Making Changes to Your Website

First video. Didn’t come out perfect, but life isn’t perfect. Get over it :).

AttentionSpan Plugin Updated For Mint

You may recall I recently released a Mint plugin for determining bounce rates and pages per visit. I called it AttentionSpan. I’m happy to announce a new version is out (this will be the first release to the Mint site) that adds a Quick View panel as shown below:

Download AttentionSpan v0.3

Stay tuned for some tips on how to lower your bounce rate.

Creating A Plan For Success

A goal is a dream with a deadline.
- Napoleon Hill

For a larger part of my life, I was anti-planning. I credit this to my father, who was in the Military for 20 years and always had a plan. For a long time, I thought of plans as I thought of suicide pacts–you stick to the plan under all circumstances. I’ve learned this to be a flawed strategy.

The Importance of a Plan

A plan gives you direction. It lets you know that you’re not only moving, but moving in the right direction. It’s silly to work hard for the sake of working hard. Having direction insures you end up where you intended.

How is this relevant to web development you ask?

It’s especially important for developing a website. You can literally do anything you want with your website. You’re in complete control. Without direction, without a plan–it’s likely you will fail. Not because you didn’t try hard, but because you didn’t give yourself direction.

My Example of Good Planning

In an e-mail to the new owner, I explained the single biggest reason behind BlogCatalog’s success is the users linking back to the directory.

I realized early on in developing BlogCatalog that bloggers by nature love to link to services they use. If I could create enough incentive for users to link back, I could build something that performed extremely well in the search engines.

I came up with the Rate this Blog button which allowed users to rate your blog directly from your site. The success of this button was overwhelming, propelling BlogCatalog to become the largest blog directory on the Internet. BlogCatalog even ranks very well for competitive keywords such as blogs.

All this because of a little planning.

Applying these Principles to MacTips

So, how can I apply these same principles to MacTips? I’m taking two approaches here I think will work well. Let me state without quality content, neither of these ideas will work.

First, if I can build a Dashboard widget that enough people use, I can keep it in Apple’s Top 50 Widgets. This is a huge source of traffic, but the key is keeping it in the top 50. I’ve been building this widget all weekend–but I’ve still got lots more to do until it’s ready:

Second, We’ve recently launched videos on MacTips. By posting these videos on YouTube and iTunes, I hope to draw in new viewers that may have never found the site. I’m especially excited about the iTunes possibility–it was recommended by Omer (one of my writers) and I think it will be very successful.

In Closing

Are these cutting edge ideas? Hardly. But by having a plan, then executing it to the best of your ability–you’ll be amazed with the results.

Of course I’ll report back in a few weeks to let you know how these ideas are going.

If it turns out one or both don’t work, we’ll revise and then try again. Don’t be afraid to adjust the plan. But don’t be stupid enough to think you can wing it.

Below is one of my favorite Latin Proverbs as it relates to motivation:

If there is no wind, row.

Attention Span: Bounce Rate & Pages Per Visit Plugin For Mint

Download Attention Span 0.1b

Why Use Mint For Analytics

I use Mint to track stats on MacTips. Mint in itself is not that amazing. It provides pretty good stats, but nothing above and beyond what anybody else is offering.

What did draw me to Mint is the ability to create plug-ins. This is the deal maker for me and many others. There’s tons of standard and 3rd party plug-ins available that take Mint to the next level.

I needed a plugin for Bounce Rates and Pages Per Visit but one didn’t exist–so I made one and I’m releasing it here (and on the Mint site once I test more).

Introducing Attention Span

Attention Span shows you how “sticky” your content is by displaying the Bounce Rate and Pages Per Visit.

Bounce Rate: The percentage of users who left your site after 1 pageview. The lower this number is the better.

Pages Per Visit: The average number of pages a user visits in 1 session. The higher this number is the better.

This is very useful for determining trends and content/design effectiveness.

What Did I Learn?

So, what have I learned from this plug-in so far?

I’ve learned MacTips is in a downward trend for effectiveness.

