Twitter, a rapidly growing micro-blogging phenomenon, is taking over the internet. Day after day new companies are joining twitter and trying to get their clients. Bloggers are joining twitter to get more followers. Make connection in the industry. And so much more. In 2008 twitter’s traffic grew 752%. So I don’t see why users wouldn’t want to get on twitter. I am on twitter, Syed Balkhi. I am not used to of updating my life because if I am at Disney World, then I want to enjoy my trip rather than tweet what I am doing. But a lot of people update their lives. They get more and more followers and indirectly you are getting a lot of advantage.

Darren Rowse over at Problogger asked this question on his blog. Which would you pick, twitter followers or blog readers? I would appreciate if you guys go and vote there.

Right now the vote for Blog readers is at 701 and Twitter followers are at 107.

I voted for Blog Readers. Why do bloggers go to twitter? To get more readers. So at the end of the day, you want more blog readers. You can’t put everything you want to put in 140 characters. Twitter is too limiting. If I am selling a product, I am better able to do so on my blog. I think my blog readers are more important to me than my twitter followers. Blog readers can contact me through the contact form. Twitter, you can only Direct Message me, if I follow you back. I can’t follow everyone who follows me, so it defeats the purpose.

Twitter is great to get beta testers, perhaps get a quick poll, only if your followers are active. If not then you are screwed.

I will say that I will pick blog readers any day. The best example is that I would’ve never seen Darren’s post on twitter, but since I read his blog through my feed, I saw it.

What do you think?

Are you a blogger? If you are then you must be using feedburner to track your subscriber count. This free service is great, and it was bought by google in Summer 2007. But now Google has started to implicit their own rules. You are mandatory to move from Feedburner Account to your Google Account.

You Don’t Have A Choice!!!

That’s right. I read the FAQ page and found:

We are currently planning to have all accounts transferred by February 28, 2009. At that time if your account has not been updated, you will no longer be able to access your account at http://www.feedburner.com, and your feeds will either begin returning a “404 Not Found” response or a “301 Moved” response back to your source feed.

Why the heck is Google doing this?

Personally I think they are retarded for doing this because it takes up my time because of all the things that I had to change. Well the real reason for them doing this is they have more things planned. Eventually, you will be getting more features with Feedburner, and you will be able to put your adsense in your feeds. All to all the stats will be more accurate! (Seriously Google, it wasn’t accurate before?) Ah well just follow along.

Process of Moving

Pretty darn simple as google would like to call it. Well you login to your feedburner account. You will see a move link toward the top. Click on it. Choose the feeds you want to move. I am hoping you will move all of them unless you don’t care about one of your feeds. Give it 5 minutes, and it is all done. Hah thats when google’s part is done. Ofcourse their part was easy. Your part will be a living hell. Your Feedburner url is now changed.

So from http://feeds.feedburner.com/balkhis the url has now become http://feeds2.feedburner.com/balkhis

Next thing is that the email code is changed. And by default it was disabled for my feed. I enabled it right away. Then put the new code in my website.

So make sure you make the template changes, and change all your prior posts which have the link to your feeds.

Earlier You Move, The Less You Will Lose

You are probably wondering why I put that in title. Well it is true. Due to the transfer, you will lose a good number of your subscribers for a few days. Well at least google won’t record it. So my subscriber count from 1900s it went down to almost 1340s which pissed me off. But I made the change last week. Now it has gotten back up to the normal amount. So the sooner you are over with, the better it is. You don’t want to start a new month, with your subscriber going down. Better to do it while the month is about to end.

Next thing was that I had to make template changes. Which wasn’t a big deal because you change one file thats all. But to change all posts that I have embedded my email box. That was a Pain in the ***. I think google should’ve kept the feedburner way and add the new way on top. To make our life a bit easier, but they are not very considerate. Any ways nothing in life is free. You have to pay some what a price. And this is the price you pay for feedburner.

I hope you guys move, and hopefully you can do it safely. If you get stuck, feel free to comment below, and I will try to assist you.

Do you use digg a lot? Well I certainly don’t. I don’t have 500 diggs in the last 48 hours. I don’t submit about 25 stories a day. But what I do use digg for is to find nice articles. Articles that I can learn more tips and tricks from. Mostly article in the designing section. But it is always good to read what weird things are happening around the world. So well any who. Now get to the real point. Among my friends I am known as a Computer Wiz. Yesterday evening I get a call from a friend of mine asking me that if I had a Windows XP Serial Key. I said sorry, but I don’t. My windows stuff comes with my computer. I have a Linux CD. So he is like where should I look for one. I said google it, and you might find some. Well later in the night we met up. So I asked him did you find that key. So he is like yea it was very easy.

