Mandrill over at I am Keith Neilson has created a new animal.
It’s cool, it’s fresh and worthy of a big thank you for what he is working to do.
He’s has a OPML file that only contains active blogs. WOOT!
It’s streamlined and has constant maintenance to adjust for blogs that are no longer active so that you will always have access to fresh content. He will be rotating our old blogs that are no longer active, that is, blogs that have not had a post made over a set period of time.
Why do this? Well, OPML files grow over time with more and more blogs and you get to the point that managing such a large file becomes very time intensive. Maintaining a OPML that only has active bloggers in it provides for a better reading experience. It’s also gentler on the RSS reader as it doesn’t have to check hundreds of blogs that have no updates. Google Reader will thank you.
Head over to http://keithneilson.co.uk/eve-bloggers-opml-download for your OPML file for the most fresh EVE blogging content.
As for the OPML file I used to maintain, I will continue to do so, however, this file is more of an archive of EVE blogs, both active and quiet. It’s nice to read the old blogs from time to time for perspective, older guides that are still useful, etc.
The EVE Player Blogs Archive OPML file:
http://www.eve-druid.com/opml/EVE_Player_Blogs_OPML.opml
And of course, you will always be able to read all the latest posts from the EVE Blogging Community at The EVE Online Portal at http://www.evebloggers.com.
Tags:
EVE Player Blogs,
EVEbloggers.com,
Manasi,
opml,
The EVE Online Portal
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I am still getting over this Bronchitis thing. It sucks but it’s getting better. There have been a items of note to highlight this week:
- Helicity Boson wrote a very long, interesting article concerning Carebears and why he hates them. It’s a good read as well as the community response. Yes, if you are sensing a Google shared item for the blog posts, your right. Read the entire collection!
- Spectre over at EVE Newb has decided to take a break from EVE Online or perhaps it’s another one of his scams. Anyway, it’s an entertaining read as are all the responses posted in the EVE Blogging Community.
- After many month, we finally have the FanFest background projection videos that were looped on the screen behind the main stage. Enjoy!
- Dominion patch 1.1 went live on Thursday, read the patch notes if you are curious as to what changed. There was a CCP Dev blog posted, the first one in a long time as well concerning the Dominion 1.1 patch changes. Items to note from these two articles: Motherships are now Supercarriers, Drones can now be used to attack Zephyrs in wormhole space and most importantly, CCP Tuxford can no longer shut down TQ on a whim.
- Still no word on when they are going to fix the game breaking lag in 0.0 space or the server stability issues. In fact, the stability issues have gotten worse since this most recent patch. Around 9:30 pm est, TQ went down along with the EVE forums. Random lag storms have been hitting systems with local counts as low as 5. CCP seems to be having a lot of quality issues lately.
In addition to continuing to play catch up at work from being out sick. I made time to work on on the OPML download file this week. From time to time I go through and make sure that I have all the correct urls and that all the sites listed are still alive. For the latest additions to the OPML download, head over to The EVE Online Portal. As of right now, we have 503 blogs listed in the OPML file. Yes, that’s a lot of blogs.
Below is the list of sites that were removed. I removed them as they were either dead sites, had no content or access to the site was denied for some reason, either from a server 403 error being presented or a site blocked page from blogspot. If your site is listed below in error, please either comment on this blog post or email me to have this corrected.
- www.autopilotdisabled.com – No content
- www.hacksplat.com - No Content
- sulla-monster.blogspot.com - No content
- caldarinavyibis.blogspot.com – Access denied to the site
- www.warpscrambled.com/blogs/suddenlyninja – Access denied to the site
- www.waypointreached.com – No content
- triffonsbio.blogspot.com – No content
- phoenixcorps.blogspot.com – No content
- newedendiaries.com – Site is dead
- podlogs.com/tetsuotakashi – No content
- eve.phasma.bplaced.ne – Site is dead
- protosolus.co.uk – No content
- the-life-of-orias.blogspot.com – Site is dead
- khezual.blogspot.com – Access denied to the site
- www.systemkaos.com – Site is dead
- podlogs.com/neuralboost – Site is dead
- evepilot.eve-gamers.co.uk – Site is dead
See you out there!
Tags:
Carebear Rant,
Fanfest,
opml,
OPML Download,
Spectre leaving
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Casiella Truza over at Ecliptic Rift wrote a great post on how to publicize your blog (http://rift.chromebits.net/2009/12/29/8-ways-to-publicize-your-eve-online-blog). I started to write a comment and it turned into something rather lengthy. So, rather than clutter up his blog with a TL;DR comment, I decided to write a post.
That brings me to one of his points be discusses, point number 8, comment on other people’s blogs. This is a great way to hold a discussion or in my case here, create inspiration for a blog post.
Some more tips to consider in no specific order:
- I have to point out Mynxee’s comment, then point to it again and again and again…It takes time to grow a following. Well written posts on a fairly consistent schedule will keep readers coming back. Many bloggers start out trying to write a post every day. Protip, don’t. Write at least two posts a week max when starting out. Don’t overdo it, you will burn out.
