The Better Blogroll is a Wordpress widget that I wrote to replace the default “Links’ widget. It works by displaying a random subset of links from your blogroll which change each time the page is refreshed. To provide a reader some better insight into what they might be clicking, the category of each link is displayed to its right (you can see this widget in action in my sidebar under the heading “Rolling Blogroll”).

Displaying link categories doesn’t really make sense for bloggers who only use one category, so I updated the plugin to make the visibility of the link categories optional in this release.

More information about the widget and the download link can be found on my Better Blogroll Widget for Wordpress Page.

Take it for a spin and help your readers to get more out of your blogroll.

Unless you read a lot about web marketing and SEO, you may not have heard of Sphinn, a Digg-like community where people go to share and vote on web marketing articles.

Because I’ve gotten spoiled by the simplicity of adding bookmarks to StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us through buttons on my Firefox tool bar, submitting good articles to Sphinn seemed like too many steps. It’s certainly not a big deal to copy a url, open Sphinn, find the submit page, and so on, but it’s not as easy as clicking a button.

Well, now it is.

If you’re a Sphinn user, I created a Firefox extension which will allow you to quickly add the current page you’re reading to Sphinn. When you find a page that you want to add, clicking the Sphinn It! toolbar button will open a new tab and submit the url for you.

If you want it, head over to my Sphinn Toolbar Button For Firefox page.

Enjoy!

Well, the results of the first Smokin’ Poll are in:

What do you think of dyers.org lately?

• It’s a daily read: 38%
• It gets me naked: 25%
• You’re getting better: 21%
• Don’t quit your day job: 13%
• Hit or miss: 4%

A good 63% of you enjoy the site, which would be considered a D rating, if we didn’t take into consideration that a whopping 25% of you strip down nude at some point during your reading. D or not, nude=win in my book.

For the 37% of you who either see improvement, or want me to just quit and return to the cold dark world of systems support, what do you like or hate about the site? Are there things that you think could help it improve?

Be honest.

Don’t let me walk around in striped pants and a checked shirt and let me think I look good. Drop me a comment and tell me what’s up.

Sometimes writing a personal blog is like being sent to the supermarket with a note that simply says “Get dinner.” While it’s great to be able to write whatever you want, that ultimate freedom to find the topic du jour can often leave you overloaded and staring at a blank screen.

Instead of giving up and writing another “I’m tired, so no post today” posts, try these ideas to help beat your writer’s block once and for all.

1. Write Daily

“Keep writing. Keep doing it and doing it. Even in the moments when it’s so hurtful to think about writing.”
-Heather B. Armstrong

To get better at something, you have to practice, and writing is no exception. If you write every day, you will create momentum that will push you over the potholes that used to bring your writing to a dead stop. If you’re worried about publishing every day, don’t. If at the end of the day your writing doesn’t seem like it’s ready to publish, then put it aside and let it stew. It just might provide a starting point for a great post at some point in the future. Remember: writing every day is the important part, regardless of whether you publish or not.

2. Read Daily

“If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.”
-Stephen King

If you’re feeling stuck, forget writing for a while and just read. Odds are that you’ll find something inspiring that will kick you into gear. Reading will not only provide you with new topics to write about, but it will also help to give you stylistic ideas on how to write. If you dedicate as much time to reading as you do to writing, you may find that you have more ideas than time to write them down.

3. Experiment

“My Homer is not a communist. He may be a liar, a pig, an idiot, and a communist, but he is not a porn star.”
-Grandpa Simpson

Because you’re the writer of a personal blog, you can write about anything, so expand beyond what you think your blog is. You don’t have to tell a hilarious or heartbreaking story in every post. Your blog can be whatever you want it to be. Don’t let your preception of what your readers think your blog is dictate what it will become. Try something new. It may not end up being classic literature, but every post has the possibility to push you in new directions.

On Monday, Wordpress 2.3 was released, and it contains some major changes that are making people nervous about upgrading. After making the jump to WordPress 2.3 on my own site and upgrading my Better Blogroll Widget for WordPress, I thought I should share some of the information that helped me survive the upgrade with minimal damage.

Things You Need To Know Before Upgrading To WordPress 2.3

• The Basics
  What’s New In WordPress 2.3
  How to Install WordPress 2.3
  How to Upgrade to WordPress 2.3
  WordPress 2.3 Download
• You Might Not Be Able To Log In
  Some users are experiencing “ERROR: WordPress requires Cookies but your browser does not support them or they are blocked.” when trying to login after a WordPress 2.3 upgrade. It happened to me, and there’s nothing worse than feeling like you’re in the clear and then being locked out of your own site. Do yourself a favor and solve the issue before it happens by downloading an updated version of wp-login.php.
  Update: This was written for upgrading to 2.3 and has been shown by some people to not be effective with a 2.3.1 upgrade. There may be more information available in this Wordpress support thread.
  
