There have been more minor changes since writing Tweaking the Wordpress theme last month.

First, I reduced the body font size to 12px – this looks neater than before. I’ve adjusted the line spacing to match and changed the font size of the sidebar text to 11px.

Second, I narrowed the width of the main text column to 400 pixels. This is now around 70 characters wide – which is much easier to read. To complement this, the gutter has now been tightened considerably – following comments by arayans. I had to play with the width of the comments as well.

Next I plan to do something about the “knowledge workers” bubble

Lijit looked like it could be useful. It’s a search application installed on this site as a Wordpress plug-in. You can see the Lijit search widget about halfway down the sidebar on the right of this screen.

In theory Lijit improves Wordpress search and drags in social network content. I’ve seen no evidence of this.

So far, after a month or so of using the plug-in it’s been used a total of 16 times. Over that period there have been more than 5300 visitors to the site, so the strike rate is incredibly low. No-one has clicked the button in past week.

There was a fancy-looking Lijit widget, but this was the slowest-loading part of my site, so I switched back to the plain text version. This may explain why there’s so little activity.

I’m going to persevere for a few more weeks, but unless I can find a good reason to stick with Lijit, I’m going to drop the application.

Is there something important about Lijit I’m simply not getting here?

Google Related Links is a tool to help push traffic around a web site.

In theory it does much the same job as Zemanta’s Interesting Articles feature – it allows you to add a list of related stories and Google searches to pages. At the moment there’s a test page at Googlelabs: http://relatedlinks.googlelabs.com/.

At the moment it isn’t as elegant as Zemanta – and it certainly doesn’t integrate well with Wordpress. But it’s results are interesting. I tested the service on my previous post: Windows 7 is great. Its price isn’t.

Here’s what it came back with:

Related Links by Google
Norton’s troubled Internet Security Windows 7 beta at Bill Bennett
Microsoft’s Security Essentials is almost un-noticable at Bill Bennett
Layoffs no panacea | Bill Bennett
Norton Internet Security – the alternatives at Bill Bennett
In memoriam Twitter at Bill Bennett
When Outlook trumps Gmail at Bill Bennett
Go East young man (or woman) | Bill Bennett
Computer security guide – what are the main threats? at Bill Bennett

Related Searches by Google
windows 7
windows 7 download
windows 7 review
isn
isn’t it

As you can see only two of the eight “related links” are directly relevant. Although another might just qualify if we are generous. And only one of the five ‘related searches’ is useful. That’s 3 and a half out of 13 or around a 23 percent success rate. Obviously some work is needed

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• Google Trying Its Hand At Related Links (techie-buzz.com)

The Journalist template by Lucian E. Marin needed a few changes to the CSS to get this site looking the way I want it:

First, I reduced the main column text width. It previously stretched over 700 pixels. That’s more than 100 characters wide – which makes for uncomfortable reading.

At the moment it’s 525 pixels wide. That’s around 80 characters wide.  This is still more than most people consider an optimal width, but narrower measures things look weird.

I considered specifying the width in ems – which would allow people to set their own character size, but my research suggests this could cause problems.

If you know otherwise, please speak out in the comments.

Second, I’ve made the sidebar wider and increased the gutter between the main text column and the sidebar.  It seems tidier, but I’m worried the gutter may be too wide. What do you think?

Regular readers may notice this web site has reverted to its previous minimalist look and feel. I’ve switched back for two reasons.

First, I wanted to cut down on the size of my pages – this format is quicker to download and displays better in a wider range of browsers – include those on mobile phones. It’s also easy to read.

Second, I plan to customise the site’s look and feel in coming weeks. This is a much easier basis to work from.

Wordpress aficionados will recognise the theme here is The Journalist by Lucian E Marin.

Regular readers will notice this site has changed a bit in recent days. There’s a new look – or theme in Wordpress‘ private language – and a handful of new features. This is because I’ve just moved from a wordpress.com site to a self-hosted version of the site at billbennett.co.nz. Once things settle down – and a week after the move things still aren’t right -I may comment more on the switch.

There are however a couple of pressing issues to worry about. First, I’ve arranged things so anyone visiting my old site is automatically transferred to the new one. The automatic redirection is largely working, but it isn’t perfect. There are a few information pages here with different URLs. It’s not that important, but for a while I was using a redirection plug-in to route people looking for the old pages to the new replacements. This had to go as the plug-in was causing problems elsewhere.

My other problem is my online identity is closely tied to my old Wordpress address. I’m registered with dozens of other sites as billbennettnz with pointers to the old site. While the redirection from wordpress.com to here is in operation this won’t matter. I’ve paid for a year in advance and could go on paying for subsequent years. But I’d prefer to either retire the old wordpress.com identity and create a new one or, even better, update that identity to reflect the new reality.

OK you’re saying, why don’t you Google for an answer to this? Or perhaps look for information on how to do this at the Wordpress support site. Fair enough. But my need is so obscure that I don’t have a clue about the terms to search for.

