I participated in #Blogchat this past Sunday and the morning after I saw this post by Allison Boyer from Blogworld, inspired by a Tweet I wrote, “Whatever you do, you can’t make everyone happy.  If you got a hater or two, you’re probably doing something right.”  Following is excerpt from her post:

Easy enough to say, but I also definitely understand why some people get upset when a hater starts leaving comments. We put a lot of work into our blogs, to the point where they feel like our children. If someone doesn’t like our child, that’s anger-inducing…but when someone makes fun of our child? Well, I don’t know about you, but it makes me want to lash out right back.

It pays to remember what @EGlue mentioned – if someone is hating on you for some reason, it’s probably an indication that you’re doing a good job with your blog in general. People may not like a certain post you write or a certain decision you make for your blog, but they feel connected enough that they have to leave a comment. You want your community to feel so invested in your blog that they leave emotional comments when they don’t like someone. If you’re community’s reaction is, “Meh,” that’s probably an indication that you’re not doing a very good job connecting with them.

And remember too, there’s a difference between a hater and a troll. A hater might hate you, but they make valid points or actually have something to say, even though it might come out in a not-so-nice way. A troll, on the other hand, is just trying to piss you off (or piss off another commenter). They don’t actually care about your blog, your community, or even, in many cases, the topic. Haters warrant a response, though do so tactfully. Trolls rarely warrant a response and sometimes even warrant being deleted, depending on their comments and your blog’s policies.

The bottom line? Although negativity often hurts, try to find the constructive criticism in it and remember that just because someone has a different opinion doesn’t mean that you’re doing something wrong as a blogger. Work on building up that thick skin and keep moving forward. – Allison Boyer, Overhead on #Blogchat: Haters (@EGlue)

Yep, 140 characters doesn’t leave us much room to elaborate does it?  Thanks for the post Allison!

I like her distinction between a troll and a hater.  She is absolutely right, that trolls are only interested in getting you to react.  But “haters” are people that care (a lot) about the topic, or at least care enough about your treatment of the topic to let tell you a thing or two.

A tip here to keep in the back of your mind (or as a sticky note on your monitor) is that no matter what, your initial reaction to any criticism is naturally always going to be to go into “defensive mode” and that’s likely to be the wrong reaction.  Take a break.  Step away from the computer.  Think about the value of addressing valid criticism and disregard any haters where the middle ground simply won’t be found.

One of the tips we give give to our clients at Infamia is to stick to addressing the facts and leave subjectivity out of the discussion.  Everyone has an opinion, not everyone is going to feel the same way about it.  However, addressing the facts as to how you came to your conclusions and claims, is insightful and lets them know that you are listening.

Ultimately, knowing your haters is going to make you a better writer, decision maker, business person, leader, etc. in that you will be well aware where the friction exists between you and your readers. The haters that bothered to leave you a piece of their mind, gave you invaluable information as to where you might want to consider focusing and improving your message.

These are opportunities to truly show that you do in fact care.

BTW, a word to any would-be haters out there: it’s far easier to destroy than to build.  There is no real value in being a critic, unless you’re also willing to provide an alternative solution.

wordpress

I am picky.  I like substance rather than sensationalistic drivel. I get irritated by bad prose.  I’ve been known to correct people’s grammar.  And I actually spell out “you” and “our” when I text.  As thus, I rarely find a blog post I’m willing to pass on.  (Oh, the foreshadowing!) голова болит секс

голова болит секс

Of course, now I’m going to tell you that I did find a blog post worth passing on.  It’s from Matt, over at wordpress.org, on how to keep wordpress secure.  But don’t just stay on the first paragraph.  This is more about wordpress.  If you’ve ever been online, if you are now online, or if you intend to be online ever, you owe it to yourself to read that, and take it to heart.  This applies to car maintenance as much as it applies to wordpress or to any other online thing you do.  Matt doesn’t sew (I dabble at it), but the premise is ageless:  an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

I’ve expounded on this before.  Coincidentally, I just read some examples in a magazine that continue to car analogy.  Tales of a forgotten oil change costing the owner the price tag of a new engine; ignored brake pads that ended up ruining the rotors; ruined transmissions; the list goes on.

• голова болит секс

This post brings it down to earth: regular maintenance is a known cost. Budget for it. Lack of regular maintenance (leading to a hacked site, for example) can cost many thousands of dollars.  I was looking at a hacked site just this week:  Over eight hours at emergency rates just to investigate.  The site may require tens of thousands of dollars worth of work to make sure that all vulnerabilities are closed.

