Tag Archives: Internet

Back from Vacation

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Well, not really vacation…more like a bunch of visits.

If you’re wondering why this blog has been so quiet lately, it’s because I was away on what I thought might be a vacation. It turned out to be a bunch of visits to friends and family in Florida, which is actually a very different thing.

I brought my laptop with me on the trip, but none of the places I stayed had a wireless Internet connection for me. I wasn’t interested in dialing up and I didn’t have an Ethernet cable with me (almost brought one, though) to connect to a friend’s DSL router. In fact, the first time I got on the ‘Net was while waiting for our delayed plane out of Jacksonville, FL. They have free wireless Internet there — a great thing that every major airport should have — and I sucked down a week’s worth of e-mail before climbing on board the plane.

Marco Island BeachOur trip to Florida started in Fort Myers. We can’t fly direct from Phoenix to that airport so we flew Continental and stopped over in Houston. We arrived late at night, rented a car (can you believe they gave me a PT Cruiser?), and drove to our first host’s house on Marco Island, about 60 miles south. Will is Mike’s former partner (now retired) and Annette is his wife, who was also the bookkeeper for the company. He sold the company a few years back and the buyer bought out Mike’s share. Will and Annette bought a home on Marco Island, right on one of the many canals there. We got to stay in one of their guest rooms.

Stan's Idle House RestaurantWe wound up staying there for four nights, which I think is the most number of nights we’d ever stayed at someone’s house. It was very comfortable. Each day, we’d do something different — breakfast at the country club followed by a walk on the beach and a visit to Stan’s Idle Hour Restaurant, a boat ride to a lunch spot, a walk around the Naples historic and shopping areas (nearly indistinguishable, although several blocks apart). I took photos, but not many.

On Wednesday, we headed out early for a long drive to my Mom’s house in the St. Augustine area. Imagine Florida — a long peninsula of land. Marco Island is near the bottom, on the west side. St. Augustine is on the top, on the east side. I don’t know how many miles we covered, but it was a long drive.

Along the way, we stopped at my Dad’s house. He lives in Ft. Pierce, which is a little less than halfway up the peninsula, on the east side. About halfway to my Mom’s place. We had a short visit with him and his wife that included lunch out at a marina and homemade cream puffs for dessert. They have four cats and it’s a lucky thing that we went out for lunch. Mike is allergic to cats and he had some breathing trouble for a while after we left.

We hit traffic on I-95 just 20 miles short of my Mom’s place, but managed to get there just after 7 PM. A leg of lamb dinner awaited us.

We camped out in the guest bedroom my Mom had designed into the house for my grandmother. We call it Grandma’s room. It’s not a big room, but it’s at the end of a private hallway with its own bathroom and has its own private entrance to the pool area. Although my grandmother stayed there a few times, she never moved in. She’s gone now and her room is the most coveted of the guest rooms.

Flagler CollegeOn Thanksgiving morning, Mike and I took a walk around St. Augustine, which I believe is the oldest city in the U.S. Lots of great architecture. This photo shows Flagler College.

Thanksgiving was nice at my Mom’s house. She had another couple over to join us, so there was just six of us. And a ton of food. Turkey, stuffing (you might call it dressing), mashed potatoes, yams, mushrooms, artichoke, turnips, broccoli (from her garden, picked moments before cooking), peas and carrots, cranberries, gravy, and rolls. For desert, there were pies and bread pudding. When her friends left at around 7 PM, another few friends arrived. Dessert lasted about 2 hours, which is how dessert should last in a perfect world.

On Friday, we packed up and went to Orlando. I’d bought my Mom and Stepdad tickets to see Cirque du Soleil at Downtown Disney. Since the show was at 9 PM, I also got a pair of hotel rooms at the nearby Buena Vista Palace. We had an excellent (and terribly expensive!) dinner at Wolfgang Puck’s before the show. The show was great. This is the fifth Cirque du Soleil show I’ve seen and I’ve never been disappointed. This was the first for my parents, and they were delighted.

Blue Spring State ParkThe next day was my Stepdad’s 70th birthday. We’d done all our celebrating the night before, so there wasn’t anything special planned. On our way back from Orlando to St. Augustine, we stopped at Blue Spring State Park to see the manatees that hang out there. Although we could clearly see them lounging in the water, we didn’t get any close views (or photos). But we did have a nice walk in the jungle-like forest around the spring.

