J.D. Meier's Blog : Blogging

Top 100 Blogs for Software Development Managers

J.D. Meier — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 10:47:18 GMT

Jurgen Appelo put together an impressive list of what he calls the Top 100 Blogs for Software Development Managers (Q3 2008). I think it's a great way to find out about blogs you might not know about.

The Top 10
Here's the top ten blogs on the list:

No, I didn't make the top 10. I'm number 20.

Blogs That Made the List
In Jurgen's words:

"The idea of this list is to promote popular blogs that are interesting to software development managers. Therefore, I ignored the blogs that did not have any (recent) content directly related to either requirements, design, coding, testing, management, process improvement or methodologies. I also discarded generic project management blogs without topics on software development practices. Likewise, I discarded the pure coding and technology blogs when they did not elevate to the level of "managing" or "ruminating about" software development. Last of all, I only considered blogs in the English language."

What Makes Great Content?

J.D. Meier — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 08:46:01 GMT

Darren at ProBlogger asks, what is great content? ...

I need to think about it. For now, I'll say that great content ...

Surprises you. You learn something you didn't expect.
Lifts you up. You're inspired to act.
Echoes in your mind. It sticks. A new idea is forever etched into the canvas of your mind.
Makes you feel. Maybe happy, maybe angry, maybe sad. You don't feel indifferent.
Changes your game. You can't wait to test your new skills on the unwary.
Leads you to an "ah ha". It wrinkles your brain. A shiver runs up your spine as you connect the dots.
Answers a burning question. You always wondered why. And now you know.
Solves a relevant, valuable problem. Life tests us. It's nice to have the answers.

To put it another way, it's got character, emotional appeal, and logic you can't help but to tango with. It changes what you think, feel, or do.

PS - I distinguish great content from great writing though they share some common attributes.

How To Choose an Effective Blog Template or Theme

J.D. Meier — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 18:09:32 GMT

How do you pick the right theme for your blog? The challenge is that it's not a linear decision and it requires satisficing to balance content, function, and design ("look and feel"). As part of my research on effective blogging, I've been analyzing themes. I’ve literally evaluated more than 2,000 themes and heavily modified more than 20. I see a lot of patterns now. I've decided to share my lessons learned, since they might save you considerable time.

Summary of Lessons Learned
Here's a summary of my key lessons learned:

