It’s Alive
I’m back up, a little bruised, beaten and on a hew host. More to come later.
Josiah Cole dot com
Professional webmaster and wannabe over funded technology uber guru.Archive for February, 2007
Be the Bot - Check Your Competitors
Be The Bot allows you the user to see the web as Google and Yahoo! bot see it. This is significant because it allows you to see which sites are serving different versions of content based on whether the viewer is a person or a bot. If you think you’re competitor is cheating in the ranks of Google or Yahoo! this is the tool for you. If you want to emulate another site’s black art in order to gain an advantage for yourself, this is your tool as well.
What is this site?
Have you ever been googleing something, and you see exactly what you need in the preview, but when you click the link it doesnt show you what you want to see?
This is because the owners of the site are trying to trick you into buying something, or registering. It’s a common tactic on the internet. When Google visits the site, it gives something called a “Header”. This header tells the site who the visitor is. Google’s header is “Googlebot”. The programmers of the site check to see if the header says “Googlebot”, and if it does, it opens up all of its content for only googles eyes.
Now, all we have to do is trick the site’s headers, into thinking that we ARE google. That’s what this site does. See the How to use box to the right for instructions on usage
19 Things NOT To Do When Building a Website
I’ve compiled a small list (or rant) of some very basic and fundamental rules that all webmasters must learn and respect when developing a website that needs to make actual money. This list can also be used by companies looking to hire a web development firm or to evaluate an already deployed website project.
I’ll start off slow and easy…
1. DO NOT resize the user’s browser window, EVER. I know you can, I know you feel really cool when you put that little Javacrap on your page and like a little miracle the browser window resizes to your wishes, but NO. You see this atrocious web technique mostly with spam sites and when “designers” design websites. That is, someone in the photo/video/art industry who “also makes websites” (see #6 for more on that), but in reality has no idea how to make a successful ecommerce website.
2. If your website requires the visitor to load your home page, and then “launch” your real website in a pop up, YOU LOSE. Pack it up, send it home, start over. If your website doesn’t load immediately on your home page and deliver your message within a couple of seconds it’s pretty damn hard to keep people along for the show (not matter how cool and Flashtacular it is). I see this technique mostly with Flash web developers, who for some reason think all flash websites must load in a pop up window (assuming it can get past pop up blockers), and have 30 second loading sequences and look curiously like 2advanced.net
3. If your website asks the user which version they’d like, high bandwidth or low, HTML or Flash, you ALSO LOSE. See above for the explanation on this one as they’re related. It’s like asking your customer if they’d like to enter your crappy store or your better store (but the ‘better’ store requires special glasses and a little 30 second wait…um NO THANKS), what you’re really asking them is “do you want to leave and buy from my competitor because I’ve put up a crappy roadblock before you even know what I sell?”.
4. If your website is ALL Flash, FIRE your web development company, and if you made it, add it to your portfolio under “Useless web projects I’ve done” and start over. Flash it just a tool, a wonderful powerful tool for delivering animation, video, interfaces, shopping carts, functionality etc. the list goes on, it kicks ass. This DOES NOT MEAN you need to create your entire website in Flash, and if you do you will be at a severe disadvantage to your wiser competitors. Look at it this way, even Macromedia/Adobe, the maker of Flash doesn’t have an all Flash website, do you think there’s a reason why? Oh yeah, they want to make actual money and don’t listen to ‘designers’.
5. DO NOT try to reinvent the website navigation. Put it on the top, the left, hell even the right will work but do not try to reinvent the way people interact with digital interfaces while trying to actually sell your product or service. People will get confused, then annoyed, then pissed, then gone.
6. This one is going to get me in trouble. If you are a print designer, and “do websites on the side”, STOP DOING websites and providing “advice” to your print clients about web design. Print design to web design is like designing an ad for a race car, and actually building and racing that race car. Don’t get me wrong, print is great and all, you make pretty pictures and wonderful messages crafted with great copy, but when it comes down to it, it’s still just a picture. People cannot buy the product with a print ad (yet), they can’t communicate with your business through a print ad. I can already here the grumbling coming from the print world, and look, it’s not that I don’t see a purpose for print advertising, just stick to print and don’t nose you’re way into a medium which you do not know and wouldn’t understand (same goes for general “geeks” who do websites ‘on the side’)
7. If you do not have sufficient copy, or any REAL TEXT on your home page (not in an image), and to a lesser extent your whole site, hire a copywriter and fire your webmaster NOW. Content is King, repeat after me CONTENT IS KING. Search engines don’t index fancy graphics and Flash, they index text. Good ol’ reliable text. If you don’t know how much text, or how to write good text, hire somebody who does (it’s essential to your ranking and to selling your product or service).
