Yabfog

I just saw some weird traffic on this blog. Last week, I was testing a plugin when it went a little haywire and automatically created a bunch of posts (based on my NewsGator clippings, including a lot of law related and gadget related topics -- things I read about but don't write about). And then because I have Alex King's twitter tools installed, each of those new posts was propagated to twitter, too.

Now, I thought that this little stunt probably would have pissed people off. Instead (maybe), I saw a huge spike in traffic to this blog -- more than three times the usual traffic.

I'm assuming that these "visitors" were just bots that were monitoring the twitter public timeline, but the referrer logs don't back that up (although that doesn't necessarily mean anything).

tecosystems Redesign | alexking.org: Another good post by Alex King, this one about developing a new theme (and also about mixing business and friendship).

Mike Arrington recently reignited some discussion about the definition of a blog.

I have a related question: What is a podcast?

I'm really only concerned with two technical questions:

1. Does each feed item need an enclosure? If not, what ratio of items with enclosures to total items makes a feed a podcast?
2. Does the enclosure need to be in a dedicated feed element, or is it okay to just put a link to the enclosure somewhere in the feed description? For example, is this a podcast? The publisher, a big RSS technology company, seems to think so.

There are other debatable points, too, such as whether Public Radio feeds are really podcasts, but I'm more interested in the technical points.

Alex King, a WordPress über-hacker (and formerly a b2/b2evolution hacker), is writing a series of posts about his recent redesign of alexking.org. His latest post describes the numerous WordPress plugins he's using, many of which he wrote.

I'm not using any of these right now, but I steal Alex's ideas and code all the time for my own hacking.

P.S. Oh yeah, I'm using WP Grins. Thanks, Jeff.