Tag Archives: WordPress

Podcasting Stats

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Stats can tell you a lot of interesting things.

I spent most of this morning updating the daily podcasts for KBSZ-AM, the local radio station.

KBSZ‘s Around the Town broadcast was my first foray into the world of podcasting. I wanted to experiment with the new technology but didn’t have any content available to experiment with. KBSZ was already doing a daily radio show. Why not podcast that?

Well, what started out as a fun and education project has become a bit of a chore. It isn’t difficult to turn their broadcasts into podcasts — especially since I also do streaming audio for them and my computer automatically records each show for me — but it is time consuming. You see, I can be a bit of a perfectionist at times. KBSZ’s show never starts exactly on time and never ends exactly on time. So there’s stuff at the beginning and end that needs to be edited out. Then I need to upload the podcasts files, create the podcast entries on their Blogger account, link the podcasts files, and publish. It takes about 15 minutes per episode. If I were smart, I’d just do it every day. But I’m not smart. I wait until there’s about 2 weeks worth and knock them all of at once. It took two hours this morning. Two hours that I should have been working on my WordPress book.

I do plan, however, to get very smart. I’ll skip the editing and fully automate the process. More on that when I find time to do it. Hopefully soon.

While I’m messing around with the podcasts, I often check the download stats for all podcasts and other files on my server. I serve all files from a GoDaddy.com hosting space. They give you a good amount of disk space and bandwidth for only $3.95/month — and even cheaper if you pay a year up front. So all podcasts and book support files live there. No need to bog down my limited bandwidth with visitor downloads.

Due to a server glitch, all stats prior to November 18, 2005 were lost. No big deal. I just started using that server seriously in August 2005. But it’s good to know the start date for the stats.

By looking at the stats, KBSZ can see who their most popular guests are. For a while, I was number 2 (behind the high school football coach — hey, sports are important here in Wickenburg). Now the top slots are held by the folks who make sure all their friends know about the podcasts. Some of the really smart ones link to the podcast from their own Web sites, further increasing the number of downloads.

While I was checking stats, I checked the stats for my own podcasts. I found that my video podcasts are among the most popular I do. That doens’t make me terribly happy, mostly because they’re a royal pain in the butt to create. Recording my voice reading a script is one thing, but inserting a bunch of screen shots at key points is another. Still, I’ll try to make folks happy by delivering a few more audio podcasts.

The excerpt from my Mac OS X Tiger book is by far the most downloaded file on my server. The Panther excerpt isn’t far behind. You can find both of those in the Mac OS QuickStart support area.

All this, of course, reminds me that I haven’t done a podcast in about two weeks. I’m behind already. Maybe I’ll throw something together on the plane to Austin on Wednesday.

E-Mail Addresses on Web Sites

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Why you shouldn’t include a link to your e-mail address on your Web site.

Many people — including me! — use their Web sites as a kind of global calling card, a way to share information about themselves or their companies with others all over the world. It’s common to want to share your contact information with site visitors — particularly potential customers — so they can contact you. This is often done through the use of a mailto tag. For example, e-mail me! which appears as a clickable e-mail link.

Unfortunately there are people out there who want your e-mail address, people who want to scam you into sending money to Nigeria, advertise their online casinos, sell you prescription drugs, show you their porn sites — the list goes on and on. If you have your e-mail address on any Web site, you probably already get a lot of this spam. That’s because of computer programs that crawl through Web sites and harvest e-mail addresses that are included in the otherwise innocent mailto tag. Heck, they even harvest addresses that aren’t part of a mailto tag, so just including your e-mail address on a Web page without a link can get you on a bulk e-mail list.

So what’s the solution? There are a few.

One popular and easy-to-implement solution is to turn your e-mail address into a text phrase that a site visitor must see and manually type in to use. For example, me@domain.com becomes me at domain dot com or meATdomainDOTcom. You get the idea. Someone who wanted to send you an e-mail message, would be able to figure that out — if he couldn’t, he really shouldn’t be surfing the ‘Net anyway — and manually enter the correct translation in his e-mail program. But e-mail harvesters supposedly can’t figure this out (which I find hard to believe) so the e-mail address isn’t harvested.

