chris nixon : nixonbyname.com

I’ve update NixonByName.com to include FriendFeed comments. FriendFeed now drives the majority of traffic to this blog, so I think it’s important to send some love the other way.

I enjoy using FriendFeed, and it seems that most of my online contacts are the same way inclined. They are not perfect, but they are doing a damned good job…especially after such a short period of time.

If you haven’t already added me as a contact on FriendFeed you can do so here.

I’ve made a load of changes here on NixonByName since I moved from Wordpress.com. The excercise was so that I get everything I needed in place before I make the same move for Photografr.com. I’m pretty happy with what we’ve got here, so look for the Photografr move to happen in the next couple of weeks.

Yours aye!

In a month which has seen some pretty major changes in NixonByName it’s also been a month that’s seen a huge increase in visitor numbers. I now feel a motivated to provide some proper content. I hope you are not disappointed over the coming months. This blog will always cast it’s net wide and take inspiration from whatever inspires.

Here are the top five posts from April 2008.

1. (L) China (H) Human Rights Violations: Apparently today Chinese internet users are saying “enough” to international bullying. Here’s my tuppence worth.
2. FriendFeed Interesting People: A top ten of the most interesting people I follow on FriendFeed. Scoble, Hawke and Arrington all make an appearance.
3. Productivity: Todoist: A post from 2007 that’s getting new attention. I’m a big fan of productivity tools. Here’s my take on a great GTD online application.
4. Apparently You’re an Audience: NixonByName has been going for nearly a year now, but with the recent relaunch I’ve only just discovered the size of the audience.
5. Getting the Hang of It: My favourite photograph so far of my wife and daughter together. Both look so happy that it’s now the desktop background on my PDA.

Well thanks very much for paying attention over the last month. I appreciate that people are interested in what I have to say. Even if it is sometimes ill thought out and badly judged.

Yours Aye.

I have changed the comment system of NixonByName.com over to Disqus in a bid to further “socialise” your comments. The Wordpress comment system is very good, but it’s very blog-centric rather than user-centric. The downside for me is I lose a little  “control” over your comments. The upside is that it will be much easier for you to track your comments, your replies, and your contacts comments. Hopefully this will provoke a little more discussion.

Comment spam is handled very well by Wordpress and Akismet, so I was concerned about how Disqus handled this problem, but by all accounts it works well and very little gets through.

I think this is definitely the way forward. If all goes well here, the same system will be put in place when Photografr.com is re-launched in the near future.

I hope this goes down well with you. I’m very kean to know what you think about this new blog system. I’ve heard very few negative points about Disqus, and my personal experience of the system has been very positive. I look forward to reading your comments on my ill though-out opinions in the future.

Yours Aye.

NixonByName has been going for nearly a year now. I previously had my personal blog over on Vox, which was brilliant, but when they started restricting the feeds and all my readers had to suffer just two lines of text from a post in their reader, it was time to leave.

I’ve always known that my closest online contacts were subscribed to the blog. They occasionally comment, and I have a FeedBurner feed, which normally showed up about ten subscribers. I was aware that there could have been a couple more subscribed to the Wordpress feed, but I really only thought I was posting for my own benefit, and that others really weren’t interested.

As you may know, at the weekend I moved the blog from Wordpress.com to a hosted space. Apart from a few minor hiccups, it’s happened remarkable smoothly. My mate Rob did a load of work to get me up and running and IMed me through the whole process to keep me in the loop.

I’ve added a couple a plug-ins to help analyse who’s reading, but this was mainly done to test what was needed when Photografr.com makes the same move, rather than to test this readership. Well, it turns out there are actually over fifty subscribers to this blog! Only 20% were ever using the Feedburner feed. Now that the site feed is filtered through to Feedburner I can see you all. Hello!

I’m pretty pleased, but I also think that I may need to provide a bit more content to keep you guys interested. Don’t hold your breath, but you may find something interesting here in the near future. I’m keen to begin writing some quality content, but I refuse to put the pressure on myself while the Wee One needs my undivided attention. I’ll always keep posting the photographs and videos, but I will try to write more in those spare moments.