голова болит секс

I guess routine maintenance is your “business decision”.  Just call me when you get hacked. I may even be nice and not add the “I told you so” tax.

wordpress

I got an email about WordPress today.  The summary: Wordpress, at least the public version, does not scale well.  So, here I go…

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I’m not sure it’s the ‘public’ version that doesn’t scale well.  Some gripes with wordpress are really a LAMP stack gripe: Few complain about the L (Linux) and M (MySQL) parts of LAMP.  But Apache can be a hog, and PHP has the same issues as any other interpreted language.  Plus, no native db connection pooling (a downside of Apache MPM).

In benchmarks, WP out-of-the-box on an untuned server can serve an  over 600,000 requests a day.  I’d say that’s not bad for something that takes all of an hour to install.

If you want to scale beyond that, I don’t know of anything that can do so without effort.  If you want over a million requests a day, you gotta pay someone who knows what they’re doing. (more on that later). секс сайты г нальчика

As for bad plugins…they’re a curse.  Designers, non-developers, and non-sysadmins like WordPress because they can throw up some code, add some plug-ins, hack at a theme, and presto they got a website.  Then it breaks.  Then they blame WordPress.  Setting up a WordPress site can be easy; that does not mean that doing so correctly is also easy or simple, and it does not mean that maintaining it is easy or simple.  There is no Ronco “set-it-and-forget-it” website. You have to maintain it, keep an eye on those plug-ins, updates, and make sure everything you install is well-tested.  So, does WordPress encourage designers to deploy bad plug-ins?  Perhaps.  But why would a designer be running your site anyway? You won’t let your developer/sysadmin/network guru design your site.  Why would you let your designer be your developer/sysadmin/network guru?  (If you’re thinking “how bad could a plug-in be?”, the links below tell the tale of one site which went from 30s page load times to under 0.5s load times just be disabling one bad plug-in.)

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Back to scalability.  Wordpress benches about 650k requests a day out-of-the box.  It can bench  over a million with a  well-designed plug-in or two.  Then you can tweak further: WordPress.com gets roughly 250 mil unique visitors/month.  Sure, that’s not out of the box; you gotta work a little at it.

Check out:

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WordPress.com stats:

http://en.wordpress.com/stats/

Slideshow on WordPress scalability:

http://barry.wordpress.com/2007/07/22/high-performance-wordpress/

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pill authors celexa quitting celexa effects side

non-sequitur? I think not

Word Association Time, kids:

Georgia? Peanuts.  Peanuts? Salmonella.  Salmonella?  Widget!

“Widget?!“, you say? 

Yes. Widget, I say. And I admit when I first saw it, I also thought that was an old pairing of words.  I mean, it’s Widget!  It hangs out with the hip crowd: social media, facebook, macs. iPhones, for crying out loud!  iPhones have widgets. “Widget” certainly does Not hang out with them FDA types.  But, like all us mere mortals have to pay taxes, so are mere technologies appropriated by all facets of government, and to the left you see a barely breathing example of the FDA Salmonella Widget.

Where do I get mine, you ask?  Well, mosey on over to the FDA.  Bring three forms of ID, a birth certificate, three passport-style photos…

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Facebook, about two weeks ago, updated its terms of use.  The Force did not like that. Here is one excerpt:

Sure, you can choose not to use Facebook at all, but that doesn’t mean a thing. Someone can still take your photo, slap it on Facebook, and now neither you nor the author of the photo can stop Facebook from using the photo in whichever way they please

[ http://mashable.com/2009/02/16/facebook-tos-privacy/ ]

Well, fear no more, masses.  Facebook this morning informed me (and presumably you, too) that “Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use”.  

Go ahead.  Pat yourselves on the back.  You deserve it.

?  Well you probably should take a few minutes to upgrade to the new and improved version.  There are several features that unlock when you run the new and improved “ga.js” version.

Oh yeah, what’s the new stuff got for me? vytorin 10 20

Lots of improvements.   For starters, it runs faster and a smaller foot print on your webserver, your system administrator would be happy to know.  But wait!  There’s more… Google several of improved abilities to customize you tracking code.  Ecommerce business owners in particular have a lot more customizing options made available to them when they upgrade.

Do you have PDF’s or files available for download that you could like to track?  You can now track those in your reports as well!

If you have subdomains, you can also setup ga.js to track those.

You can even track users as they jump from domain to another, which interest us since we have www.infamia.com (our corporate website) and www.webconsultingdc.com (our blog), and if you have more than one website, it should interest you too.

