…and that’s from 6am to 7:30am on a Saturday. (Don’t ask about my insomnia…) I guess the moral of the story is to get a “story” out on the Internet before CNN and FOX have a chance to spin it too much, or at least make more posts about pop culture icons…