Glowleaf

I have been using a Phpfox installation to create a niche community. Mind you, this is not a full fledged review, just some notes.

Well, in summary, Phpfox sucks for SEO.

• There are no url rewrites, and messing around with the code is bound to break something.
• The sitemap generated is great for text only sitemaps, but you cannot generate an xml one. (EDIT: now you can, see how to make xml sitemaps for phpfox)
• The internal urls forbid you from linking to any single file in the domain, practically the rewrites hijack anything to a useless page not found.
• The rss feeds it generates are not validated in any standard. They do work with rss readers though, but you simply cannot burn them.

Of course, I did not expect the script to be a breeze like wordpress, but some seo options would be nice. The pages do seem to get indexed though, they are just not seo optimized.

To its defense, Phpfox is a beauty to work with.

The installation is simple and fast. As soon as you are done, you have a mini Myspace in your hands. The default options are enough to run the majority of social sites, complete with a forum, PM, announcements, chat, polls, blog pages, member search and both video and image galleries.

Every hardcore webbuilder like me will want to hack it to death, but for a newbie, its amazing. The adminpanel gives you somewhat easy and almost complete control over everything, with no technical skills required.

There are some way better options, but if you want a “right off the box” social site, Phpfox is your friend. And get ready to dish out 500$-1000$ for modding it.

Popularity: 28% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: online communities, phpfox, social site

I am working on a new project of mine, one that involves a community, and user generated content.

I was working out the quirks in PhpFox, changing the little things that I don’t like, moving things around, etc.

The project is still in very early stages, there is only the basic logo, useless links everywhere. A single, but huge page of content from me as a sample for the members. There is a faq, but no step by step guide on how to use the site’s features.

I still have plugin integrations, code tweaks, sql optimization. It still has a months worth of work left.

Late at night, I got bored of webdesign. I was looking at the site, trying to be objective. Looking at it from the visitor’s point of view.

And then a thought dawned on me. I will launch it now.

Why wait? The basic structure is there, the usability exists. I will never be pleased with the site anyway, I am going to edit and move stuff around forever. So, why not launch it?

So I did. I wrote a nice submission on social bookmarking sites, hit publish, and went to bed.

I woke up to find the community alive. Of course, not huge, but its there. Its something, where there was nothing before. And they liked it

So, where am I going with this?

People are shy. And people are shy to publish their creations. It takes guts to hit that publish button, really. As soon as you publish anything, it becomes prey to everyone around, judging it, and in turn, judging you.

That is where the fear comes from. I believe that a man pours a tiny bit of his soul into his creations. And by looking at those creations, you see the true self of that man. (replace man with woman if it suits you, I am not sexist)

Everyone unconsciously knows that. People will judge you by what you create.

I was lurking in an amateur writer’s forum a while ago, and I read something that gave me a little shock. They were having a huge thread, on publishing, agents, problems, rejections, experiences etc.

And one guy wrote, that a writer sometimes writes for himself, that his writings are for his eyes only. They are his little children, his fragile creations, and he fears that if another human lays eyes on them, he will stain them forever. Beautiful, ain’t it?

Well, no. That guy is a pure pussy. Chicken. COWARD. I don’t care if he is at the same level as Dickens or Tolkien. Not having the guts to publish his writings, makes him useless. If you want to write for yourself, write a journal. Don’t pretend that you are a writer, hang out in real or virtual writer’s joints, and talk about writing, when no one has ever seen your work because you are too afraid to hear their comments.

Have you seen the movie “Knocked up”, where the guys are working months on creating a website about which movies have which actresses boobs showing? They delay, working on perfecting it every day. They learn something valuable in that movie, when they log on one day, and find “MrSkin”, a cooler, sleeker, and active website with the same idea as them.

MrSkin had the balls to hit the publish button.

Every human, has a different way of experiencing things, a different worldview. I watch an action movie at the cinema and notice the guns and the computers/gadgets. The guy next to me sees only the actresses ass. The girl on the other side checks out her shoes, ignoring the huge explosion that fills the screen.

Everything you make, everything you create, will touch people in a different way. Some will be offended, some will admire you, some will learn from you. Most will misunderstand you. Readers of my Anarchy Online post found it refreshing! I never expected that someone would find that refreshing, but they did. Great! It touched them in a different way. My goal was to “teach”, to share a worldview. But the world is a huge place, with an endless variety of people. Each and every one of them will have a slightly different opinion on every creation they lay their eyes on.

