Happy Monday, folks! We’ve only got a couple of things to tell you about this week, but I think you’ll find them both very useful.

First, Dan Wolfgang has updated his Hot Date plugin to work with Movable Type 4.25. I’ve been using Hot Date since its original release and I love it. It makes updating the timestamp on an entry very easy. This really comes in handy on those entries that take several days to complete — click a single button, and your entry date is updated to the current date and time.

Next, Beau Smith has a trick for manually ordering categories. His method will allow you to customize the order in which categories are output for things like menu listings. I’ve done similar tricks in the past, but his solution is far simpler and more elegant than mine. Thanks, Beau!

What have you done with Movable Type this week? Let us know in the comments.

Yesterday, Mark Ghosh at Weblog Tools Collection made an announcement that, due to the rampant abuse of their RSS feed, that the site would be moving over to a truncated, or shortened, feed.

However, the decision did not last long. After less than three hours, Ghosh reactivated the full feeds after many of the site’s readers posted comments objecting to the change. He instead said he would experiment with RSS footer and reopen the full feed.

Still, Ghosh’s frustration is more than understandable. With countless spam blogs scraping content without permission, the temptation to deny them access is understandable. However, users overwhelmingly prefer full RSS feeds and denying access to spammers is almost impossible without hindering access by legitimate aggregators.

The good news is that there are alternatives to shortening your RSS feed, practical ways to protect your content without cutting off your readers. read more

Mediabistro.com has launched BayNewser.com, a blog that reports on San Francisco and Silicon Valley media landscape.

BayNewser.com will deliver the news about the news in the Bay Area, break media stories from Russian Hill to Menlo Park, and cover the new media ventures the rest of us only learn about later. From Google to Craigslist, from the Chronicle to the Merc, from KNTV to KCBS – BayNewser.com will attempt to be the one-stop source for news about the Bay Area news media.

With the addition of BayNewser.com, the mediabistro.com network now includes 12 online destinations serving media professionals including FishbowlNY.com, FishbowlDC.com, FishbowlLA.com, TVNewser.com, AgencySpy.com, GalleyCat.com, UnBeige.com, PRNewser.com, WebNewser.com, MediaJobsDaily.com and MobileContentToday.com.

I’ve been at this blogging thing since before 1994 and faced many a time staring at my computer with dread. Not again. Honestly. Ain’t nothing left to say. It’s all been said before. And I said it. Tank’s empty. It’s boring. I’m bored.

A blog calls to you, begs you to feed it. Your readers want your words, and the need must be fed. What do you do when you can’t think of anything of value to add other than what you ate for lunch?

A couple years ago, when blogging was still in its infancy, a post title like this was fairly common, along with titles such as: read more

If you’re a blog network like Gawker Media, mixing rumors and news with celebrity stalking and snarky commentary, you need a demo reel to go with it. Luckily, enough people have spoken out against the network blogs, and they have been featured in a fair share of popular culture TV shows (you missed the Californication Gawker mugshot, guys!) to make for an interesting video. read more

Or science at least, as you’ll find him on Popular Science from now on, incidentally his previous employer it seems. He’ll act as editor on the PopSci.com site, which should be an interesting gig. Check out the goodbye post on Gizmodo for space jokes and more.

With the majority of the world’s workforce logging hours Monday through Friday, I’m curious to know how many people out there read blogs during the weekend.

Since I often see a dip in traffic, I usually use the time to pre-write several posts for the coming week rather than post new content. However, there have been rare occasions where I’ve posted on the weekend and been pleasantly surprised by traffic. These posts, however, often leverage a current event.

There are several factors, including what the subject matter of your blog is, and if you are covering a niche that is active on a particular day/time.

Personally, I do not read many blogs over the weekend. In general, since I’m anchored to my desk and the computer during the week, I try to limit my Web activity (as best a born again blogging geek can!).

So fellow blogger, what happens to your traffic during the weekend and how does this shift affect your blogging habits? Do you read more or less blogs over the weekend?

Ad network Federated Media is losing one of its bigger clients, the TechCrunch network. Michael Arrington announced it on TechCrunch, of course, and explained the decision with the fact that they have been selling direct ads for some time already, and want to move on in that direction.

We’d like to acknowledge Federated Media for the contributing role they’ve played to help TechCrunch get to where it is today. Notwithstanding our differences of opinion about the role of conversational marketing, we part friends. Unlike others, we’re not leaving to move to competitive selling networks, we’re just leaving to chart our own course.

There’s been some noise around the TechCrunch-FM relationship over the years, Arrington not being the most subtle guy and probably rightly so when it comes to handling Federated Media, but the two parties are apparently splitting up on good terms, which the FM Blog post confirms.

What does this mean for Federated Media? It’s a loss, of course, but it won’t get them on their hands and knees. Not unless they are already there, given the financial situation the world is in.

The MTV Multiplayer blog is silent once again, as writer Tracey John leaves. You might remember that Stephen Totilo moved to competetitor Kotaku which put the blog on hiatus, then it rolled back out with updates from contributor Tracey John. And now he’s gone too, hinting that something’s going on but nothing more than that.

And I encourage the industry and gamers to continue to support MTV Multiplayer and the new editor when the blog is back in full force. Exciting things are in the works — just you wait. Thanks for being so patient.

This is a bad move. It is way better to just put a blog on hiatus and offer some sort of notification solution for its reader, rather than being this vague about what’s happening. The editorial group on MTV.com really need to get its act together. They are hurting the brand with this nonsense.

Last month, I started SEO work for a client.  The client has a website in a pretty popular niche.  As I worked on the site, it surprised me how powerful SEO is especially the activity of link building. Since the client is in a popular niche, I thought it would be hard to get them a front page ranking.  See one of the maxims in SEO is popular niches are very competitive.  And the more competitive a niche is, the harder it is to attain a top 10 ranking.

The client was only a couple spots from the front page but I still thought it would take at least 2-3 months to get a front page ranking. However, after just one month and a couple of links, they now have not one but two front page rankings for popular two word search terms. This surprised me because it didn’t take much effort. read more