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| The old look and the new look on a mobile... |
To start the year on a good footing, I am redoing a number of my blogs. Several of them used to be hosted on Tumblr. Unfortunately Tumblr is losing its edge, so I am now migrating them in WordPress, hosted to my own server.
For almost a year, I have run a dozen Twitter accounts which are automatically fed with the latest posts from several of my blogs. Most of these Twitter accounts broadcast a dozen updates per hour.
Some people like the abundant stream of information, but others wanted less frequent tweets.
As an experiment, I have now released "The Two's": a series of Twitter accounts broadcasting the same information as the "main accounts", but at a far lower pace: 2 Tweets per Hour (or 2 tph ;-) ).
Each has the name of the "main account", with a "2" added to it. To show the link to the "main accounts", the Twitter icon features a large "2" too (toodeloo).
These accounts will not be monitored for direct messages or replies, for which you will have to go to its related main Twitter account.
Each tweet of the "Two's" will refer to its main account with a "via @mainaccount" in the suffix.
As a reference, here is a full overview of the Twitter accounts I manage, with the blog they refer to, and -if applicable- its low traffic account:
For the following Twitter accounts, there are no changes:
Do know if you subscribe to one of the "Two" Twitter accounts, you will miss updates as I can never get as far as I need to keep up with the frequency of the posts at 2 "tph"...
While being 'out' for 6 weeks, plenty of stuff has happened on my blogs and its related projects. So without further ado, here is Part 3 of my 'catching up' exercise.
The most important stuff first: Change Starts Here, the social project we started on The Road almost 2 years ago, keeps on flying high. I just posted the details for our latest batch totalling $1,000 in loans.
Our Kiva team now counts 82 members, who issued a total of US$35,325 in 894 different microfinance loans. Ieehaa!
Check out the project scorecard and join our Kiva team!
Lemme see, what else happened?
Oh, we passed our 500,000th visitor on The Road! Iehaaa once more!
During the month of July, I had serious problems with the hosting of several of my blogs. Humanitarian News and BlogTips went offline for days in a row. I described my battle to get the sites back up in this post. I am now working on moving the hosting to a more reliable provider.
Still, that did not stop Humanitarian News from doing its job. In July, we collected 25,600 articles from 1,012 different sources and now store a total of 244,770 articles. On a downside, the poor performance of the servers forced me to shutdown the customized search and user-defined RSS feeds, though. Hopefully these can be revived after we moved Humanitarian News to its new host.
Meanwhile, my Twitter network kept on growing by itself. @aidnews now has close to 7,500 followers, @humanitynews approaches 3,000 followers. @newsongreen, @NonProfitBlogs have both well over 1,000 followers. @ChangeThruInfo and @AidBlogs are progressing more slowly, but steadily...
I get more and more requests from nonprofits to publish their press releases, which increased the traffic by 200% on my newest blogs The NonProfit Press. Shot from the Hip, a site close to my heart where I post sound, video and picture snippets straight from my mobile phone, has now well over 1,000 visits a month.
Several readers sent me lists of nonprofit blogs to add to my list, which totals almost 800 blogs at this moment. I made an analysis of the most common issues I found in these blogs in this post. The latest posts from each of these blogs are neatly aggregated (even though I say so myself) on The NonProfit Blogs and its dedicated section on Humanitarian News.
In the coming month, I will pick up quite a bit on BlogTips where I have a lot of pending posts, and expand the functionality in some of the other blogs e.g. putting in search boxes and finetuning the search engine optimization. So plenty of stuff to do.
As the years went by, I collected a large amount of blogs and websites I like. The lists have grown that large, I had to split them off into different posts, which I will continue to update:
● The largest collection of blogs by fellow aidworkers you'll find anywhere
● Resources for aidworkers
● News sites specialized in aid, humanitarian work and nonprofit causes
● Expats, travellers, adventurers and people with their heart in the right place, you can find here
Other interesting blogs to add? Let me know!
BlogTips, my blog for tips on social media and blogging for nonprofit causes, got a new look. Much more plain vanilla than the previous look, so it puts more emphasize on the content.
I am still putting in some extra "schpank" in it (a proper logo and a favicon), but am already happy as it is now
Meanwhile, Humanitarian News continues to grow, so the site became slower and slower. That should be solved now (for the nerds: more aggressive caching was enabled on the site, and I avoided multiple DNS-lookups).
This evening, I also solved a nasty bug in the "search" function: since about a month, the search no longer showed the most recent articles first. Consequently, all the RSS feeds on the searches no longer worked properly (you remember that one of the main features of Humanitarian News was the ability to make customized RSS feeds based on your searches, right?)
Last month, we retrieved a record of 31,050 articles from 890 different sources on Humanitarian News...
I cleaned up my list of aidworkers' blogroll in the sidecolumn. Blogs with irregular updates and those from aidworkers who moved on, I moved to the archive.
I also added my latest aidworker blog finds:
 Peter. Flemish, European, aid worker, expeditioner, sailor, traveller, husband, father, friend, nutcase. Not necessarily in that order. |
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