In the past month the Bounce Rate has gone up and Pages Per Visit has gone down.

As you can see the bounce rate has gone up to 40% in the past month. This isn’t great news, but at least I know now and can do something about it.

I’d guess the reason for this is either me placing more ads on the site or me cramming more information into the pages.

Either way, I realize there’s a problem now and I can actually do something about it. This is what Bounce Rates and Pages Per Visit stats tell me.

Without this information I may have never realized my effectiveness was going down, especially considering my visitors were going up.

Download Attention Span 0.1b

SEOSense 0.1b - A WordPress Theme For SEO & AdSense

In an effort to continue giving back to the community, I’m releasing my first WordPress theme–SEOsense.

What is SEOsense?

SEOsense is a WordPress theme that aims to be very lightweight. It also attempts to provide a good framework to build a theme on. It focuses on search engine optimization and AdSense placement to make this happen. I’ll go into detail about each below.

WordPress Search Engine Optimization

There’s a number of things I did to focus on SEO with this theme. First and foremost I put the content first and used CSS to arrange the layout the way I want.

This is important because the higher the content, the more importance Google gives it. When your content is above your header and navigation–it lets Google know this is the most important content.

Search engines love more content and less markup, so I’ve focused on making this as clean and minimal as possible, using CSS whenever possible to style tags.

Another thing I did with SEOsense, is I attempt to generate the best page title possible.

Every title ends with your blog name. Your blog’s description is used for your main page. A post’s title is used for a post page. With categories, the category description is used unless it’s empty–then your category title is used.

I set it up like this so you can target specific keywords easily and make changes through the WordPress backend as needed.

Pages and posts have appropriate hierarchy and repetition to let Google know what the page is about.

WordPress AdSense Optimization

This area probably could have used a little more work, but I think it’s off to a good start. I personally don’t like “optimizing” AdSense to the point where it becomes hidden and tricky–so I’ve left some things I could have added out.

What I have done is allowed a large 728×90 ad up top. On single posts pages, I’ve wrapped the content around the ad.

On the archives and category pages, however, I’ve opted to put the ads between the posts. This is done through the functions.php file with the function betweenPosts(). I’ve found this a pretty clean way of inserting content between posts that allows for easy editing.

A few other notes

It’s good to note the entire theme uses 1 image, which is for the RSS feed icon. Without this image the theme is an impressive 13KB.

If you’re going to be using the AdSense, remember to swap out my ads with your own. While I love making money on sites that aren’t mine–something about that doesn’t seem right.

If you don’t want to use AdSense, simply remove the code and everything should snap into place as expected.

There is a link to my website on the bottom. You do not have to leave it in, but I would appreciate it.

I tried to keep all of the ad’s separated from the layout for easy updating. The ads are located in ad-top.php, ad-single.php and ad-between.php.

The CSS is setup in a way that editing styles is easy. The first part is only structure, meaning the placement of the header/sidebar/content. Everything after /** Styling **/ is styling and can be edited to your hearts content.

Also, please note I’m not a designer by trade. I can design, but I’m color deaf. I’ve done my best to create an appealing theme, but the design is only a portion of this theme. The real work goes into the placement of content. This is part of the reason I make it so easy to edit, because it’s a framework and should be built off accordingly.

This is my first WordPress theme I’ve ever released, so I’d love to hear your feedback.

Download SEOSense 0.1b

WordPress Plugin: Ask A Question - 0.1b

It’s time I started giving back to the community that’s done so much for me with Ask A Question (0.1b)

I’ve been developing on WordPress for a few years. It’s become my CMS of choice for nearly any project. On MacTips alone I’ve written over 10 custom plugins, not to mention all the hacking in the template.

Ask A Question - 0.1b

So the first (of many) plugins I’ll be releasing is called Ask A Question. What’s it do?

It allows your users to ask you questions.

Pretty easy right? Well I wanted my first released plugin to be easy–but not too easy. So I added some AJAX and sexy effects with script.aluco.us.

