Don't Back Down

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" »

I'm not a big user of images - though I have a digital camera, I typically end up using it less than I probably should. I think one of my goals for next year will be to actually get some of the images off the memory card in the camera and let people see the pictures I've taken. One step in that process is to get them in a format that makes them nice looking. A single page without much around it, as you often see on a web page, can be downright ugly. Enter Lightbox.

This JavaScript framework is a fairly simple way to display pictures with a sort of frame around them - the image is actually assigned a special HTML segment, and the surrounding section of the page is blacked out, giving the viewer a much more pleasing experience than a simple image without much around it. There are three problems with Lightbox. The first is that it's big, the second is that it's slow to load and the third (and most important) is that it doesn't work! Luckily, there are some options.

Read "Enhancing the Display of Images on Your Site with Slimbox" »

Some of you may have noticed a problem with your online RSS feed aggregator, such as Bloglines or Google Reader. This had to do with the formatting of the Browser Friendly feed from FeedBurner (not their fault, I was trying something new, and I'll explain it soon so you can learn from my mistake).

Anyway, the problem was that some web-based aggregators weren't able to see the feed as a valid one. If you read the feed in your own browser, or via email, you should have been okay. I'm not sure about desktop aggregators, but they probably would have had the same problems as the online ones. The end result is you may get a bunch of updates, but things should be flowing normally again. Sorry for the disruption.

So the other day I downloaded Sizer, a cool little utility that adds a menu item to your windows and allows you to easily snap the window to certain pre-defined sizes. This is most useful, of course, for seeing what your web site looks like at other resolutions. Not long ago, I was accused of having an unsustainable web site, at least because of the width of my template, so this is of some interest to me.

Looking at some statistics, we see that just over 54% of users browse the web at 1024x768. This can certainly explain the reason why so many people have gone to wider layouts. But that's still only half of all users. While 14% use 1280x1024, there are still almost 25% that use 800x600. That's a significant percentage to leave out in the cold. What do all these sites look like at such a small resolution? Let's take a look.

Read "When Size Just Might Matter" »

Much of the world seemed to be really interested in the fact that FeedBurner recently announced that you were now able to flip a switch and see ads from Google AdSense in your site's feeds. If you've been waiting patiently to be allowed into the FeedBurner Ad Network, only to find that you still hadn't made it - or like me, you've seen the option to get in, only to have it not work and the door closed again - then it seems like a nice alternative. At least you can put some ads into your feed in the meantime.

The first step is to link the two accounts. Luckily, this isn't hard - you just need to tell FeedBurner your AdSense account information - email and either zip code or part of your phone number. Then you'll receive an email from Google asking permission to allow FeedBurner into the account. Of course, FeedBurner is Google, so this is a bit odd, but it's really not bad, and once it's done, you can turn on the ads, which is when the fun begins.

Read "New FeedBurner Ads Open Doors, But Problems Remain" »

It's not difficult to get a web site these days. To be fair, it's never been particularly difficult, but now it's probably easier than it's ever been. I'm sure that it will only get easier as time goes on. Just because you have a web site, however, doesn't necessarily mean that you have one that functions well, however. You need to consider first the ability of others to get to your site, second the ability of visitors to return to your site, third your ability to keep the site running and finally what you will do if you need to move the site for any reason. These aspects of running your site are all related, but it is not always immediately clear how the pieces fit together.

First and foremost, you need a domain name. This is, quite simply, how people find you. Sure, you can get a site on a hosted service, and many of those will offer you the ability to map your domain to theirs. But whatever you do, don't settled for foo.somehostedservice.com, because invariably you will want to move your site, and when you do, you won't be able to take your link mojo with you. Get the domain name and start using it from day one. It'll cost about $10 per year. It's a worthwhile investment so do this first. Yes, even before you have somewhere to put your data, because the two do not have to go together. I'll tell you why next.

Read "The Three Pillars of Constructing Your Domain" »

I tend to work with any number of web hosts on a daily basis through my work as a computer and network consultant, and for the most part, they are all the same. Day in and day out, there is really very little difference between hosts - when everything is running smoothly. What really makes the difference is when things aren't running smoothly, and that's why I've chosen to keep my own sites at pair Networks. Their tagline of World Class Web Hosting may seem to be just a bit of marketing fluff, but I have to say that I'm really sold on it.

Some years ago, when I first ventured online, it was through bulletin boards. As with a lot of people - at least a lot of people that I knew - I started off calling into boards, and later ran one of my own. Often it was an adventure in trying to be popular enough that people came by, but not so popular that people couldn't get in. This analogy actually corresponds quite well to web hosts these days.

Read "The Long and Winding Road to pair Networks" »

Early this week, the New York Times stopped charging for access to parts of the web site. Obviously part of this comes from the fact that online advertising is doing well. Just look at Google to see this - a huge amount of their profit is derived from advertising.

I've long maintained that access to online data should remain open, and it's really irritated me when it doesn't. I strive to keep the archives here available - a feat which isn't easy if I move things around. And I understand that it's not always easy to do if you have as much data as a newspaper or an online portal. But storage is cheap and advertising plentiful. Why shouldn't archives be free?

Read "New York Times Opens Site, Who is Next?" »

With all the attention I've been paying to statistics, I thought I'd take a look and see where traffic has been headed lately, which of course raises the question of whether to look at current content (in other words, posts I made this month) or total content (posts that have been made since the site was started). I have to say that I still haven't decided, but for the moment, I'm leaning towards the latter. After all, if a post was written years ago, and it's still more popular than a post that was written a week ago, then there's probably a reason for it.

I'd like to think that I'm keeping things current, but maybe I'm just not. So I'd like to start off by looking at the posts that have been the most popular overall. I'm interested to hear your feedback, however - if you are more interested in a monthly recap, then perhaps I can do separate posts, or even combine them into one. I'm not a huge fan of metrics (that's really my wife's thing), but I do like to see what is getting people's attention. Let me know what you think.

Read "Most Popular Ten Posts During August" »

After one year of advertising, I was seeing AdSense at about 80% of the income from the site. This month, that figure went back up a bit - to about 85% - which is not as high as it has been, but still the wrong direction. Mostly this is due to a largish return on one of the other affiliate programs, which reduced that percentage by a bit. Everything else held fairly steady for the month - traffic, income and page views were remarkably... even.

The interesting thing about this was that, even though you will find content for August at this point, it wasn't actually posted during August. As I mentioned in What Affects My Advertising Revenue? I was on a bit of a self-imposed sabbatical for the month, and that meant that I didn't really write. Well, I did write - but I didn't post the writings when they happened. Instead I hid in my cave and just sort of watched to see what happened. In reality, not much happened - traffic stayed fairly steady, and so did the income. It's almost like I didn't have to be here. Which is nice. But now I'm back (though I'm still catching up, so I'm a little behind - that will be rectified in the next couple days).

Read "August Review, New Layout and Ad Plans, Thanks Sponsors" »

I've been debating for a while about whether or not to add an email subscription option, but I finally decided to do it. Using FeedBurner makes the option really painless to implement, after all, so I figured that there was no harm in doing so.

If you already use FeedBurner - and anyone using Movable Type has no reason not to, with the release earlier this year of my MT-FeedBurner plugin - then you can use this service.

Read "Email Subscriptions Now Available" »