I first heard about Andy Beard from his ‘Snow’ plugin which snows! I changed the snowflakes to pink colour and made it into plum flowers for Chinese New Year and red hearts for Valentine’s Day. Normally, plugin authors or WordPress theme authors don’t bother to drop by our blog but Andy did. And he even gave me some good suggestions about my feedburner (which is still weird why I have only 35 readers on my personal blog, btw).
Then, I have been following his blogs and find his views very fair and smart. These are opinions he had when people bashed PayPerpost. He usually draw out all the facts and figures for the enlightment of everybody, haters and lovers of PPP. So, I have high respect for Andy.
Recently, he started a group project to increase our votes in the Bloggers Choice Award and all we need is to subscribe to his thread on the Bloggers Choice Award and vote for each other. I had done my part, voting for the other nominees and they did the same for me too.
Yesterday, I stumbled on Andy Beard’s Smart and Lazy Technorati Favourites. I had seen the thread going on in PayPerPost’s forum but did not give much thought about it because I was afraid I did not have time to reciprocate by adding others. But Andy has made it easy. Just import the XML, download to Technorati and that’s it.
So, I really look up to bloggers like Andy who spend some of his valuable time to bring together bloggers, big and small, known and unknown into one big circle. I think this is what all of us should do, to give back to the community. So, bookmark Andy’s blog and keep yourself up-to-date with the latest news on the IT and blogging arena. Andy is what I would say, has not forgotten his roots. Read my Have you forgotten your roots as a new blogger?
As bloggers, we ought to spread our wings and step beyond our (Malaysia) shores and see what people are doing internationally. For example, I am highly defensive of the MY List and the reason is because this is in line with what others (abroad) are doing. So, when I get petty remarks that we are boosting our Technorati in a fake way, I will definitely hit back. My retort is ‘Get out of your coconut shell, open your eyes and see what others are doing. Stop being such a coward and so self-righteous.’
2 thoughts on “Andy Beard – Why I like him”
Ah Pek
(April 25, 2007 - 2:59 pm)Yes!!! Well said! I must recommend this post to the blogger that I just recommended to MY List.
Andy Beard
(April 27, 2007 - 12:01 pm)Seems to me you are not using the Feedburner Redirect plugin – that will most likely up your stats quite a bit.
Once you have that running, you should also make sure all those links to your feed that you add by hand, such as your feed count, use the same URL – it is normally domainname.com/feed/
With the plugin set up correctly, that will redirect to your feedburner feed.
On Technorati Favorites you should always remember that Technorati is in many ways just another feed reader, thus encouraging people to subscribe to your feed any way to can is fair game, even if that means subscribing to 600+ feeds to nudge them to come and visit you once in a while.
I am not sure those redirect links through to alexa really make a difference, but if you are using a redirct, make sure you stick nofollow on the links.
A better way is to show your readers all about the search status plugin for Firefox, and how it can be used to spot nofollow links
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