A break, courtesy The Onion ...

(America's finest news source, after all ...)

'Most E-Mailed' List Tearing New York Times' Newsroom Apart

NEW YORK—A feature on the New York Times' website that lists the stories most e-mailed by readers is destroying morale and escalating tensions among the once-dignified and professional Times staff, sources within the newspaper of record said Tuesday.

...

Columnist Nicholas Kristof, a Pulitzer Prize–winning former editor who has covered Asia and Africa for the Times, claimed not to be aware that his work frequently appears on the Most E-Mailed list, saying he "never so much as glances" at it.

"Who cares—lists are stupid and arbitrary," Kristof said. "Only shallow morons pay attention to them. As if an article is inherently better just because more people happen to read it. This isn't a popularity contest."

Kristof returned Thursday from the Sudan after a six-week-long investigation of the plight of displaced house cats in the genocide-ridden Darfur region. His findings will be published in next Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

(Link found at CyberJournalist.com)

Common Errors: Table foibles ...

Every now and again, someone will get adventurous and tinker with a table or two.

I'm not telling you not to, but just make sure you "close" your table out when you're done. Nothing will screw up a page ... the entire page ... faster than forgetting a little </table> ...

That doesn't make sense? Good, acceptance is the first step toward doing something about it. For a decent overview on the table phenomenon, try this page.

Living and dying by your pageview total is a bad idea ... a hypothetical

One of the biggest challenges as newsbusiness people (predominantly) is overcoming the "one and done" mindset. When you work in an industry where your product is usually either in the trash or lining hamster cages by the time it's eight hours old, you become accustomed to a very short lifecycle.

Happily, the Internet doesn't function that way.

Good stuff that you write might not net boffo pageviews the day you post it, but good work will often pay off in the long run.

This is relevant because all too often I see people dispirited that they aren't getting huge numbers when that accursed "daily report" gets circulated every day.

But you have to attack it from the mindset that you're creating a collection of things, not publishing individual items. And even those individual items might be more valuable than the daily spreadsheet might indicate.

Let's create an example:

Person A has created a blog called, well, "Blog A." (Sorry, not big on the whole creativity thing today.)

Blog A posts an Item of General Interest, and it gets homepage play, because we're pageview whores, too.

Blog A ends up with 1,000 pageviews for the day. Great, huh? But a big chunk of that is a collection of about a dozen or so readers, arguing endlessly back-and-forth in the comments and refreshing often to see if anyone else says anything bad about them. In the end, about 500 actual PEOPLE read the posting, which is good, but not the slamdunk it originally was thought to be.

Blogger B's blog, "Blog B," is a touch more specific ... even "niche-y," to sort of coin the phrase.

This blogger posts a very specific, but very well-crafted and insightful entry, and that doesn't get big homepage play, because we're very close-minded.

At the end of the day, Blog B's new entry has only 100 pageviews.

Colossal failure compared to Blog A, right?

Not so fast.

Blog B's readership likes the entry so much, they begin e-mailing friends and family who share their Blog B passions. Over the course of the next two weeks, the humble little blog entry averages about 70 views a day. Not enough to chart on our daily reports, mind you, but enough that ... over the course of 14 days, our nicely-written little blog entry brings in 1,100 pageviews, largely from unique readers.

Compared NOW to the flash-in-the-pan (and now quite stale) Blog A's 700 or so unique readers ... let's be generous and throw another 200 or so in there .... Blog B doesn't look like the qualified failure anymore, does it?

And the best case scenario: if Blogger B continues the solid work, those people will become regulars, and begin to have inane comment-battles of their own, driving daily readership up as it goes.

Will that always happen? Is it likely to happen? The incredible competition of the Internet makes it tough ... but a Best Practice is always a Best Practice.

And, to spell it out, the Best Practice is to blog frequently, and blog well. Do things that please you and your peers.

Most importantly, do not get discouraged if your numbers aren't what you think they should be. Because, frankly, they're probably better than you think.

Common Errors: The Dreaded Dash

Curly quotes and apostrophes, which I've whined about in great detail over the months, only account for most of our garbled text.

The rest?

Usually dashes.

It happens when MS Word (or its equivalent) "helpfully" converts double-hyphens into hard dashes, and Movable Type chokes on those.

Best thing to do? Replace the dashes with this code:

&mdash;

That gives you the nice, smooth dash you need and none of the gobbledygook nightmares.

And it saves your editors time. And that's a good thing. Right?

A message from the proprietor ...

Please ... let us know when you post.

A lot of you have editors or other colleagues editing and publishing your entries — which is awesome, we totally dig the initiative — but if you don't either send a notification or simply drop us an email at our normal address (the one that starts with "news" and ends with "mysanantonio-dot-com") than we won't know to publicize your fine, well-crafted entry.

(If you don't know how to send a notification, check the bottom areas of this entry.)

It's frustrating when I happen across a particularly juicy blog entry that's a few days old.

We now resume our regular programming.

Common Errors: Image won't upload

So you're adding a picture to your blog, which is a good thing, and you're rocketing along until you try uploading it to MT.

Then you get this little beauty:



So what's gone wrong?

Nine times out of 10, you're looking at an image so large that the server couldn't handle the upload.

Check the size of your photo. (Easiest way? If you're using a PC, right-click on the image and select "properties." "Size" is usually right in the middle of the box. If you're using a Mac, you're kind of on your own, though if memory serves "Apple-i" gets you some information.)

If it's a bit on the hefty side (anywhere from 50 KB up to a meg or so), make it smaller. Remember, your photo should be no more than 450 pixels wide and the "DPI" should be set no higher than 71. Anything larger than that, you run the risk of choking the system.

I have a few details on how to size a photo further down in this entry, though I should probably do a larger entry on it later. (Look for it, I guess.)

How big, exactly, is "too big"? I can't put my finger on it, exactly, but as a rule of thumb, try to keep your photos from not getting much larger than 20 or 30-odd Kilobytes.

And, as always, if none of this makes any sense, contact me.

Common Errors: A series ...

I'm hoping to set this up as an almost "FAQ" for our most common errors. If you feel I'm missing an issue you'd like to see addressed, drop me a line.