Regulars will have noted that things don’t stand still for too long here on twopointouch. Apart from the post count. Fiddling with new themes and plugins is almost compulsive behaviour. While I’ve only had around four long-term favourite themes over the last five years, there’s every chance that you’ll have dropped in at some point when I’ve been doing something totally different — for about five minutes.

This continual urge for dalliance when it comes to off-the-peg themes has now led me in a totally new direction. Actually making something for myself. It’s all a bit scary and random, but one of the things that I’ve learned is that there’s lots of info and tools to help you out.

This is how I started.

I like the functionality of the Hybrid theme for WordPress. It’s got tons of page templates, plugin-compatibility and SEO right out of the box. So let’s start there.

It’s built for designers, and one consequence of that is that it looks a bit drab when you use it ‘naked’. The author, Justin Tadlock, encourages people to develop child-themes. For a while, I used his Structure template, which I customised very slightly to allow for full posts on the home page and the spaceman picture that I stole from the wonderful artist Jeremy Geddes.

Then I managed to break that, while trying to upgrade something else. I know how I broke it, and I could go back. But the breakage made me feel that I ought to be doing something else. That I should be trying to make something of my own.

So I reinstalled Hybrid and created a child-theme. This means that it takes everything Hybrid has to offer, but then gives you a blank canvas at the same time. By a blank canvas, I mean a new CSS file that can override every element in the theme.

Looking around recently, I liked the look of a theme called Clean Simple White. Up to a point. I liked the clean and simple bit, but there seemed to be loads of lines all over the place (according to my simple aesthetic sensibilities). It also didn’t work with the pages I’d already made and I like serifs for body copy — sue me.

So, I thought, I could take some of that look and remake it with Hybrid. You have to learn a tiny bit of CSS (this site makes it really easy) and you really want the Firebug extension for Firefox for testing and stealing things. And then it’s just trial and error.

I’m quite pleased with the look so far, but it’s maybe a bit wide and I want my spaceman back — maybe as a sort of ghost image behind the header area. Let’s see how we go.

Your old stuff — the stuff you wrote before, even your best stuff — mostly turns bad. It always did, but the Internet remembers. The churl.

Most people don’t bother about it. I, however, am foolish.

I’ve recently started using the Broken Links Checker plugin on this site. It finds the articles and sites you’ve linked to that don’t exist anymore. I did it because had a feeling that there was a need for some curation of my old articles:

• It seems like a bad service to readers to send them to content that you know isn’t there. If you click on a link that says ‘Ten things about X’, and you only get five, because the rest of it has disappeared, then you’d be disappointed, I’d suggest. Probably a bit annoyed with the person who sent you.
• I’m told that Google regards broken links with a stern eye and downgrades you accordingly. I want to be found (still need a new job, people!) and so this seems like a squandered resource.
• There’s a sense of personal and professional hygiene to this. They may have link-rot, but dammit, I don’t.

Anyway, I ran it and it found about 300 broken links in old posts.

Drat.

In a lot of cases, the broken link didn’t matter – it was just a case of extra information that wasn’t essential to the heart of the piece. Nonetheless, I get annoyed when I click on something and it doesn’t work; I expect you do, too. It wouldn’t be right to just leave it there.

In some cases, it ruined the whole article:

• Check out this research report – I think that… [Except the research report isn’t there any more and so readers have nothing to go on].
• Cool video from XYZ – pass it on… [Not so cool when it doesn’t exist anymore or has been removed].

So what to do about this?

Maybe, in an ideal world, I’d go back and either (a) find the Internet Archive cache of the old file and re-link it or (b) rewrite the post to explain exactly what the report said or what was so cool about that video, so seeing it didn’t matter.

But that isn’t going to happen: if I had extra time to spend on this blog, it would be to create more new posts, not fool about with stuff from four years ago.

So back in the real world, my options are (a) delete the post; (b) brief note of explanation; © ignore it; or (d) unlink the link.