But you must not be afraid of that. Sure, your fellow webmasters will find the template ugly. Visitors will think you are cool. Newbies will learn something.

But in order for those things to happen, you have to hit the damn publish button.

Related Blogs

• Related Blogs on cowardice
• Joe Biden – A Profile in Cowardice
• Cowardice and Incompetance

• Related Blogs on stage fright
• Fear of Public Speaking? No More Stage Fright
• I caved!
• Yogurt and Nuts Help Beat Stage Fright

• Related Blogs on writing
• Sydney Writers’ Centre launches podcasts on writing, featuring …
• 10 Tips for Effective Technical Writing

Popularity: 15% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: cowardice, stage fright, writing

As expected, SeoBook has another great post on innovation or immitation in web building.

I mostly agree with him, but as a commenter noted, there is still room for immitation if you are a webmaster in a non english country, kinda like me.

For example, in Greece, social bookmarking is still crappy. Not because there are no sites, but because people simply don’t use them.

In my experiments, I managed to dominate the top 3 Greek bookmarking frontpages without even trying, and all I got was 300 visitors. The seo benefit was noticeable though. Those webmasters tried to immitate the success of english bookmarking sites, but they seem to fail, while people ignore their service.

On the other hand, we have our own little Amazon version, called eshop.gr

This site started as an online bookstore, just like amazon, and rapidly expanded to fill up everything, computers, gadgets, office stuff. This was an immitator that took off, because the timing was right, and there was a huge hole in the Greek online store market.

Eshop was an immitator for foreign e-stores, but an innovator in the Greek internet. Now, it dominates that market.

As I said in an older post, the cyberspace is very different in other languages. Practically every professional site becomes an authority on those countries.

So, if you are in a saturated market, innovate or die.

If you are in a murky market, immitate the big guys. It’s the classic “let’s import something that we don’t have here” trick. It works, but it may not always work for you.

Why? Because people are different. The internet has invaded their lives in different stages. Greeks have learned about blogging the last year for example. Brittish are quite used to them.

Noone can really tell you if an immitation will work for your people, you have to trust your gut, and you will never know until you actually try it.

Related Blogs

• Related Blogs on idiot
• Episode 16: Idiot Box
• Sarah Palin thinks George W. Bush is an idiot
• Comment on Tick tick tick TOCK and a book launch by idiot
• Blithering Idiot

• Related Blogs on immitator
• Free Music

• Related Blogs on innovator
• Flavor Innovator – online store
• Vehicle-to-grid innovator gets scooped up by GridPoint
• Post2Post Virtual Book Tour: Scott D. Anthony of Innovator’s Guide …
• Video: Mark Johnson on The Innovator’s Guide To Growth
• Book Review: The Innovator’s Guide To Growth

Popularity: 13% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: idiot, immitator, innovator

I found this on my Google alert:

I submitted 4 more of my old articles on Sphinn, and their overenthusiastic staff decided to delete them all, because I was flooding the Upcoming page.

I agree, it might look spammy, but that was not my intention. I just had a few minutes spare time, and decided to submit some of my best posts. I am used to stumble, where the upcoming queue is irrelevant, and digg, where the queue shifts in seconds. Sphinn is a more tight, small community, and submissions are slow.

So, sorry. I really am.

But, just for your information, sphinn uses an engine that does not parse the deleted links from the submitted urls database. So the urls are effectively banned. So, don’t submit too much stuff, and also, don’t let your site go inactive for a few hours, because they remove the submission too! This makes your url “banned” as well.

To their defense, the same Mod emailed me that they are aware of the problem, and its on their to-do list. So, Sphinn keeps getting better, and I like it.

And I never submit any crappy pages, its always the articles, and most of them are close to 2000 words.

But getting accused of autosubmitting and spamming Sphinn? Get a life guys.

Or at least say it on something that does not get indexed for the public.

And no, don’t submit this to Sphinn. I forbid you.

Let me rephrase all that: Screw Sphinn.

Popularity: 10% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: buzz, sphinn, twitter

Here is another practical post. I am going to list some do’s and dont’s in webdesign. I started working on some new projects recently, and those things I mention here are always in the back of my mind, so I might as well write them down.

• Screw flash. No, really, screw it. I don’t care if it gets crawled now. Its annoying unless it is used minimally, and it sucks for SEO. Screw it.

