Written on April 28th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 11:04 am by Darren Rowse
Blog Comment Form Design
Smiley Cat Web Design had a cool showcase post a few weeks back that highlighted great comment section designs and today posted another showcase that is looking specifically at comment form designs.
Once again there are some nice examples there of some great blog design.
Written on April 28th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 08:04 am by Darren Rowse
enternetusers Vidcast
After my previous post on video on blogs I thought I should put my money where my mouth is and do one myself.
It should be noted that what follows was a spur of the moment recording and that technically it will leave a lot to be desired. Content wise I talked about my move to publish full feeds and add feedburner ads to them (a double up I know for my email newsletter list).
Also - I’m aware that the video and audio become out of sync more and more as it goes along. I’m unsure why this is as when I uploaded the video it wasn’t like this. I’m pretty sure most of you will be pretty frustrated with it by the end - sorry but something happened at the YouTube end I suspect. This was my second attempt to upload it, the first one was still ‘processing’ my upload 5 hours after it completed uploading and kept telling me it would only take a few minutes longer. Oh well - it’s a start.
I’d be interested in feedback - more on the medium than the message.
Update: The irony is that in the video I talk about my lower traffic to this blog after moving to full feeds but that producing a vidcast that can’t be viewed from within the feed has actually caused a surge in traffic an comments on the blog. Using media like video could well be a strategy for getting actual eyeballs on your blog if you’re publishing full feeds.
Written on April 28th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 12:04 am by Darren Rowse
Alternate Ads and the noscript Tag
This article by Eric Giguere is adapted from his upcoming e-book “Uncommon AdSense“. enternetusers readers will also find his contextual advertising blog of interest. Please Note that if you use the AdSense code outlined below that you should add your own publisher code and channel codes to it to make it your own.
AdSense and Chitika, like most ad serving programs, depend on JavaScript being enabled in the user’s browser. The code you paste into your web pages is JavaScript, so if the browser’s JavaScript support is disabled the code doesn’t run and no ads are displayed. Even your alternate ads won’t display — the alternate ad facility still requires the JavaScript code to run. Nothing will be displayed, in fact, if JavaScript is turned off. This is where the <noscript> tag becomes important.
How <noscript> Works
If JavaScript support is enabled, the browser executes any code it finds between a <script> and </script> pair and ignores any markup it finds between a <noscript> and </noscript> pair. If JavaScript support is disabled, however, the contents of all <script> tags are ignored and the contents of the <noscript> tags are displayed instead. Consider this simple page:
<html>
<body>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
document.write( “<b>Hello!</b>” );
</script>
<noscript>
<b>Goodbye!</b>
</noscript>
</body>
</html>
Load it into a browser with JavaScript enabled and you’ll see “Hello!” with JavaScript disabled you’ll see “Goodbye!” instead.
Using <noscript> with AdSense
Let’s say you’re using the 234×60 (half-banner) ad unit on your page and that you’ve defined an alternate URL for it. You’ve created a separate HTML file to hold your alternate ad, which could be pretty much anything that will fit in a box 234 pixels wide by 60 pixels high. Just make sure that the alternate ad doesn’t use any JavaScript.
Let’s say your AdSense code looks like this:
<script type=”text/javascript”><!–
google_ad_client = “pub-5964030199537728″;
google_alternate_ad_url = “http://www.mysite.com/mybannerad.html”;
google_ad_width = 234;
google_ad_height = 60;
google_ad_format = “234×60_as”;
google_ad_type = “text_image”;
google_ad_channel =”";
//–></script>
<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”>
</script>
Notice the alternate URL property: we’re telling AdSense to display the content at http://www.mysite.com/mybannerad.html if it has no ads to display. (These are all fake URLs, of course.) The equivalent Chitika code is very similar.
The alternate URL is the address of an HTML page much like this:
<!– mybannerad.html –>
<html>
<body>
<a href=”http://www.affprogram.com/myaffid”>
<img src=”affad.gif” width=”234″ height=”60″ border=”0″></a>
</body>
</html>
This particular alternate URL happens to display a banner promoting a product sold via an affiliate program; when clicked, the visitor is sent to the product site via an affiliate link.