I’ve mostly gone for (d) unlinking. In some cases, I have deleted: hey, check out this cool video you can’t see.

Shouldn’t you delete the post when the evidence or source no longer exists?

No. Because there’s this whole permalink thing to blogger culture. If you wrote something, then it should be there forever. We made a break with the ever-breaking links of other media outlets and decided that these records are set in stone. Links disappearing every five minutes was a bad phase for the Internet and we made the right decision. I agree with all of that, except if it means that something useless is there forever, because I was linking to a source that couldn’t care less about that whole idea.

And also, I have sinned enough. I have a confession to make. I changed the permalink structure of this blog a few weeks ago, rendering almost all inbound links useless. [Short version — I got some bad SEO advice that killed server performance — see this for good advice]. Mea culpa. If I knew more about WordPress and search when I started, I would have done it better.

Hehe. You were so dumb in 2006.

Another consideration. I certainly was (am). A lot of my early posts are naive and sometimes stupid to my and your 2010 eyes (not saying that never happens anymore). Should I wipe them to make me look cleverer? No. That’s OK, in a way. The blog is also a personal history, and stupidity plays a major part in that. In my case, anyway. If this was a company blog? Hmm. Well, maybe I’d make a few edits, especially if the old guy had left.

So the broken links are displayed with the <del> attribute, mostly.

picture credit: zen

Anyway, he isn’t. Yes, he’s laid-back and he did use the expression ‘real good’. We only had a short conversation, but I can imagine him being a big hugger. I like that sometimes, though. Anyway, I was disarmed. He seems to be a charming man. Actually, I’ve been really lucky so far, and only a couple of my Web 2.0 interviews have been with people who turned my flesh. Bottom line? You try to knock the scobleizer and you go through me first. Also, cheers to Robert for doing a live interview after the recent debate on the subject.

So what got you into blogging?

Back in 2000, I used to work as a conference organiser for a tech company and I was asking all the speakers what the sessions should be about. Quite a lot of them said ‘blogging’. At that point, I had no idea what that meant. *laughs* I went and Googled it, and there seemed to only be about 150–200 blogs out there.

So I had a look, and it was interesting but I didn’t think it was good enough to do a session on — which is so ironic, given that there are entire conferences on the subject now. However, I thought I’d have a go. I was really lucky, after about a week, I was linked by Dave Winer, and that suddenly brought about 3000 readers. From then on, the readership just grew.

And so then you got hired by Microsoft. What was their attitude towards your blogging?

Well, I kind of assumed that they had hired me partly for my blogging. So that gave me the impetus to carry on in the same style. Before I went there, I had criticised the company and advised Steve Ballmer to split it in two. I thought that gave me a go-ahead to carry on in the same way. And so that’s what I did.

What did MS gain from the blog?

It showed that they were listening. Which is so rare. They got a lot of PR out of it, and I suppose that was the main thing. But it also affected the way the rest of the company communicated with users. I used to get technical queries about certain products and I used to just forward them on to tech support. I didn’t know who the people were who were really responsible and neither did any of the users. Nowadays, though, all of the product groups have their own blogs with the product manager in charge, and they’re engaging with customers all the time.

And so for businesses in general, what do they have to gain?

Well, the PR effect is mostly because companies never listen and the blog format creates a vehicle for that. Any kind of listening is a major thing. At the same time, it goes both ways. A blog post can be a lot better than sending out a press release.

On the other hand, companies that hire agencies to do their blogs for them aren’t doing the right thing. South West Airlines have set up a blog, but it seems to be written by their PR company. It isn’t human. You need to get the idea of real human beings behind the posts.

So why have blogs become so popular?

