Everything Else

I hope the New Year is good to us all. Have a very good one.

LibraryThing. I like the idea. I joined to try it out. Somebody should do something similar for DVD's.

Marissa Mayer quotes.

Source: Jeremy Zawodny's Linkblog

Yesterday my web page loads slowed down dramatically. At first I thought it was Comcast broadband slowing down as everyone bought new music for their iPods they got at Christmas.

But, this morning the problem was still there. So while I went to make my second cup of coffee for the morning, I shut down my computer and unplugged it. I also unplugged both the wireless access router and the cable internet modem. Then plugged it all back in again and restarted the computer.

Bingo.

Now all pages are once again loading very fast. Static cling almost ate my Apple.

I spent the last two days actually working.

I have been redesigning a little portal I had, hastily cobbled together about 15 months ago.

Old Portal:

I was using a Blogger blog as the main index page. The blog acted as a CMS for all the written content of the portal. Behind the blog was a user submitted directory. Well, it did look sorta cobbled together - more than I liked. I also had problems with Blogger being down or buggy too often when I wanted to post something. It puts you off your content creation when Blogger suddenly gets stuck and won't publish.

New Portal:

On the redesign, I am trying to limit the choices visitors are presented with in the index page. I want the majority to explore the directory and find stuff the rest I would like to channel to the blog.

1. No blog on Index: I moved the blog off the index page. I think it is too busy. People stop to read the blog (not a bad thing) and never discover the directory.

2. New Index Page: A.) I have run links to all the top level directory categories down the left hand sidebar; B.) at the top of the main content area of the index page I put a search form for the directory and a link to the directory, below that is a seperator line and then a link to the blog. Below the link to the blog is a little headline ticker for the blog, I got via Feedburner, which rotates through the last 5 blog posts to act as a teaser. I don't think it is too annoying. 3.) Of course all this is also available through the navigation which runs across the top of all pages.

3. The New Blog: the blog serves several purposes: frequently updated content for search engine spiders; a place to link out freely and perhaps attract links; a place to build repeat traffic and importantly community and discussion; place for me to expound on the subject.

I am trying some different things with the blog. I.) keeping the blog main page simple, link lists like blogrolls, causes and references are all on seperate sub pages; II.) unlike the rest of the site no links to the directory categories in the sidebar on the blog; III.) the sidebar is mainly for links to the RSS feed and blog subject categories; IV.) I am going to try to not archive by date - only links to the blog categories (I don't know if this will work with this blog client but we shall see) I'm thinking, nobody really cares much about the date stuff was blogged on but the subjects.

My hope with all this is that there will be deeper exploration of the site beyond the front page and also deeper linking since some people will link to the homepage, others to the directory and still more will link directly to the blog. It will be interesting to see if it works.

You can see the results at the portal.

A post and conversation with DianeV about Macromedia/Adobe products got me thinking about Flash again. I have always wanted to build a site with Flash, just to play. It always looked like a neat technology and I think it would be fun to build a site with.

But there is always a gotcha: all the cheap Flash clones, that I know about, like Swish, are all on Windows OS only while I use a Mac. That means I would be limited to the "real thing" from Macromedia, and that ain't cheap. (Gosh, I think I could buy a Windows laptop and buy the clone: Swish and I would still pay less than buying Flash from Macromedia.) That is a lot of money just to play around.

If anyone knows of an inexpensive Flash builder for Mac OS X, let me know.

I bought a Christmas present for myself, a box of Yorkshire Gold Tea. It is quite good, far better than the store bought stuff here in the US. The tea bags a very generous in size and you can make a nice strong mug of tea without it tasting bitter. For us Americans, Amazon carries it.

I'm no expert on tea, but I also like Melitta's Zen in Black tea, which works with the Melitta pod-type coffee maker I currently have.

Christmas is not complete until I hear Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College Chapel, Cambridge, England. The quote below, from the Bidding Prayer, is some of the most beautiful use of the English language I have ever heard.

And let us at this time remember in his name the poor and the helpless, the cold, the hungry and the oppressed; the sick in body and in mind and them that mourn; the lonely and the unloved; the aged and the little children; and all who know not the loving kindness of God.Lastly let us remember before God all those who rejoice with us, but upon another shore and in a greater light, that multitude which no man can number, whose hope was in the Word made flesh, and with whom we for evermore are one.

I cannot sum it up better than that.

Have a Happy Holidays, everybody, just in case I don't get back to blogging before Sunday - have a good one.

