Swell, I have a “great personality”
So I got this email from The Blogging Time’s Beth Gottfried a couple of nights ago:
I plan on posting about you vs. MySpace's Tom on The Blogging Times site tomorrow. You will come out on top.
Best. Email. Evar. Beth is super cute and she’s a pop culture goddess. Sure, it doesn’t really matter given that I’m a) happily married and 2) not Jewish, but still, when a cute chick who writes about Franz Ferdinand says she’s going to publicly say I’m cooler than MySpace’s Tom… oh happy day!
So yeah, I started obsessively checking The Blogging Times the following day. I can admit that. Minic -- that spike in page views? Sadly, it was just me hitting reload. Don't raise the CPMs just yet.
I should have realized that things were amiss when I read one of Beth's recent posts, I Like Em Fugly Hot. But no, I was still riding my wave of "cute chick thinks I'm cooler than Tom" euphoria and it didn't register. That she digs guys who aren't, shall we say, classically attractive. Attractive in the conventional sense. Well, attractive. A more astute man might have said "Waiiiiit..." Instead, I said "she thinks I'm cooler than Tom!"
And then the post hit. Lead with a classic glamour shot of Tom with his sassy bed head versus a gawdawful picture of me at a Web2 meetup earlier in the year. After a two hour drive. In the middle of growing out my bangs. Seriously, there are better pictures of me out there if you look hard enough. Or you ask me. And let me pull from my college days. And give me photoshop for a while. But nope -- it's just straight up Smokin' Hot Tom and Fugly Hot Eric.
But that's okay, because this isn't just a beauty competition. Nope, this is like Miss America -- personality is important and we're grading on a curve. This is my area to rule, right? And rule I did! Let's compare:
Me:
- "he’s grounded, unpretentious, and just really likable."
- "he has an affinity for his wife, kid, and James Bond."
- "I emailed him and he got back to right away with a response."
Tom:
- "he has a reason to be vain"
- "he’s incredibly rich, gorgeous, and did I mention rich"
- "toned top-tier educated geek who like to organize fundraisers for worthwhile causes"
Waiiiiiit...
It's comforting to know that when my marriage falls apart (after my wife reads about me mooning over Beth) I'll be reelin' in the babes thanks to my promptness!
(In all seriousness, this was super fun and I'm psyched that everyone at The Blogging Times has a profile on MyBlogLog. Thanks for my brief moment in the sun.)
Swell, I have a “great personality”
So I got this email from The Blogging Time’s Beth Gottfried a couple of nights ago:
I plan on posting about you vs. MySpace's Tom on The Blogging Times site tomorrow. You will come out on top.
Best. Email. Evar. Beth is super cute and she’s a pop culture goddess. Sure, it doesn’t really matter given that I’m a) happily married and 2) not Jewish, but still, when a cute chick who writes about Franz Ferdinand says she’s going to publicly say I’m cooler than MySpace’s Tom… oh happy day!
So yeah, I started obsessively checking The Blogging Times the following day. I can admit that. Minic -- that spike in page views? Sadly, it was just me hitting reload. Don't raise the CPMs just yet.
I should have realized that things were amiss when I read one of Beth's recent posts, I Like Em Fugly Hot. But no, I was still riding my wave of "cute chick thinks I'm cooler than Tom" euphoria and it didn't register. That she digs guys who aren't, shall we say, classically attractive. Attractive in the conventional sense. Well, attractive. A more astute man might have said "Waiiiiit..." Instead, I said "she thinks I'm cooler than Tom!"
And then the post hit. Lead with a classic glamour shot of Tom with his sassy bed head versus a gawdawful picture of me at a Web2 meetup earlier in the year. After a two hour drive. In the middle of growing out my bangs. Seriously, there are better pictures of me out there if you look hard enough. Or you ask me. And let me pull from my college days. And give me photoshop for a while. But nope -- it's just straight up Smokin' Hot Tom and Fugly Hot Eric.
But that's okay, because this isn't just a beauty competition. Nope, this is like Miss America -- personality is important and we're grading on a curve. This is my area to rule, right? And rule I did! Let's compare:
Me:
- "he’s grounded, unpretentious, and just really likable."
- "he has an affinity for his wife, kid, and James Bond."
- "I emailed him and he got back to right away with a response."
Tom:
- "he has a reason to be vain"
- "he’s incredibly rich, gorgeous, and did I mention rich"
- "toned top-tier educated geek who like to organize fundraisers for worthwhile causes"
Waiiiiiit...
It's comforting to know that when my marriage falls apart (after my wife reads about me mooning over Beth) I'll be reelin' in the babes thanks to my promptness!
(In all seriousness, this was super fun and I'm psyched that everyone at The Blogging Times has a profile on MyBlogLog. Thanks for my brief moment in the sun.)