This was something I needed for MacTips as I started trying to get more user feedback. The site is also being geared towards helping users so this seemed like a good idea to connect with the confused Mac user.

The Features

I wanted my first plugin to be simple, but not crippled. So I’ve added a few features I think are necessary when adding a form like this to your website.

• Flood protection: Keep users from asking more than x questions in x seconds
• Degrade Gracefully: AJAX is nice for things like submitting forms without page-loads. AJAX is not nice for users that don’t have Javascript. So the form degrades gracefully so non Javascript users can still submit questions
• AJAX Backend: AJAX backend for easy managing. This part requires Javascript, sorry–maybe next version.
• File Size: Some AJAX libraries are huge. I’ve done my best to use the smallest one I could find and strip out all unnecessary information. I’ve also removed all unnecessary effects in script.aluco.us.

Ground breaking? Not by any means. But I needed it and figured others might too. WordPress thrives because of all the plugins available–I’ve certainly benefited from this.

I’m able to contribute–so I will.

If you try it let me know your thoughts.

Download Ask A Question (0.1b)

TheSixtyOne - Music Exploration Done Correctly

I’ve long searched for a service that helps you discover new artists. There have been a few attempts at this in the past. Last.fm was my favorite for a while and they do a pretty good job.

Recently I came across TheSixtyOne, a Digg like rating system for songs.

Initially I liked the idea, but calling it a “Digg-like” site actually cheapens the experience. TheSixtyOne goes so much further in to music exploration I immediately signed up.

I hardly ever sign up for a site immediately. If you want my e-mail address you’re going to have to work for it or really wow me.

Instantly I fell in love with TheSixtyOne. It uses a little Flash, a little AJAX but uses them in appropriate ways. It manages to continue playing songs through page loads, a great feature.

It also allows you to build a queue of songs to play, effectively making TheSixtyOne a media player.

I’ve already found a few new artists I really like, on Last.fm I’d find one or two per session max.

I even went to purchase a song through Amazon but abandoned ship after realizing Amazon makes you download their software, yuck.

The last concept I find interesting is the idea of points. You can bump songs or artists but it costs points. You get points for logging in, and I assume other routine tasks like writing comments.

This means you only bump artists you really really like because you only have a certain number of points.

I’m still sorting through the site, there seems to be a lot here–but so far I love the idea and the implementation.

BrowserPool: Test Your Website on Different Platforms

If you follow the W3C Standards, your website should look the same on all browser and all platforms.

Anyone whose ever developed a website knows this is often not the case. Different browsers render completely differently let alone different platforms.

There’s never been a suitable solution to this problem, so developers have been forced to keep many different browsers and platforms on hand for testing purposes only.

A few years ago, various services were started to help this problem. Basically taking a screenshot of your website in various browsers and feeding the images back to you.

The problems with this is these services is they often take a very long time or they don’t work at all when there’s a lot of traffic.

You’re also limited because you’re only getting a screenshot. You can’t see how mouse movement effects your design. Hovers, Javascript, pull-downs and other items are limited here.

Recently I discovered a great service called BrowserPool. This service lets you VNC into different platforms and try all the different browsers available. Great idea!

The best part, however–it’s free to try. You’ll only get booted off if a paying customer needs the space.

So far I’ve done lots of testing using BrowserPool and I’m ecstatic I’ve found this service.

My Powerbook died, so I’m waiting for MacWorld 2008 before I upgrade. This allows me to continue developing MacTips on Windows (I know, sac religious) and still make sure everything is compatible for 95% of my users.

If you need this type of service, BrowserPool should certainly be your first choice. Free to try, and 30 Euro’s per month to buy.

I will never build a website that plays sound in the background.

I will never build a website that plays sound in the background.
I will never build a website that plays sound in the background.
I will never build a website that plays sound in the background.
I will never build a website that plays sound in the background.

That should do it for today….

And if you do, please at least make it easy to turn off.

But still, never do it. It’s annoying. Really annoying. Annoying enough to write about it.