For years I created niche directories that stood alone. I do not think that is a sustainable plan anymore. People find a niche directory via a search engine, use it to find what they need and leave, probably never to return, and probably never to click on your ads or banners. I am talking about a real niche web directory, an authority site on it's topic, NOT some fake scraper directory.

I think there needs to be more than just a directory. It takes time for a niche portal to be found by webmasters, and you cannot rely on user submitted URL's alone, as a good reliable stream of regularly updating content. I think the solution is to make the site more of a niche portal.

What follows is my blueprint for a simple niche portal run by one person. It needs to be simple to run and add to on a regular basis. When starting out you need to keep things inexpensive particularly if you are doing this as a hobby.

Remember, the goal of a portal is to make it an authority on the subject.

A simple niche portal needs 3 elements:

1. Web search: that is focused on the niche topic. It is better if it has a unique database (eg. a web directory) of sites that you have added as the editor.
2. Content: Articles, reviews, photographs or what have you. The content needs to be original and unique. When you are starting out I suggest a blog to post this content on and you should expect to have to write it all. A blog makes it so much easier. Update it regularly. The reason you have the blog as a traffic builder, a viral inbound link builder, and constantly updating spider food for the search engines. (This blog and it's content needs to be hosted on your own site, not remotely hosted.)
3. Community and Interaction - part of this is going to be with your blog and comments, but you also want to build a forum or at least test the niche to see if you can build a forum.

I like Nick Wilson's plan for starting a forum:

Enable one forum. Call it the "Q & A" and promote it on every page -- you'll find those few readers that use it will quickly define what seperate forums you should enable further down the road.

That idea about starting with a one board Q & A forum is brilliant - in one step it allows for interaction, community building and establishing yourself as an authority. Fantastic. It may well be that the forum never grows beyond that one board but I think you still need to keep that one board available so as to allow your blog comments to remain on the topic of the blog post. I se no reason on a hobby site why you cannot test the waters by starting with a remotely hosted forum like Proboards, or even Bravenet if you are not sure that the niche can sustain a forum. Just be prepared to have a proper forum board installed if you find you have a lot of posting members. You do want to try to drive visitors to your blog and directory to the forums and encourage posting.

Here is another good post from Performancing about making your blog sticky. Substitute "portal" for the word blog in the article and you will start getting more ideas.

Today I received a letter through the solicitors for a company, demanding removal of material from the Platinax forums, after people claiming to be customers posted complaints about the company’s sales procedure.

So says Brian Turner on his blog post.

I am no lawyer and do not know UK law but if every forum operator or website owner is liable for every negative review that might be posted on their website/forums then we are in a mess. One defense is to make the world know about lawyer and corporate bullying and threats of legal action they may find the negative publicity engendered by the legal threats worse than the original complaint. Good luck to you Brian. There is a good discussion of this at Cre8asite forums

Source: Threadwatch

Shiira browser for Mac OS X has had a major upgrade with plenty of new features. I like Shiira, in many ways it is better than Safari. I particularly like the ability to add additional search engines of my choosing to the search box. They have also added an RSS reader which is a fine addition. What Shiira is still missing, and what keeps it from becoming my main browser, is autofilling of forms and proper remembering of login and passwords. Once it has that I will seriously consider switching to it. Until they do I will stick with Camino.

As I look at my stats I can see several key differences between what people searched for in 2001 and what they search for now in 2005. Back in 2001, I could get an easy 100 -120 visitors a day just for "science fiction search engine" (without quotes) across all engines, with ranking that were worse back then than they are now. You don't see that kind of traffic today. People don't look for specialized search engines, the same way they did 5 years ago. Google and Inktomi fed engines led for most of that traffic.

Given that everything is the same or better, it just seems that searching habits have changed.

I also notice a marked decrease in content site webmasters looking for niche directories to add their URL's too. I wonder about that, back when I started:

1. Most directories were free.
2. Search engines were not that good.
3. SEO was still a lot about submitting it was a part of the culture.
4. Google had not destroyed all competition.
5. The quality sites in the web were always listed in directories.

I do not think content webmasters look for directories as much, the main people that are looking are SEO's, commercial webmasters and submission spammers.

Now, this is neither good nor bad, and this is not to say that a well spidered well optimized niche directory does not get traffic from the search engines. Traffic can be very good indeed - but it is different traffic - people searching for different things and different keyword phrases than they used to.