So how does the alternate URL get displayed? An <iframe> tag like this one is used:
<iframe width=”234″ height=”60″ frameborder=”0″
src=”http://www.mysite.com/mybannerad.html”>
</iframe>
If you’re using an alternate URL already, why not make it do double duty and use it within a <noscript> tag as well? Here’s what I mean:
<noscript>
<iframe width=”234″ height=”60″ frameborder=”0″
src=”http://www.mysite.com/mybannerad.html”>
</iframe>
</noscript>
Now place the <noscript> block immediately after the AdSense code, like so:
<script type=”text/javascript”><!–
google_ad_client = “pub-5964030199537728″;
google_alternate_ad_url = “http://www.mysite.com/mybannerad.html”;
google_ad_width = 234;
google_ad_height = 60;
google_ad_format = “234×60_as”;
google_ad_type = “text_image”;
google_ad_channel =”";
//–></script>
<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”>
</script>
<noscript>
<iframe width=”234″ height=”60″ frameborder=”0″
src=”http://www.mysite.com/mybannerad.html”>
</iframe>
</noscript>
You can’t modify the AdSense code itself, of course, but it’s OK to immediately follow it (or precede it) with your own code. As long as your alternate ad doesn’t require JavaScript itself, you’ll always be showing some kind of ad to the user, regardless of their JavaScript setting.
Written on April 27th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 02:04 pm by Darren Rowse
Video and Blogging
Over at b5 some of our bloggers are beginning to experiment with video in their blogging. Sean at our boxing and wrestling blog is doing Predictions Posts using YouTube. He’s also brought in a friend on some and the results are pretty cool - two guys chilling out and arguing about a fight - very conversational and despite the lowish quality video quite engaging (even though I have no idea what they’re arguing about).
I think we’ll see more and more of this in the months ahead and it really excites where it all could end up. I know of one blogger who has been doing this type of thing on his blog for a few months now that is currently negotiating a deal with a cable TV station to produce similar content for them. I can’t mention his blog yet but I know that the videocasts that they are producing are as popular if not more popular than their audio versions (podcasts) and their blog posts.
Written on April 27th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 07:04 am by Aaron Brazell
Will You Reboot on May 1st?
This post has been submitted by regular contributor - Aaron Brazell
There’s been an unofficial holiday on the web for the past 6 years or so. It’s called the May 1st reboot and it refers to the date that web designers have chosen as “spring cleaning” day. The day is used to go through websites and apply a new design, or cleanup artifacts that have been left lying around the site. In just a handful of days, the blogosphere will play its own part in the May 1st Reboot and it’s being organized over at CSS Reboot. While I’ve already done my reboot a few weeks early, there are currently 1,319 signed up to participate in the CSS Reboot which offers no rewards save tons of exposure and potential for traffic. From their about page:
The CSS Reboot is a community event for web professionals. May 1st, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 18:00 GMT Rebooters from all over the world will launch their web standards-based redesigns simultaneously, bringing traffic, interest and a little respect to their sites. There are no prizes or arbitrary winners, just great exposure and the knowledge that we all participated in something great.
Of course, to reboot you don’t have to join up with the official site. Perhaps some spit and shine on your own or grabbing a ready made theme will do nicely.
I see a few reasons for doing a CSS reboot on a blog. There’s probably much more that can be said as well so feel free to add your own reasons.
Cleaning Up What You’ve Left Behind
Every spring, folks head out to their lawn sheds or garages and start rummaging through stuff. They toss what they don’t need and keep what they want. They start cultivating the lawn, trimming weeds, pruning the rose bushes and washing the sidewalks (or is that only my father-in-law that washes his sidewalks?! ;)) You usually know when it’s spring cleaning time as the pickup trucks hauling trash start queuing up at the county dump. In the same way, blogs tend to collect rubbish in the form of broken links, file
downloads that are no longer needed, or if you’ve moved between hosts one or more time in the past year, possible messed up text (usually because character set settings are different between settings or blog platforms). Setting aside an annual Reboot day, like Darren does at the beginning of the year, puts you into a cleanup and dispose mode that only helps to keep your site lean and trim and served up well for Google.
Gives Opportunities for New Features
One thing that I’ve always enjoyed about blogging has been the technical side of things. I enjoy the code and making it do things that it wasn’t intended to do with clever use of plugins or add-ons. WordPress has a gallon of plugins (150 points for someone who can help me translate ‘a gallon of plugins’ into metric units!). A reboot provides an opportunity to examine what features you are using and how you might employ new and different features on your blog. There’s heaps (or gallons) of plugins available
for WordPress and Movable Type. Give some of them a try and see how you can spice up your blog life a little.
