Tag: internet

Stupid IT department

First webmail, now Del.icio.us. Actually, Delicious went first. The webmail ban isn’t supposed to go in for another week. Why is this annoying? Because I bookmark work-related sites through Delicious. Sure, that’s not all I use it for. But a big chunk of my bookmarks there are reference for work. And now I can’t get to them. And I’m not saying they don’t have the right to block what they want, because it’s their network, and they can block all IP addresses divisible by 17 if they want. I’m just saying it’s stupid, it makes me less effective, and it annoys me to no end.

Marketing your content

I have a friend with a background in marketing. He’s the one who sent me the Comcast complaining article. We’ve been talking about marketing and the internet. The two of us come from completely different perspectives on how we consume content online. I’ve just introduced him to Google Reader and the concept of subscribing to an RSS feed. He seems to be enjoying it, and even shared an article with other people on his GTalk buddy list. I complained to him that he shared a link to a NYTimes article that didn’t have the full text in the RSS feed. This is a pet peeve of mine – I read almost no websites that don’t offer full-text RSS feeds. Techdirt talks about how full-text feeds are better. Feedburner does, too. But NYTimes.com doesn’t do it. Are they stupid? I don’t know. A little Googling suggests that there’s a lot of disagreement on whether or not a partial-text feed drives more traffic to the site. That is, if you have a feed that doesn’t show the full article, do more people actually click through and come to your site, where you probably have ads? Or do most people (Like me) just skip it? Techdirt makes the point that the real bulk of your traffic comes not from your regular feed subscribers, but from them sharing it with their friends or on their blogs. Things get passed around on the popular sites – when something hits the front page of Digg, it’s probably going to show up on a lot of other popular sites. That can generate way more traffic than you’d ever get from your subscribers themselves, even if they clickthrough on every RSS item. My friend says that NYTimes is not dumb, and they’ve probably researched where they make their money, and decided that partial feeds are the way to go. I’m less inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt, but I realize that the way I consume content is not the way everyone does, and I’m probably in the minority. We may be a growing minority, but NYTimes doesn’t make its money on what people will be doing in 10 years. I will always provide a full-text feed. But I don’t make my living with this blog, so I have the luxury of doing what I want rather than what might drive more clicks. I can’t bring him around to my way of thinking, though. But I’m still working on it.

Drupal and the Blog API

I wish someone had told me you had to enable the Blog API module before you could use all the cool blogging tools like Flickr’s “Blog This” or Firefox plugin ScribeFire. I tried setting up both, and kept getting unhelpful errors. It looked like my username and password were wrong. This was frustrating, because I was sure my username and password were correct. After significant Googling, I finally found a helpful explanation. And now it works perfectly. You can see the previous post, which I sent straight from Flickr. So, hopefully now this page will be one more Google hit explaining that, if you want an external site or application to access your xmlrpc.php file, you’d better turn on the Blog API module.

Drupal, SEO, and you

I’ve been getting annoyed by a few things about this blog. First, in the last sixty days, exactly 28% of the pageviews on the site are one page – the community bitch page about Vector Security. The percentage is even higher if you include some other random pages that come up on a Google search for “vector security” and related terms. Which brings me to the second point – Drupal’s default “Clean URLs” are crap for search engine indexing. If none of this makes sense to you, stop reading now. Go read something else, like Bad Astronomy Blog or Whatever or any of the other millions of blogs out there. Some of them are certainly talking about something that interests you. But if you’re interested in what I’m doing to help people find me, read on. I want people to find me based on stuff I write about a lot – complaining, sports, probably some politics when we get closer to November. I appreciate the people who come here looking for Vector Security, but that’s not really my focus here. So I took some steps to become more search-engine-friendly. SEO, if you will. First, I installed multiping. By default, Drupal isn’t that good at pinging Technorati and whatnot. I think you can set it up with cron, but I don’t understand cron, and don’t feel like learning. Multiping takes the cron out of pinging. Now, Technorati gets updates whenever I post, and they can share my posts with the world. Then I added trackbacks. Trackbacks are one of those things, like the Metric system, that sound like a really good idea, but depend on widespread adoption to really succeed. But I figure it can’t hurt to be trackback-enabled. And I added pathauto. Now, the link for this post (As opposed to the link to the front page) is complainthub.com/blog/drupal-seo-and-you instead of complainthub.com/node/943. This is much more informative, and I think it’s much better for search engine indexing. So we’ll see how it goes. Either it will be awesome, and my traffic will go through the roof, or it will be exactly the same. Or somewhere in between. I’m betting on somewhere in between.