You can also segement your visitor types into your reports.   This is really important for associations in Washington DC that like to track their members seperately from non-members.

And then there’s the future: Google has said that it will support the legacy code up to a year… maybe a bit longer,  but eventually they will discontinue it.   You’ll see new features appear for those that have converted, why be left behind now?

Google Analytics Urching.js or Ga.js, which one do I have?

Okay, what version of Google Analytics do I run?

Easy, open your browser, pull up your website, and select View Source.   PC users right click on the page and and Mac users…  Mickey?

[Mickey's note for Mac users lanoxin : In safari, hit command-option-U or select "View Source" from the View menu; in Firefox hit command-U or select "Page Source" from the "View" menu.]

What you’re looking for is whether you have a bit of code that has urchin.js or whether it has ga.js.   The thumbnail on the right is a snippet from Google’s Migration Guide.

Alright, so how do I implement the new version?

Well, you can either contact us and we’ll do it for you.  Or if you’re crafty enough replacing the code pretty straight forward.   Customizing it to your business needs is another article but you can get it started.   Log into your Google Analytics account, edit your website’s profile, and click on “Check Status” at the top right.

Kinda hidden, click Check Status for your website's Profile (top right)

Once you’re in there you’ll see the code at the bottom, you’ll want to copy that and replace your Legacy GA code with this new code, on every page of your website.   This goes without saying, but I’m going to say it anyway, careful not to mess up any other code within those pages.  In fact, do a backup first!

Keep in mind the appropriate location for your ga.js code is at the bottom.  For large websites, the best place is to put it in a dynamically referenced footer so you don’t have to keep adding the same code into every page.

With complex websites such as e-commerce websites, you may require some programming particularly if you’re interested in taking advantage of some of the customizing features available now available to.   Get in touch with us, we would be delighted to help.

Federal Contractor Misconduct Database

Mandy at Project On For Government Oversight couldn’t wait to share on POGO’s blog about tomorrow’s official release, so neither could we.

“So we’ve been teasing you about the upcoming re-release and updating of POGO’s Federal Contractor Misconduct Database.  While we’re officially releasing it tomorrow, since the President just signed the FY 2009 Defense Authorization Act creating a government-wide (though not publicly available) database of information regarding the integrity and performance of federal contractors and grantees, we couldn’t help but share the fact that it’s AVAILABLE NOW.”

Tsk. Tsk.  Bad federal contractors!

This upgrade contains 50 more federal contractors that have gotten themselves into trouble.  In addition, there are some layout improvements and a new sort by Enforcement Agency feature.

So how much have the 100 had to pay for their bad deeds since 1995?

Grand Total of $23.6 Billion

Yes, thats 23… BILLION… with a B.

Has that happen to you?

I signed up with Gubb to manage my grocery list and now there’s no more missing gorcery list problems. There’s no more list problems, period.

Yeah, but I have room for one more overly feature rich, complex program to help manage my life and business like I have room for another set of in-laws, why should I use this thing?

I found this little “web 2″ gem to be just about perfect. You can definitely squeeze this one in. Gubb.net lets you make, lists, that’s it. Simple. And you can access them through your web enabled cell phone. The sign up, setup, all of it, was a breeze and I got right into using it in about 10 seconds. They strictly follow the “don’t make me think” rules of engagement. It’s just absolutely useful.

Great, now the in-laws want us to vacation with them. They’re talking about camping and they want my wife and I to bring… everything. I don’t want to get swamped with email requests for BBQ chips, how do I get this organized between us all without losing it?

First take a deep breath. No worries, mate. Just share your list with your in-laws, or whoever you want to help your get organized. You just add their email address and your off to the races, or camping, or whatever you do with your in-laws. Its one of the best list sharing tools I have come across.

Wow. Well, the in-laws just called and they said they liked this thing so much that they were wondering if they can post the list to their blog. Yes, they’re bloggers, and apparently somewhat famous, probably writing about how much they enjoy bugging me.

Common, this is web 2.0 stuff. There’s always an RSS feed. Simply click under options and find the Feed that’s associated with with the list, copy, paste into your favorite news reader or blog tool, and that’s it! You can attach your list anywhere frankly, with anything that understands RSS technology. For your privacy, your feed reader should support “authenticated feeds”, which simply means you need to enter a username and password to access the feed the first time. You can turn this authentication off if need be.

What else can this baby do?

Check out iCal. If you have Outlook 2007, this feed type integrates with your Outlook Calendar really well. So for example, you can track a list of appointments on Gubb that will appear as a calendar in your Outlook and you’ll be able to identify any conflicts that you may come across your other calendars (use Outlooks Overlay feature). Very easy to use together.