Our return flight to Phoenix (by way of Houston) was from Jacksonville. We got home just after sunset.

And that’s my week, in a nutshell.

Getting Regular Blog Readers

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What good is blogging if no one reads what you write?

The Zero Boss has written a good article about how you can attract and retain readers for a new blog. Lots of good advice.

Read it here: http://thezeroboss.com/2006/11/05/so-i-have-a-blognow-what-how-to-get-people-to-read-

what-you-write/

In the same vein, Connected Internet has a great article specifically for WordPress users that lists four “engagement” plugins — that is, plugins that engage the reader and encourage visitors to read more of what’s online. I’ll be adding at least one of these plugins to my site soon.

You can read it here: http://www.connectedinternet.co.uk/2006/11/04/1022/

Reader Engagement Site Improvements

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I add a few “engagement” features to this site.

Blogging is more than just using blogging software to create and edit posts. After all, if someone shouts in an empty room, does her voice make a sound? An important part of blogging is to attract and retain readers. That’s where content, SEO, and site design come into play.

I’m a strong believer that once you get a visitor to your site, the site’s overall design can help keep them there, at least for longer than the average 30 seconds. (Read Jakob Nielsen’s books for the sad truth about site/page visit lengths.) You can do this by making sure the site is legible and by including navigation features that make it easy to find interesting content.

I read an excellent article on Connected Internet today: “Best WordPress Engagement Plugins: Make Users Read More Posts“. The author lists several plugins — some of which I already use or have tried in the past — that’ll help keep site visitors on your site, reading more content. I added two of them today.

Readers Posts

Readers Posts is a plugin that offers three features:

  • Within The Loop, indicate how many readers have read a post before you.
  • List the most recently viewed posts.
  • List the most viewed (i.e., popular) posts.

I installed the second of these three options in the sidebar of aneclecticmind.com. It began working immediately, drawing information from the WordPress database to list the ten most recently viewed posts. Refresh the page after a few minutes and the list changes. This site has, on average about 5 visitors online at any time and they don’t always come to the site’s Home page. That, of course, is the drawback of any plugin that lists recently read posts — it only lists the posts that have been read on their own page — not on the Home page or archive page. In a way, that’s a good thing. It means the person reading a post is reading it because he found it via a search engine or used a link on the site to read it. He’s reading it because he wants to read it (or thinks he does; as we all know, search engines don’t always display desired results). That’s more meaningful than Home page reads, which could include lots of articles that the visitor just isn’t interested in at all.

The benefit of this: site visitors are shown a list of articles that other visitors have found interesting. I love this feature because it shows me what people are coming to the site to read and it helps me write more content of interest to visitors.

If you try this plugin, don’t be alarmed when you click the link above and arrive at a German-language site. Scroll down on that page and you’ll find an English-language translation. Although it isn’t perfect grammar (what is?), it’s certainly good enough to understand the installation and configuration process.

Landing Sites

Landing Sites is a very cool plugin that does a bunch of things, when installed correctly:

  1. It checks to see if the visitor was referred to the page from one of several popular search engines. It the visitor has not, it stops working.
  2. It displays a message with the name of the search engine and the search word(s) or phrase used to find the page.
  3. It displays a list of links to posts on your site that also match the search criteria.

What I like about this plugin is that it only displays content if a visitor has arrived at the site by clicking a link in a popular search engine’s results list. I put it at the top of the sidebar, where visitors are most likely to see it when they arrive at the page.

Installing the plugin isn’t difficult, although you really do need to follow the instructions on the page you download it from. If you copy and paste the code right from that page, you’ll need to modify all the single and double quote characters so they’re straight quotes when pasted into your template file. (I didn’t notice this at first and got PHP errors. It was an easy enough fix.) The result is what you see if you happened to arrive at a page on my site via popular search engine results link. You can try searching for Hermosa Ranch Insanity (the test link I used) and clicking the link to content on my site to see what I mean.

The benefit of this, of course, is that if the article the visitor came to read isn’t enough for him, he’s given other possible articles to try. He may or may not follow the links, but at least they’re there for him. You could keep him on the site longer.