8. If your website does not work in Firefox, welcome to 2007 DUMBASS. Yes in most markets Firefox only commands at most a 10-15% market share, but for some sites it’s much higher (my other site Oomny.com has 80% Firefox users). Furthermore, if the morons you hired didn’t make your site and functionality compatible with Firefox they obviously have no idea what they’re doing, and aren’t up on their game. I have no idea why you would need a website, or functionality system that is so dependent on IE that it simply can’t work in Firefox, and frankly it doesn’t matter because there is no good reason. The lack of Firefox knowledge by a webmaster shows they aren’t of the Internet culture, and that’s a bad sign if you’re a business owner.
9. Commandment 9 is a collection of small issues that have been beaten to death other places, and are quote common principles, but bear repeating. No blinking text, no Frontpage, no pop-ups (even requested), no scrolling text, no font downloads, and no Flash intros. If your product or service needs a flash intro to sell, it probably sucks.
10. If you use music on your site make sure the user can stop it, and it BETTER NOT start on page load without the user requesting it. Same goes for video with audio (*cough ESPN *cough), many web users surf from work and don’t enjoy their speakers lighting up with your horrible and intrusive taste in music while their boss roams the halls looking for some ass to bust.
11. Text navigations are better than images, this isn’t a big deal but it’s better to use text for your nav with some clever CSS, then to export a large and bloated mouseover image navigation. I know Dreamweaver makes it so super simple, but you’ll benefit in a lot of other ways without it. Images wisely used, just like Flash are excellent, but don’t rely always on mouseover graphics to deliver your image, design is more about content than designing the interface (do you know any of your friends that raves about the iPods elegant interface? No, and that’s the point, it just works)
12. A well thought out site map with logical sub sections is better than using “drop downs”. Simply put, drops downs never work quite right, and only a few of the ones I have seen actually are usable. Furthermore, the use of drop downs usually means that the person organizing the content did a piss poor job of it. If you have the mother of all sites and need people to access hundreds of pages, you’re probably Microsoft or CNET and you’re ignoring me anyways.
13. If your site needs a search engine for users to find information, it’s time to start over and fire the guy who came up with the site map (and those slick drop downs on your nav). Search engines are wonderful, and play a great role on some great sites, but if you lean on it for users to find content you’re pissing 50%+ of your customers off. Some people like to browse, they also like to search if they NEED to. Give them a logical browse option and they won’t need to search, but leave search there for the advanced users really digging into your vast amount of content (and you do have LOTS of content to be indexed right? If not see #7)
14. Load time is still a factor for over 50% of American web surfers. Even though you live in the wonderful world of Cable and DSL, half of America does not and hates you for it. If you design your site for only broadband users you’re sending a message, “Every other customer can bite me�?. Bloat is simply NOT ALLOWED on the home page, but it can be used deeper in when users request it specifically.
15. This one seems obvious but isn’t to some people *cough Designers *cough. Do not HIDE your message, and don’t OBSCURE what you want the user to do. Home page design is like a billboard, hit them with a message and a desired path (buy now) in 1-2 seconds, but provide information for people who want to dig deeper and research.
16. If you lead the user through a pre-determined path in order to deliver a message or demo, it’s time to get an ANT farm and take your controlling wills out on some species that will actually like it. The web is about modular content, it’s not an “experience” or a “wonder tour of magical enchantment”. If you have to have a slideshow, put thumbnails there too so people can get the content they want when they want it. If you’re demo has 20 pages, give them a table of contents or at least some next/previous buttons so they can fast forward (they’d be wathcing broadcast TV if they wanted content shoved down their throats at a pace decided by the man). Pushing people through a demo, no matter how complex 1 step at a time is a mistake and will lead to the inevitable; annoyance. And if you’re purpose of reloading the page to deliver the next slide in a slide show is to increase your ad impressions, you should DIE (see SI.com, Time.com and CNN)
17. If you’re delivering video, it better not ask the user which bandwidth or version of video they’d like. Real Player, 100K, Windows Media Player, Quicktime, WMV, 300K, AVI, Cable, DSL, Dial-Up? NO THANK YOU. Deliver your video in an embedded player in Flash. I’m sorry, Flash won this battle a long time ago (see YouTube), it has the install base, the lean interface and isn’t trying to get you to join “their world” of media player fantasy where they place system tray icons and launch helpers and pop up every time you pop in a CD or DVD. Flash is cross platform and cross browser compatible, something none of the other providers can say.
18. This is a small one, but if the user has to mouse over your graphic or small image to know what it is, or where it will take them if its a link, quit your job and be a magician or a blackjack dealer, making web interfaces is not for you.
19. This final commandment is related to many of the above ideas, and is a good guiding principle for web geeks that are excited about new tech and want to use it. Just because a technology is new, or you just discovered it does not make it suitable to put on a business website, JUST BECAUSE you can. This happened with Flash, Java, and is now happening with AJAX. Yes new technology is cool, but only integrate it on a business site if it improves the customers experience or sells more product/service. Technology for the sake of technology is silly and only belongs on your personal show-off site, or your own computer where not one will be exposed to its horrid creativity except you.
