Prequel: well holy crap, “foofery” is an actual word. And here I thought I’d get a neologist’s badge. Bah!
Foofery – Noun
1. a frivolous activity, often of a goofy, silly, and/or foppish manner. Similar to folly.*
2. a semi-serious attempt by one blogger to keep her blogroll (and other things) up to date.
1. This is a very interesting article about MMO Community Enhancement. Go read it. Then read some of the stuff it links to. I think Tobold pointed me at this in a recent post, but unlike Tobold, I agree with almost all the suggestions in there, caveat being (as the article in fact states) that not all solutions are appropriate for all games or all communities. At base, I agree with the fact that community and chat tools remain woefully inadequate in this game of find-me-anywhere portable electrofoolery.
2. Hear ye, oh new Citizens of Blogland! If your blog template doesn’t yet have an RSS feed link (and most should), or if it’s not very prominent, please add it or make it so! RSS = Really Simple Syndication, and it’s how most of the blog addicts serious readers get their daily fix. In normal-speak as opposed to geek-speak, the little magic genies watch for blog post updates and funnel them into a client which shows said updates without requiring a specific visit to a specific blog to check if there’s anything new. (Yes, you’ll still get page hits.) Clients — or “readers” or “aggregators” — include Google Reader, which I can heartily recommend as simple enough for ME to figure out in minutes, especially for those who already have a Google account.** (As an aside, if a page you want to get a feed for doesn’t have an RSS link and you’re using Google, just copy the main page’s URL into the handy-dandy box provided and hey presto! new feed.)
Hat of ... Snobbery
3. I had a third item, but RL-phone aggro just drove it right out of my head (not a difficult feat even without telephonic interruptions). Oh, duh! The foofery itself. If I’m on your blogroll — for which, thanks! — and you’re not on mine, let me know. I’ll put on my Hat of Supreme Taste and Snobbery and decide if you’re worthy. Actually, if you can string two words together coherently and post more than twice a year, you’ll probably make it. My supreme taste and snobbery is very inclusive.
Unnecessary epilogue: what’s with Firefox suddenly thinking I want to save image files (ya know, PICTURES) as html files? Apparently it’s not Firefox’s fault — oh yeah? Then why does http://blahblahblah.jpg try to save as “url.htm”? Someone’s being stupid, and for once it’s not me. Fix! AT ONCE! (I know, I could just use Chrome, but Chrome is a himbo. Firefox is my Heathcliff — heavy and prone to fits of rage, but rugged and handsome.)
(And if you really want to know — or see me torture a helpless metaphor a little more — that makes IE the really creepy guy who lives in your building that you can’t get away from; he pretends to be helpful but what he’s really doing is drilling little holes in the wall of your bathroom so he can watch you in the shower. Or an ex- who does the same. Your baggage, your choice.)
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* The grammatical error isn’t mine: “of a goofy […] manner” indeed.
** And if you don’t, I have about a zillion gmail invites left. Just let me know who to send one to.
Stylish Corpse 
Yer on the blogroll, or more accurately, the list of links.
http://dukestreet.org/
And I really should update, rather than just thinking about updating…
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Tangential question: What does my blog do to your reader? I’ve not bothered to set anything up, but I do use the WordPress “Excerpt” field as a summary, and I tend to write a opening paragraph that gives a good idea of where I’m going. I try to be “snippet read” friendly that way, but I’m not sure if I need to do something else to actually make the RSS readers happy.
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I see your excerpts, which is presumably then working as intended. My *preference* would be for the whole article, because it’s easy enough to scroll past even ginormous walls of text (I should know 😉 ). With an excerpt, the tendency can be to think “Oh, I’ll get back to that later” because I’d have to click through to read it, and I don’t always want to do that… and I don’t always get around to it.
But then, I’m also not a fan of teasers in general — gimme the whole thing already, I can take it! 😀
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Interesting. I wonder if you would get the whole article if I *didn’t* write an Excerpt. I also wonder if you could turn off the Excerpt filter for your reader, bypassing it to the whole article. I’m not even sure that readers who just go to my front page even see the Excerpts, either, so those wind up being redundant, since I don’t want to put any unique points in them. Then there’s the “read more” link that I use when I do the really big articles (more than about 700 words).
…you really can’t please everyone. I’ll admit, though, I *like* walls of text. Always have, so long as they are well written.
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Don’t all browsers have an RSS subscribe button in the URL field? That’s the main reason I don’t have a button on my site, because I assumed those who wanted to subscribe knew where to click.
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Also, I don’t think you need an invite to get into gmail anymore.
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Hah I dunno, I haven’t checked the status of gmail in, err, years! 😀 I just know it still keeps adding those invites to my pile, which seems silly if they’re redundant now.
Dunno about the RSS thing — probably many browsers do, but until I actually took the time to learn about it I had no clue what RSS was. This was in prehistoric times (6 months ago). Given how many blogs I like to at least glance at pretty regularly, I couldn’t do it without the feed, and I have a suspicion I’m not the only ignorant kid on the block.
For those who know it, it’s no big. For those who didn’t, it might help make a bit more sense of the daily read, especially after the Age of Blogging initiative in January.
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@Drew sorry it took me so long to mod that comment of yours — got busy yesterday and never got back to the blog. Somehow I missed the “oi! you have comments!” mail for that one too. Fixed now.
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my posts are too long for full deals… i also came from some drupal set up where teasers became the standard way, and it actually took me a while to figure out how to (OMG HAXORS) it into blogger. but yeah. i’m happy with my layout.
I like being able to go to a page and see at a glance how many things I haven’t read already (this of course assumes they update frequently). i’m new here, but got you added in my dashboard as “followed” (no blogroll on the frontpage yet, though, I guess I could set that up).
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@ixobelle – there’s no obligation to have a blogroll, whatever anyone might say. For me it’s a way of sharing other sites I enjoy on the off-chance people stopping by the site here haven’t been to some of them. Also, it’s an easy way for me to find them when I need them. 😀
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