Spreadin’ Widgets Far and Wide
We're data hounds, of course. I'm particularly obsessed with our internal reports. Whenever the guys in Orlando want me to quit asking questions, all they have to do is give me some new data to hover over.
On 30-Oct, I was surprised and happy with our widget stats. How little I knew. Now there's 2,398 Recent Readers widgets installed (vs. 1,325 then). And, yesterday was our first million widget day. i.e. a million of our widgets were loaded into web pages. That's a bit over 9% of the 10.2 million pages (also a record!) that we tracked through the system yesterday. It's somewhat under 10% as a few pages have both widgets. Thank you all!
Holy crap, we have awesome members!
I've said it before but it's worth repeating. Any success MyBlogLog has is due to the insane passion of our members. One of the best parts of growing larger is that we are running into more cool people all the time. But qureyoon deserves special recognition. He has written up an awesome post modestly called The COMPLETE Guide to MyBlogLog(ging) and it's a winner.
I was just IMing with Drew that the best thing about all the customer support mail I get is that it helps us figure out how to improve the site -- members keep asking me to add a co-author for them? I ask the tech guys to make a self-service form and the requests drop to nil because the readers now have access to a great new featue.
So what does this have to do with qureyoon's post? One of the common messages I get can be summarized as "I just joined MyBlogLog -- now what?" Thanks to qureyoon, now we have a kick-ass summary for readers to check out. Thanks, man!
Customer Service is back in action
This Thanksgiving, I was most thankful for MyBlogLog's many patient members, who refrained from sending me threatening emails when they're requests to update their email addresses and adult statuses went without response.
But now the MyBlogLog team is back and ready to serve. My goal is to get through all the outstanding customer service emails today and have a response or fix out to everyone by the end of the day. This means that if you wake up tomorrow and you don't have an email from me, you have official permission to send me a followup email that begins with "WTF, fool!"
And with that, I am off to begin helping my many friends at MyBlogLog. Have a great day!
Customer Service is back in action
This Thanksgiving, I was most thankful for MyBlogLog's many patient members, who refrained from sending me threatening emails when they're requests to update their email addresses and adult statuses went without response.
But now the MyBlogLog team is back and ready to serve. My goal is to get through all the outstanding customer service emails today and have a response or fix out to everyone by the end of the day. This means that if you wake up tomorrow and you don't have an email from me, you have official permission to send me a followup email that begins with "WTF, fool!"
And with that, I am off to begin helping my many friends at MyBlogLog. Have a great day!
It’s Alive!!!
Sound like it was working for at least some people when we thought it was down, but I'm glad to report that it's back to 100%. Sorry for any inconvenience, stress, upset stomachs or sexual side effects we may have caused.
Reader Rolls are temporarily offline
Even though they are offline, they are not holding up any page downloads. We're working on it. Back in a jiffy!
Manage your face (and your community)
There are times that you just don't want to be noticed. Maybe you're sneaking off to a gossip blog, or checking out what people across the political divide are chatting about. Who knows. Who cares. You should be able to go incognito when you want to. That why we've launched the ability to hide yourself from the reader roll on any site. Just put your mouse over your face and click on the little "X" that appears. From that point on, when you visit that site, no one but you will be able to see your face. You'll know that your hidden because you will always see an "X" on your picture. When you're ready to be seen again, just click that "X" and you're set.
Authors get tons of value out of this too. If someone shows up in your reader roll -- spammer, troll, arch-nemesis -- you can hide them from your site. You'll see an "X" over every person in your reader roll and you can turn any off that you want. Don't worry, a member can't override your hide setting. Authors also have this control in their communities. If someone you're not comfortable with joins your community, you can hide them as well.
PLEASE NOTE: The relationship between the reader roll and community works differently for reader and authors.
For Readers:
Your "hide" status in the reader roll does not affect your status
in a community. If you are a member of a community and then hide
yourself from the reader roll, you'll still be seen in the community's
member directory. If you don't want to appear there, just visit the
community page and click the "leave" button. We are working under the
impression that membership is a less fluid relationship than showing up
in a reader roll.For Authors:
Hiding someone in either place hides them everywhere. We are working on the assumption that when you don't want someone associated with your blog or site, that's a universal feeling.
This is the initial release and, as always, we will be improving it based upon your feedback. Please give it a whirl and let us know what we can do to make the service even better.
Widget for Wordpress users REDUX
We've had an unofficial Wordpress widget for a while now, and Steve Ho just released an official one. You can get the full scoop on the Wordpress here. Please note that this only works for the installed version of Wordpress -- we're still working hard on something for all you Wordpress.com users!
UPDATE: It's always the line breaks that get ya. Because they're invisible. Anyway, the Wordpress widget is once again live and working great so have at it. In fact, our resident development hero Steve Ho found a few blogs that have already the Wordpress widget to use:
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