Part of the fun of working on open-source projects is the fact you get to connect with other developers all over the world in a collaborative fashion. Using Internet Relay Chat (IRC), you can connect to other Elgg developers for help or discussion.
If you’re new to IRC, check out the wikipedia article on the subject and download a good IRC client (for Windows) (for Linux KDE).
To connect to the Elgg channel, connect to irc.freenode.org. Then, join channel #elgg.
See you there!
I got back from the 6th Guelph DemoCamp around 9:00pm last night. Free beer, free food, a group of 50 or more programmers, and one block away from my apartment. Guelph rules :)
If you live in the Guelph area and you’re interested in going to the next one, there will be another DemoCamp on the 17th of September 2008. You should be there. Presenting stuff is easy: You get 5 minutes to set up, 5 minutes to talk, and 5 minutes to answer questions from the crowd. If you just want to come listen and mingle that’s cool, too.
I presented Jack of All Links to the crowd and it went really well. There were a couple of guys from WeGoWeGo, which is a startup that’s gearing up in Toronto as well as a few other people presenting technology or software they wrote. I really enjoyed it.
I was really surprised at the size of the crowd! I figured there might be at maximum 10 people (I mean, how many programmers *are* there around here anyway) but there were over 50. Exciting!
If you’ve just started your own blog or even if you’ve had one for a while but are always on the lookout to incrase your readers then take a few minutes to read this post. Included below are 3 sites that will help build readership by making your blog more visible and more accessible by people reading (and other bloggers quoting) on the internet.
Technorati is one of the original and definietly one of the most respected blog catalogs available on the web. By adding your blog to their listings, Technorati will routinely “ping” your blog to look for new posts. Then, it’ll take those posts and make them available to all of its readers giving full credit to you and your blog. Already there are over 112 million blogs in Technorati’s index!
Technorati also offers a few neat features including the ability for people to become “fans” of your blog as well as a ranking system called “Authority.” The Authority of your blog is determined by how many individual blogs (not just many posts on the same blog) link to yours. The idea is that the most popular blogs will be the ones that most people link to or quote from. Technorati also offers Top 100 blog lists and other ways to see how well you stack up to other bloggers.
Blog Catalog is exactly what it says: An online directory of blogs. While that doesn’t sound terribly exciting off the top this site is definitely worth a look. They are quite large, with over 18 billion messages in their message forum and countless blogs listed and updated daily, there is a ton of stuff happening at Blog Catalog.
An interesting feature available on Blog Catalog is the widget you are able to place on your own blog that links your Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and YouTube (among others) accounts and place the updates you do on those sites directly on your blog. For an example of this, take a look to the right side of this blog where you’ll see a red square titled “Latest Updates.”
There are other widgets available too, including one that shows you other Blog Catalog users who have recently read your blog. This service really helps to promote the social aspect of blogging.
Zimbio is a relative newcomer to the blog indexing lineup. An interesting feature that sets Zimbio apart from the other services are “Wikizenes”, which are a sort of dynamic magazine that include articles from similar blogs. There are thousands of Wikizenes available to read on the site and you are more than welcome to create your own for everyone else to read as well.
As an example, someone has created a Wikizene on Gordon Ramsay.
Last but not least, don’t forget to submit your blog (and your blog posts) to my social search engine and social bookmarking service: Jack of All Links.
I hope this helps you in your quest to promote your blog. I know that it’s helped me immensely with this blog as now all 3 of these services are pinging my blog daily. I’d appreciate any feedback you have, including additional services that are similar to these. If I receive enough I may post a follow-up. Thanks!
If you use the WordPress plugin Social Bookmarking Reloaded then you can benefit from the addition of the Jack of All Links social search engine icon on your pages. For the uninitiated, check out the previous article I wrote about the service. Otherwise, follow these instructions to add Jack of All Links support to Social Bookmarking Reloaded:
Add these lines to the bottom of your “sites.xml” file just before the </social_sites> tag. The file “sites.xml” is located in the “./wp-content/plugins/social-bookmarking-reloaded” directory.
<site>
<name>Jack of All Links</name>
<url>http://www.jackofalllinks.com/action/submit?url={link}</url>
<img>jackofalllinks_mini.png</img>
<key>jackofalllinks</key>
</site>
Download this image to your Social Bookmarking Reloaded directory (“./wp-content/plugins/social-bookmarking-reloaded”).
After you do these two simple steps, logging into your blog’s administration panel will give you the ability to select Jack of All Links as one of the icons to show in your “Bookmark to:” bottom bar on each of your posts. For an example, look at the “Bookmark to:” bar on this post!