Top Ten Blogging Tips of 2007

Significant Figures was formed from a flippant blog, originally run on Blogger and now on its own custom blog domain. It started out as an outlet for my ranting and raving about poor reporting on scientific matters in the media (something I wanted to keep off my Sciencebase Science Blog), but somehow morphed into the blogging and browsing tips, tricks and hacks you see before you. At the beginning of the year, when I first imported the old Blogger Blogspot version of the site into the Sciencetext.com, I believe I had 2-3 RSS subscribers (me, me again, and my mother). At the time of writing, the site is sustaining well over 100 subscribers. It’s obviously not a big fish, but some of the more popular items are seeing a lot of readers, with a StumbleUpon spike earlier in the year producing 45000 visitors for one post, but on the whole the site is now averaging over 1000 unique visitors each day.

Anyway, as 2007 draws to a close, a chance to reflect on some of this year’s most popular posts. So, here they are:

1. Top Ten Firefox Addons to Annoy Advertisers - some of the best plugins to keep your browsing clear of ads
2. Use Your GMail Account as a Virtual Hard Drive - Google is about to make 3rd party GDrive software redundant, watch this space.
3. How to Design Your Own Minimalist Wordpress Theme - a serendipitous trick to adapt a theme to make your site unique
4. Blog Excerpts - Does what it says on the tin
5. How to Access Banned Websites - of perennial, especially as nations and organisations attempt to filter our browsing
6. Top Ten Reasons Bloggers Should Avoid Social Bookmarking - Some readers seemed to think this was serious!
7. Jet-powered taxi - Harking back to the good old days
8. Blogger Custom Domain - where the change began
9. Passwords for Scientists - a novel approach to creating memorable passwords, plans are afoot to create an applet to help with this, again, watch this space
10. Boost your blog with Sphere - a nice idea, but I kicked the ball into touch