Keeps Readers’ Interest Alive
If there are two things I have learned in my professional life it’s that 1) change is inevitable, and 2) people hate change. The exception to this rule seems to be websites. Most people (and I say most because it’s a suspicion that I have no way to prove one way or another), seem to like change in design and layout because most layout changes seem to be evolutionary - that is, they get better and more user-friendly with time. A Reboot is a kick in the butt to freshen a users experience,
place a fresh face on your work and, in general, break monotony that tends to set in after awhil
When I rebooted a few weeks ago, it was because I found that the architecture of my blog had backed me into a corner. I found I could no longer effectively present older content, new content and that ad placement was not effectively optimized. I’m still not completely happy with my current design but for what it was intended to accomplish, it has done well. Perhaps my next entry will dive into some of the techniques that can be used as well as passing along some of the things I’ve picked up from other
established and highly-effective blog designers.
Written on April 27th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 03:04 am by Darren Rowse
Lessons from a Celebrity Blogger
The following blog case study was submitted by Derek - a celebrity blogger. In it he reflects upon 7 lessons he’s learned in building his blog from 50 to 1500 uniques per day since March.
Derek Hail - stealing celebrity dignity and fame was launched on March 13th of 2006. The first two weeks the Derek Hail.com staff focused on producing content. The only promotion for our blog was through our friends. We would ask our friends for feedback on our writing. After the two weeks were over we decided to start aggressively promoting our blog.
The first two weeks, Derek Hail.com received on average 50-60 unique hits per day. Now, as of April 23, 2006, the past two weeks we have received 20,000 unique visits which averages to around 1500 hits per day.
Here are lessons I have learned along the way while trying to promote blogs:
1. Blog Traffic Exchanges are worthless.
The amount of time spent surfing to earn credits is not worth it. Instead of wasting 3 hours a day surfing for credits, write content. Most people surf these blogs for credits and they do not read anything. They are only at your blog for a credit.
2. Collect a list of all the links possibly available in your niche:
This was originally mentioned on Darren Rowseâ•˙s Blog Promotion tips post which can be found here.
The list of links was the blogs I would regularly attend during the week to leave insightful and funny comments. This was successful because the less popular blogs would make the author of the blog interested in viewing my website. On the more popular blogs that received a significant amount of traffic, some of the readers from the popular blogs would then stop by my blog
3. The reader of a related blog can be your reader as well
I discovered that most people who comment on blogs in a particular niche, usually have their own personal web log which is not necessarily related to the niche they are reading about. I decided to start going to each of these peopleâ•˙s blogs and leave insightful comments on their blogs as well. This would then help me to attract someone who was already interested in a particular niche to my blog because I was taking the time of my day to comment on their blog.
4. Submit articles to popular web-sites in hopes of getting picked up
I have been linked by several popular websites in the short period of time I have been blogging. This did not come easy because I Actively sought people to submit to. I started perusing places like Fark and other humor sites that dealt with writing. After several submissions to these web-sites, naturally some of my articles were picked up. This helped build my traffic to what it is today.
5. Sell yourself and your blog
Make the blog worth while to read. My blog has focused on entertaining our readers with humor. We write about celebrity gossip and add twists and jokes at the end of each of our articles. This was our selling point of our blog. There are other ways to sell yourself, but we chose to do it in a humor fashion.
6. Ask for Link exchanges the right way:
I mainly collected a list of links of approximately two hundred blogs that were in the same niche as my own. I originally started emailing these bloggers with informal emails. My successfulness with informal emails was limited. I decided to create formal email messages that included proper greetings and format. My success with emails went up drastically. The moral of the story is, present yourself professionally and people will take you seriously.
7. Create a community
This is self explanatory and has been hammered to death by several different bloggers. I created a community a little bit differently. It is not uncommon for other bloggers to plug each other when they find something they find interesting. Instead of relying on luck, I set up a community of a few bloggers who would exchange plugs with each other a few times a week.
This is significant because we would be sending each other targeted traffic.
These are the lessons I have learned over the past month and a half and helped me grow my blog from the minimal 50/60 visits a day to a much more significant 1500 visits per day. I hope this helps everyone in promoting their blog as well.
Written on April 27th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 12:04 am by Darren Rowse
The Cost of Comment Spam
It seems that bloggers everywhere are giving up the fight against comment spam - Or it least it seems that way to me.
