October 16th, 2011
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| Outbrain and Disqus |
OK I'm not sure how much blogging about my blog qualifies as, well, blogging, but here it goes. You might start noticing some suggested links appearing under the posts. These are powered by an interesting recommendation engine I found recently, called Outbrain.
First to make things clear, whatever links you might see on the blog are not exactly my own recommendations, but rather those of the algorithm used, so don't blame me if some weird recommended post appears there :P. The best I can do is the occasional "zipping out" of a link I happen not to like, though through observation I found out that the same recommendations don't necessarily appear twice in the same place.
The second thing you might notice is the "Paid Distribution" tag on the links. And as much as I'd like that, I'm not really making money out of these links. Rather Outbrain gives you the option to allow these sponsored recommendations on your blog, and donate the proceeds to charity. In my case, I've chosen to donate whatever revenue to the International Red Cross, simply because among the limited choice given, that was the only organization whose reach extends to here in Lebanon. It was either that or the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (as if! :P). So now the next time you visit my blog, you can actually feel good about yourself doing so! :D :P
The other thing I started using here a bit earlier and wanna talk about is Disqus (pronounced discuss, clever no? :P), which is a comment platform. It allows you to easily add comments using either your Facebook or Google accounts (or even Disqus itself). I made that decision after some complained about Blogger's native comments system (OK it was just one friend, happy?), though I do think that Disqus provides more functionality. The only downside for now is with the blog's mobile version, where Disqus won't work due to Blogger dropping widget functionality there; Otherwise, Disqus is clearly the better option.
With that out of the way, stay tuned for more posts soon.
First to make things clear, whatever links you might see on the blog are not exactly my own recommendations, but rather those of the algorithm used, so don't blame me if some weird recommended post appears there :P. The best I can do is the occasional "zipping out" of a link I happen not to like, though through observation I found out that the same recommendations don't necessarily appear twice in the same place.
The second thing you might notice is the "Paid Distribution" tag on the links. And as much as I'd like that, I'm not really making money out of these links. Rather Outbrain gives you the option to allow these sponsored recommendations on your blog, and donate the proceeds to charity. In my case, I've chosen to donate whatever revenue to the International Red Cross, simply because among the limited choice given, that was the only organization whose reach extends to here in Lebanon. It was either that or the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (as if! :P). So now the next time you visit my blog, you can actually feel good about yourself doing so! :D :P
The other thing I started using here a bit earlier and wanna talk about is Disqus (pronounced discuss, clever no? :P), which is a comment platform. It allows you to easily add comments using either your Facebook or Google accounts (or even Disqus itself). I made that decision after some complained about Blogger's native comments system (OK it was just one friend, happy?), though I do think that Disqus provides more functionality. The only downside for now is with the blog's mobile version, where Disqus won't work due to Blogger dropping widget functionality there; Otherwise, Disqus is clearly the better option.
With that out of the way, stay tuned for more posts soon.