Category: Tech

Posted on
by

Since joining BlogExplosion, I’ve noticed something interesting about surfing it. First, I tend to see many of the same blogs over and over. Second, when I’m actually reading these blogs, by the time I log out all my new credits have been used up by people looking at mine. This leads me to this conclusion:

The only people who see this site through BlogExplosion are the people who are logged in at the same time I am.

If you have a routine where you spend a half hour on BE every evening, or 1 hour every Tuesday, or whatever, chances are the same people are seeing your blog over and over again.

Just to experiment, a few days ago I took 10 minutes late in the day and logged in from work. I don’t think I saw a single familiar blog.

So what’s the answer? Vary your BE routine as much as possible. Don’t assign your spare points when you surf, pick a random time, log in for 1 minute and just assign them. Make a banner and assign points to it the same way. Talk someone into signing up with you as a referrer, and get a share of their points.

Otherwise, you’ll get the same audience every time… and chances are they’re either regular readers by now or they’re tired of seeing you.

Posted on
by

There’s a new anti-IE site on the web: Digital Proof [archive.org]. Rather than tell you why you should switch to browser X, or why you should pick one of browsers XYZ, it just collects links to other people’s articles about why you should switch.

The advantage I can see for this campaign is it can collect a wide variety of perspectives. After all, everyone who chooses to install something other than IE has their own reasons. Some want the security, some want the more modern capabilities for design, some want the better usability, some want to promote marketshare diversity, and so on. No one argument is going to work on everyone.

On the other hand, I suspect the target audience is unlikely to wade through all the articles available, even with a top-5-rated list on the home page.

(via Mezzoblue Dailies)

Posted on
by

Holy crap, ThinkSecret was right about pretty much everything. Apple has just announced a $499 miniature Macintosh. Daring Fireball had suggested the price might be unrealistic, given what happened with the iPod Mini announcement last year (ThinkSecret predicted $100, it turned out to be $250, and the audience was underwhelmed because their expectations were set too high… or low, depending on your point of view.)

The Mac MiniCheck out the photos. I’ve been looking from time to time at what’s available in the small form factor market, but for the most part PCs are still clunkers compared to the G4 Cube (remember that?), and the Mini makes the Cube look gigantic. The specs for the Mac Mini look virtually identical to this generation’s PowerBooks.

I keep having to remind myself I’m specifically looking for a new PC—we’ve got a PowerBook and a G4 tower, and the machine that needs to be replaced is a (non-upgradable) Celeron that dual-boots Fedora Core and Windows Me. Otherwise I’d be seriously tempted.

The iPod Shuffle, on the other hand, is just silly. I think its main effect will be to remind people why they went with the regular iPods in the first place.

Posted on
by

Comments on this site are now moderated. After a week of daily spam runs that have managed to get past other blocking methods, I’m tired of messing with it. At least with moderation, they won’t show up on the site.

This means that when you post a comment, it will not show up immediately. One of us will have to get the moderation notice and approve the message before it will appear.

I apologize to those who want to make actual comments on our posts. Just one more thing for which you can thank the spammers.

Update: It turns out it could have been much worse. The run of about 15 comment spams that showed up this morning turns out to be the few that made it through out of a total of 357. Over the course of 20 minutes this morning, a network of 126 zombies posted nearly 360 junk comments to this site, and 95% of them were rejected immediately. On one hand, it gives me a bit more faith in the countermeasures, but on the other hand, the scale of the attack is just staggering.

Posted on
by

Interesting subject line from a spam that hit today:

The spirit of customer service

It was a pharmacy spam, but for some reason I immediately thought of the ghosts in A Christmas Carol.

Imagine the ghosts of customer service past, present and future visiting some CEO and convincing him that they need to provide a decent experience to their clients.

Posted on
by

A truism of television is that they aren’t in the entertainment business, they’re in the advertising business. Their job is selling commercials, and the shows you watch are nothing but an enticement to get you to watch long enough that you’ll see the ads. This is true for ad-based websites as well. The content is just there to get you coming back so you’ll see and click on the ads. (I’ve always had a problem with the idea of using click-through as the primary measurement of an ad’s success, but that’s another story.)

The problem here is that a balance needs to be struck between content and ads: Tilt too much toward content, and you need another business model to pay for hosting. Tilt too much toward ads, and people will stop visiting your site—or start blocking your ads. The more intrusive and annoying the ads, the more likely people will block them.

I rarely block ads. (Of course, I don’t click on them very often, either.) I figure if the website owner needs an ad banner to pay for hosting and/or make a profit and continue providing the site, that’s fine…as long as it doesn’t distract from the content. Remember, I’m not there for the ads, they have to convince me to come to their page, and if the ads make an otherwise-appealing site too annoying to read…well, sorry, I’m either blocking the ads or I’m not coming back.

DevArticles is a good example of this. The page was so full of animated banners visually screaming for my attention, I could barely focus on the article long enough to read it. This one page prompted me to install the Adblock extension for Firefox at work and block everything coming from their ad server, just to be able to read it. Had they kept their ads sensible, like the dozens of ad-supported sites I frequent without blocking the ads, I probably would have bookmarked it as well. As it is, the site reminds me of a line from Babylon 5: “Too annoying to live.”

Posted on
by

Here’s a pair of excellent articles about how to avoid cluttering up your website so that people can actually see your content. The article is, however, hampered by appearing on a site that seems to violate every usability principle imaginable…. to the extent that the second one showed up on the Cruel Site of the Day. From the introduction:

We’ve all visited websites that made us wince. You know what I mean: full of distracting animation, flashing text, and enough other clutter that it reminds you of a Victorian home filled to bursting with knick knacks. Are you guilty of filling your website with useless junk? Christian Heilmann takes you down his checklist of website clutter. You just might find yourself considering a redesign.

Yeah, that sounds like a description of Dev Articles to me. I count no fewer than 8 ads on the first page, 6 of them animated. The text is buried in a morass of advertisements and navigation that make it extremely difficult to actually read the article.

It reminds me of a book called Fumblerules, which collected (or possibly originated) guidelines like “Always proofread carefully to make sure you don’t any words out,” or “Plan ahead” with the last few letters scrunched together to fit on the page. These were designed to make their points by deliberately breaking the rules to make them more memorable.

Well, there’s always the Daily Sucker.

Update: I checked out the author’s website, which demonstrates he has the sense of taste and aesthetics one would expect from his articles. It really is too bad DevArticles isn’t willing to take his advice.

»All pages site-wide with this tag