Geeked out beyond all repair

I confess that I’m obsessing about the tracyplaces dot com fiasco. Remember, we’re moving to www.tracyplaces.NET. I’m pointing the .net domain to http://tracyplaces.wordpress.com right now. Hopefully, the wordpress administration page will allow me to make the link more permanent soon.

For now, though, I’m still bound and determined to bury the dot com domain that a splogging scumbag is currently using.

So this morning, I decided to revive my blogspot account. Previously, the site was just a dummy blog that pointed to the dot com account. Wordpress has always been very versatile and easy to use. Blogspot was kinda clunky.

It’s still a bit clunky, especially when it comes to geeky stuff like tagging and pinging and such. It took me forEVER to post a photo this afternoon.

Even so, blogspot’s relationship with Google gives that place a distinct advantage. For instance, it readily interfaces with AdSense. That ain’t ever gonna happen here at wordpress.

What I’m looking for in blog technology is something that allows me to think more about writing something that is easily readable. Next, I want a powerful outreach (for lack of a better term) interface — technology that reaches out to all those fancy internet spiders so that when people type in “Fort Smith” or “Tracy Places” or “marshals museum” my blog pops right up to the top. Third, it’s fun to actually measure how many people are drawn to my blog, how they got here, and which posts they read. Wordpress seems to be the easiest in all three criteria.

That said, blogspot is getting better with all three criteria. Plus, the whole AdWords and AdSense thing is intriguing. It may not ever be worth much, but the idea of making a little bit of money just by writing what I write and allowing the spiders to decide what advertisements might be relevant to what I’m talking about is pretty cool. It’ll be fun to learn how it all works, even if I never make a dime.

Also, RSS technology allows me to cross populate my blogs. Ultimately, running two tracyplaces blogs may be too difficult to maintain. Certainly, the few loyal readers I’ve captured during the past year with the wordpress account may be too confused to keep track of both.

For the time being, though, I’m going to keep two blogs running. TracyPlaces@wordpress, and TracyPlaces@blogspot. One advantage is that I begin to dominate tracyplaces, and I play defense against scummy spammers like the one abusing my dot com domain (yes, it’s ultimately my responsibility that I let go of the URL). I’ve learned something about online branding. Own the name. Gobble up anything and everything that might be associated with it. ESPECIALLY if the domain is short, readable, and memorable.

So, if you’re game, plug both blogs into your feed reader. If you don’t have one, ask me how RSS works. Or read a simple explanation here. Basically, RSS is a must these days. It allows you to scan multiple sites at once to determine which content may be interesting or relevant to you or your work.

Most definitely, I am geeked out beyond all repair. I think my geek speak friends may even be horrified as they read this…