I’m not going to start naming names but this week as I’ve read a number of fairly high profile and Active blogs I’ve noticed that there is ALOT of comment spam in many of their archives. I’m suspecting that they are not alone and that it’s symptomatic of what is happening on a larger scale.
Whether the spam is slipping though some how under the radar or whether these bloggers have just given up because it’s all become too hard I’m a little concerned to find so many examples of comments sections of posts with literally hundreds of spam comments linking to all manner of dubious sites.
While I understand why some bloggers might give up under the weight of numbers of spam comments it’s worth considering the costs of comment spam on your blog:
- Ignore it and it will Go away? - one blogger who I spoke with this week actually told me that he was hoping that if he did nothing that it would sort itself out. I don’t know what this blogger was on but it has to be one of the craziest things I’ve heard for a long time. You see in my opinion it’s the exact opposite. If we (and I mean WE collectively) ignore comment spam and allow it to clutter our blogs it will not only not go away, it has the potential to grow further. My anecdotal evidence this week is that if you allow comment spam to sit on your post that it’s more than likely to be added to a list of posts to spam again. Many of the examples of spam in comments threads this week revealed many many comments left on single posts while other posts seemingly were ignored by spammers. This says to me that it’s a systematic attack upon unmonitored blogs. Ignoring it will only encourage spammers.
- Search Engine Impact - the comments that your readers leave on your blog have the potential to impact what people find your blog searching for in search engines. This can work for you or against you. Most bloggers have stories of people ending up on their blogs having searched for all kinds of bizarre terms/spelling mistakes used by commenters - but one impact that comment spam can have upon your blog is that it alters the keyword density of your posts. This particularly happens when comment spammers latch onto a particular post on your blog and leave ALOT of comments. I found one post on a well known blog this week that had 200+ comments on it, mostly on the topic of porn. I didn’t investigate it too much in Search Engines but I’d hazard a guess that his page had some keywords on it that were much more densely populated on that page than what he intended. This decreases the effectiveness of his content for the purposes that it was written for and increases the effectiveness of the spammers work.
- Linking to Bad Neighborhoods - once again on the SE front - a common warning that SEO experts give is to be careful about the sites that you link to as they can have an impact upon how search engines rank your site. Link to so called ‘bad neighborhoods’ and you can get into trouble with your own SE presence. No one really knows just how much of an impact that this has upon SEO but it’s definitely not worth the risk.
- Dead Links - one blogger that I approached this week to tell them about their comment spam argued that most of the links that people were leaving were dead links within weeks of them leaving them and that as a result they were not linking to to gutter sites after-all. My response to him was that dead links on a site can harm it’s Search Engine Presence. It’s commonly known that dead links are not looked upon favorably by Google and to have hundreds of them on a post cannot help it’s ranking.
- Reputation - imagine with me a first time reader stumbling upon a post on your blog after doing a search for ((insert your blog’s topic here)). They find your post which has relevant content that they find helpful and scroll down to read the comments of others or to leave a comment of their own - only to be confronted with ads for pharmaceutical companies, porn sites, finance products, poker websites and all manner of other irrelevant and gutter crawling content. As I’ve said many times - EVERYTHING on your blog has the potential to add to or take away from your reputation. This not only includes your design and the content that you write but also the comments of your readers/spammers. Some first time readers won’t understand that that the comments are left by malicious spammers and will tie you and your blog to it - whilst others who understand that what they are reading is comment spam will make a judgement upon you and how willing you are to maintain your blog (just like the people walking by my house right now looking at my un-mowed lawn are making judgments about me (note to self… mow lawn)
- Ethics - perhaps I’m something of a prude but looking at some of the comment spams left on blogs in the last few days I have to say that it would take a pretty tolerant blogger to find all comment spam acceptable in terms of it’s nature. I’m particularly thinking of some of the sexual graphic language that is used which refers and links to pages claiming to have some pretty foul and illegal material. I won’t impose my morals on anyone else but would encourage bloggers giving in to comment spam to take a serious look at the type of topics that they have showing on their sites. Ask yourself if you’re willing to live with a child… your child… stumbling upon some of it.
