AirToob

On October 24th SU will trash* all images, hyper-links, formatting and colours, shortly followed by all blog-mode posts, i.e. posts not related to web sites.

Luckily for me, I have finished copying this entire blog to Categorian. It looks at least as good as the original in its new home, and some things work a lot better than on SU.

I have been transferring my SU blog to Categorian on a post-by-post basis using simple copy and paste. It sounds tedious (and was) but in my case it was necessary as there were so many adjustments to be made to tags, links etc. For me it has had to be a "brain engaged" job, rather than an automatic one. With 1,500+ posts to process, it took something like 5-6 hours each day from September 29th to now, October 9th. Simple posts took just a few seconds to copy, but a lot of my posts aren't simple. I'm happy with the result, though - I hope you will be too.

To go to my new blog, click 'AirToob' above or you'll find me on Categorian as 'AirToob'.

I'm on holiday soon for a couple of weeks or so. When I return, I will be purely on Categorian, with occasional visits here to communicate with SU or ex-SU friends.

I won't delete my StumbleUpon blog, although I won't add to it in future (except stuff about Categorian!). After October 24th it will look a mess, but so be it. There will still be some useful stuff here, particularly if you use my tags (under "interests") like image-searches-art.

BTW: You'll find many people who have gone to Categorian, and other useful stuff, if you click the Categorian tag at the top of this post - or just head over there!

* Update: as of October 25th, the original contents of each post are still there, images, hyper-links and all - it's just that SU isn't showing them to people. The good side of this is that you can still export your original blog to somewhere else. You can do this automatically to WordPress, and the export files created can also be used to automatically set up your Categorian blog. Alternatively, as I did, you can simply edit each post that you want to keep, and copy and paste it into Categorian.

How long this situation will last I don't know.

Another BTW: an awful lot of traffic ends up at StumbleUpon because of Google Image Searches, which will no longer find any images on SU. It will be interesting to see what happens to SU traffic when the crawler databases no longer have any images to direct people to SU from...

I have moved to Categorian (username AirToob) and I love it. It's clean and unrestrictive - I would describe it as "SU done right", at least from the perspective of someone who doesn't use the "Stumble" button much (or at all).

As a Categorian newbie I have asked Matt Siegel, the guy who created Categorian, a number of questions (or suggested questions for the FAQs) and have always got fast and useful answers, e.g.

Q: What is the limit, if any, on the number of characters in a post?
A: It's about 50,000 characters, or around 20 pages of a novel.

Q: How many tags can you add to a particular post?
A: About 200 characters worth, so I'd say less than 20.

Q. Can you add tags to a post that isn't related to a web site?
A: Yes! :)

Q. If I edit an existing post will it change its date or change its position in my blog?
A. No. But you can move it to the top of your blog using "Bump".

Q. Can I create more than one review for the same site (same URL)?
A. Yes - just use "Blog It" or "Photoblog" again and you will create a new review.

Q. Can an individual post be linked-to from outside Categorian, even if the person following the link isn't a Categorian subscriber?
A. Yes. click the date/time to get a permalink. This can be used anywhere inside or outside Categorian. Also, if you click a tag such as 'landscape' at the top of a post, this will bring up all your posts with that tag. The URL that appears in the browser's location bar can also be used anywhere inside or outside Categorian as a link to all your posts with that tag.

Q. Are blogs searchable from Google and other search engines?
A. Yes. Blogs are open for indexing, and we get a lot of indexing activity (visits) from Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Baidu. It helps if you tag your posts. [If you are copying from SU, get rid of those rel="nofollow" attributes that SU puts into hyper-links if you want a particular link to be followed by search engines!]

There are many nice simple and effective touches. For example, in your list of friends the names of friends who have posted stuff since you last visited them appear in bold letters.

You can copy a post from SU into Categorian without problems (an automatic facility may eventually become available) and (unlike other blog sites that I have found so far) it can display images with the same visible size (700 px wide) as SU can. In fact the "natural" maximum picture width on Categorian is about 740px, but it will fit larger pictures to the right-hand edge of the screen - and you can widen the whole blogging area if you want.

Oh yes... and Categorian doesn't scramble those strange non-USA characters. I can finally write cafÃÃ,Ã,Ã,Ã,Ã,Ã,Ã,Ã,Ã,Ã,© instead of cafe without measles breaking out in the text, as happens here!

From my experience so far I would describe Categorian as people-centred, not site-centred. Unlike SU it isn't fundamentally a site rating system, there is no "thumbs-up", hence no spamming and no site-related profit motive driving the whole thing. You can't see all the Categorian reviews for a given site, you will just see recommendations on the blogs of people that you visit.

However Matt writes:

"Check out the library link at the upper right of your home page :D It leads to a browsable library of over 100,000 sites.

Many subject areas are waiting for sites to be submitted, but in time i'm confident they'll all be filled :)"

If you do as Matt says, you will see another reason why Categorian is so much more effective than SU at things that really matter.

It's also worth noting how many people who have moved to Categorian have voluntarily made donations. SU, you have lost out big-time...



(Watch this space for updates.)

I don't seem to need it since it's so easy to drag links from the Categorian setup page to the Bookmarks toolbar in FF anyway.

My final words to SU:

"Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain..."

One more attempt (in case SU takes any notice of its clients, which doesn't seem likely):

Dear SU, please read this with brain engaged if you don't want to go down the financial tubes:

1. The value of site ratings depends on the quality of people rating the sites.
2. Read 1. again, several times.
3. By exporting all your creative people to other services, you will end up with poor-quality site ratings. A much higher proportion of those ratings will come from spammers and trolls.
4. Like many other people, I currently pay attention to ratings from people that I know on SU. I don't care what mindless clickers think.

The best thing that can happen to you, SU, is that you will become just another extension of Google - maybe that's what you have in mind.

I hope, and predict, that if you don't change this policy NOW (actually, it's probably too late) then you are going to lose a great deal of money, as has happened to many other organisations that forgot that the quality of their people (in your case, the Stumblers themselves) was their most important asset.