iZachy

Check out the CSS Cheat Sheet over on Leslie Franke's blog. What's so great about it? It prints out on one sheet of paper and as the words "Cheat Sheet" imply, the page contains CSS hints and syntax. I'm not a CSS expert and I don't mess around with CSS enough to have the syntax, property, and values memorized. I usually have to hunt around the web to find what I'm looking for. With the cheat sheet, I have the CSS information tacked on my wall. No more searching. OK, that's probably an over-statement, but you know what I'm saying.

Last week, I posted about the spikes in my RSS feed subscriber stats. Thanks to Jessiec at FeedBurner, I was able to determine the source of the spikes was Pageflakes. On the days of the spikes, Pageflakes subscriptions jumped to about 120 and then dropped back to zero on the non-spike days.

I was puzzled by the Pageflakes spikes so I added my feeds to Pageflakes. When I reviewed my FeedBurner stats later, I noticed all my feeds spiked up on the day I added them to Pageflakes. However, after the initial spikes, the number of Pageflakes subscribers dropped to zero until I visited my Pageflakes page again. Then once again, my feed count spiked up and then returned back to zero the next day.

Take a look at the table below. I visited my PageFlakes page on December 26th. As you can see, one visit resulted in a relatively big increase in my feed subscription stats. So, by visiting my PageFlakes page daily, I could inflate my feed stats fairly easily (I'm not condoning this; just pointing out it would be easy to do). Someone could go to town on this by creating multiple accounts on PageFlakes. BTW, TechCrunch also has a post about the PageFlakes spikes.

I guess I must have been in the Batcave too long. I just found out last week that Pluck was discontinuing its RSS reader. So, if you have one those "Subscribe to Feed with Pluck" link, you should remove it. Here's a blurb from their web site:

All consumer RSS reader services to be discontinued on January 5, 2007

All versions of Pluck's RSS readers for Internet Explorer, FireFox and Pluck's web edition will be discontinued on 1/5/2007. The RSS Readers have served our community of end users well for several years, but with Pluck's focus in other business areas, the venerable RSS readers are set to be retired from our product line.

Over the next two months, you will have the opportunity to export your RSS feed subscriptions to other RSS readers of your choosing. Please visit the RSS reader support pages for details on how to export your subscriptions and bookmarks for use in other readers.

You have until 1/5/2007 to export your data, after which our servers will be turned off and your data will be deleted. Note that the Pluck RSS readers are not supported for use on the new releases of IE (version 7) and FireFox (version 2).

I was going to put up a Christmas photo, but then I read Darren's post about looking back on the year and making predictions about the future. I think the photo below sums up both the past year and the upcoming year.

This past year (and earlier), the blogosphere has become a giant experiment on monetization. As bloggers (including me), we are constantly looking for ways to monetize everything we write, every item we review, every video and podcast we produce, and every photo we take. And every month, a new company forms to help us monetize this, that, and the other thing. Is this what blogging has become?

As for the future, I see more of the same next year. However, I expect more and more companies will focus on monetizing videos (including free video editing tools) and content for wireless devices. Monetization will continue to drive the web in our future. Even though I'm not entirely thrilled with this, I don't think monetization is necessarily a bad thing. Do you?