According to Halfdone, New Zealand has roughly 200 blogs of note. When I analysed these for my New Zealand’s top Wordpress.com sites list, Google’s Blogspot accounted for 50 percent of the total, Wordpress.com was a shade under 20 percent, Typepad had only a four percent share and the remainder were not immediately obvious.

It’s not immediately obvious why Blogspot (also known as Blogger) dominates. To me the technology appears dated and the Blogspot sites look inferior to Wordpress.com sites. As far as beginners are concerned, Wordpress is slightly more intimidating to use, but far more flexible and, once mastered, it is in fact easier. It makes better use of graphics and  has many useful built-in features.

So why does Blogspot dominate?

At first, I assumed it was because Blogspot, being owned by Google has a higher profile. It’s easier to find and the Blogspot name is more descriptive of what it does. These things matter for raw beginners. This visibility is probably a factor in its success.

Safety may also be a factor. People know who and what Google is, so they feel comfortable. Wordpress is obscure by comparison and something of an unknown.

There could be a mercenary reason. Blogspot allows users to place Google Ads on their blogs, which, theoretically at least, means they can earn money. Not much. In fact, I doubt if anyone below the top ten New Zealand blogs has seen as much as a dollar from Google’s advertising. Wordpress doesn’t allow Google ads on its hosted blogs. Occasionally Wordpress may put one of its own ads on a Wordpress.com blog.

Scrubone, who runs Halfdone, suggested the reason for Blogspot’s success is that it’s been around a lot longer than Wordpress. This is true and it is likely to be a major reason, even though many of the Blogspot sites in the list were created fairly recently. Being the incumbent player in a technology market is often enough to ensure some degree of success.

Can anyone suggest any other reasons for Blogspot’s continuing popularity in New Zealand?

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• Moving from Blogger to Wordpress (rchurt.com)

Tim Selwyn at Tumeke! and Scrubone at Halfdone both do a great job of providing useful lists of New Zealand blog stats. So, in a way I’m standing on the shoulders of giants producing a new list focused exclusively on New Zealand-based Wordpress.com sites. My aim is to learn more about the way Wordpress.com is used by New Zealanders (and Wordpress.org as well but that’s another story).

Tumeke and Halfdone update their lists each month. I haven’t decided yet, how often this list will be updated. Stay tuned.

The two general lists use different formulae to rank sites in order of popularity. Tumeke’s list shorter, but more comprehensive and can be considered as much as a directory as a popularity list. The Halfdone rankings are based on traffic rankings.

Both use data from Alexa. I’m slightly dubious about Alexa because my understanding is it measures traffic using a toolbar which some people install as a browser add-on. Given the number of Alexa toolbar users is only a tiny fraction of all internet users, this make for a small sample size. A small sample size isn’t an issue for measuring the major web sites — and possibly the top half dozen or so New Zealand blogs — but it’s a crude instrument for measuring sites where the weekly traffic is measured in the hundreds or low-thousands. I could be wrong about this, let me know in the comments if I’ve misunderstood how it works.

Here I’ve taken the Halfdone list and extracted the sites that have recognisable Wordpress.com addresses. Halfdone ranks 199 sites. Of these 99 use Blogspot, 38 use Wordpress.com, eight use Typepad and 54 either use a different technology or have domain name redirection (see the pie chart). I suspect at least some of these use either Wordpress.com or Wordpress.org technology.

As you can see, Blogspot dominates the New Zealand scene. I’ve got some ideas about why this is the case. In my opinion it is inferior to both Wordpress.com and Typepad; I’ve used all three at some time or other. For my money Wordpress.com is easier to use and the results always look better than Blogspot. We’ll look more at this issue later.

New Zealand’s top Wordpress.com blogs:

Here’s the raw list with rankings taken from Halfdone’s list. If you operate a New Zealand-based or New Zealand-focused Wordpress.com blog, leave a message in the comments and I’ll add your site to the list. I’m planning to reorganise the ranking system by the time I publish an updated version of this list.

1 Homepaddock

2 Dim Post

3 Poneke’s Weblog

4 The Inquiring Mind

5 Something should go here, maybe later.

6 The visible hand in economics

7 Hitting Metal With A Hammer

8 G.blog

9 Jafapete’s Weblog

10 Newzblog

11 Samuel Dennis

12 In a strange land

13 Aotearoa: a wider perspective

14 Luddite Journo

15 Kiwi Polemicist

16 Consumist

17 100 Word Blog

18 Ideologically Impure

19 Dear John

20 Object Dart

21 Ethical Martini

22 Contradiction

23 Knowledge Workers

24 Anarchia

25 Renascent Exegete

26 John Ansell

27 Socialist Democracy

28 the gossip

29 The Reluctant Botanist

30 Concerned of Linwood

31 anarchafairy

32 Still Truckin’

33 The sprout and the bean

34 the Nicholas O’Kane blog

35 Si Quando Dubium, Illic Est Scilicet

36 Maidennz