He says: “I typed in the term ‘windows xp serial number’, and the first one was it.” Now from my experience, the site have to be dead good to provide good serial numbers and stay up there for a long period of time. Now why did you think I thought it was for a long period of time? For competitive keywords new sites don’t rank really high. Google tend to rate older sites. But when the sites get some authority and have age, Microsoft usually catches the serial and disables it.

Well apparently when I went and typed the term, I saw the site and it was DIGG.

While it was no surprise for me to see digg rank high in google. But it was very surprising to see that it was ranking high for this. Usually either Microsoft, or Digg administration catches these things and remove it. But this submission was 1 year and 260 days old. WOW! And even sadder point is that it has 202 diggs up till now.

So what the fuck is the point of buying windows XP CDs if you can just get a torrent for it and use these keywords to make it work. Chances of getting caught is so slim. It just promotes more and more software piracy. I feel like a dumb ass for spending a lot of money for expensive softwares. But I do it because it is the right thing to do.

Well anyways after reading all the comments, This serial has been working. My friends say it has been working.

I think Digg’s Spam Control and Microsoft Spam Control need to do some work. Usually digg catches stuff like movies and what not. I know I stream movies and often times digg rank high for free stuff, but they remove it. I think this one just slipped their eyes. So I am hoping this get fixed.

There is this retarded thing around blogosphere which bloggers are getting obsessed about. That is the Subscriber count. I am very sure when feedburner came out with there system, the goal was for bloggers to get sort of an idea of how many people read their blog. But now number of subscribers has become so important, some bloggers are taking their strategies to an extreme. They would do just about anything to get another subscriber.

You guys heard of the system called Aweber right. Yeah this is the email newsletter service. They actually can be combined with the feedburner stats to make your subscriber count look high. The concept of Aweber is nice, but with the way people are now abusing it is F**king ANNOYING. I loved reading Shoemoney’s blog. Heck this guy was the reason why I started this blog. My first design was inspired from Jeremy. Now I am annoyed by his blog. Every time I visit his blog I have to deal with this extremely annoying pop up that asks me to subscribe to his news letter. Ok one time is ok. But every time I go on his site I get that. If I don’t want to subscribe, then it should just ask once and never ask again. I am so frustrated with this popup that I have decided not to go on his site anymore. So there your chances of gaining subscribers might be costing you your old loyal users.

John Chow is an awesome guy. I met him at Izea and had a blast with him. I loved reading his blog, and I was a top commentator at his site too. My thing is I don’t subscribe to Newsletter. I subscribe to feeds, but I have to go to their site to comment and so on. Well there is this annoying pop up on his site also. I close it each time and it comes back the next time I go on his site. So John, I will not be commenting on your site again either unless I am really really desperate.

Following these big bloggers a lot of new bloggers are following this path also. I can’t remember the site I went on a few days back which I recently discovered. I got to the blog and saw the pop up. I exit out and now I don’t even remember the url. Great job on that pitch to get me as your subscriber.

By no means I am saying that Aweber is a bad service. I think email newsletter are a great addition to a blog. But keep it on your sidebar. If I want to subscribe, I would. But don’t force your readers. If you force them by throwing a pop up at them each time they visit then most likely they will leave. Like I did.

The choice is yours.

Finally as I got back to Gainesville, Last night I updated Balkhis to wordpress 2.7, the latest version. Wordpress 2.7 is named Coltrane in honor of American Jazz Sexophonist John Coltrane. Coltrane was released on December 11, 2008 far after the planned date which was November 2008. I’d rather have it late then having to update few times after but one bug is still there. The plugin WP-Affiliate is not working with Wordpress 2.7. Which was the reason why I downgraded on the first place.

Until I find another alternative for that plugin, I will stay with 2.6.5. There are too many referral links on balkhis that is helping me generate all the revenue from these posts. I can’t afford to lose that because of one update. If you are not using this plugin, then you should definitely use Wordpress 2.7. My other sites are upgraded to WP 2.7.

Wordpress blog has posted this video that features everything:

Everything that I mentioned in my review is added into this version and some.

I will suggest that you guys check out 20+ Great Wordpress 2.7 Compatible Plugins.

If you guys know alternative to WP-Affiliate please let me know. You can Download Wordpress 2.7 here.

This is an exciting release because of the new look, and I will try to get updated as soon as I can once I figure out the solution to my plugin problem.