Recent Blog Posts
Blogs » Archive for April, 2007
A coffee break moment: Google Maps FlightSim
For me, APIs have been probably the most interesting area of Web development over the past few years, allowing modestly resourced (and perhaps modestly talented) developers to tap into bigger, richer systems than they could ever hope to create themselves.
Looking at site like FD’s Flickr Toys it’s tempting to conclude that the Flickr API has been the most widely used, but that might be selling the APIs from Del.icio.us, Amazon, eBay and, of course, Google short. The result has been hundreds of new and interesting products, services and miscellaneous mashups that would otherwise never have been.
Some have been deeply practical — X-Moments and HousingMaps comes to mind — while others have been focusing on being clever and fun. Like this one: Goggles :: The Google Maps flight sim.
So, next time you grab a coffee, load it up, choose a city, pull on a set of flying goggles and take to the skies over any of the great cities of the world — from London to New York to Zurich to Sydney. You can even choose your own if you’ve got the patience. The basic app is simple but …
Markup Separation with Template IT
One of the more challenging things I’ve run into while doing PHP development is effectively separating presentation from program logic. In many projects, I felt I was doing a great job until I had to do a markup change and jump through a lot hurdles to make it happen. In my recent projects, I’ve starting using the HTML Template IT extension in PEAR, and its made things a lot easier.
The HTML Template IT extension provides a solid template system that allows complete separation of code and presentation. Rather than placing markup in your PHP files, the markup is contained within separate template files. Within the markup of these templates are variables that can be replaced by dynamic data when the template is parsed.
Pick the Right Niche
Not all niches (topics) are created equal. One of the things we discovered when building our network of sites was how competitive some markets were.
Here’s the problem: Lets say you start up a gaming site. You get popular pretty quick, say up to 2000 unique visitors a day an about 20,000 page views a day. Not bad, right? Off to a great start. So you go to get into your favorite ad network and you get turned down. Their minimum is 2000 unique visitors so what’s the problem? The problem is there are so many gaming sites competing for these ads that there just aren’t enough to go around. The gaming industry spends a lot of money promoting online but there are way more sites than there are advertisers. Minimums for gaming sites suddenly become 10,000 unique visitors a day!
That’s not to say you can’t run a successful gaming site, you just have to be prepared to do serious battle with your competitors. You’ll need to have a better site, better content and more visitors. But if you can beat your competitors it is a niche that pays well. If you have a passion for a topic and …
Faster Page Loads - Bundle Your CSS and Javascript
Have you ever watched your status bar while you wait for a page to load and wondered why several files seem to be downloaded before you see anything at all on your screen? Eventually the page content displays, and then the images are slotted in.
The files that keep you waiting are generally the CSS and Javascript files linked to from the “head” section of the HTML document. Because these files determine how the page will be displayed, rendering is delayed until they are completely downloaded.
HTTP Overhead
For each of these files, an HTTP request is sent to the server, and then the browser awaits a response before requesting the next file. Limits (or limitations) of the browser generally prevent parallel downloads. This means that for each file, you wait for the request to reach the server, the server to process the request, and the reply (including the file content itself) to reach you. Put end to end, a few of these can make a big difference to page load times.
Example Case
As a demonstration, I’ve created an empty HTML document which loads 5 stylesheets. Browser cache is disabled, and I’ve used Firebug, an invaluable tool for any …
Usability tips for bloggers
Now this is an article that grabbed my attention straight away!
Often when I think about web usability and usability heuristics I think about it from a commercial perspective. I think about my clients and the type of sites I would normally work on: Finance, government, retail, travel, telco’s… you get the picture. But one genre I haven’t considered in much detail is the blog.
Tom Johnson has just published a really useful and well researched article on his blog, I’d rather be writing. The post, entitled Twenty Usability Tips for Your Blog — Condensed from Dozens of Bloggers’ Experiences really does cover a lot of ground.
I’ll leave it for you to take a look at the post yourself, but in summary his 20 tips are:
- Pick a topic for your blog
- Encourage comments
- Make it easy to subscribe
- Include an About page
- Present your ideas visually
- Keep posts short and to the point
- Use subheadings for long posts
- Link abundantly
- Make headlines descriptive
- Archive by topic
- Include a list of related posts beneath each post
- Allow users to contact you offline
- Present your real viewpoint
- Write for your future employer
- Include a Top Posts section
- Provide an index
- Get your own URL and match it to your blog’s title
- Include a Recent Posts section in your sidebar
- Reward …
Digg Users 3 Times Less Likely to Click Ads Than Google Users
Anyone who’s been on Digg can tell you that while the traffic can be amazing there isn’t a correlating increase in ad revenue, the bottom line being Digg users don’t click on ads like traditional visitors do and especially not as much as traffic from search engines. Chitika has stepped up and provided some facts to backup this claim.