–
One might say that if you followed all of my commandments, the web would be a boring, dry and conformist web of sites only engineered for 1 thing; selling. And you’re right, but thankfully the world is full of plenty so called “creative” people and they keep it interesting for the rest of us.
*UPDATE* 3:47 PM EST
cartooncorpse and jcs on Reddit.com suggested 4 more:
1. Don’t link to PDF content without disclosing the link.
2. Don’t employ any scripts to prevent the user from “Backing” out of the site with the browser’s back button. Ever try locking someone in your store? do they usually buy something?
3. if your website says “you’re” where it should say “your”, you should fire the person that wrote it.
4. If your website has LOTS of random words in all capital LETTERS because the author was TRYING to emphasize words without the or tags that were created for exactly this purpose, he should be fired.
5. It goes without saying but Taladar suggests; No pop ups and no javascript links (breaks open in new tab).
popurls - A stylish look at the Web 2.0 World
I’m not a fan of aggregators, I prefer to maintain my own list of my favorite sites and visit them individually to get the information I need. If I only pulled RSS feeds from each of these sites I’d only get a small window into what is actually ‘happening’ at the site and I instead prefer to visit directly and gather my news and entertainment first hand. This allows me to see site changes, read full articles and longer excerpts and also allows me to easily visit sites with and without RSS feeds.
Popurls.com however is a pretty neat site, with lots of tools and a preset aggregation scheme pulling feeds from the top web 2.0 properties from around the web. Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit, flickr, Newsvine, Metafilter and Tailrank are all represented there as well as several others. There are viewing options and the overall design is very pleasing to the eye.
Here’s the ‘about us’ blurb from the site describing it’s intention and beginnings…
With the intention to get a quick glance on what’s happening on the web while keeping the common newsreader clean from short-term headlines, popurls was launched in march 2006 by Thomas Marban who is often mentioned for creating the original trend of “single page aggregatorsâ€. Rather than a tool, popurls is considered as a gate to an editorial selection of the most popular sites on the internet, presented in a usable way. After features on thousands of blogs and newspapers like the NY times, Yahoo! named it best of the web to finally enter the 30 most popular sites of all time on del.icio.us. Today, popurls is frequented more than 40.000 times each day.
Web 2.0 Style Guide
WebDesignfromScratch.com put up yet another guide on Web 2.0 to join the already crowded group of bloggers and media types attempting to define and disseminate the 2.0 style. The guide is actually a very good one and covers very extensively the main elements of 2.0 design style and the reasons behind each (with plenty of eye candy to demonstrate the point).
The main areas covered are:
1. Simplicity
2. Central layout
3. Fewer columns
4. Separate top section
5. Solid areas of screen real-estate
6. Simple nav
7. Bold logos
8. Bigger text
9. Bold text introductions
10. Strong colours
11. Rich surfaces
12. Gradients
13. Reflections
14. Cute icons
15. Star flashes
You may scan that list and find it not making much sense, but if you read the article is will all become clear to even the biggest 2.0 noob.
Second Life - Virtual Economy Metrics
Second Life is one of those companies that just continues to amaze me in regards to how it is connecting with ‘real’ society and also how it continues to be a very profitable and expanding business/network. Always open with their metrics, SL released a newly updated Virtual Economy Metrics Excel notebook document (what no Google Documents or OpenOffice? how 1.0 icky) highlighting their various growth patterns.
Some highlights:
Total Hours Used:
Sept 2003 51,699
January 2007 10,817,668
Currency Exchange Summary
July 2006 USD Sales: $2,203
January 2007 USD Sales: $622,839
TechCrunch is estimating that Second Life is pulling in around $670,000/month in ‘hosting revenue’ or real estate sold in SL. That’s almost 8.1 million dollars per year, and with the kind of growth they have been showing that’s only going to increase in 2007.
DemocraKey - Bringing Privacy and Security to your iPod
I’ve blogged about many security and privacy issues over the years and I’m always on the lookout for new tools that will help me protect my privacy and keep ‘the man’ from snooping on what I do online. DemocraKey.com popped up on my radar and I checked out the website to see what it actually offers. DemocraKey is a small collection of tools bundled up to run on any flash media or even your ipod. The applications included are Clamwin (virus scanner) Torpark (private browsing) and Thunderbird with a GPG plugin to allow secure email transmission. It’s a 50mb download so it should fit on almost any removable flash media you may have.
Imagine carrying a portable security suite with you wherever you go. Walk up to any computer, quickly scan it for viruses, and then defeat any internet access blocks to view any website you want anonymously. It’s here, and the DemocraKey 2.0 Lite let’s you have it on your iPod.