Know your purpose. You need to know what your optimizing for. This shapes all the rest of your decisions, so if you know this, it helps. For me, my portfolio of blogs will be online personal knowledge bases to share my learnings. For me, that means putting a premium on organizing, browsing, searching, and sharing posts.
Start with a two column theme. If you don't know where to start, start with a two-column template for your blog. Three column templates have more moving parts and are trickier to create a clean reading experience.
Your content drives your theme choice. Will you use images? How long is your content going to be? What types of posts will you have? Will they vary? Test the variations because this can have a big impact in the look and feel in your theme. Your posts are the wood behind the arrow. While your theme is the initial impact, your posts should be very readable and scannable. Test the readability of your posts for different scenarios (skimming, in depth, long, short ... etc.)
Test how you'll use images. Some of the themes I tested completely changed simply by adding images in the banner or in the posts. The two main patterns are whether to use pictures in your banner or pictures in your posts. The benefit of the picture per post approach is that your feed readers will get them. If you use pictures in both your banner and your posts, it's tougher to help your users know where to focus. Using a good picture at the front of your post, helps draw your reader in, particularly if they are scanning and sick of text.
Test key scenarios. This includes users reading your feed, commenting, scanning your posts, reading your posts in detail, searching your blog, and browsing your blog (using your tags and categories.)
Choose simplicity over complexity. You can evaluate the complexity by walking your key scenarios. Do your eyes know where to focus when you first pull up your blog? How tough is it to find a particular post? ... etc.
Trust your gut. If something doesn't feel right, it probably isn't. You just might not be able to put your finger on it, so ask others who might know. Sometimes intuitively recognizing a problem is more effective than trying to logic your way through it.
If it's not working, change it. As tough as it is to let things go, it's important to cut the deadwood or change things that don't work. Experimenting opens new doors. Some days after a long customization session it was really tough to drop the theme entirely, but I stayed focused on making my focus group happy. That helped me keep going and continuously throw out what didn't work and carry forward lessons learned.
Ask your users. While I had built up my own internal references of what good looks like, using a personal sounding board was invaluable. I really enjoyed the surprises the most. They forced me to challenge my thinking and test new ideas.
Know you can't make everybody happy. This was really tough in the beginning. I couldn't believe how I couldn't get any critical mass down any particular path. What changed was I found the common denominators and patterns. Once I chose themes that shared these patterns, then it was easier to spiral down on agreement.
Beware if you have to modify a template too much. If you have to modify a template too much, something might be off. While you can dramatically reshape a template to your liking, I think the base theme is a reflection of the designer's style and expertise. If you find that your changing a lot of the theme, at some point you might be adjusting the theme too much and working against the theme. In some themes, it starts to become obvious whether the designer knows SEO very well or knows how to bullet-proof their layouts or is good with overall look and feel, including typography. That's why I paid a lot of attention to live examples and user comments to see what sorts of changes people were making, and whether they were just personal style or represented real structural or significant changes. Spotting the patterns saved me lots of time, once I knew what I was looking for.
Leverage the Internet Explorer Development Toolbar. The Internet Explorer Development Toolbar is your friend. I couldn't have analyzed as many themes as I did without it. The ability to quickly point at themes and reverse engineer them was invaluable. For Firefox users, you can try FireBug, but I haven't tried it myself. The key is to find a tool that helps you analyze the CSS HTMl, and JavasScript.

Vital Factors in Your Blog Theme
It's the sum of the parts that creates your overall blog theme impact. Part of the problem that cost me so much time is I didn't know what to look for at first. I had to go through hundreds of themes before I started to see patterns that made some themes more effective than others. The other thing that cost me so much time is that it's a combination of factors over any one thing. The overall look and feel is the sum of the parts. Here's what I found to be key factors in overall look and feel:

2 Column vs. 3 Column Templates. This is a good macro-level decision because it helps divide your theme choices. While there's exceptions, my readers told me that in general they prefer two columns over three. They said it's a cleaner reading area, easier to know where to focus and it's simple to scroll the full page and see posts/pages on the left and the navigation/ads on the right. If you go with a three column theme then there's a few issues. Overall, try to find a theme where the column for posts is around two-thirds of the page and the two sidebars add up to around one-third. In general, for three columns, my users preferred a column on the left and a column on the right with posts in the middle, versus two columns on the right.
Color Patterns. Colors and color combinations have a big impact on your blog's look and feel. This includes your background, banner, text and links. Your best judge is how you and your user's feel when they see the color combinations. They may not to explain the reaction, but they'll feel something. One of the guys on my team knows some science behind colors so he helped me better understand different reactions. You can check Crayola's America's 50 Favorite Colors and Kuler helps you explore, create and share color themes.
Font combinations for titles, body, and sidebar. According to my users fonts and typography matters a lot. This includes font size, family and colors. This ones tough and can vary a great deal. You need to evaluate both Initial impact and readability over time. Again, unless you're a designer, you'll need to compare your gut reaction to different examples and test with your users. For the main post text, What I did find was that, in general, my users preferred a white or off-white background, with dark gray font (versus black) and Verdana font. They also prefer the post titles to clearly stand out, at least in size and style (for example Trebuchet or Ariel.)
Post readability. Width is a big factor. My users told me that when the post column is too wide, scanning is more difficult, and that when it's too narrow, they have to scroll too much. Overall, they expect the post column to be two-thirds of the template width. Once the width is right, then the next issue is the
Effective sidebar design. It seems like the features my user's cared about the most on the sidebars were: subscribe to RSS, search, categories, tags, recent posts and recent comments. There was a definite preference for search and subscribe to RSS to be at the top.
User experience patterns for searching/browsing. If you have a large collection of posts this is particularly important, and pretty easy to test. If you know your posts, you should first test how quickly you can browse and search for specific posts. Then test the theme with your users. They won't have the same inside information you do, so this could be very revealing how well the patterns are working. I think the biggest factor here is using a "Read More" feature and showing just the first part of your posts when browsing categories or in search results. The longer your posts are, the more important this becomes.
Effective use of images. Choosing images for banners and posts made a dramatic difference in how my focus group responded to some themes.
Effective banner design. This can make or break the initial impact of your theme.
Comment support. Some themes host user comments better than others. It really helps when you find a live example with many comments. That way you can see how well it scales while maintaining readability.
Effective use of whitespace. My users pretty consistently commented on how effective whitespace really made some themes seem cleaner than others. I think the biggest factor here was spacing between blog sections and elements.
Links. My users told me they prefer links that are easy to spot versus get lost in the text, but that don't steal the show. They also told me they prefer underlined links in posts, but don't underline in the sidebar (for example, categories, tag cloud, recent posts, ... etc.)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I did notice that some themes seem optimized for SEO more than others. While my user's didn't notice this, search engines will. I think the main thing to pay attention across templates is how they use the title, description and header tags. You can tailor how your results will show up in search results. For categories, you should use permanent links. This improves your URLs for the search engine using more meaningful words. You should put your posts in only one category to avoid duplicate content from the search engine view. You should also only show parts of each post when browsing categories, to also avoid duplicate content (as well as make it easier for a human to quickly scan all your posts in a category.) See The Blogger's Guide to Search Engine Optimization - by Aaron & Giovanna Wall and Search Engine Optimization for Blogs - SEO.