Conclusion

Read the Connected Internet article. It tells you more about these two plugins, as well as others I currently use or have tried in the past. You might find overlap among features; pick the plugin you like best. Give them a try and see how they affect your visitor stats.

The Miracle of Google

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How did we live without it?

We have the power to find virtually anything on the Internet. And that power is called Google Search.

Moments ago, I found a question in my FAQ system (horray!) from a reader of one of my long out-of-print books (darn!). He asked a question about an error message he’d seen (that I’d never encountered) while he was attempting to build additional administrative pages for a FileMaker Pro CDML-published database.

The book he’d bought is called Database Publishing with FileMaker Pro on the Web and it dates back to April 1998. It’s long out of print. If I recall correctly — I’m not at my office so I can’t consult my copy of the book — the book covered FileMaker Pro 3, which was the first version of FileMaker to support Web publishing. FileMaker Pro is now in version 8.5 and no longer supports CDML for Web publishing. CDML was the language and technology that FileMaker, Inc. bought from the Lasso folks to make FileMaker Pro Web publishing work.

So it should come as no surprise that I was unable to answer his question. And unable to replicate it, of course.

But Google has all the answers and it proved it again yesterday. I did a Google search for CDML Error 102 and Google came up with a list of Web pages that discussed the problem. I suggested this as a way for the person with the question to find his answer. (It would be silly for me to repeat what was on those pages when he could just as easily find the same pages himself.)

Google is like this. Have a question? Google it. If you enter the right search phrase, Google will come up with a Web site that answers the question. I think I can report a 90% results rate. And considering some of the questions I come up with sometimes, that’s pretty darn good.

The trick, of course, is to come up with the right search phrase. Googling a single word won’t usually get the results you seek. You need to come up a string of words that succinctly describes what you are searching for. In the example above, if I’d entered FileMaker Error, a much more general search phrase, I seriously doubt whether I’d see any results about the specific CDML error code the reader was getting. If a search phrase doesn’t get desired results, rethink it and try another phrase. In my example, I got the results I was seeking right away, so a second try wasn’t necessary.

With the amount of junk out there on the Web — including, some people might say, sites like this one — we’re very fortunate to have search technology like Google’s available to us. It helps cut through the chaff to get to the important stuff we want (or need) to read.

Prioritizing Web Usability

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“Don’t defend your interface. Fix it.”

Designing Web Usability : The Practice of SimplicityBack in 2000, I read Jakob Nielsen’s Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity. This excellent book reinforced several theories of Web design that I had already suspected: simpler was better, Flash animations and splash pages were idiotic, and sites should be built to convey information in a way that was easy for visitors to find and understand.

Nielsen’s book was a summary of thousands of hours of usability testing with people and Web sites all over the world. It wasn’t just the opinions of an outside observer. He could make statements because he had proof that his statements were valid.

I liked his book so much that I mentioned in — and I believe I even quoted from it — in my own book, Putting Your Small Business on the Web for Peachpit Press.

Prioritizing Web UsabilityPrioritizing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen and Hoa Loranger revises and and expands the information in Designing Web Usability. Using new test results and taking into consideration new technologies and user experience levels, Nielsen and Loranger revisit many of the problem exposed in the first book, summarizing how important they are today. The goal of the book is to help Web designers create sites that are effective, easy to navigate, and informative. These are the sites that people want to visit and spend time on, the sites that communicate information and sell products or services.

Nielsen and Loranger are not shy about voicing their opinions. The book has hundreds of full color illustrations of Web pages, each with a detailed caption that points out page problems. For example, a caption for Burger King site page begins, “This is an example of the misuse of visual metaphors…” And, for a page on the Montblanc site, “Montblanc makes nice pens, but it’s impossible to find out anything about them on the company’s Web site…”

While I feel that some of their criticisms are a bit nit-picky, illustrating and commenting on what they see as problems gives the reader plenty to think about. You might not agree with what they have to say about a site’s problem, but you’ll remember it when you design the pages on your sites.

As for me, I learned a few tricks I can apply to my sites. But I’m more relieved that my sites don’t have most of the problems their book points out.

Do you design Web sites? Get and read this book!

[composed on top of a mesa in the middle of nowhere with ecto]