While moderating comments on my most active site today I became annoyed at the number of people who leave comments with obviously fake email addresses. I haven’t gone to the extent of requiring people to validate their comment by sending them an email like other sites have– however it is something I’ve considered. This gave me the idea to write a very simple WordPress Plugin… No MX Records, no comment. » More: No MX No Comment
Archive for the ‘My Works’ Category
No MX No Comment
September 14th, 2009Rebuilding Sites for better SEO
March 29th, 2006
I’ve just finished rebuilding a site for a client who offers translation services, LWT Communications. A graphic designer had created the original site, and there wasn’t much actual text on the site for search engines to gobble up. The designer had basically taken the work and created jpeg files for each of the pages. A picture is only worth 1000 words to human eyes…. it isn’t worth practically anything to a search engine.
So I’ve rebuilt the site using text wherever practical. There were a few design elements I was asked to change, but by and large this isn’t a site I did any of the design for.
» More: Rebuilding Sites for better SEO
OmniGraffle for Website Layout Development
February 18th, 2006
One thing I love about blogs is that every now and then someone mentions a tip which totally changes how you work. This happened to me yesterday. Peter over at The Blog Studio wrote about how to design a blog. And among the couple dozen juicy paragraphs in the article he wrote this.
I use a fabulous program called OmniGraffle (mac only) to play around with site layout and element hierarchy (more on this in a moment). I like to stay out of my graphics editor, since the potential to get sucked into designing visual elements is so strong. You really want to avoid jumping into the visual part of the design at this stage, since youll just end up getting lost.
Website Growth
February 1st, 2006
Another new month marks the time when I gather statistics and review the past few weeks. However instead of my usual recap of the previous month’s stats, I’ll share how things have been going for the past several months.
While I won’t share any actual figures or tell which color is which broker, the slope of the graph itself will tell the story. There is still one source I’ll still need to add data for (the top red figure above the orange) however omitting it here won’t make much of a difference in the representation.
» More: Website Growth
WordPress 2.0 Upgrade
January 13th, 2006Okay, no less than two weeks after I listed reasons I wasn’t going to upgrade to WordPress 2.0, I’ve done so. But…. Just on this site. I have not upgraded any of my other WP installs and I don’t plan to soon.
My opinion of the release remains the same. It will be great for many people but none of the new features excite me. And that is okay. I like the simple nature of WordPress and I nearly giggle whenever I need to download the tiny source.
Since I use xmlrpc to post entries, I never even see all of the nice new ajaxy eye candy in the admin section. So just so that I would see something new I installed a new template here. It was about time I moved on from that highly hacked kubrick theme. I really like the new template… I like looking at it so much I might actually post around here more often. We’ll see. 
A Tale of Four Bloggers…. or Two
January 9th, 2006Looks like I might need a category for “blog psychology”. Once upon a time, I had a blog, “blog 1″. All of my posts were signed as my nickname and people addressed me in comments as “dear nickname”. Life was good and there were many regulars who posted comments to my bog. I came to respect one reader (I’ll call him “Bob”) who frequently posted thoughtful, friendly comments. I liked Bob.
Then there was another blog, “blog 2″. Here I wasn’t the author, but occasionally posted comments and when I did I posted using my firstname. Lots of people posted comments on this blog so getting to know each commenter wasn’t plausible, especially since it wasn’t one of my own blogs.
One of my comments on blog 2 was responded to with criticism from another commenter, also named Bob. Bob phrased his response in a way I doubt he would have said directly to me. I started to dislike Bob as a knee-jerk reaction to his comments.
Then suddenly, I had a realization…. Bob from blog 1 and Bob from blog 2 was the same Bob.
I have not fully absorbed this realization yet so I’m not 100% sure what I’ll take away from it. Perhaps it is just that first impressions are extremely critical and can set a strong tone. Perhaps it is realizing that just because I find someone on a blog that I dislike, I am only seeing a tiny part of who they are and perhaps they would be a best buddy on another blog…. even if that seems like a stretch at the time.
