Don't Back Down

The fourth annual Don't Back Down Tournament Pick'em has arrived. You can make your picks now. Thanks again to Yahoo! Sports for providing the brackets, which make it awfully easy for me to keep track of things.

This year, the contest is even better, because you can win $5 million for a perfect bracket (not from me, unfortunately), so get those brackets filled out to see if you can win the big prize. There are a few more readers around than last year, so hopefully we'll have a few more competitors - but no matter how many people are in the contest, I'm sure that it will be a good time for all! In order to sign up, you'll need a Yahoo! ID, along with the group ID (69931) and the group password (which, as usual, is dbd). So visit the Tournament Pick'em page and sign up!

An interesting comment was raised on my review of Web Hosting Bluebook. Someone by the name of "Internet Marketing Blog" (if you follow their link, you get a blog by the name of "Money Maker Jobs", and someone posting under the name of "admin", so finding out the real name isn't easy) mentioned that "this is the internet" and we're here to sell people BS. I think that this is an interesting comment for many reasons. Most notably because, as I mentioned in my follow-up comment, that the commenter himself mentions on his own page that "money is not everything" - so if money is not everything, what else is there?

I certainly have a number of thoughts on the subject, but if we're all here to sell people BS, that implies that money is, indeed, everything. Looking at the monstrous page offered by our commenter, we see 12 posts spread over three months and eight categories, along with four Google boxes. So obviously, our friend is all about the money. But without much content. And I'm wandering now, so let me get to the point, which is that much of what I do is offer reviews. I offer reviews of products, such as keyboards, I've reviewed many pieces of software, including downloadable software and services (most recently TypePad). I also review our government. This site is full of reviews, in fact, and I'd venture that all of them are pretty honest.

Read "The Dilemma of Paid Reviews" »

With version 3.31 of Movable Type, the product began shipping with feeds.app lite, which allowed some simple abilities for republishing the content of other feeds on your site, through the use of Movable Type template tags. This plugin was a great step forward, and expanded on earlier plugins that did similar things, but in fact, it is the less-capable sibling of the (much) more powerful feeds.app from Appnel Solutions.

The primary difference between the two is that feeds.app lite allows you to pull some basic information out of the feed, while feeds.app allows you to get anything at all - it's much, much more powerful (and it also has a price tag associated). Unfortunately, feeds.app, while insanely powerful, also has caused some signficant hair-pulling to get things working from time to time. It's a shame, because it's a good plugin. Some of the problem is a conflict between the default feeds.app lite plugin and the full-featured feeds.app plugin. Some is that there are a lot of requirements (that ship with the plugin), and it appears that many systems just don't support everything that you need to get it working. Because of that, I have recently been looking for an easier solution, and I think I've found one in Feed Digest.

Read "Using Feed Digest to Republish Feed Content on Your Site" »

Much of today, twitterfeed has been down. Which is okay - it just means that my blog posts don't get into my Twitter stream (just one of the reasons I don't like depending on third-party services). Last week, John Chow announced that he had set another new record, with more than $30,000 in income. Unforunately, if you haven't read the report, you may not be able to do so, because his site has been responding horribly of late (at least for me). I don't know what's happening for John - if it's a problem with his server, his software, or if he's just bogged down because of the latest numbers.

Frankly I don't care that much because I keep up with his blog through Google Reader, so I don't often have cause to visit. I only happened to notice that things were slow when I went to look something up, and realized that it had happened last week when I did it as well, so it seems to be an ongoing issue. Or it could be related to my own ongoing issues (but I don't really seem to have much of a problem with other sites). Whatever the case, it underscores the importance of keeping your site running.

Read "The Importance of Uptime and Availability" »

One of the problems that you may encounter when you add new features to your site is that you run the risk of slowing down the page load time. Before adding anything to your site, there are a couple of things you should check out. Even if you aren't considering adding anything, you may want to take a look, just to see what's what.

First, take a look at Web Site Optimization. In the interest of disclosure, this is a client of mine for Movable Type Consulting, so I'm not a completely unbiased observer. But the site is a good one. You can use their free web site analysis tool to see how long it takes your page to load. A quick look tells you how long it takes the items on your page to load - HTML, images, scripts, styles and the like. What's even better is that you get a good look at how long it will take not just on your high-speed connection, but how long it might take on a slower connection as well, and some basic tips to speed things up. I'll talk about that more in a minute.

Read "The Effect of Multiple JavaScript Files on Page Load Time" »

There's a school of thought that says you should Fake It Until You Make It - that even if you aren't successful, that you should pretend that you are successful, because it will make people believe that you are, and that will in turn, lead to success. But just how long do you go on pretending to be a success? As long as it takes, of course. That's the standard answer. How long do real successes go on pretending? The simple answer is that they go on as long as they can keep you believing.