- Write posts in advance. I take time every Sunday to sit down and read. I read the EVE forums, I read blog posts from other bloggers that I have starred in Google Reader and I decide what I am going to write. I write out a few different draft posts and touch them up over the following week.
- Mur Lafferty has a wonderful writing podcast, I Should Be Writing. She has a great quote and I can’t remember it verbatim, but this is the sentiment, “It’s okay to suck. Write and suck at writing. The only way you will get better is to write, suck at it and write some more.” Write that piece of fan fiction and let it bomb horribly. Need some examples of bad fan fiction, read my stories. They totally suck when compared to many of our talented fiction writers like Roc and Shae Tiann. It’s okay that my fiction sucks, it will get better in time and more importantly, I enjoy writing the stories.
- Don’t topic spam. This is a very hard one to do. With 500 blogs listed in our OPML file, the potential for posts that are on the same topic is very high. There is nothing wrong with people talking about the same topic, say an upcoming expansion, but when there are several posts with identical content, the general reader base may tend to skip over your post. Sometimes it’s better to keep that post as a draft and use it later, perhaps revise it with a different perspective after a day or two.
- In reference to point number 7, I found it useful state at the top of my bio about having auto-reject turned on and to in game mail me so that I don’t encounter an ill timed chat request. I also turned off my in game email charge so that people can contact me without having to pay isk. When someone does contact you in game, do try to respond to them.
- Tags. Use tags for your posts and try to use similar tags for similar topics. Search engines love organization and if you are consistently using tags and categories in your blog, you will increase traffic to older posts. Just because a post is not on the first page does not mean that someone will not read it. Remember, people add blogs to their RSS readers all the time. Your first post from 2 years ago may be brand new to people today.
- Spell check. Do it, your readers will thank you.
- Read your post aloud before you publish it. Things you write always seem to look fine when you read them in your mind, hearing the words in your ears helps to smooth out language. Again, your readers will thank you.
- Revisit old posts and write new ones. It’s funny, your perspective on something in game can change over time. You may have really hated warp bubbles in nullsec when you were trying to take a shortcut a year ago but you may really love them now as you may be a HIC pilot. Write a new post about how your perspective has changed and why.
- Publish your blog to the Kindle. I know, it sounds silly. Why subscribe to a blog on a Kindle when you can read it in a RSS reader or web browser. Well, some people like to subscribe to blogs and read them while traveling and while they are NOT connected to the online world. It’s another way to expand your reader base and best of all, it’s free!
- That’s all I can think of for right now. If you have some tips or tricks on blogging, do contribute to the discussion over on Casiella’s blog!
Tags:
Blogging,
Casiella Truza,
Discussion,
EVE Blogging,
Kindle,
Mynxee,
opml,
publicize,
Response to other blog
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Alexia maintains a wonderful portal for the community, The EVE Online Portal at http://www.evebloggers.com. It’s a great resource for people to find many different pieces of information concerning EVE Online.
What I find really cool is the RSS aggregation that updates for all the EVE Online blogs in real time and thus we come to the point of my post here.
As you are well aware, I maintain an OPML download file for RSS readers for the EVE Online Community. It’s a lot of work to maintain and I have a lot of help from the bloggers and the readers in keeping the file populated with all the EVE related blogs out there.
Alexia and I work closely together to ensure that we both have the same blogs listed in our services. Such work in all honestly is time consuming and creates confusion. It confuses us when we are updating our blog lists and it confuses people as to where they should go to find the latest information on EVE blogs.
As the old saying goes, the less hands in the pie, the less mess. So will be true for OPML files for our community.
From this point forward, there will be ONE OPML Download file. This file will be obtainable from Alexia’s wonderful site. Alexia has given me a user account on The EVE Online Portal so we both can easily continue our work in bringing the best and most up to date EVE Blogging resources to the community.
So, please head over to The EVE Online Portal at http://www.evebloggers.com and enjoy the fruits of our labor!
Tags:
aggregation,
Alexia,
Blogging,
blogs,
EVE,
EVE Blogging,
EVE Online,
EVEbloggers.com,
opml,
OPML Update,
portal
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This is my blogroll or website listing. It’s broken out in categories.
If you are looking for my listing of EVE Player Blogs, I have removed my listing as it was a duplicate of the many listings that exist. Trying to keep all this separate lists in sync was a lot of work for everyone and it simply did not make sense. So, to find the most up to date listing centralized listing, head over to The EVE Online Portal at http://www.evebloggers.com.
Player Blogs
EVE
Podcasts
Comics
Blog Tools
My Social Networks
Current Hot Topics!
Archived Hot Topics
The HellFleet Bloggers
Tags:
blogs,
EVE,
EVE Online,
EVE Player Blogs,
EVEbloggers.com,
opml,
OPML Download,
Player Blogs,
portal
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