One last argument that I heard from a blogger this week was that they had no-follow tags in operation on their blog and that the links spammers were leaving were ineffective. While this might be true in terms of the benefits that the spammer might get from SEO - one interview I saw with a comment spammer last year (I can’t find the link) said that they get a surprisingly large number of click throughs on comment spam and that they benefit that way also. I’d also remind you that while no-follow tags might decrease the effectiveness of the links from the spammers perspective that they don’t have any impact on some of the points above. To this point no one has come up with a ‘fix-reputation’ tag or a ‘mend-ethics’ tag and bloggers will need to live with the consequences of their inaction.
So what do do?
It would be all very nice of me to attack bloggers who give up on comment spam and no propose solutions. My main piece of advice for bloggers is to use up to date blogging software and to use the built in spamming solutions that many of them have built in or available with plugins.
While spam killing plugins don’t stop everything they do help.
What does slip through the filters and plugins needs to be diligently monitored and checked manually either before or after they go live on your blog. There is no other way to ensure blogs are spam free than to have someone monitor it. If you’re not willing or able to do this then you might also like to consider the option of either switching off comments on your blog or disabling them after a certain period of time.
I hope I don’t come across as an unsympathetic blogger in this post - I do understand the strain that spam can put on a blog. I have quite a few blogs of my own and unfortunately need to put time aside each day to maintain their comments sections. It’s no fun but it is important.
I’d be keen to hear what other bloggers comment spam strategies are - feel free to share your practices in comments.
Written on April 27th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 12:04 am by Darren Rowse
Celebrating 34
Today I turn 34. It’ll be a pretty low key day with most of the celebrations happening on the weekend (not too big a deal this year but we’ll have a good night Saturday night).
So lets talk presents….
Ok - I’m kidding, i don’t need anything but there is something I do WANT from you my wonderful readers.
Whether you consider it a birthday present, a payment for the time and energy that I invest into enternetusers or whether you do it out of some other motivation I’d like to invite you to being involved in my annual blogathon that I’m planning by making a donation.
I’m still a few weeks away from pulling it all together but I’ve begun planning for it and as I did last year will blog for 24 hours straight, posting every 15 minutes (I aim for 100 posts in the day) and ask readers to make a donation to a charity.
I’ve chosen this year’s charity and just need to finalize a date but I would really appreciate people getting involved. More about this in the coming week or two.
Now - lets get back to blogging.
Written on April 26th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 11:04 am by Darren Rowse
Google bans Mango Sauce from AdSense
There’s a fascinating story over at Mango Sauce today that recounts it’s blogger’s (David) interactions with one representative at AdSense who has banned Mango Sauce from AdSense over what it says are violations of the program. The AdSense team member says that MS has content for mature audiences which violates the program. The post is long and raises all kinds of interesting ideas and possibilities for conversation. Of particular interest to me is the double standards that David points out. Personally I’m not a fan of ‘adult’ content in any form but have long wondered whether Google seem to have different standards for different parts of it’s business.
Head over and have your say.
Found via an email from Stuart
Written on April 26th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 09:04 am by Darren Rowse
Pheedo’s RSS Ads System Launches
Speaking of RSS ads, Pheedo has been testing their ad service for the past couple of months and are launching this week according to Mark at Weblog Tools Collection. Mark writes that it’s a system for WordPress ads but I can’t see on Pheedo anywhere saying it is exclusively a WP offering.
I also can’t see any official announcement of them coming out of beta yet at Pheedo or on their blog but their registration page is up and running so it seems there is nothing to hold bloggers back from applying.
For those wanting to sign up you might also like to check out their information page for publishers where they outline two ad solutions, ‘Ads for Feeds’ and ‘Ads for Feeds+’. Also check out their Publisher FAQ and Terms of Service.
A few quick tidbits on Pheedo’s system:
- Publishers take 65% of revenue generated
- The signup process takes 1 to 2 days
- Payment is via PayPal or check
- Payments are made once your balance is over $50
- Payments are made 60 days after the end of the month you earn from ads
- Their TOS says it is a CPC (cost per click) system - however their PDF information pages talk of CPM (impression based) systems also
- Both ad solutions have statistics systems to moniter performance
- Their TOS and Registration page indicate you need a US Tax ID (but the comments on Weblogs Tool Collection indicate you can contact them to get around this if you’re not based in the US).
If you’ve been one of the beta testers of Pheedo’s Ads I’d love to hear from you. Write a review (long or short) of your experience with it and I’ll publish it on enternetusers (with links back to your blog) if you’d like.
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