I love it and I love you.

I know bro. I know.

Google Antimatter?

Summer 2008: in a planet called Earth, which we seem to inhabit for now, a new power seems to have taken over. A once-little search engine has rose to dominate our specie’s most vital method of communication: the Internet. No one dares compete with them. Erstwhile monoliths are courting this new entity like timid schoolgirls, and bright new start-up dream of being assimilated into this new power’s all-encompassing aura. You and I have already been assimilated. Resistance is futile. [This space for lease for your own cliché.] In case you haven’t guessed it yet, it’s Google of course. The Mater of the Search.

So, in the peak of Google’s success and popularity, in the world where we “google” things before we search for them, where Gooogle is a subject, verb, object, and all other parts of speach, what’s a mom-and-pop startup to do?

Enter Cuil, stage left. Now, I’m not sure whether their owners have any kids, but for those to whom it matters Cuil’s owners are married. (To each other). They decided to do what us normal google-fearing won’t dare do: Start a new search engine. And the Internet is abuzz.

Unlike Google (and, for both of you who don’t use google, pretty much every search engine out there) Cuild does not rely on link popularity to rank search results. Instead, results are ranked based on content relevancy: You’re searching for “blue” and a page talks a lot about “blue”? Good match. No matter how popular or unpopular it is. Groundbreaking! Innovative! Oh wait…isn’t that what we used

do to, before Google came and rocked our world? Well, admittedly we should have better analysis tools today, so who knows. It may work. Let’s take it for a spin.

Cuil People

Ernesto on Cuil.com

download kiss before dying a

I got this link from Ernesto, so I figured I’d search for him. As you can see below, I found some blog posts mentioning him.

The first thing I noticed is a different look. No longer a list of links…now I get three columns with descriptive text for every link and sometimes an image (but more on that later). Still about 10 results per page, though

Oh look, and there are pictures. How neat. But wait a minute…none of these pictures are Ernesto. And I see a lot of replies he left on blogs, but where’s his personal site? his Linked IN page? The same search on Google shows this blog as the second link and Ernesto’s Bigsight.org and Linkedin.com pages are next.

me on cuil

Next I decided to search for my narcissistic self. Better luck there: My LinkedIn profile and BigSight.org profile are both right on top. But wait! who’s that man looking back at me? I hope I don’t look that old, and I certainly never had so professional a photo taken of me. And if Cuil can look in the future and tell me that’s me in 15 years, then, well, you tell me what you think. Some other information about me that also shows up on Google shows up here, as does some pages that I don’t see on Google.

So I said to myself, then: “Self,” I said, “when you’re searching for Ernesto or yourself, what are you really searching for?” I thought and thought about that and decided if someone was searching for a person, they were trying to find background information and contact information. I guess both Cuil and Google succeed in that, in different ways.

cuil on cuil

I decided to get a little recursive with all this introspection and search Cuil for Cuil. Guess what? I didn’t find Cuil. I found instead French cuisine links, links about towns and villages of sligo, information about the Scottish glens. But no search engines. I also searched for “web search engines” and again I didn’t find cuil. But I did find links that reference searching the web, which of course make sense since Cuil searches the content, stupid.

Real Cuil Search

Enough abstract searching. Earlier in the day I was honestly searching on Google for an outdoor WiFi extender product I remember looking at a while back. Google had let me down, so I gave Cuil a go. At first I was disappointed: old news stories, blog posts, and reviews. When I started reading the excerpts however, the word I was looking for came up in-text: 12 times on the first page, 11 times on the second, didn’t count on the third: Meraki. Now, does this mean that Cuil was successful? On one hand, it didn’t point me to the Meraki site; on the other, I was able to find it on Cuil whereas on Google Meraki does not show up at all on the first 3 page (I didn’t go further), except as a sponsored ad. (I should have read those I guess).

Cuil’s approach vs. Google’s

Cuil’s text-analysis analysis approach seems to favor wordy sites: blogs, news, technical dissertations. In theory, this would also work well for less popular subjects whose keywords are similar to more popular ones. But why did Meraki not show up? Meraki’s website focuses more on Internet connectivity than extending your wifi signal. Their Solution is not to the problem of extending WiFi signal but rather to the problem of getting Internet to the vast number of people who aren’t connected. OK, good theory but if I search for “get the people connected through WiFI” or other meraki-tailored searches, Cuil tells me “No results because of high load”. Getting past that, I still don’t get Meraki. I also noticed that Meraki’s site is heavy on Flash. Could it be that Cuil does not index Flash files (a known problem with search engine optimization)? I searched for something else I searched earlier: “Transmission steering”. This also got me the “high load” error. Good to see the word about Cuil is getting out.