Chasing the Swirl of Contextual Advertising, or Trout
January 7th, 2006I really enjoy fly-fishing. One technique that divides all fishermen is that of “chasing the swirl”. If you are not a fisherman “chasing a swirl” is when you see a fish jump not where you are fishing, but within casting reach. Do you turn around and cast hoping to place your fly directly above where the fish previously jumped? Or do you keep fishing where you are.
Some people argue fish travel so frequently and so fast it isn’t worth your time to chase a swirl. Others will gladly spin around in the canoe and rapidly cast at the swirl.
So what has this got to do with blogging or contextual advertising? With the rise of popular AdSense alternatives such as YPN, Chitika, etc it might be tempting to chase the swirl. This might be especially tempting if you have a good ad-server program setup where you can easily swap out ads from one broker to another.
The question becomes are the reports fast enough, and do the small swings in CPC last long enough to make it worthwhile to chase the swirl? How do you know ads from the other networks didn’t have a bigger surge in CPC just a little later that you could be taking advantage of?
» More: Chasing the Swirl of Contextual Advertising, or Trout
Things are Crazy
January 5th, 2006Things are crazy. Things are very crazy. I’ve written close to 100 blog posts this week and I’m still behind on one of them (flightnest). This whole craziness has been the result of a few different factors.
- Google let one of my websites out of the sandbox. Or since Google barely acknowledges such a thing exists I’ll say that overnight traffic from Google increased over 30 times normal levels. Yes, I wrote that correctly, overnight traffic increased 30 times.
- Perhaps it wasn’t entirely the sandbox, as I made a couple of other important SEO changes to my site and perhaps all of that hit at once. Who knows. I’m happy though.
- I’ve started to really figure out contextual advertising. It takes time. Contextual advertising isn’t simply adding ad code and changing colors and placement. As Jeremy Wright has said, contextual advertising is now about “delivering the correct ad to the correct visitor at the correct time”. I’m closer to understanding this now.
- The start of a new year is just a crazy time in general. We’ve all taken some time off over the holidays, got behind in work, and then all of these trade shows like CES and MacWorld happen that I need to cover news from.
All of this boils down to being a crazy time. I’m behind on a few of my other, non blogging projects (sorry John!) and I also have realized that I need to take some time, sit back, and evaluate where my business has gone in the past fourteen months. I sense a new direction is in order, one that will allow me to set aside the projects I was never enthusiastic about doing, but did so because they were lucrative. Instead I’ll be focusing on projects I enjoy, that I avoided before since they were not lucrative…. but now I’ve figured out how to make them lucrative.
Overall, I need to figure out how to start saying no. I’ve turned down a few projects in the past, but not many. I need to start looking at projects in a different way, and evaluating them based on time constraints and long term gain. And this is just the start of some business brainstorming I need to do. I wish business coaches were less expensive.
Why I’m Not Upgrading to WordPress 2.0 Yet
December 30th, 2005I thought I would offer my list of reasons why I’m not upgrading to WordPress 2.0 yet. I’ll approach this by going through the list of new features listed on the WP website.
- Completely Redesigned Backend – Okay, yes it is pretty. But this won’t impact my blogging.
- Faster Administration – Yes, if I decide to add a new category on the fly while in the middle of a post things are faster. But it really doesn’t make a difference to my blogging habits.
- WYSIWYG Editing – I’m faster with a keyboard than with a mouse, the editor doesn’t work properly in my browser of choice, and I typically use ecto to post anyway.
- Included Spam and Backup Plugins – I’ve got spam filtering in place that works perfectly and my site files and databases are backed-up nightly automatically already.
- Resizable Editing – Doesn’t impact me, I use ecto.
- Inline Uploading – Again, I use ecto for this which gives me more control over the images
- Faster Posting – Ecto
- Post Preview – Now this I would enjoy having. I do sometimes edit posts within WP and sometimes I look over something that “isn’t right” because I didn’t see it under the proper CSS.
- Streamlined Importing – All of my sites are already under WP.
- User Roles – Almost all of my blogs are one person blogs so I don’t need this. And I’ll need to rewrite one of my plugins to get it to work under the new role based security.
- Header Customization – I got rid of that awhile ago.
- User Level Options – I’m the only user of most of my blogs.
- Improved Abstraction – This is nice, it will make troubleshooting easier, but not a reason for me to upgrade.