I’ve used TorPark and some Portable Apps for several years and think they’re both great projects. Torpark takes a great privacy tech in Tor and bundles it with every geek’s favorite web browser Firefox which produces an incredibly easy to use private browsing experience. No configuring proxies, no funny business, just launch the browser and wait a few seconds for the Tor circuit to initialize and you’re off browsing.
Features
* Protect your computer from viruses with a security enhanced version of Firefox
* Visit sites that are blocked by your school/employer/government
* Hide your internet actions with Tor
* Encrypt personal emails with GPG
* Scan your computer with portable built in Antivirus software
* Runs from any portable media - iPod, USB key, Digital Camera…
* It’s FREE and Open Source!
Tracking Web 2.0
I follow the so called Web 2.0 industry fairly close, I monitor and review new startups and hold accounts with dozens of Web 2.0 and older 1.0 websites. Keeping track of all these companies becomes quite a chore and after the initial buzz has warn off a lot of times these 2.0 startups fade into the oblivion. Movers 2.0 is a Metrics tool that attempts to track the overall popularity and rank of the top Web 2.0 properties.
The Movers 2.0 project was created by Eran Arkin, one of the developers on the eSnips team, in his spare time (which is not much these days). He was looking for something similar online and couldn’t find anything that allows people to track Web 2.0 metrics without working too hard. After we got addicted to it here at eSnips, we decided to let everyone enjoy it.
Topping the list is of course YouTube followed by MySpace and Orkut from Google. The most interesting aspect of the system is the Alexa traffic graphs and the convenient Compete links for each listing. Another cool feature is the Weekly and Daily movers. This shows the current hot companies and how fast and far they’re moving up.
10 BETTER Things To Do With a PC with No Internet
Recently DG of Speaking Freely ran a popular story that bubbled up on Digg and del.icio.us about what to do with your PC when you have no Internet connection. I read the article and was generally unimpressed by DG’s ideas for the lonely few who can’t get online.
Here’s what he said in a nut shell:
-Clean out and categorize your bookmarks.
-Delete programs you don’t use.
-Unplug your PC, take the cover off and clean out the dust.
-Write your next blog post.
-Run any maintenance programs you don’t have auto-scheduled.
-Write down your logins and passwords for all your sites, blogs, email accounts, Adsense, affiliate programs, where you purchased your domain names, etc. All that information is the key to your business.
That last one is really long, and the whole list makes me want to stab myself in the eye. Here’s 10 Better things to do with no Interweb (in no particular order)
1. Don’t do any of the things here.
2. Play one of your games. I know, some of them are online only but I’m sure you have a few that you can play in single player or offline practice. Game on.
3. Organize your Porn collection. While this task is very lame in the organizing sense, it usually leads to distraction and the excitement level rises sharply.
4. Create and Edit a Video. No you can’t upload to GooTube but you can shoot, cut and burn some movies while you’re waiting to get back in connection.
5. Listen to Music, Burn Some new CD’s. Yes this is an oldy but a goody but still presents some fun, listen to your tunes, burn some new mixes for the road and see what old music you can discover.
6. Photoshop some Images. Take some family shots and some of your friends passed out drunk and have some fun. You can’t get fresh material from Google Images or Flickr but you can have some local hard disk fun making new images for the Fark forums.
7. Screw around with Linux. You provably have 86 Linux discs burned sitting around from the last 6 months. Take some old hardware or if you dare your own rig and have some Linux fun. Create that media server you always wanted or attach those laser beams to your toaster.
8. Design a new Website. Fire up Photocrap once again or Fireworks if you prefer and create a new layout and design identity for your super popular Kevin Rose uber mega ultra fan site.
9. Watch TV . Yes this is a lazy one but for those with a nice TV card you can just fire up the old boob tube and watch some Family Guy and Stephen Colbert.
10. Hardware Upgrade. This of course depends on your access to new goodies but time spent offline can be spent buying and upgrading essential hardware.
That’s my list, I hope you like it and I hope you spend your offline time wisely.
Writer - Online Writing Web 2.0 Style
(no the screenshot above is not just an empty black screen)
Forget Google Documents and Zoho, Writer by John Watson and BigHugeLabs.com is lean and mean and gets you started immediately. I like Writer for a few reasons, first because it’s black and has the uber geeky green text, and second because it’s so very lean. It welcomes you and asks you to begin typing, saving a document just happens with no fuss and composing new documents is easy as well, all without opening an account even.
The application I was thinking of using this for is composing some of my blog posts, or at least using this tool to check the word count of my WordPress postings. It has a blog posting feature built in, but I haven’t tried that yet.
Here’s what John says about Writer, or rather himself…
Writer was written by me, John Watson. I’m a freelance web developer and I’d love for you to hire me for your next web project. You can find out more about me at: http://watson-net.com/