Key Blog Features
Here's a quick list of the features that my focus group seemed to care about the most:

Title and purpose. The test is - do your user's quickly know which category in their RSS reader to put your blog in?
About page. Your about page can quickly help clarify the promise of your blog and setting expectations. See Skellie on How to Write the Perfect ‘About’ Page (by Numbers).
Categories. Categories help your user's browse your catalog of posts in terms of key themes, as well as help clarify what your blog is really about. It's another visual cue.
Search your blog. Even if you don't have a bunch of posts, users tend to rely on search. Once you have a bunch of posts, your search is vital. It's like a chicken and egg scenario though. If your search is tough to find, user's wont use it much. If it's easy to find and convenient, they'll use it more. Because there's so many ways to customize your search feature, the most important thing is to make it obvious that it is a search feature (and not a subscription form) and that it is scoped to your blog.
Tag Cloud. Tag clouds are nice way to provide a topical browsing experience for your blog. There's two types -- internal and external. Internal tags (Wordpress 2.3 has built in support) help you slice up your body of posts in a more fine-grained way. External tags, such as Technorati tags, help showcase your posts in those social circles. For more information, see my post, Tags vs. Categories.
Recent Comments and Recent Posts. Using Recent Posts and Recent Comments is an effective way to improve your user's experience and help user's discover your other posts, as well as show signs of life.
Browse your posts. Your user's will browse your posts either by categories, tag clouds, searches, or related posts. Another entry point is Recent Comments and Recent Posts. Another approach is to create pages that organize your posts in alternate ways.
Subscribe by RSS. If a user likes your blog, it should be easy for them to subscribe. Most blog themes I experimented with either exposed RSS in the right place, or it was easy to add.
Subscribe by email. None of the templates that I experimented with exposed this by default, so it can be easy to forget about. Some of my users pointed this out, so I tested adding subscribe by email.
Comments. One thing that my user's pointed out to me was how they like when they can scan posts and quickly see the comment information beneath the post titles, rather than at the end of the posts. A few users pointed this out so this seems to be a common preference. I noticed some themes did a better job than others of showcasing the comments for each post. The key decisions are whether to show links above the post or at the end of the post, along with what font and color. Once you're actually looking at the comments, the quick scan test will tell you how readable the comments are. Actually add some comments yourself so you can find any surprises.