For a quick study, let's take a look at the man everyone loves to hate, John Chow. He took his personal blog from a couple hundred dollars per month in September of 2006, writing relatively decent content, to over $25,000 in December of 2007. All the while, he says that his traffic hasn't really increased (it has certainly increased from that point, but when he does share traffic figures, it shows that it hasn't changed much in recent months), but his monetization strategies have. Perhaps most importantly, it makes you wonder - has he made it, or does he fake it?

Read "How Long Should You Fake It?" »

I mentioned last week that some of the most successful posts (at least in terms of popularity) were written when I simply wrote, rather than ones that I felt I had to write. Just yesterday, Darren Rowse talked about thinking like a blogger - in other words, not struggling to come up with posts, but actually changing your mindset so that you begin to get into that process of creating content.

I've been thinking about this for a while, and I have to say that there are definitely times when I wonder who I'm writing to when I create entries. Way back when I wrote The Angler Fish (the eleventh entry ever, ID#20), I had no idea that it would end up well-ranked at Google. I just wrote, because I had a question that I needed answered, and I wanted to be able to find the answer later. There are other times, when I will put something together that is more of a tutorial. This may be for my own memory, but it is also for others to learn too. Finally, I will sometimes find myself writing for Google. Invariably, the last sort of post ends up being something that no one wants to read and Google will never index well.

Read "Do You Write for You, Your Readers or Google?" »

Not long ago, I asked how the Lynx Blue Line was doing. According to the Charlotte Observer, they had 12,000 riders. It turns out that the figure is, in fact, closer to 12,000 riders per day, which is an important distinction to make. After all, if you handle the same number in a day as in a month, you have a whole lot less work to do, right?

Unfortunately, it seems that the plans to actually handle those riders went somewhat awry. As I have mentioned previously, putting the bill collector way down on the bottom of the front means that a lot of people just can't find it. I'm sure that they will get used to it eventually, but come on - they shouldn't have to. It should be right there where they can see it, not where they have to hunt for it so long that they give up in frustration and just don't pay. The issue that you already have with light rail is that there are no turnstiles preventing people from getting on. Allowing them to use the Ticket Vending Machines as an excuse just means that many more people will skip paying.

Read "Don't Forget to Plan for the Future" »

I've been writing for a long time, and I've been creating blog posts for a while now. Almost 1500 entries, and closing in on five years! But the majority of those are written through the regular Movable Type editor. I've tried WYSIWYG editors, and I just don't like them. But with the increase in offline editors, I figured that it was time to give them another try.

Perhaps the most advanced editor actually comes from Microsoft. The Windows Live Writer is really a decent piece of software, and competes well against established veterans such as BlogJet, Ecto, Qumana, w.bloggar and the ScribeFire plugin for Firefox. There are a lot of options!

Read "Using an Offline Editor to Post to Your Blog" »

Now of course I am most curious to know what makes you want to read this blog, but I really am curious what makes you want to read any blog. I mentioned the most popular posts the other day, and it's easy to tell that for whatever reason recently, I haven't been resonating with people.

In a brief discussion over on Raanan's blog, we talked about search engine traffic. I've mentioned before that I get a ton of it - more than 90% of the traffic here comes from search engines. His is less, around 60%, meaning that he has more regular readers. I don't know that either is better than the other, it's just different. What I want to know is what makes you read something regularly.

Read "What Makes You Want to Read a Blog" »

As the year winds down, it's time to look at what has gone by and what we might expect in the year ahead. I'm pretty bad at looking at things monthly, but maybe I can keep up with it once a year. We'll see how it goes. At least I won't have to worry about it for another year.

Business is Booming

I've been absolutely slammed at my job, where I mostly do Movable Type Consulting (though I also do other things as well), and so I haven't had as much time to post this year as I have in years past. I also spent a few months seeing what would happen if I didn't post at all. The answer is that it didn't seem to matter a whole lot. A hair under 180 posts this year (nearly half of what I had been averaging previously).

Read "Don't Back Down Year in Review: 2007" »

To build a community, you need your visitors to comment on your site. Unfortunately when you do that, you open up your site to others who you might not want to come calling - namely spammers, who will leave all sorts of garbage on your (virtual) doorstep. While we probably won't ever be able to get rid of them, managing spam feedback is a completely bearable process.

Depending on who you ask, you're likely to get a wide variety of answers on the best avenue to take when it comes to plugins to use or configuration directives to take in the fight against spam. You'll see names like Akismet or Defensio mentioned, and plugins such as MT-Approval and Tiny Turing thrown into the mix. Some will tell you that you need a CAPTCHA and some will tell you that there's just no way to win. In the end, you don't really need much more than a little creativity and some patience.

Read "How to Best Handle Spam on Your Movable Type Site" »