I just got up from bed and wanted to Write à Blog post via the wordpress iPhone App. Why? Because i like Typing on the iPhone Keyboard very much. In fact, I Must Object to the critisizers of the iPhone virtual Keyboard that they’re plain wring about this. Typing goes fast in landscape Mode, you get haptic, Visual and Audio feedback from your keystrokes, which is Way more than à Hardware Keyboard would get You and you get à Typing correction that Works just Fine when You’re writing the correct Language, which isn’t what I’m doing now and therefore I put the uncorrected Version here As à document of what Happens when You write an english post on à German iPhone.

Uuhm. Back to the Point: my wordpress Blog wasn’t updated Forever, As they didn’t have that nice upgrading stuff in there when I First used and installed it on my server some Years ago. I didn’t think it would Be necessary to Ever update, As my Blog wasn’t à Center of reader’s attentions anyways. But Not being able to post directly from an iPhone without using e-Mail ( which is what I’m doing right now) is Kinda sad, as the wordpress app only works with blogs of version 2.7 and higher. Therefore i Hope I can Be doing an update or à Complete reinstallation of my Blog soon, in Case i find some hours during my easter holidays. A new major version of wordpress is ahead anyways. And especially, I Hope that wordpress got à Bit faster since Version 2.5 or whatever I used there. Cause loading Times here on ithoughts are à pain, and I’m Aware of that. Sorry for that. See you Next time. Oh, you can keep all the typos you find here.

In retrospect, the english stuff didn’t make too many errors, right? It took about double the time to write this than on an actual (laptop)-keyboard.

Image by magerleagues via Flickr

Well most of you reader will have recognized that my blog was loading pretty slowly. I now decided that I should do something about this. When I thought about my blog and why it loaded so slowly, I recognized that I was loading A LOT OF outbound pictures. I first thought it was only the Zemanta-integrated pictures that took too long to load because of their filesize, but after all I saw something more more slowing: the sociable-plugins POST TO SOCIALNETWORKS-buttons.

“But they are very small! Filesize = extremely unimportant?” Indeed. But each of these elements with a src-Attribute makes the browser perform an HTTP-Request, and browsers don’t do too many of those a time. Especially if they’re on different hosts, like all those socialnetwork-sites.

After all I think every “good” social networking site has their own means of posting good stuff (like the Digg and StumbleUpon-Toolbars or one million clients and browserplugins for Twitter), so I decided to just remove them. If you like my posts, you’ll Tweet them or Stumble them anyways, even if I don’t put two million buttons on my page, I guess. Hmm …. so few pictures … I have to post some more content now I assume.

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Image via Wikipedia

Listening to technology-podcasts on the german Handelsblatt.com-website, I heard about Zemanta. It is a service that uses a firefox-plugin to read out your blogged text and parsing it for “words they know”. They present you links, tags and images to embed in your blog post, showing you links to wikipedia-articles and pictures fitting the content. Just after finishing this sentence, the sidebar that gets embedded in my webbackend of wordpress refreshes. Whoa! I got 5 links for the first sentence and I just included them all. I also included a pic you see floating right.

This is what many people think the semantic web or Web 3.0 to be. And in a way, it is. The use of Web 3.0 (the term in my understanding encapsulates user-generated-content as in Web 2.0 and the semantic web) in blogging seems logical to me as blogging the one of the most public displays of Web 2.0. This firefox-plugin makes it much easier to generate interesting articles and IF it doesn’t break my blog frontend, I’ll definitely use it in every post from here on. But back to the functions:

Image by pshab via Flickr

You can press an update-button and your content gets scanned again. New pictures appear and new links can be included. Just realized that most links are Wikipedia ones, but some (like the firefox-plugin-link or the Zemanta-link at the top) are also directed at other “well-known” resources. You can search for a term you put into a searchbar and get links, content and new pics. I tried “semantic web” for example. You can drag-and-drop pictures into the content-pane, and it gets easily included.

We’re standing on the edge of Web 3.0. I don’t think that this here is all that Web 3.0 is about, but I think its a great application that can be called “Web 3.0″-ly. If you would like to use this ff-plugin too, just go to their website and install it. You’ll have to agree to their TOS, that basically says “don’t change anything our plugin includes” and “we need access to the text you write” and “you are in charge for your content and all content you get from us as we show you the license”. So now I hope this post doesn’t get destroyed by some bad constructed CSS on my side. Fire and forget - or do you have any comments, iThoughts or fears about this plugin? You may also comment in german.