How I Did My Research
My research was pretty basic, but time consuming and challenging, particularly because there's a lot of variables and not much prescriptive guidance that I found actionable. Here's what I did:

Searched for patterns. I could recognize when a template looked and felt good, but I couldn't reliably figure out why. To fix this, I filled my head with as many patterns as I could by evaluating hundreds of blogs, then evaluating thousands of templates and then by spiraling down around the vital few variables (once I figured out what they were.)
Set up multiple test beds. I setup multiple test sites for testing with users. Each test bed was a full blown blog with theme, so that I could do fast comparisons between theme A and theme B.
Tested with Wordpress. I've done testing before with Community Server and Blogger, so this time I focused on Wordpress.
Evaluated free templates. I explored multiple, free template galleries to build a foundation for recognizing effective blog theme patterns. I tried to find templates that were actively used, so I could see live implementations.
Evaluated templates you buy. I ended up buying various blog theme packages so I could explore them too, to see if I could find any clear quality differentiations.
Modeled from effective blogs and bloggers. I evaluated the top 100 bogs in Technorati. I also explored lots of blog examples that my friends sent during my research.
Created a focus group. I selected a subset of my users that were able to provide multiple rounds of in-depth feedback. This helped tons and I can't thank them enough!
Used the Internet Explorer Development Toolbar. The toolbar helped me quickly analyze various blog themes on live sites and then tweak my own. See Alik on using the IE Development Toolbar.

Key Galleries I Explored
I explored several galleries, but here's a few of the key ones:

Key Themes I Tested
While I tested a lot of themes, her's a few key ones that stood out:

Deep Blue. Here's a live demo of Deep Blue. I found it very clean and functional. Some of my users liked it too for the same reasons, but I didn't get critical mass with it.
Easy Wordpress. Who is Jon Ray is a good live example. I like the theme and I like what Jon's done. I think the theme really optimizes both browsing and reading content, and pictures work really well. Even though it's a three column template, it's well organized. The majority of my focus group preferred this theme. One user thought the post column is too wide, but they read using a feed reader, so it's not a show stopper. The majority of my focus group really liked the width and balance of the theme across the columns, and it would scale over time.
Grid Focus. Write To Done, Skelliewag.org, Anywired, and Six Revisions are really good live examples. I was very partial to this theme, particularly because it has a similar look and feel to my Guidance Share Wiki (particularly after I added baby blue bullets instead of the default dark bullets.) However, my users told me to choose otherwise. This surprised me. I imagined I was going to be using Grid Focus. I still think it's a great theme, but my user feedback says it's not the right one at this time for me.
Neoclassical. Open Education and Schaefer's Blog. This theme had universal appeal across my users particularly at first glance. In fact, for a while, I thought this would be my theme of choice. However, after more analysis, user's eventually told me the post column was too narrow, the typography was tough for extended use, and that browsability across a large body of posts might not be as effective as they would like. The key thing I learned from Neoclassical was that images are important.
MistyLook with Two Sidebars. Cheap DJ Systems and Gluten Free Cooking School are live examples of the two sidebar version, and here's a live demo of MistyLook with one sidebar. This theme is very clean and very easy to customize. I really like the pattern of a prominent image in the banner with clean, readable posts. The sidebars are compact too which really helps for navigation. While most of my focus group liked the theme, they didn't like it enough to make it the final choice. One of my focus group members really liked this particular theme, enough that it made it tough during final eliminations.
My April Reloaded. Me, Myself, and I and Market Associates.com are good live examples. This theme really is spectacular. Posts are incredibly readable and scannable. Depending on how you structure the layout, you can make it very, very clean. There's plenty of room in the third column to fit full post titles without scrunching. My focus group really liked this theme, but ultimately prioritized Easy Wordpress.
StudioPress and GreenTech. I found these themes very clean and functional. However, I didn't get enough critical mass to spend a lot of time investing in them.