Just let me do my job

LifeHacker | IM Can Reduce Workplace Interruptions, Study Shows It has always driven me crazy that so many workplace IT departments block various web pages deemed as harmful to productivity. My philosophy is:

  • If I’m using too much bandwidth, reprimand me
  • If I’m not doing my job, reprimand me
    Otherwise, trust me to be an adult and do my job. Who are you to say what web sites I might need to do my job? At my previous job, we used GTalk all the time for legitimate work purposes (In addition to non-work purposes) before they blocked it. Dozens of times I’ve been researching a work problem and come up against a blocked website. I spend A LOT of time on the computer. Too much, some might say. And some of it is time spent at work on non-work things. I freely admit this. But I get my job done. Sometimes, GTalk helps me do that. Sometimes some sketchy-looking forum helps me do that. Sometimes Google Documents helps me do that. And sometimes I just want to putz around on eBay for fifteen minutes to clear my head. I think if employers started worrying more about actual employee productivity than micromanaging internet access, we’d all be a lot better off.

Help Firefox set a world record

Download Day 2008 is coming. We’re just not sure when. They’re trying to set a world record for software downloads in a day. Since you should be using Firefox 3 as soon as it comes out, this is a great opportunity. In case you haven’t tried Firefox, it is light years ahead of Internet Explorer. Even IE7, which Microsoft put out to implement a bunch of functionality that’s been in Firefox and other browsers for quite some time, is a steaming pile of crap compared to Firefox. Anyway, join in. It’ll be fun to watch the Mozilla Foundation’s servers melt with the download traffic.

Getting rid of some books

Last night I joined BookMooch to get rid of some of the extra books I have lying around that no one will ever read again. They range from old paperbacks I bought for plane trips to pretty new hardbacks that I read but didn’t love. I mean, I’m not giving away my tattered paperback Catch-22 that I’ve read a dozen times, or my signed copy of Halting State. But I have plenty of books that I don’t need. BookMooch works by giving you points for giving away books. 1/10 of a point for listing a book you’re willing to give. One point for actually sending it, and 3 for sending it overseas. For each point, you can request a book from someone else. The sender always pays shipping. So I listed eleven books last night that I’m willing to part with. Within an hour, I already had four requests, and by this morning it was up to six. So it looks like I’m making a trip to the post office tomorrow. And I have some space on our bookshelves for some new (Or new to me) books. I think the wife is a little skeptical about the whole thing – we’re trying to get rid of stuff to make room for the incoming baby, not get random people to send us books. But I think she’ll be fine as long as I keep a good ratio of sent-to-received books.

An internet company with customer service?

This story has popped up on at least a half dozen sites I read more or less regularly over the last few days, and it’s pretty interesting. Zappos, who are as far as I know the ONLY place to buy shoes online (I mean, the only place it’s worth your time to buy shoes), hire new employees, train them for four weeks, then offer them $1000 to quit. This means that they only get employees who actually want to be there. I’ve said over and over how Dell was so much cooler when they still cared about customer service, but it’s a little more surprising to see this coming from an industry where there’s a lot more room to play with the prices. I would expect Zappos to be able to better compete on price because there’s so much markup on shoes (One of the few things I learned about the money side of the business while working at Boater’s World in high school – the store makes tons more profit on shoes and clothes than on electronics). Dell, meanwhile, has a much smaller profit margin on their computers, so it seems logical that they’d have to compete with HP and the others on something else. I’ve never bought from Zappos, in part because I have weird feet and it’s often hard for me to find comfortable shoes. But if their customer service is as great as people make it out to be, maybe I should try.