• This is what your contact or order form should look like:

No more. Get that email, its worth gold. No “how did you hear about us”, no nothing. My hosting company has the “how did you hear about us” field a prerequisite! And if you forget to fill it, the order form resets. Don’t do that, never. Let those guys at the statistics department bitch all they want, they are useless anyway.

JUST GET THAT EMAIL

Ask whatever you need after the order or the signup. Check out tnx.net registration, it sticks to the basics. Or namedrive registration, they ask their guest to paste in their domains. Those are good examples for different business plans, do the same to yours.

If you run an online business, you can send them offers a year later, new products, whatever. Those guys actually showed interest in your product, and, I will say this once more, they are priceless. No, you dont need his website, nor his age, nor his boxer size, no nothing. Get the email address, and then you can poke into his life all you want.

• Use a CMS. Unless you are creating the new, never seen before website/service that does it all and makes you coffee at the same time, you can find a related cms to work on. But even if your idea is revolutionary, you can still use a cms as a base.

This website I made for my designer is made in Wordpress. I am sure most of you can’t tell, neither can I at first glance. All it has is the cforms plugin, a modified theme, and the NextGen gallery for the portfolio. It really does not need anything more, and its devilishly beautiful.

• Put an RSS button. What? Your CMS does not support RSS? Modify it, drop it for something else or fire your programmer.

RSS is a marketer’s wet dream. Its permission marketing to the maximum. Especially given the added step the visitor needs to do to add your feed to his reader, makes him even more valuable. Every crap is weeded out, you are left with people actually willing to listen to you, so make sure you have something worthwile to say. Makes you wish real life worked like that…

Also, put your full post in the feed. Now hit my big bad RSS button.

• Integrate social media. How? For starters, there are those digg, twitter, fark etc buttons you see everywhere. Let your visitors vote your article, and remind them to do so, there are plugins for that. 

Keep in mind that different social sites have very different crowds, you need to find which one appeals to your niche. Digg for example is for mac freaks and primarily computer geeks, stumble is for short attention span people who love anything that comes in under 20 sec chunks and is flashy enough to blind them, and sphinn is for webmasters and SEO’s. Twitter is for… Ehm, twitters. Nevermind.

Totally different crowds. Find yours.

Also, most social sites offer you widgets for your website, to show your bookmarks on delicious, twitter or digg. DoshDosh is a very good implementation of that, to the sidebar, on the bottom right. If you actually get to a point where your opinion matters to your readers like doshdosh, sharing handpicked bookmarks can work well, like the editorial pick of the week etc.

Upcoming is Google’s new unreleased feature that wraps all social sites together on a single widget for your website. Its called Friendconnect, still beta, and I believe it will be a cool feature.

• Make it load fast. Page loading time can really affect your traffic. Every second the page takes to load, means a percentage of your visitors is gone.

Those new Ebay flash banners take like 6 secs to load by themselves. Drop them.

Graphics are pretty much useless except for the first impression. If it adds information, keep it. If not, drop the picture, or compress it till it squeals.

Caching. Not only does it reduce load times, it saves bandwidth as well. Dynamically generated sites can take a beating from a traffic spike coming from a social site. Cache them, its that simple. What? your CMS does not support caching? Read the rss comment above.

Javascript breaks. Unless there is no other way to do what you want that piece of code to do, drop javascript. Javascript crashes more often than windows, and it takes down non Chrome browsers with it.

Its ok for a video embed or a google map, or a particular script to load slowly, but only as long as it is on a separate page. Don’t do what so many others do, embedding 32 youtube’s on the homepage. It’s simply dumb. A visitor will be ok waiting to see the video you suggested, and which he clicked to see. But he will not be ok waiting 50 seconds for your homepage to load. And if you have to include a heavy script somewhere, make sure to cut off everything else to lighten the load.

And, last but most important is:

• Focus on your site’s main concept. It’s very easy to get carried away adding features and widgets and thingies to your site. But you need to make it actually deliver the service that the site is about.

Related Blogs

• Related Blogs on site usability
• UK Marketers Investing in SEM At Expense of Usability
• Usability & Security – Unlikely Bedfellows?
• Three Key Site Usability Tips
• Free Web Site Usability Assessment – This Means You
• Web Site Usability Testing

• Related Blogs on web design
• Create A Website: Design With Care
• SEO Website Design and Development Company California
• What Is Web Hosting?

Popularity: 15% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: site usability, web design