If you aren’t already subscribed to NixonByName, you can get the feed here.

Yours Aye!

I’ve fallen hugely behind with all my blogging recently. I put it partly down to tiredness, and partly down to laziness.

One of my aims this year is to move Photografr.com over to a paid-for host. I love Wordpress.com, but I now find it a little restrictive and now need more customisation. The problem is I have no idea what I’m doing when it comes to web hosts. I have no doubt that I’ll pick it up quickly, but I don’t want to bugger everything up.

The smart thing to do is move Nixonbyname.com first, and find my legs.

A friend has generously offered me some web space, and he’s going to show me the ins and outs. Hopefully the switch-over will happen in the next few days, and (at least initially) nobody will notice any difference.

Basically what I’m saying is, “Stand By! Normal service will be resumed shortly.”

I’ve been using Skitch recently to capture screen shots and resize photos for my blogs. It is one of the best pieces of software I have ever used.

Somebody over at Plasq has obviously thought very hard about how to make their software work for the user.

The software has many uses. Screen grabs, and camera grabs are the most obvious, but they also make it easy to make basic edits to your photos, resize images, draw and share or just host the images created at Skitch.com.

Where before I was using different apps to make changes to images and take screen shots, Skitch has wrapped these all up into one extremely useful and easy to use application. I really couldn’t recommend it more highly.

My only wish was that they had a windows version so I could use it at work. I regularly miss using it when I’m not on the Mac.

The problem is not that I don’t have time to write a proper blog post, it’s that I don’t have time to think about something interesting to write. At most, I am getting an hour to kill each day and (no offence), I’d rather spend that precious time with the wife.

So what happens with the blog?

I’m not dropping it. I find it a good record for me about life, and some others seem to appreciate it too. My idea is to make my posts shorter and snappier, rarely thought out and often misplaced or stupid. Think Twitter+, but badly formatted.

I’ll also keep posting my photographs too.

As time passes, and The Frog starts to sleep through night, longer posts will return.

Welcome to Nixon by Name. I should explain why I’m here. I have been a very happy Vox user for just about a year now. I like the community spirit, I like the design, and I like the simplicity of use. These features are all brilliant for the new blogger. There are not many blogging systems where you have an immediate audience straight out the box.

Over the last few months, however I have begun to feel restricted by what Vox had to offer. Keen to avoid the fugly interface problems that have beset MySpace, they do not allow you to add in many extras. This is in many ways a good thing, but for those of us with half an ounce of taste, it has just meant that we cannot do what we want.

To my point. Last month, without warning, or even announcement Vox decided to restrict their RSS feeds to two lines of text, and a thumbnail of any photographs or videos. This means that any of my readers now have to click through to the web site to get more than the vaguest idea of what I’m writing about. As a result I have found there is much less interaction on my posts. Viewers just aren’t bothering to click through. Why should they…they don’t know if there is any point.

I understand that Vox want to drive traffic to the site, but that is not compatible with my needs, which is to make it as easy as possible for my readers to read and interact with my writing. I think Vox have made a big mistake. I think they’ll find that instead of pushing users to the site, many users will not bother. I know I didn’t.

As I have made the move to here, I have also got the feeling from Vox that I do not own my own content. There is no way to export my posts, and that is extremely annoying. They want to tie me in, so I must start fresh here.

So it’s goodbye Vox and my neighborhood over there, and hello WordPress. I wish you all the very best. Please pop by to say hello. I may pop past to say hello every now and again, many of you are very good writers, and I wouldn’t want to miss that. If any of you have blogs outside of Vox, let me know your address in the comments, and I’ll add you to my Google Reader feeds.

UPDATE: Nick O’Neil from Vox responded by saying: “Sorry to see you leaving - however, your full feeds are still available for your blog, they’re just located at atom-full.xml rather than atom.xml (the trimmed feed). They’re auto-discoverable, just like the trimmed feeds so any feedreader will detect them just the same. Do come back if you’re ever missing Vox!”

However I think it’s all very well the full feeds being available, but they are not obvious to most users…and especially those that have already subscribed to my feeds. It’s a cheap little trick by Vox, and I think it’ll backfire on them unless they do some back tracking.