I think we have to start with Google, and the way Google works. Blogs are extremely search-friendly. And blogs also create an environment where linking is natural. If you link to someone, then the chances are that they will link back to you. It’s just human nature — people will return a favour. That affects your Google ranking. Also, journalists are using blogs as a source for stories and so they get good quality inbound links. Word of mouth is important. People just saying ‘have you seen this site?’. Also there are new mechanisms for blogs to gain a lot of traffic. The digg site, for example. People are posting on there, ‘have you seen this site today?’ And it works really well.

Your blogging style is very like a diary. You don’t really do articles, for example.

I just tried to write on my blog in the same way that I talk. I picked up the style from Dave Winer. I just wanted to try to be conversational and talk to the readers on my blog the same way that I would talk to you.

Sometimes you find your audience by accident, though. A lot of people just blog for their family and friends, and if they do that well, then the audience will extend beyond that and it becomes a different thing.

So this blog thing, is it a fashion or here to stay?

Maybe, but it’s hard to know where we’re going. At the moment, I am experimenting with video, and I’ll be doing a video thing later this year. However, what you have to bear in mind is that video is a lot more difficult to consume than blogs. Everyone can write because they were taught that at school, but far fewer people know the grammar of good video, how to tell a story with a camera.

You can’t consume video in the same way, either. I can read maybe a 1000 blogs in an hour or two, but you can’t do the same thing with video. You have to give up after half-an-hour or so.

The thing is, that you can still get a lot of value out of a poor writer. You can scan their post for the good information. The same thing isn’t true of video, you can’t scan it.

That’s what makes me confident about podcasts, in a way. The audio element is so much more important than the visual element. If you remember the reports from Baghdad, when it was getting bombed. The pictures were appalling, but because you could hear all the sound, those reports were very affecting, picture or no picture. Also, podcasts are more location-independent. You can listen to a podcast while you’re in your car or while you are exercising.

So what makes for a successful blog?

Well, if I knew that… *we both laugh. There was a note of bitterness in mine*

Write about the stuff that people want to know about. You should spend a little time thinking about that if being successful is your aim.

Link a lot. People will link back to you. It’s human nature. They want to know that they’re being talked about and they will be generous in response.

People who have done it really well. Techcrunch. What they have is compelling graphics alongside really tight writing. That sort of format seems to be working well.

But for someone just starting, I’d advise they read 50 blogs for a couple of weeks. See what really interests you and try to be as good as them.

Any guidelines on posting frequency or length?

I would say that more is generally better. But then that depends on the area that you are in. If you want to be the best trucking blogger, then work out how much the current champion does and do a little better. If that guy posts once a week, then posting twice a week is obviously better. But I would say that most people who blog don’t care about having a big audience. They just want something they can be proud of.

If you are good and interesting then you will get an audience. That might take a little while, but I have known of blogs that have become famous overnight due to just one thing. For example, I search for the word ‘geek’ in blog posts and if I find it, then the likelihood is that I will go and read that post. This world — the blogosphere — is doubling every six months, though. It’s going to always be changing as a consequence of that.

Is blogging part of Web 2.0?

Sort of. The way I see Web 2.0 is that it’s mixing technology and communities together. Someone could reverse engineer digg, for example, and create an identical site on the technical level. But what they wouldn’t have is the community. And that community is what has made digg, in many respects.

Blogging kind of plays into that space. It’s user-created media. But also the communities around blogs are as important as the blogs themselves. When you participate, say by offering a comment, then you become a part owner.

picture credit: laughingsquid

Signs are that this will be an interesting read. Major corporate + apparent humility = addictive qualities. Check out this quotation from the first line of Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s latest blog entry from Sunday: “I had lunch with Tony Blair today. (And yes, I have been waiting all afternoon to type that.)”

How cool is that? He’s a big shot, but he’s just like you and me. He remains respectful throughout the entry to both the reader and to Blair. It’s good for me as a reader and him as the main conduit for communications between me and Sun. That’s because his opening remarks mean I might actually want to read what he’s got to say on the subject. He’s established himself as a human being with the same frailties as you and me, before he does anything else.