The template I have been using on this blog for the last 3 months or so closely resembles the classic Twitter look (see the image below).

Nice, isn't it? Well, I just love its look; it just gives (may be) not a little credence to the main topic of this blog: Microblogging. With that cartoonish, blue sky background, it is less harsh on your eyes when you are reading this from a computer. You can actually get this cool theme from this site. However, there are few things you have to check out for before applying any third-party Blogger template. If you hate to read source code you'll end up agonizing why your templates do not show properly at all.  So it is better to get your hands dirty if you would like to get the results that you desire.

How to choose a good, Third-party Blogger Template

I'll not delve into the choice of colors  to choose for your site. That is best left to you, the site owner. However, the most important factor that influences the look of a website's template are images mostly the embedded ones and the background images. Without this, many templates would be wholly made of CSS color schemes that mostly have a matt look.
If you are about to apply that glossy, third-party Blogger template to your site first analyse the template using this simple checklist (be ready to immerse yourself into CSS, Blogger XML format: source code):

1. Where are the template's embedded and background images hosted? This is very important. I once had the misfortune of running one third party template that had some images hosted on ImageShack. At the start it was alright. A few months down the line, the blog had error messages all over in place of the colorful images. . I just had to apply another template. One way to know where the template's images are hosted is to read the template's source code. Wherever there is an image URL, pick the URL and run a search for the image online. The best free, third-party Blogger templates usually have all their images hosted on Blogger but this is not a guarantee that the image cannot be deleted. Steer clear of templates that have images hosted on the developer's website.
2. Are you allergic to sponsored links on website templates? If you are, then it's best you choose some premium templates for your site.

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Visualize this incident: a driver reaches a junction and is about to move into the main "road". A motorcycle rider is coming up the main road while cruising at roughly 20-30km/h. His bike is heavily loaded. The motorcycle rider then punches his horn on which lets out a blaring noise (most motorcycles nowadays have got very loud electric horns) which kind of shakes the car driver. The car driver halts thus letting the motorcycle rider to pass first before he joins into the main road. Does that seem funny? One by-stander was so amused by this spectacle that he had to ask this question: Since when did motorcycle riders start hooting to vehicle owners so as to get their way? OK, this is Kenya. Many vehicle owners consider motorcycle riders as those pesky road users on two wheels.
Back to some serious stuff now. Many microblogging sites have hashtags as one of their features. By simply appending a hash, "#", to a word, the word becomes a link. Clicking on this link will bring up all posts with that hashtag. Hashtagging, if I can call it that, is just one of the ways of effecting categorization.
Here is a little history of where this concept came from. Joshua Schaster, the guy who started the social bookmarking site Delicio.us, had a file of 20000 links. As a way of trying to quickly access some link from the file, he started appending hashes to some little information he added to each link. With this system, he could easily grep any word with a hash thus easily bringing up the particular link he was searching for. From this we can see that hashtags are quite beneficial when it comes to doing searches for particular posts/tweets/notices in any microblogging site.
How are they mostly used then? There is no any hard rule of how one should use them; that's left to the user. Mainly, if you would want to prominently show a particular word on the post, you mostly hashtag that word. But there are 2 ways in which hashtags are mostly used:

1.  Do you remember this post that I had posted some time back: the line between spamming and promoting in microblogs?. Yup. That's just one of the ways hashtags are used.
2. To create Trending Topics: This is Twitter-specific. If a group of users are using a particular hashtag continuously in their posts, that hashtag may turn out to be a trending topic on Twitter that day. For example, some of the hashtags by #KenyansonTwitter that have turned out to be trending topics are: #rutoplaylist and #KCPEresults. And I thought that we weren't a crowd on the site!

REMEMBER: To create a hashtag, the words need to be stringed without any spaces in between; much like Camelcase wording in wikis. Hyphens break up the words which you would like to hashtag; so please leave them out.

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This blog is rolling into its second year since when I started it. That's great. I know many blogs out there which started at the same time but are practically dead right now.

Taking Stock

How has been the year really? Well, this one is the most interesting; the "How to Create a Microblog Using Buddypress" post, which I posted early this year was the most popular post on this blog for some months this year. That comes with this reality; that it is the post that brought in the most traffic to this site. The funny thing is that I had been postponing posting the entry from last year ;-|. Then the "Tweeting on the Nokia X2-01?" post overtook the Buddypress post around November in popularity (thanks to this blog's Indian audience). ;-)

The microblogging communities on the other hand, have not been inactive albeit local guys are not really into them [why?]. And they get some traffic from searches for StatusNet according to the Alexa ranking too.

Happy Holidays

To close off this year, let's get into the Christmas holiday groove. Enjoy your Christmas but be cautious. And lets not forget the religious background of this season. Merry Christmas.

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Blogging is tough, especially if you do not have the writer's streak. I am not saying that one can't learn how to be a prolific writer. I am actually pointing to to those who write occasionally or erratically. Their output is usually low. Some not only have fewer posts but heir posts may be very short. So what do we have in the long run? A neglected blog. Publishing new articles on a regular basis is almost a requirement in the blogosphere. It's a fact that a blog's homepage design - where the latest post is always at the top of the page - can expose a blogger's activity quite easily, without even the user digging into the site's archives.
On the other hand, microblogging does not require as much input from the user in terms of the time spent on thinking of what to post. You can simply post anything, even non-sensical posts such as:



ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.


Idle babble occupies a sizable proportion of all posts on Twitter. Disclaimer: Microblogging cannot replace blogging. But it does help whenever you get the writer's block. Furthermore, no single person can generate a good article every hour of their working days :-).

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