Another solution is to use an e-mail obfuscation program. These programs take e-mail addresses and change or insert characters to make them impossible to read. The e-mail addresses look okay on the site — to a person viewing them — and work fine in a mailto link — when used from the Web site. WordPress plugins are available to do this. I don’t use any of them, so I can’t comment on how well they work. But they must be at least a little helpful if they’re available. You can find a few here, on the WordPress Codex.

The solution I use is form-based e-mail. I created a Contact Form with fields for the site visitor to fill out. When the form is submitted, a program processes it and sends it to my e-mail address. Because that address is not on the Web page that includes the form — or on any other Web page, for that matter — e-mail harvesters cannot see it. As a result, I’m able to provide a means of contacting me via e-mail that keeps my e-mail address safe from spammers.

The program I use is called NateMail from MindPalette Software. it’s a free PHP tool that’s easy to install and configure. But what I like best about it is that you can set it up with multiple e-mail addresses. Use a corresponding drop-down list in your form to allow the site visitor to choose the person the e-mail should go to. NateMail directs the message to the correct person. You can see this in action on my other WordPress-based site, wickenburg-az.com, in its Contact Form. If you want a few more features, such as the ability to attach files to an e-mail message, MindPalette offers ProcessForm for only $15.

Other WordPress users are likely to have their own favorite methods of protecting their e-mail addresses from spammers. With luck, a few of them who read this will share their thoughts in the Comments for this post.

One more thing…this doesn’t just apply to WordPress-based sites. It applies to all Web sites. And a contact form tool like NateMail will work with any PHP-compatible Web server.

If you’re already getting spam, using one of these methods won’t stop it. It’ll just keep the situation from getting much worse. Your best bet is to change your e-mail address and protect the new one. In my case, that’s a big pain in the butt — so many people I need to be in touch with have my e-mail address and, worse yet, I often use it as a login for Web sites I visit (which does indeed make the spam situation worse). I’m working on a plan to phase out the bad addresses and replace them with ones that I protect. Until then, I have to rely on the spam-catching features of my ISP and my e-mail software to sort out the bad stuff — currently about 20-40 messages a day — so I don’t have to.

What I’m Up To

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Maria Speaks Episode 24: What I’m Up To.

This short podcast brings listeners up to date on what I’ve been up to since my podcast suddenly stopped in November, along with a repeat of my pledge to keep coming up with new podcasts weekly.

Transcript:

I promised a new podcast every week and I’m trying hard to deliver. This week, I’ll bring everyone up to date on the things I’ve been up to. Of course, there are always more details in my blog at www.aneclecticmind.com.

I promise I’ll try not to bore you.

Work in Progress

About a month ago, I started working on a new book for Peachpit Press called WordPress 2: Visual QuickStart Guide. I’m working with a co-author on the project, Miraz Jordan. Miraz lives in New Zealand, where it’s always tomorrow. I’m recording this on a Sunday evening and, at this very moment, Miraz is probably hard at work on a Monday afternoon. I think it’s kind of unfair that she gets an extra day on the deadline. Or is that one less day? Too much sangria this afternoon to think it out properly.

WordPress, for those of you who don’t know, is my current blogging platform of choice. I started using it late last year and quickly fell in love with it. Since then, I’ve sucked down all the information I could about it and I think it’s safe to say that I experiment with it daily. I love its flexibility most of all — the ability to build all kinds of features into a blog-based Web site and to have it look just about any way you like. But I felt I needed a seasoned expert to help me write the book, so that’s why I asked Miraz to join me. She’s been using the software for years and has over a thousand entries in her blog at mactips.info. Check it out.

My other current writing project is actually a DVD training video for macProVideo.com. It’s about Microsoft Word for Macintosh and, if I can figure out how to narrate while I’m performing tasks without sounding like an idiot, I might get it done sometime soon. I know that writing a script for each segment isn’t the way. I quickly discovered that I can’t read a script and perform tasks at the same time.

Computer Woes

If you follow my blog, you know that I had a series of computer problems this past winter.

First, my main production Mac’s hard disk got scrambled and required professional help to bring back from the near-dead. I backed everything up, reformatted that drive, and reinstalled everything.