How I'll Use This
This has definitely shaped my perspective on blog themes. It's night and day from when I first evaluated themes. Knowing what to look for helps me test and experiment faster. I now have a more systematic way of figuring out why some blog themes work and why some don't. I'll be helping some colleagues with their blog themes and I'll be using what I learned as I launch new blogs.

Additional Resources

My Related Posts

Tags vs. Categories

J.D. Meier — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 09:00:00 GMT

What's the difference between tags vs. categories in your blog? A lot. Knowing the difference between tags and categories can help you better structure your blog for browsing and SEO. Personally, I hadn't noticed the issue before because I only have tags on my MSDN blog. As part of my research on effective blogging practices, I hit the issue. Now that I've experimented with a few blogging platforms, the difference between tags and categories is more obvious. For example, WordPress 2.3 supports tags in addition to categories.

Categories, Internal Tags and External Tags

Categories. Categories are your high-level buckets. You should be able to chunk up your blog by a small, mutually exclusive set of categories. Imagine a user trying to browse the broad themes of your blog. Categories can also become part of your URL.
Internal tags. Internal tags are for finer-grained slicing and dicing and hopping across your categories.
External tags. External tags, such as Technorati and del.icio.us are for showing your conent in the relevant topics and niches at Technorati and del.icio.us.

Tag Clouds
I think the big benefit of tags is creating browsable tag clouds where you can discover related content. Whereas categories are just one topic, you can use tags to find related content. For example, you might browse a "security" tag and then browse a "performance" tag to find the intersection of content tagged both "security" and "performance".

Notes from Lorell
In Categories versus Tags - What’s the Difference and Which One?, Lorelle makes the following points:

"Categories help visitors find related information on your site. Tags help visitors find related information on your site and on other sites."
"Categories generate a page of posts on your site. Tags can, too, but often generate a page of off-site posts on an off-site website".
"Tagging gives you topical search capabilities for your site that are a middle ground between categories and all-out search, but it shouldn’t replace categories entirely."
"Should tags replace categories? Absolutely not."
"I use categories as broad groups of posts and tags as micro-groups of posts, helping narrow down the interest."
"Tags shouldn’t replace categories, but they can help the user and search engines and directories find and catalog related information on your site."

Notes from Problogger
In Using Categories and Tags Effectively on Your Blog, Michael Martin makes the following points:

"The number of categories should be small."
"Each post goes into one category."
"Use the same tags over and over again."
"The tag cloud is easy to scan."

The End in Mind
In the ideal scenario, to use tags and categories more effectively (assuming your blogging platform supports it), you would have the following in place:

A small set of categories for browsing the key themes of your site and for helping SEO (by having relevant category names in the full URL.)
A nice tag cloud that helps users browser your site more like a topical search -- using words that your users would know and be looking for.
Posts tagged with Technorati and del.icio.us tags that match the most relevant niches.

Turning It Into Action

Use categories to divide your blog into a small set of mutually exclusive buckets.
Use internal tags for slicing your content in more granular ways and to create tag clouds for your users.
Tag your posts with external tags for Technorati and del.icio.us to reach the relevant social circles.

Additional Resources

My Related Posts

Top 100 Blogs in Technorati

Top 100 Blogs in Technorati

J.D. Meier — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 06:22:32 GMT

I created a snapshot of the top 100 blogs according to Technorati. I'll be starting with these blogs to identify patterns and practices for effective blogging. I'll be analyzing blog design, user experience patterns, key features, content, style, frequency, information management, community interaction, impact ... etc. I think there's a lot of lessons to be learned.

Top 100 Blogs
This is the list I see in Technorati as of 02/23/2008.