Chitika grabbed 31 days of logs and compared traffic from Digg and Google and came to the obvious conclusion that Digg users are less likely to click on ads. The actual ratio is a little closer than I thought it would be. I suspected something like 5 to 1 or 10 to 1, but Chitika’s results put Digg users at 3 times less likely to click on ads. As we all know users are becoming more and more banner/ad blind and no one more so than the tech/geek crowd which is the primary audience of Digg.
What does this mean in terms of making money? Don’t rely on the Digg traffic as a direct method for making money. It’s a means to get exposure. If you do get on Digg try to capture the audience as much as possible. Direct them …
Keep Testing Your Site in IE6 The Right Way—With a New, Free VPC Image from Microsoft
When I first announced that Microsoft had made an IE6 VPC image avaliable for testing purposes, there was a fair amount of consternation about the expiration date in early April. MS indicated that they intended to keep providing images, and they have held true to their word. There is now a new image availiable for download that expires in July.
Making Money With Communities—Part 2, Ways To Make Money
Yesterday I talked about the problems facing communities when it comes to making money. Today we’ll talk about specific ways that you can turn the loyal following that communities naturally attract into opportunities.
As I mentioned in Part 1, CPM (banner ads, etc.) and CPC (Adsense, YPN) are not always the best fit for communities. While I do use them I always put them in low priority places and use them as filler or remnant inventory. We don’t want to leave any money on the table, right? That said, there are better ways to use the precious screen real estate.
Lets look at a few:
- Direct Ad Sales
- Sponsorships
- Text Ads & Text Links
- Member Support, Donations & Micro Sponsorships
- Affiliate Marketing
1. Direct Ad Sales
Direct Ad Sales may be the hardest of all ad types to get. You really need solid traffic numbers and a great niche topic, but mostly you’ll need to be a bulldog. The hardest part about getting direct ad sales is getting finding the person who’s handling ad buys for a given company. Lets say you run a sports site and you want Nike to buy an ad. You’ll have the daunting job of sending email after email and making call after …
Flocking To The Coop
Introducing “The Coop”. An experimental Firefox add-on that will let you to see what your friends are doing online, as well as share content with them from popular web services such as Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us, etc.
Some of the cooler features include auto-discovery of your contacts data feeds, and the ability to drag and drop the things you want to share with them.
It builds upon the lifesream concept which Jeremy Keith spoke of last year and brings it right into the browser window. I suspect the ill-fated Deapleep project may have achieved something similar had it not been 7 years ahead of its time.
A prototype of the add-on which uses the sharing feature from Facebook is available for the early adopters out there. The mere curious might like to check out the mockups at the project page.
Is there any wind left in the Flock sails?
Making Money With Communities - Part 1, Problems
As I mentioned in my bio snippet, I’m a big fan of user generated content. Before the Internet I read somewhere that the worlds content was created by 10% of the worlds population. I think it’s obvious that with the ease of publishing all kinds of content online along with the dropping price of tools to create content that the percentage of creators has greatly increased.
Communities and Forums have always been of particular interest to me as someone who comes from the BBS days of computers. My first site was a forum. In fact, one of my earliest sites started as a forum and evolved into Lit.Org. Ironically, I later launched a companion site for Lit.Org called WritingForums.com. I don’t own them now, but they taught me about all the pitfalls of running a community.
In part 1 of this series on Making Money With Communities lets talk about some of the problems facing communities.
The main issues communities and forums face are:
- Fear of User Generated Content.
- High page views per unique visitor (frequency capping).
- Broad range of topics, often very general so CPC (Adwords, YPN etc.) aren’t as effective.
- Banner Blindness (everyone has this problem).
Lets talk about how to overcome these.
1. Fear of …
Sponsored Links
Logo Design, Web page Design and more!
- Custom logo designs created ‘just for you’.
- Pick the design you like best.
- Only pay if you’re satisfied with the result.
Want More Traffic?
Get up to five quotes from qualified SEO specialists, with no obligation!
Download sample chapters of any of our popular books.