Image via Wikipedia

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I just wondered how much money I gained from the clicks on the one google-ad that I put up in the sidebar for over half a year now. Its not even 10$. Well I deacivated AdBlock PLUS for one moment and took a look at the ad, and wondered why anyone ever would click on such an ad - its not nice and the content is not even close to what I’m writing about. Well its main purpose was counting the visitors, but meanwhile I discovered other methods that I use for counting visitors now.

So I took it out. And thought about what could take its place. When I thought about that, I remembered seeing recommendations for books and music in other blogs and thought - why not make advertisements for books and stuff I really would recommend to my readers? So I googled to the amazon-website to take part in the affiliate program. This is the english website and this is the german one. First I saw that the english one give much more benefit to the user than the german one - but as most of my readers are from germany, I took the german program after all.

I entered german and english books that I can truely recommend, some of which are also available in the other language (like some of the HeadFirst books). I wrote a short comment about each item, chose an ad outfit and color - and copy-pasted the code to a wordpress-text-widget. I plan on writing reviews of the ad-items later on (I reviewed Super Smash Bros. Brawl for Wii on german here), but you can watch them now in the sidebar, if your adblocker is off and if you have flash installed.

This way I can recommend interesting things to you, have a nice flash-application and gain more rewards if someone buys on of those books on amazon. Hope you like it! I’d like to see your recommendations too, if its liked to amazon doesn’t matter much to me. Any comments?

Just want to inform you about the new plugins I’m using. The TweetSuite gives you the opportutiy to tweet the post you’re just reading via twitter and show which tweetbacks (tweets about this post) exist. I replaced the Twitter Tools, as tweet suite does the same and more … while they’re not as configurable. You’ll have to dive in the code of the plugin to change the CSS-appearance of the button at the right for example, as it comes without ID or class.

The MathAntiSpamPlugin is something you surely have seen before - I need to put this in place now as I getting more and more spam everyday. You’ll need to answer a simple addition of two small numbers to be able to post a comment.

Hallo lieber iThoughts-Leser! Im Sinne der vor kurzem gestareten Blogparade zum Thema Zitate und Gedanken:

“Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.” chinesisches Sprichwort

Ich habe mir aus mehreren Gründen überlegt, ob ich vielleicht in Zukunft auf Englisch bloggen sollte. Gerade aufgrund der hohen Englischfähigkeiten, die von mir in meinem späteren Beruf erwartet werden, und der (größtenteils) englischen Fachliteratur, wären bessere Englischkenntnisse nicht schlecht. Aufgrund der weiteren Tatsache, dass man eine Sprache am besten durch ihre aktive Anwendung lernen kann, wäre Bloggen auf Englisch sicherlich eine große Lernmöglichkeit für mich. Die Frage ist natürlich: können meine Leser (sofern sie existieren) Englisch lesen? Oder haben sie dazu keine Lust?

Der generelle Bildungsstand von Internet-Nutzern, die auch noch Blogs lesen, ist relativ hoch. Man könnte also vermuten, dass die meisten auch Englisch verstehen. Andererseits habe ich hier eine .de-Domain, auf der es ein bisschen irritieren würde, wenn ich englische Artikel schreibe. Einen Artikel in beiden Sprachen zu schreiben, dazu bin ich zu faul bzw. soviel Zeit habe ich einfach nicht.

Lieber iThoughts-Leser, wenn du ein paar Kommentare für mich erübrigen kannst, wäre ich dir sehr dankbar. Hier auch noch ein kleiner Vote, wenn keine Zeit / Lust für Kommentare vorhanden ist:

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Da habe ich doch in einem Forum ein kleines Quote-Battle gesehen und war genervt, dass man eigentlich immer nur dieselben Quotes findet, die eh schon alle kennen (Albert Einstein-Kram von wegen zwei Dinge sind unendlich blabla…). Da ich inzwischen eine nette Sammlung von Quotes in Wordpress gesammelt habe, will ich mal periodisch ein paar davon vorstellen und einige Gedanken dazu präsentieren, denn ein Zitat, dass unkommentiert im Raum steht bietet wohl kaum einen Anlass zur Diskussion.

Ausserdem denke ich, dass das einen guten Anlass zu einer Blogparade liefert - wenn euch also die Idee gefällt, oder ihr auch mal Gedanken zu einem oder mehreren Zitaten in die Welt entlassen wollt oder ihr vielleicht sowiso langsam nicht mehr wisst, worüber ihr eigentlich bloggen sollt - bitte mitmachen oder mitkommentieren! Denn Zitate geben auch häufig neben einer klaren Aussage einigen Raum zu Interpretationen.