1. Engadget
2. Gizmodo, the Gadget Guide
3. Techcrunch
4. Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
5. Boing Boing
6. Lifehacker
7. Ars Technica
8. Mashable! The Social Networking Blog
9. Blog di Beppe Grillo
10. icanhascheezburger.com
11. Daily Kos: State of the Nation
12. TMZ.com
13. Perez Hilton
14. ReadWriteWeb
15. ProBlogger
16. PostSecret
17. Smashing Magazine
18. Official Google Blog
19. Seth's Blog
20. Dosh Dosh
21. TreeHugger
22. GIGAZINE
23. Kotaku, the Gamer’s Guide
24. ShoeMoney® Skills To Pay The Bills
25. Gawker, Manhattan Media News and Gossip
26. Copyblogger
27. Think Progress
28. The Consumerist: Shoppers Bite Back
29. Valleywag, Silicon Valley's Tech Gossip Rag
30. GigaOM
31. Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger
32. The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
33. Search Engine Land
34. Crooks and Liars
35. uthink
36. Neatorama
37. BlogCatalog
38. A List Apart
39. Joystiq
40. DRUDGE REPORT 2008
41. At0mica.net
42. Zen Habits
43. Talking Points Memo
44. dooce
45. Microsiervos
46. Autoblog
47. The Daily Dish
48. JAUHARI
49. Google Blogoscoped
50. The Wrong Advice
51. Noscope
52. How to Change the World
53. O'Reilly Radar
54. Threat Level Wired Blogs
55. NewsBusters.org
56. www.mattcutts.com
57. The Sartorialist
58. Matt Cutts
59. Download Squad
60. /Film
61. Deadspin
62. Antbag.com
63. The Corner on National Review Online
64. SEOBook
65. Lifehack.org
66. Google Operating System
67. CrunchGear
68. 43 Folders
69. Freakonomics Opinion New York Times Blog
70. kottke.org
71. Xiaxue
72. FanHouse AOL Sports Blog
73. TorrentFreak
74. Hot Air
75. The Superficial
76. BuddyTV
77. Mac Rumors
78. Yanko Design
79. Dlisted
80. Joel on Software
81. Coding Horror
82. Gothamist: New York City News, Food, Arts & Events
83. Stereogum
84. Instapundit.com
85. Wired Blogs: Gadget Lab
86. Global Voices Online
87. Jalopnik: Obsessed With The Cult Of Cars
88. Crave: The gadget blog
89. Coding Horror
90. Pronet Advertising
91. Vacuous Virtuoso
92. Techdirt
93. Daring Fireball
94. TravelPod
95. Bad Behavior
96. Metafilter
97. Online Marketing Blog
98. Go Fug Yourself
99. Political Radar
100. Upstart Blogger

7 Types of Blog Posts

J.D. Meier — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 02:36:16 GMT

What types of posts get traction? In a nutshell, posts that either hit the heart, lead you to "ah-has," consolidate insight, consolidate resources, or help you nail a task. Skellie outlines 7 Types of Blog Posts Which Always Seem to Get Links and Traffic.

Types of Posts
Skellie's list of types of posts:

Resource lists
Lists of tips
Good advice
Aguing a popular point of view
Anything with a killer headline
Q&As with high profile people
Best of lists

Specialized Versions of Above
I think the following types of posts are variations of above, but worth calling out because of their prevalence on the Web:

Link lists. This is a variation of "resource lists", but focused on links.
Step by steps. This is a variation of "good advice", but provide prescriptive action.
Top 10 lists. This is a variation of "lists of tips" but it's a numbered set.

Additional Types of Posts
In addition to the types of posts above, I think there's an additional set of patterns:

Question / Feedback posts. Posts that ask the community a focused question.
Stories with lessons learned.
Blog carnival.
Timely hot topic. Timely posts about a relevant topic.

Blog Improvements

J.D. Meier — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 10:14:00 GMT

I did a few things to try and improve browsing and findability:

Added a "Best Of" list to my blog's navigation bar.
Added a Personal Development tag.
Added a Productivity tag.
Added a Professional Development tag.

I was surprised by how many of my posts related to productivity. Then again, I focus heavily on productivity with my mentees. I think personal productivity is an important tool for turning their great ideas, hopes, and dreams into results. If it's not already their strength, I want to make sure it's a least not a liability.

