TheNHBushman.com

We’ve all known about Twitter of course, since it first appeared on the scene. I checked it out long ago and decided that I didn’t want people to know what I was doing at any exact second. This is mainly because I’m a privacy freak and Taiwan is a rather small place. It would be fairly simple to deduce where I was at any given moment with some instant notification system. It’s bad enough that I have a blog and make announcements where we’ll be sometimes.

Well, I caved in and signed up for Twitter because, if nothing more, it appears to be a good way to build blog traffic. Twitter is still on a probationary period with me though. It remains to be seen whether or not I use it. Facebook hit the bit bucket for me a few months ago. Let’s see how Twitter fares.

My twitter URL is http://twitter.com/thenhbushman (of course).

I write the articles, but you make them interesting! I always enjoy reading and responding to the comments in the comments section.

But the comments section is limited and some of the recent articles have spawned a lively discussion that could be better served in a more appropriate platform. Therefore I have implemented a new discussion board.

The direct URL is http://www.thenhbushman.com/bbs

All of our readers are invited to join the forum. Any reader has the freedom to start a new topic for discussion based on any blog topic. If you do, please inform the community by posting a comment to tell everyone that you’ve started the topic on the forum.

Of course, there is a General topics forum too. We’re open to any new topic suggestions (with the exception of politics, which would be best served elsewhere).

also, feel free to post stuff here that doesn’t belong in the blog.  for example, you found a cool video on You Tube but it doesn’t belong in the comments section of the blog.  well, put it in the new forum!

I’m looking forward to seeing what happens with the new forum.

Thanks everyone.

We are currently experimenting with video comments with the Seesmic plug-in. If you have a cam and a microphone you can leave a video comment on our articles without first having to upload a video to one of the video server sites such as You Tube. Look for the link at the bottom that says “Or add a Video Comment.” Please note that selecting this option will open a small window that make take a little time to load. If you are not registered with Seesmic, you may do so on the fly and immediately begin recording your video comment. Be sure and let us know what you think.

Hat tip to Mark Forman.

April 1, 2008, HUKOU TAIWAN

Taiwan blog The New Hampshire Bushman in Taiwan, today introduced a policy to help defray administrative costs.  This policy would be the first of it’s kind anywhere in the blogging world.  From April 1st, the blog would charge readers NT$5 to reply to articles with their comments.  When asked about the impact of such a policy on readership, and in particular comments, blog owner MJ Klein had this to say:

“It costs money to run a blog.  Our readers know that.  It’s all about time, and how best to manage our limited time.  Creating quality content takes time and our readers would prefer to have better content in the long run. At first we’ll lose a few, but we’ll gain more with better content.”

In order to comment to articles, readers would have to setup an account on the blog and then pay for credits which would be used each time a reader left a comment on the blog.

“We realize this new policy is controversial.  We realize that some people will be put off by this policy and may refuse to comment.  However we believe that this is the future of blogging,” Klein said.

Those responding to this article will be charged NT$5 for each comment.

UPDATE:

Thanks to Silas Partners, the Flickr Photo Gallery plug-in is updated! Be sure to install version 0.95.

Now, speaking of upgrading, there are some recommendations that we have for you:

First, install the newest version of the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plug-in in your current WordPress installation and activate it. This plug-in is fantastic and will upgrade your WordPress installation painlessly. The newest version of the plug-in will handle the upgrade to WP 2.5 and will even update the database and clean up the install files when finished.  So, go ahead and upgrade!

Please note that 2.5 looks quite a bit different and some of the plug-ins look different as a result. The Flick Photo Album plug-in now has a small Flickr icon at the top right of the compose window, as opposed to the expandable option below the compose window as before. But you will like how it functions - much better than the older version.

I am finding a few plug-in problems with 2.5 as this was a major revision to WordPress.  For the most part, nearly everything works.

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We’ve upgraded our WP engine to version 2.5 and discovered that a few plug-ins don’t work. We depend upon these particular plug-ins, so if you haven’t upgraded to 2.5 yet, maybe this information will help you.

• Absolute Comments

This is one of those plug-ins that you just wish WordPress would incorporate into itself. I need this plug-in to manage all the comments that we get (which are considerable). I’m going to have to reply to comments the old fashioned way but don’t let it throw you off.

• Flickr Photo Gallery

This is another one of those plug-ins that I can’t live without, because this is a photo blog. I host my photos on Flickr.com and this plug-in is essential for adding photos to articles. One can also cache flickr photos on their server and display thumbnails on a blog page. Very useful and once dependent upon the plug-in, going back is not an option!

Several times a week I get spammed by this domain: http://www.karaokecentral.info/  Don’t click on the link because there isn’t anything there worth even looking at, let alone driving traffic to that idiotic site.  I’m mentioning it because I’m hoping the spamming ‘wad will read this and get the message: your site sucks, and stop spamming me - your domain is banned and you’re wasting your time.  Ah, but these types are normally stupid so I don’t expect anything.

There are a growing number of these completely valueless sites that are nothing more than link, and link bait repositories. These sites usually leave their garbage spam as trackbacks on blogs.  Trackback spam is becoming more of a problem as spammers figure out that as long as they have the blog URL in the trackback, the spam blocker software will usually post the trackback.  Our readers should have fun checking out the comments for the last 10 or 15 articles and then count the number of links to blogs of completely worthless content.  Some of them are truly retarded.

Karaokecentral doesn’t allow comments, but they have a laughable terms of service and privacy policy.  Hopefully with your lack of support for these kinds of blogs they will dry up and go away.  They exist for one single reason - to get clicks on their ads.  There’s no content to speak of.  Just make sure that you never click on any of the ads for these sites, and avoid them altogether if you can.

This is what I’m reading, and what I recommend for this week.

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I just wanted to drop a line to our readers to let them know that we’re taking a short break on the mini park series because of the weather.  I’ve shot a few parks in the dreary overcast and those reviews just don’t do the parks justice.  Parks look terrible in this weather so we’re going to hold off on any more park reviews until the weather clears up in a few weeks time.

Thanks for reading our blog!  Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss anything!

Dear Readers,

We apologize for not featuring Bushman’s Picks last week, due to the Lunar New Year holiday. We were out of our office, enjoying all kinds of cool foods with our family and friends. So, on the one hand you didn’t get the picks, but on the other hand you’ll eventually get to see the pics! (more…)

Here’s what I’ve been reading since last week folks:

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