  Continue Reading…

Although e-mail subscriptions are related to RSS feeds, I didn’t like using the standard RSS icon next to my “Get Updates by E-Mail” link. I had trouble finding an icon that matched the standard RSS icon being offered for free, so I created the icon to the left for my own use.

Recently, I noticed that one of my favorite “how to make money” bloggers (Maki from doshdosh.com), was using the standard RSS icon next to his “Get Updates By E-mail” link. Because I take a lot of free information from DoshDosh, I thought I’d offer him the email icon as a small token of my appreciation. He graciously accepted it, and you can see it in action by visiting his site.

If any of you have been looking for a similar icon, I packed eight different sizes of the icon pictured above into a .zip file for you to download and use on your website for free, no strings attached.

Download the free email subscription icon pack here.

If you found this useful, be sure to let me know in the comments.

It took me a couple of days, but I wrote my first plugin for Wordpress last week to fix the default way Wordpress displays your blogroll.

The default Links Widget in Wordpress works by pulling your entire blogroll into an unconfigurable list. This is fine if your blogroll only contains five or ten very descriptive links, but it doesn’t scale well if your blogroll contains a ton of obscurely named blogs. The longer the list gets, the less your readers will be able to see the individual links in it. The more obscure the link titles are, the less they’ll trust them.

If your readers don’t see a it, or they don’t trust it, they’re not going to click it.

So how do you fix that?

While I enjoy and appreciate the effort that goes into the 100+ blogs that I chew through daily, there are a number of things that grind my gears. Here’s my top 10:

10. Put in huge blocks of text and never break them up

I don’t care what that big, fat, snotty ass of an English teacher told you about writing. Writing for the web is different than writing for the approval of a washed up author. Most of the time, people don’t read your site, they skim it. Newspapers traditionally break up their paragraphs into smaller chunks to provide multiple places for your eye to rest on your way down the page. The web is exactly the same. When you give me big blocks of text, I lose my place a lot and end up getting aggravated. When I get aggravated, I read something else.

You know when you’re really excited about what you think is a great idea and people just look at you with that “And where’s the punchline” look? That’s how I felt getting up today. I spent so much time on my Top 10 Driving Albums post that I expected that it would be more of a hit than it was. I really put about a weeks worth of time into picking that music, and even convinced poor Tankboy to get into the action, and it generated slightly more than no interest.

It was sort of a let down.

I admit that I still haven’t got a clue where traffic comes from on the net, and I honestly don’t know how some sites generate a high number of visitors and commentors. On a basic level, I shrug it off on the premise that you have to network to get readers, and I suck at networking. On a deeper level, though, I know that content is king. And when I think about my content being the problem, I start to feel bad. I’m much more comfortable with the idea of generating gems that no one sees, than I am with generating a bunch of shit that isn’t useful to anyone. The first idea means that I’m simply undiscovered. The second means I’m deservedly ignored.

When someone like Dooce can write about every poop her kid takes and get world famous, and I can spend years putting out post after post without being famous among dozens, I found myself having to consider the less appealing view as a possibility. The numbers don’t lie, and the truth is sometimes a little ugly.

To distract myself, I spent some time looking up average salaries for jobs that had similar descriptions to mine. I really tried to pick job descriptions that were very closely tied to mine while avoiding those that sounded like they were obviously steps above me. Not considering myself an average employee (who does, really?), I was surprised to find that I was pretty average in terms of salary. To prove to myself that I was at least on the high side of average, I took one of my checks and calculated my exact salary. I was hoping to be at least slightly above average, just to feel better about something.

After doing the math on my gross pay for the second time in a row, I confirmed that I was not only below average, but I was actually earning less than I thought I was. Once again the numbers were ruining my happy little illusions.

I started dwelling on my job and finally admitted to myself that after 13 years with the same company, it’s not that I don’t want to play the corporate game to get ahead. The real deal is that I have no fucking idea what game is even being played. While people are steadily moving their pieces around the board, I’ve been setting up a perfect, four move checkmate on the pop-o-matic using only my queen, my bishop, and Cobra commander.

So, there I was, without a clue as to how to excel at my job or my hobbies, faced with the mounting evidence that I’m average, if not below average, on the things that eat most of my waking hours. Everyone wants to feel like they are above average, but if you look at the evidence facing you, and it says otherwise, do you ignore it and cling to your illusions, or face the facts and accept the reality of your situation?

My questions are these:

How do you find blogs that you to read?

How do find people who like to read you?

and

What do you find works best for cleaning your bathroom?

People think that there is something wrong with me when I don’t blog. Sometimes, there is, and sometimes there isn’t. Sometimes I am actually out enjoying the benefits of a 3D world, leaving the Virtual Jon behind. I feel guilty about it, you can believe that, but there’s much more to life than documenting the mundane crap that happens to me. And there’s much more for you than reading it, so I gave us all a break.