On my Book Share blog, I changed themes, reorganized key features, and created a best of list. While it may sound simple here, I actually went through quite a bit of trial and error. I tested many, many user experience patterns and relied heavily on feedback from a trusted set of reviewers. Although I used a satisficing strategy, I did try to make browsing the content as efficient and effective as possible. I was surprised by how many subtle patterns and practices there are for blog layouts. Maybe more surprising was how many anti-patterns there are.

Feed Readers

J.D. Meier — Sun, 13 May 2007 20:32:00 GMT

Darren asks Which Feed Reader is Best? I was going to just add a comment, but it quickly turned into a post.

I've used Bloglines, Google.com, Google Reader, Live.com, Newzie, OMEA Reader, and RSS Bandit. I know I've used more that I'm forgetting. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, so finding the right match for my scenarios is the key. They all seem to continue to improve, so I find I also have to go back and re-evaluate from time to time.

For the rich desktop experience, I ended up using Newzie. Rob pointed me to it and I know he does a lot of feed reading and he too had tried a lot of readers. What's interesting about Newzie is its use of color-coding to flag by time. I also like the fact that it has multiple views, including a tree view, list view, news ticker view, and a today view.

For my "webtop" experience, I end up mostly using Live.com so I could get to my feeds from any desktop. I created pages for different topics. This lets me chunk up my reading experience and never get overwhelmed. The nice thing about a page view is it's easy to scan across.

When I help somebody get started reading feeds, if they have a Windows Live account, then I show them how to add pages and add feeds to Live.com, since I don't think it's obvious. If they don't have a Windows Live account, then I have them download Newzie and help them add a few posts of their favorite topic, and then show them how to swtich views.

My Related Posts

My Tag Cleanup

J.D. Meier — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 00:30:00 GMT

I made some changes to my tag cloud and learned some lessons along the way:

A few useful tags are more effective than a laundry list.
If I have to choose between tags too often, consolidate and eliminate.
If I'm not using my own tags, they aren't working.
If my tag cloud doesn't visually reflect some hot spots, it's broken.
Use search for the long tails. Tag and browse for the big buckets.

I removed the following tags:

Enterprise 2.0 (consolidated under Social Software)
General
Information Management (consolidated under Guidance Engineering)
Product Design (consolidated under Design)
Requirements (consolidated under Design)
User Experience
Work Tips (consolidated under Effectiveness and Project Management)

I changed the following:

Project -> My Projects
Visual Studio Team System -> Team System

I'm not satisfied with my tag set yet, but I did find some of my old favorite posts. There's still a few sets of posts that aren't easy enough to get to, but I'll have to think more about how to surface them.

5 Tips for Blogging

J.D. Meier — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 05:11:00 GMT

Here's some quick blogging tips I shared with a colleague, that they found helpful:

Have a purpose or a theme -- I find having a simple purpose helps. For example, my one-liner for me is to journal my Microsoft adventures. Within that, I'll tend to focus on shaping software, project management, and effectiveness.
Know what you want from blogging -- if you don't have a compelling why, you'll lose the path. Your's might be *share insights and lessons learned*, or *build a sounding board* or *influence change one reader at a time* ... etc. It's whatever is compelling for you, and remind yourself when you need a boost. For me, it's personal growth and sharing what I learn with others.
Schedule your blog time -- it's not tough to write stuff; it's tough to sit down to write it. Make the time first, and the creativity will happen.
Post "good enough" vs. fit and finish -- if you always aim for the long-shot, you'll miss great posting opportunities along the way.
Do a blogging 30 day improvement sprint -- Seriously. You'll learn a lot up front, that you can use over a life time. While a piecemeal approach over time works too, I think this is a case where you can learn a lot in batch. There's a lot to be said for little improvements for 30 days. Even if that means asking and finding one good blogging question per day. Most importantly use this sprint to find your rhythm. Start off more frequently to become more efficient, then choose whether you want to do daily or weekly.

