DeadRooster.com

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WEEKEND PLANS ABORTED. The plan was to take a few days off, mix up a pitcher of margaritas, relax on the back porch and finish reading Cluck: Murder Most Fowl. The trouble was that the temperature here in the beautiful wine country of southern California shot up to over eight-million-degrees–or, in the real world, about 102 F (39 C), and it was way too hot to sit out there and read. I think I even heard some grapes popping on the vines.

Anyway, I really needed to get this reading done because I had promised Eric Knapp, author of Cluck, that I’d get a review of his book posted this week. Lucky for me, the temperature is supposed to back-off to 86 F (30 C) today which should be just fine for reading in the shade. I am only about half-way through the book, but I should be able to finish it today and have the review posted by Thursday.

Over the weekend, while I was stuck inside watching cartoons and sipping margaritas, a thought occurred to me: after all the extra traffic from the CNN story, I wonder how many of the new visitors converted to RSS feed subscribers? I don’t really push the RSS feed subscriptions, but with all those extra visitors you would think at least some of them would do it.

Some of them did: Two of them.

I always wondered why my feedcount looked so anemic compared with other, similar blogs. I guess part of it can be chalked-up to the fact that I just haven’t been around for very long; but, it still seems like I should have more subscribers. So, I did a little research and discovered something very interesting that made me feel a lot better.

…and, I doubled my feedcount in 24 hours.

I’m not going to get too much into the inner workings of WordPress except to tell you that there are several RSS feeds hiding in there and if you use feedburner it just adds another one. What this means is that there are feed subscribers scattered all over your blog, some of which you probably don’t even know about, and the feedburner feedcount displayed on your blog is probably only a fraction of the actual number of subscribers you have.

If you operate a self-hosted WordPress blog there is an easy solution. Feedburner has acquired “Feedsmith,” a plugin originally developed by Steve Smith that takes your maverick RSS feed subscribers and converts them all to Feedburner subscribers.

Installation is a breeze, just download the plugin, unzip, pop it into your plugins folder, activate it, and then set it up with your feedburner RSS address in your WordPress dashboard.

DOWNLOAD FEEDSMITH FOR WORDPRESS

FEEDSMITH INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS

Remember, Feedburner updates their stats only once a day so you might have to wait as long as 48 hours to see the full results.

A few notes:

1) obviously if you are a blogspot blog this does you no good, however, it’s probably a safe bet that “blogger” blogs already convert all the RSS feeds (I would be a little surprised to find out that Google doesn’t incorporate this technology into their own blogging platform).

2) This is not yet available for WordPress.com blogs—hopefully they will get around to it at some point.

3) I got to thinking that some bloggers may want to keep some of the feeds separate. If that’s you, there is a hack I found by Abhijit Nadgouda that might do the trick.

4) When I first started this blog (January 1st, 2008) I didn’t immediately start out using Feedburner (I didn’t even know what Feedburner was at that point), so that may account for my unusually high gains–mileage may vary.

Note: If you want to help get Dead Rooster’s feedcount up to a respectable, display-worthy level, you can subscribe to my full RSS feed by clicking the orange RSS Subscription button at the top of the sidebar at right. You know you want to!

Welcome to the first and last time I will ever respond to a Meme Tag. The only reason I’m doing this one is that I really like ettarose and her blog ettarose-edgeofsanity.com. The main reason I won’t do another one is because most of my readers are NOT bloggers and when they see something like this they go, “what the…?”

OK, let’s do this thing. Make sure you read it all because I have to tag 8 bloggers and one of them could be YOU! If you ARE one of the lucky tagees, copy the following set of rules and paste them on your blog and follow them.

RULES:

1. Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged, write a blog post about their own 8 random things, and post these rules.
3. At the end of your post you need to tag 8 people and include their names.
4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment on their blog and tell them they have been tagged, and to come back and read your blog for the whole story.

OK, here’s my 8 facts/habits:

1. I watch cartoons every night–even if I don’t come in until 2:00 a.m.
2. I have a Bowflex machine in the garage but so far the only exercise I’ve gotten out of it is walking around it to get to the car.
3. I am a Rare Book expert.
4. I create original songs on-the-fly which I then sing to my cats…and they love it!
5. Artistically speaking, I believe THIS is the single most perfect music video ever created.
6. I live in Southern California wine country.
7. I can name most of the birds you see in the state of Wisconsin without looking them up in a bird book.
8. I once built a squirrel feeder that looked like a fire truck and I designed it so the only way a squirrel could get to the seeds was to sit in it like he was driving it.

So, who shall I tag:

1. The first one that I absolutely MUST tag is my friend TheMrs at Ringtailed Squealers because she sent me a tag once and I didn’t respond. Now she can “not respond” to this one and we’ll be even.
2. Since I haven’t seen him around here for quite a while I am going to tag Static at Krapsody just to let him know I’m still alive.
3. My extremely funny friend Jinksy at Extremely Funny
4. Jenn at Cabbages and Kings because her blog will soon be super popular and I want documented proof that I was one of the first people to know about it.
5. Consider this a plug for one of my favorite blogs SciFiDrive. I doubt he will respond, but if you like vintage Science Fiction as much as I do, head over there, right now!
6. Paisly at ….Why Paisley? because her writing is so inspiring and I need at least one classy blog on this list.
7. Lobo at Predator Press to show my support for mentally deranged bloggers.
8. The funniest person alive: Don at It’s a Funny Thing…

Check others on my blogroll to see who would have made this list, but didn’t because of the numerical cut-off point.

For those of you that have never had the pleasure of getting “Rick Rolled,” I will briefly explain. In the original version, you would read a forum post, email, or article on a social network which had a link to something of extreme interest to you such as an adult-oriented video featuring Brittney Spears and Paris Hilton spanking each other with fully-marinated barbeque brushes.

However, when you clicked the link, you were fed a script which hijacked your browser, reduced it to YouTube Size, and had it jump around your screen playing this 1980’s video of Rick Astley performing “Never Gonna Give You Up” at full volume.

At one point the video would stop jumping around but you still couldn’t close it because when you tried it would launch a series of never-ending message boxes. Every time you closed one, a new one would open—and remember, to add to the frustration, the whole time all this is going on THE BLASTED SONG KEEPS PLAYING!

So, anyway, this morning I got Rick Rolled again (but no nasty script involved). Why it happened though requires a little bit of explanation: Earlier this month my brother Raymond and I took a week’s vacation in Orlando Florida. We visited Walt Disney World, Universal Theme Parks and a few other minor attractions. We took several gigabytes of photos and downloaded them all on to his notebook computer’s hard-drive.

When we returned to California and back to his apartment, I asked if he could quickly burn them onto a DVD so I could take them home with me and utilize them in some blog posts. Unfortunately, he was out of blank DVD’s so he promised to mail me one in a few days. So far, I haven’t seen it (which is why I haven’t written about our trip yet).

Back to this morning: I get up at about 5:00 a. m., put on coffee and check my email. Lo and behold there is an email from Raymond with a link to “all our Florida photos.”

The link led to this YouTube video:

Good one Raymond! Now send me the photos!