Michael Martinez has a good post wherein he tries to explain the whole Google Trust and reputation thing:

Google can flag pages in its index as "Trusted", "General", "Penalized", or "Delisted (Do Not Show)". As many people have found, pages can "drop out of the index" but still be listed. That is, a page's URL will be returned for queries but no title or description are provided. These listings are regarded as "partially indexed" and often reflect pages that have not been recently fetched. Google knows about them through links. Activating SafeSearch in its most secure setting filters out uncrawled listings, but they are neither delisted nor penalized.

Previously speculation about this has been fragmented and scattered about many different forum threads and blog postings Michael Martinez tried to pull it all together into his take. Read the whole thing.

This sort of reminds me of the old Inktomi Best of the Web (BOW) index.

I have been messing around over at Feedburner exploring and making adjustments to my feeds. I like this service. Way back when Feedburner opened in Beta I switched my feed over to them. I wasn't sure how reliable they would be or if they would even be around in 6 months. I don't think I have logged into my account with them since that time and they have added a lot of features. I'm impresses enough that I'm going to be switching all my RSS feeds on all my blogs and forums over to them.

Added.

I'm pondering about switching the feed to summary instead of full post. Not sure about that but anyone with preferences let me know.

I often think this about marketers.

I've mentioned before that I feel the need to consolidate. Here is one of the reasons: every time I want to post something I have to _think_ about were I want to post it: at one of the two forums I moderate at, or one of my several topic specific blogs or here. I have to weigh things like, do I want/need a response, how long will the post be, does it fit the forum or blog theme and audience? Feh, too complicated. All that thinking about where to post gets in the way of actually writing the post.

For here at this blog I'm going to try to just post - even if they are just short observations or pointers to posts I have made at one of the other aforementioned places. I mean there aren't that many rules about blogging are there? The blog police won't kick my door in and arrest me for not making long formal posts will they?

Cre8asite forums has new forum software and a new look, or should I say 'looks' in the plural because you can choose from about 7 different 'skins'. That is a nice feature because there is something for everyone looks wise. Although it has to be a pain to administer that because for any changes by the staff to navigation has to be done on each skin (like 7 times).

The admin staff pulled off one of the smoothest transfers to a new, completely different forum script that I have ever seen. Darn near everything worked from about the first minute. Good stuff.

But laying down compliments is not the reason for this post. What interested me the most, was observing both in myself and other members, through their comments, how we get used to one interface and don't really want to have to learn a new one. It's not a bad thing, just human nature. But you can see how the resistance to change can build up in any system be it an online forum community, a shopping site or even politiical systems in the real world. People tend to be predisposed to like that which is familier to them. It's not just technology that makes change incremental, it is human beings. If you try to change to much to fast (which Cre8 did not change to much too fast) you will have people rebelling against the changes.

So back to Cre8 - one thing I noticed right off is how with one skin the placement of the member's name makes the name stand out to me when I am scanning a thread, while with a different skin the Avatar becomes the visual identifier of the poster. This really jumped out at me so much that for the first time ever since I had joined Cre8 I had to upload an Avatar for myself. Hmm. maybe these usability people know their stuff?

My other self test is that I am forcing myself to use one of the more radically new skins, albeit one with a traditional blue/gray color scheme (the change of both color and template simultaneously was too much change for me to deal with comfortably) - and what I am finding out about myself is how quickly my brain (okay at least I thought it was quick) remaps itself so that I pretty quickly learned where all the new buttons were.

I'm not sure what all this means, but the observations are interesting. I think there are also lessons here for sales too but I'll save that for future posts however here is a hint - I think it's all about inertia.

I have switched the Feedburner to read this feed now so I will start posting here. I am copying some of my old reviews and lists from the old blog into a text editor and I will transfer them here after the old site disappears. I don't want a dup content penalty.

I'm using a Mac based client side CMS for this blog and site called Rapidweaver. It is a bit more basic than TypePad but it looks like it will get the job done for the amount I post. I like it because I can build truly static pages for content if I want. It makes it all very simple to manage a site.

Forum

I put up a link to a little forum board. Comments are great for individual posts but sometimes people have a general observation, question or just want to chat with me about something not specifically related to a particular post. This gives them a way to do that. I don't care if it is a freebie remotely hosted Bravenet board - I'm not trying to impress anyone here.

Just testing to see what this looks like with a post.

Added:

More testing.



Today in History:
* $FreeBSD: src/usr.bin/calendar/calendars/calendar.birthday,v 1.19 2002/12/19 05:14:35 grog Exp $



Listening to ''White Christmas'', by Bing Crosby (Play Count: 18)



The delayed stock quote for AAPL is: 71.11