Google on the other hand does solely rank pages based on their use of keywords…rather, based on the popularity and relevancy of links to these pages: If you write about topic X and link to site Y, site Y gets more points. With this strategy, popular sites get higher rankings, which works most of the time. However if you’re searching on an esoteric subjects (transmission steering, anyone?), you get a lot of car links and transmission links and steering links and even break links…but finding transmission steering links is an exercise in patience if not outright sisyphian. A few days ago I was searching for a solution to a compatibility problem between two pieces of hardware: I instead found a lot of links to reviewers and sellers of said hardware.

Summary

Well, it seems Cuil’s servers are down for searches that are not cached, or so it appears. This means I can’t test my theory on searching for esoteric subjects on Cuil. But I’ll keep working on it for the next few days and report back. In the meantime, comment with your experiences on Cuil so we can find out where it works, where it fails, and what we can use it for. Competition is good, and someone challenging Google can’t hurt.

How many of you out there have registered more than a few domain names? Considering how hard it is to simply find an available “.com” domain name, I would venture to say there’s a lot of you that have more than one. It make sense, you want to sure they’re available to you when someday in the future when you’re ready to do something with them, they’ll be there. And, if you like some of my more entrepreneurial clients, a few domain names can sometimes be a lot of domain names.

As much as I deplore the illegal practice of domain squatting (aka cybersquatting), it is certainly legal to register domain name for a future use. If you’re lucky enough to even find a decent domain name that isn’t already held by someone else, you should consider registering today, because really may not be there for you tomorrow.

That being said, NameDrive is a great service to park your domain names with them and here’s why:

If you use Register.com or GoDaddy as your registrar, you duly pay your annual registration fee to keep the domain under your ownership and control. Then, like most of us, we get to work on creating a masterpiece of a website, which of course takes time.

Until the website is complete, what is actually running under your shiny new domain name? Advertisements. And guess who’s profiting from them? Surprise! Not you. Your beloved registrar, yes, the company you just seemingly paid for the privilege for them to advertise on your domain name.

Argh, ok, so why not you? I agree, why not you!? It’s your domain name right?

Ok, queue in NameDrive. They help you sort this mess out. You sign up with them, they run ads on you domain name… and generously split the ad proceeds with you. Far better deal if you ask me.

How?

You simply point your domain name’s DNS to their servers, and they handle the rest. You can pick from a variety of templates. You can select what types of ads are suitable to run under you domain name (you wouldn’t run football ads under a “KittensNPuppiesForMe.com” would you? No of course not.) Or you can just let NameDrive put up a generic template and forget about it.

They’ll manage the ads, rotate out lower performing ads out, rotating better performing ads in, and provide you with statistics of how many visitors and click-throughs your domain names have attracted on their very own.

There are several other companies that compete against NameDrive, but most of them are for professional domain name… hogs. They offer services to questionable practice of bulk domain name buying and dumping. It’s not quiet illegal but not exactly nice either. These competitors want the big fish, and they set a minimum number of domain names you should have in tote. Usually anyone with less than 100 domains they’re not interested.

But you can place your one domain name if you like with NameDrive, they’re happy to have you no matter what. There’s no minimum stay, no contract, no setup fees, nothing. You put your domains in, and keep them there until your ready to do something else with them.

How much can I make with them and how do I know what they’re earning?

From NameDrive’s reports, you’ll easily see what kind of traffic they get without any heavy lifting. But before you get too excited with delusions of easy money, its not exactly easy.

In fact most of your domain names will likely not earn a dime. But don’t throw in the towel, it just means these domain names need to be developed into a full fledge website before traffic starts to generate. It’s a rare gem, that you domain name alone, has enough typed-in and residual traffic to make cash.

Regardless of your luck, NameDrive can still help you. Apart from identifying if your domain name is a diamond or dud, they have additional services available to you that can still help you make some cash. For example, if you want to sell your domain name, you can put it on the chopping block with them. They’ll help you find a buyer and broker a sale for you.

Or more interesting, NameDrive’s latest service called BuildingBlocks helps domain name owners find interested professional web developers, to help you develop your website concepts as part of a revenue sharing approach.

Whatever you end up doing, if you have a few domain names just sitting there collecting ad revenue for your registrar, I would consider parking them with NameDrive and make sure that revenue goes into your pocket, not the registrar. Good luck!