- Built-in Caching – Reducing server load is always a good thing, especially when it comes to hitting a database. But WP has always been better than most CMS systems in this regard. My Xserve handles the load quite well.
- Plugin Hooks Galore – This is nice, but I don’t have a need for any of the new hooks at the moment.
- Import Framework – I don’t have a need for this at the moment.
- Theme Functions – This is pretty interesting, and maybe something I might use in the future. But right now I don’t have any needs that are tied to a theme that wouldn’t better be done within a plugin.
- Theme preview images – I don’t change themes enough for this to be beneficial. Only one theme is loaded in each of my blogs.
- Hundreds and Hundreds of Bug Fixes – None of them appear to impact how I currently use WP.
I’m not saying people shouldn’t upgrade. I’m not saying I will not upgrade. I’m not saying there are not very good things about WP 2.0. However what I will gain will not exceed the time it takes for me to upgrade…. not right now anyway.
I will eventually upgrade to WP 2, but not at 2.0. I’ll wait for some of the Ecto/WP issues to be sorted out and hopefully by then I’ll have more use for some of the new features.
Mac OS X Charting Application / Database
December 7th, 2005I need an app. I don’t know if it exists. If it does it needs better marketing. Anyway, here are my requirements.
Nice looking Charts – I say “nice looking” because they don’t need to be as beautiful as the charts Keynote produces. However I’ve seen some charts out there that look like something a three-year-old created with crayons and a ruler. We’ve got Quartz Extreme, Core Image, and OpenGL so stunning charts shouldn’t be a problem. The charts need to support polynomials and moving averages.
Easy Customizable Data Entry – Sure I can create option lists in Excel, but being stuck in that grid interface isn’t the cleanest way to create a data entry form. I want something like a FileMaker Pro layout where I can drag and drop option lists, radio buttons, checkboxes, etc onto a controlled layout. This is how data entry should be.
Powerful Data Queries – I want to be able to look at my data in ways I can’t think of today. Maybe I want to analyze my revenue by day of the week. Perhaps I want to compare sales versus leads by channel. I’m not sure how I want to look at my data tomorrow, but creating another worksheet in Excel with calculations from other columns then incorporating those results into a new graph isn’t the answer. I want a nice form where I can select items from a list or tick a checkbox and have a chart that automatically updates.
Solutions Considered
Excel - This is how I’m doing it now. My worksheets are 5% actual raw data and 95% calculation columns…. Rolling up by day of week, month, or year. Calculating percentages, maxes, minis, means, etc. I shouldn’t need to create all of those columns to look at the data from so many angles, thus the data really belongs in a database like MySQL.
LAMP – Or in this case MAMP. I could construct the MySQL database, then use PHP to create a bunch of query builders though HTML pages. Then find a PHP charting class to char the results. But creating something custom like that from scratch is way more work than I want to put into this. And I haven’t come across many PHP charting classes that draw polynomials and such.
FileMaker Pro - Does pretty much what I need, and does it well… except for charts. Why oh why are there no charts in FileMaker? There are some plugins, but the ones I have seen produce those crayon drawn looking charts that I would never want to use in a presentation.
Aabel – This looks pretty nice. But I don’t want to spend nearly that much money on this project. While analyzing data is important, it isn’t my full-time job.
Current Status
Basically I’m going to evaluate any solution suggested in three categories. Data Entry, Data Storage, Data Charting. Right now my best option for Data Entry is probably FileMaker Pro. The best option for data storage is probably MySQL, however FileMaker Pro could also handle the task. And for data charting the best option is probably Excel. They look pretty nice and support polynomials and moving averages. Of course having the database crunch the polynomial and/or moving average data and feeding the results to Keynote to graph via AppleScript wouldn’t be a horrible option either.
As of this moment I’m considering building the data entry interface into FileMaker Pro. I would also store the data in FileMaker Pro. And I’m going to experiment to see if I could build a Query Builder of sorts in FileMaker that then perhaps sends the resulting data via ODBC (Actual Technologies ODBC drivers for FileMaker, Excel, MySQL, etc) to Excel. Maybe that would work. Bu there’s got to be a better way…