Tag Big Buckets First

J.D. Meier — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 04:31:00 GMT

Here's an example of a mistake I made tagging to illustrate how I'm now thinking about tags. I originally created the following three tags for my team system nuggets: Visual Studio 2005, Team System, and Team Foundation Server. I did this because I first did my research on Visual Studio Team System tags and found that's what Technorati was using. I figured by covering my bases, users would find what they might otherwise miss.

The problem with this approach is I no longer had a single big bucket to show me all Visual Studio Team System posts. This approach is also error prone (tag a post with two out of the three buckets). Worse, I was cluttering my tag cloud, without adding value.

I then adopted the approach of thinking in big buckets first. For now, all my team system related posts will go into my Visual Studio Team System tag. If I need to chunk that up, then I'll add a tag for my team foundation server posts. If I need to further divide then I'll add tags for sub-buckets like source control, reporting, work items ... etc. I'll also draw from my research on Visual Studio Team System tags.

I should point out that while now I think in terms of big buckets to small, I like the fact that I can also jump right to the smaller bucket. However, I also know that I can count on one big bucket to contain all my smaller buckets.

View-Driven Tagging

J.D. Meier — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 04:16:00 GMT

I'm not satisfied with the browsability of my blog. While I can get to a lot of the nuggets I need, sometimes I have to dig.

My initial reaction was that I just need to throw all my nuggets into a Wiki and do what I do best. Then I realized, no, I'm making a very basic mistake. True, blogs are oriented around time, but there's a lot I can do with tags. I simply need to make the most out of what I've got, before I take another path.

There's a few things I need to do:

Think in terms of drill-down. I was thinking too much about multiple entry points and not enough about bigger buckets to smaller buckets.
Think big-buckets first. I need to think in big buckets first. For example, I need to browse all the Security. Within security, I then want to browse Security Engineering. Or within Performance, I then want to browse Performance Engineering.
Test-drive my views. It's one thing to tag, it's another to use them. I sometimes get surprised when I click a tag and don't see the set of posts I expect. I need to make browsing my tags more of a habbit.
Use under-the-gun tests. It's one thing for me to find what I want, when I take my time. Can I do it on the fly, can I do it fast, can I do it when I'm at somebody else's machine and I have 30 seconds to make a point?
Test with users. OK, so I can find my posts and I can find them quickly. Can my teammates or a customer? Time to test.

I do have a few other rules of thumb that guide me. Rather than make a bunch of buckets up front and then wonder how to fill them, I prefer to make them as I need them. Also, even though I'm adding a little more focus to being able to walk my categories, I realize there's many paths, and part of the power of tags is more about "related item" discoverability, than actual hiearchy.

Using Live.com for RSS

J.D. Meier — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 05:18:00 GMT

Here's a quick set of steps for using Live.com (http://www.Live.com) as your RSS reader. What I like about it is that I can log in to it from anywhere. What I like most is that I can create multiple pages to organize my feeds. This let's me focus my information.

Here's the steps for creating pages and adding feeds to them: (you need to login to Live.com for these options)

Adding a New Page

Click Add Page.
Click the drop-down arrow next to the new page you just created.
Click Rename and type the name of your page (for example VS.NET)

Adding Feeds

Click Add stuff (upper left)
Click Advanced options
Put the path to the RSS feed you want (for example, http://blogs.msdn.com/jmeier/rss.xml), next to the Subscribe button.
Click subscribe. This will add the feed to your page.
Either add more feeds or click Add stuff again (upper left) to close the options.

Tip - If I need to search for a feed, I use a separate browser, do my search, and then paste the path next to the Subscribe button. I don't like the Search for feeds option because I lose my context.

I like Live.com for my Web-based RSS reading experience. I use JetBrains Omea Pro for my desktop experience, where I do my heavy processing. I think of this like my Outlook Web Access and Outlook desktop experiences. My Web experience is optimized for reach; my desktop experience is optimized for rich.

J.D. Meier's Blog : Blogging

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Tag Big Buckets First

View-Driven Tagging

Using Live.com for RSS