http://www.rklau.com/tins "It is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself." Wed, 01 Oct 2008 16:33:56 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en A while back, Brad Feld asked Don and I to be mentors for TechStars. (Don was a mentor last year as well.) The list of mentors is impressive (my participation notwithstanding!), and the overall program is a fantastic idea. In short: 10 startups get picked from among hundreds, receive seed ... http://www.rklau.com/tins/archives/2008/03/18/techstars-two-weeks-left-to-apply.php Umm, so I don’t think I was very clear last week. The feed updates are for the “shared items” feed, not for the blog feed itself. In other words: if you weren’t subscribed to my “shared items” feed before, the post didn’t/doesn’t apply to you (and sorry for the rambling). ... http://www.rklau.com/tins/archives/2007/10/29/update-to-the-update.php I’ve been using Google Reader’s shared items for a while now, and originally ran the resulting feed through FeedBurner. Truth be told, I don’t need the metrics (it’s mildly interesting that there are three dozen people subscribed to my shared items feed, I suppose). More importantly, some useful context with ... http://www.rklau.com/tins/archives/2007/10/26/administrivia-update-my-shared-items-feed.php Experiencing serious blog issues (which is why I’m upgrading – maybe that’ll exorcise the demons?). Stay tuned… Update: Huge thanks to Aaron Brazell who was extraordinarily helpful in isolating the issues behind the wonkiness. http://www.rklau.com/tins/archives/2007/09/20/upgraded-to-wp-23.php …but wow, I’d forgotten how painful moving is. Not painful in the “so sorry to see you go” way. No, the goodbyes have been sweet, and appreciated, and since we’re moving to the Bay Area, we’re already scheduling visitors – it’s not like we’re never seeing our friends again. No, ... http://www.rklau.com/tins/archives/2007/07/17/im-not-dead-yet-2.php Picking up the thread, Erik points out that there’s a lot of room for improvement when it comes to blogrolls. I’m not sure that FeedBurner’s the right answer to solving all of the things he points out (traditionally, we republish and/or manage existing info, rather than creating it originally), but ... http://www.rklau.com/tins/archives/2007/04/30/blogroll-chaos.php In between mowing the hay, getting the garden ready and chasing the kids, I got a little housekeeping done on the site today: Fixed the search engine. It was pointing to the internal WordPress search engine, which wasn’t working. I didn’t have the energy to debug that, so I punted and ... http://www.rklau.com/tins/archives/2007/04/29/housekeeping.php Last week I wrote about problems leaving comments on blogs using Akismet to protect against spam. Thanks to some assistance from Matt Mullenweg, whatever gremlins I was offending are now happily approving my comments. Which makes me happy. Thanks, Matt! http://www.rklau.com/tins/archives/2007/04/27/akismet-update.php Akismet, the brilliant spam plugin that makes it possible to let people leave comments on a blog (in a year, it’s stopped more than 180,000 spam comments, or nearly 500 spam comments per day), doesn’t like me. As you probably know, I’m pretty proactive (along with Jake and Eric) about ... http://www.rklau.com/tins/archives/2007/04/18/akismet-hates-me.php A feature I had on the site about a year ago was the Now Reading plugin which gave me an easy way to use WordPress to manage the books I was interested in, a way to log my thoughts on the books as I read them, and a neat archive ... http://www.rklau.com/tins/archives/2007/04/18/recommended-books.php I just wrote up a post I’m pretty proud of over at Burning Questions. It’s specifically about the full vs. partial feed debate, but from a different perspective than most discussions on the topic. Specifically, I looked at the likelihood of partial feeds generating clickthroughs (low), the ability to increase ... http://www.rklau.com/tins/archives/2007/04/18/full-vs-partial-feeds.php The pace continues to accelerate here in FeedBurner-land, so I’ve been pretty slack in posting to the blog. I know, I know – you didn’t miss me! – but it still feels odd to be out of the habit of posting and then face the inevitable writer’s block when I ... http://www.rklau.com/tins/archives/2007/03/20/shared-items.php I don’t care which baseball team you root for, if you have any interest in professional sports, you should take a look at Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling’s blog. His first posts are remarkable. My favorites so far: On baseball’s recent deal with DirecTV: “I don’t think there’s any doubt that ... http://www.rklau.com/tins/archives/2007/03/09/curt-schilling-is-blogging.php Really excited with the latest post we put up today at the company blog: FeedBurner’s View of the Feed Market. The gist of the post is this: for all the attention focused on subscriber numbers, they’re an incomplete metric to use when evaluating a feed’s audience. What good are a ... http://www.rklau.com/tins/archives/2007/02/22/how-engaged-is-your-audience.php A postscript to last night’s update — though it worked on 99%+ of the posts, several posts that already had hyphens in them were resulting in 404 errors. If you’re running WordPress, I found two plugins that you should absolutely look into using: 404 Notifier. This monitors any 404 errors and ... http://www.rklau.com/tins/archives/2007/02/06/more-on-the-site-update.php