Reformatting my main hard drive is a maintenance task I used to do every time I upgraded to a new version of the system software. Mac OS X’s time-consuming installations and hidden preference files made it a bit of a chore, though, so I stopped.

Reformatting and rebuilding a hard disk is like a massive spring cleaning. Imagine taking all the furniture out of your home, stripping out the carpet and tile, sandblasting the walls and floor, and putting brand new versions of everything you had back in. The benefit is that when you’re done, everything is right where you put it, all in one piece and easy to find. You also throw out a lot of junk you didn’t really need.

Moving is like that, too. You throw away stuff when you pack, you move the boxes you packed, and then you throw more stuff away when you arrive in your new place. Sometimes I think you should unpack at your old home just so you can throw away the second time without moving it first.

The second computer problem was way more serious. My Web server’s hard disk crashed. (There must have been something in the electricity this past winter.) The drive was a complete goner. And, of course, the DVD drive in that computer was already toasted. So I had both replaced and rebuilt the Web server from scratch using whatever backups I had.

Of course, I didn’t have everything backed up. This was my third hard disk crash since 1989 and you think that by now I’d learn. I didn’t. My two WordPress blogs (aneclecticmind.com and wickenburg-az.com) had their databases backed up — thank heaven! — but the theme files, plugins, and other stuff that makes up a WordPress blog had not been backed up. Neither were a bunch of the image files. Because the themes were so heavily customized (due to all that experimentation I bragged about earlier), it took a lot of rebuilding to get it back to what I wanted to see. wickenburg-az.com is still not 100% back — it’s missing lots of pictures.

It’s kind of weird because I was never really happy with my first version of aneclecticmind.com, but I’d put so much work into it that I wasn’t willing to change it. Then all that work got wiped away, as if my computer sensed my dissatisfaction and wanted to prod me into fixing it. So when I rebuilt, I made it more to my liking. I’m much more pleased with the current site. But I really wish my computer hadn’t taken so much with it.

Miraz and I will be covering backup strategies for WordPress blogs in detail in our book — or on its companion Web site. I don’t want any of my readers to go through what I went through. What a waste of time!

Flying

I’ve also been flying. A lot.

March was my busiest month ever at Flying M Air and I actually earned enough money to pay the helicopter loan for the next two months. I did charters to Sedona and the Grand Canyon, photo shoots at proving grounds and golf courses, real estate tours, and a charter to Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport. (Helicopter Zero-Mike-Lima, there’s an airbus on short final for runway 7 left. Do you have him in sight? Sure. I’d have to be blind not to see him.) All that and the usual round of 25 minute and 50 minute tours.

March was also a record breaking month in a bad way. In one week, two different passengers broke my record of no pukers in my helicopter. One of them puked in my lunch bag. (Watch the leather seats and the carpet! Move the microphone away from your mouth!) They were both kids, so I can still tell people that I’ve never had an adult puke in the helicopter. And I have a new policy: no flights over 1 hour long with kids on board.

Yesterday, I flew more than 90 people at an airport event in Buckeye, AZ. So I have June’s loan payment taken care of, too. Looks like I’ll be able to keep the helicopter a few more months.

I even flew today — two flights totaling an hour and a half. Where are these people coming from? And where the hell were they in January and February? And will they stay long enough to take me through the long, hot summer?

Listener Feedback

I got one bit of listener feedback recently from Justin. Or maybe it was Jason. I’m sorry. I accidently deleted your e-mail. Justin or Jason got a new iPod Nano and wants some iPod tips. I want some, too. I’ll have to look some up, put together a podcast, and record it for us. Until then, I recommend doing a Google search for something like iPod tips. I did it and found a bunch of sites. Unfortunately, I’m not prepared to comment on their quality.

If you have feedback about this podcast or my podcasts in general, send them to me at mariaspeaks@mac.com. I’ll try not to delete it before I commit your name to medium-term memory. I do take requests for topics. As Justin or Jason has learned, I don’t always get right to the request topic, but I eventually get there. This just hasn’t been the best week for thinking about new things. Too much old stuff to think about.

Thanks for listening. More next week.