The decline in New York Times revenue and readership surprised me somewhat, but I accepted the decline at face value. Given the New York Times atrocious editorial standards throughout the Bush regime, including aiming and abetting war crimes (Judith Miller), the loss in circulation seemed like just desserts.

But today, Comcast's list of the top 50 websites for March came across my desk. Based on unique visitors, guess who's at number 12 with 47 million unique visitors for the month? For refernce, that's just behind Wikipedia, Amazon and ahead of Facebook, CNET, Adobe, CBS and Craigslist: The New York Times Digital.

Comcast top 50 websites by unique visitors

Which set me to thinking what kind of second rate media (advertising sales) strategy would it take to lose money with the number 12 website.

I don't know how reliable the Comcast numbers are so I went and ran some quick checks on Alexa.com.

While the numbers are not as good over at Alexa (the New York Times is number 25 in the United States), the reach is still fabulous. Where the New York Times falls down is in page views. They average only 3 page views per unique visitor.

Contrast those page views with Wikipedia at 5 page views per unique visitor or Google at 7 page views per unique visitor or Facebook with 25 page views per visitor.

nytimes vs wikipedia vs amazon vs digg vs facebook

Why are the page views so low for what should be a multiple page view experience (who opens a newspaper to read one article)?

The silly registration hoops. You can't read NYTimes.com without jumping through hoops. Either you register with them (and they kill off the registrations occasionally, requiring reregistration as I did register once but my login is dead) - or you can't view the site. They've taken to effectively blocking BugMeNot.com which used to be the best way to log in to NYtimes.com in a hurry.

NYtimes registration firewall lockout

It is possible to bypass the login with a very clever automated NYTimes registration bot which generates a totally anonymous profile in a nanosecond. You can link to stories with a special URL which can be generated with a javascript bookmark.

All of these shenanigans are time consuming and annoying. And guess the results - you arrive at NYtimes.com from a weblog on a permalink. You seem something else interesting and want to go and have a look. Paff - you're locked out. Register or forget it (correction: apparently you do get four or five peeks before you hit the registration firewall).

Once you do register, a good number of the stories still won't be accessible without paying a ludicrous fee ($5 for a newspaper article?).

So now the business model is to start letting journalist go. So less high quality (I think they got rid of Judith Miller, no? and lately they've been letting a lot of Republican cats out of a deep dark bag - so let's be optimistic) original content. Less information for the search engines, less possibility of generating original content.

I don't understand these guys. Their assets are:

1. brand
2. original content

What they think are is their third asset - traffic/eyeballs - is only built on the first two. So when they dump a certain amount of the original content, down goes the traffic. The only thing differentiating the NYtimes from all kinds of news and aggregators is their pressroom.

The first attack came on the quality - the brand:

Well, they didn't let Judith Miller go. And her fact-impaired cheerleading for the Iraq war has helped land us in a mess that's going to last at least another 10 years, in my opinion. And kill several thousand more US soldiers, several *hundred thousand* more Iraqi civilians, cost us trillions more dollars, and worse...

The problem the Times has isn't the quantity of reporters, it's the quality. People know they can't rely on truth from the times on important issues, because they *have not* been able to rely on,

Wave two is coming on quantity (number of reporters).

With the traffic, search engine rankings and original content they have, someone in the NYtimes media department is doing a seriously bad job of promoting and monetizing the site.

Years ago Salon.com came up with the model of subscriptions or day passes which require viewing advertising. It's still working for them (and they are looking for New York advertising reps). In the meantime, couldn't somebody clever implement this or come up with something new?

If the New York Times media department doesn't hurry up and figure out how to extract revenue from their brand and original content, the next loss will be traffic. From the loss of traffic, there will be no return.

This is not a critique of their tech department who seem to know what they are doing:

1. high search engine rankings
2. good internal search
3. attractive layout
4. open source contributions

But rather a critique of the business side of operations.

Ken Evoy Pumping Site Sell

Evoy's been at it since the bad old days when the internet was a mess and Site Built It! did have the advantage of actually getting a website up in some form - easier than coding html from scratch for the neophyte.

Throughout SBI's history, Evoy has shrieked about his process and his proprietary tools. On the surface, a clear process and proprietary tools are a good idea. Probably worth the price of admission (or so I thought at the time). The issue with the proprietary tools (which otherwise might be a good deal) is that you can only use them a little bit. Come and play for one hour per week, see you next week. Not exactly inviting brainstorming or creativity.

In contrast, the indepdendent expensive (many of which are free) tools Evoy condemns let you use them as much as you like once you find them.

Over the years, I've learned not to expect much from Evoy's newsletters (sometimes for six months at a time, they get relegated to the read later bin). Still it's worth sometimes checking in on somebody who's multiyear obsession has been selling ecommerce sites. Another perspective.

In the last couple of years the internet has changed and it's actually quite easy to put a website up. Just buy a hosting account (a single domain account is $3 to $7 Ken, not the $10 to $15 you cite), click the one step install button and you have vanilla Wordpress (or Mambo or Joomla or whatever else catches your fancy). Or pay nothing and sign up at Wordpress.com and have a better than vanilla Wordpress install with lots of attractive themes ready and waiting for you and an active forum.

The ease of putting up a high quality website - almost all of which look better than Site Build It websites and are easier to post to - is naturally a huge threat to the SBI business. Why pay Ken Evoy $300 per year per website for hosting which should cost $50?

Evoy's latest missive starts yet another hysterical title "Why blogging is a massive mistake!" Exclamation mark is his.

Writing a weblog is not a massive mistake. Handled properly, a weblog does wonders for your website traffic and search engine standing. But taking away the hype, this time Evoy does have a worthwhile point about weblog type sites (Wordpress in particular) - i.e. they date like stale newspaper. I can confirm the tendency from my own sites.

By publishing a weblog, you are effectively creating just a daily news source.

What happens if you publish a very good article which has value as a permanent reference? It stands alone in your weblog. People come, read the single article and leave. There may be other interesting content on your weblog for them to read but the visitor can't be bothered to ferrret it out. If your writing or content is extremely compelling, perhaps some visitors will read a certain amount of your content. But then they will leave. Which quite frankly for an online journal is fine. You're not selling anything.

But for a business, this isn't so good. What you want is to create an information resource for people in your business, which will bring them back again and again. An information structure which invites them to find immediately the other relevant areas of interest.

And Evoy quite correctly points out that this is the built-in model for Site Build It:

Blog posts are created and stored in chronological order. A good blogger will produce a post that is useful today, but who will read it in three months? Even when bloggers go to the extra effort of archiving their posts by "keyword categories," the articles are dated and not rewritten into coherent definitive articles. Usefulness plummets with time.

How does a Theme-Based Content Site differ? Instead of a stack of old newspapers, each resembles a good resource book about its theme, composed of useful, original articles ("Web pages") that cover related topics in some depth. Written in each small-business owners's unique voice, and based upon that person's experience in the field, they are useful resources that visitors return to over and over.

Evoy correctly points out that a photography weblog would just be one in a million, posting the nattering about the latest cameras and software:

How would a blog be presented? A stream of disjointed photography tips would be organized by "date of post." And posts on any given topic (ex., "portrait lighting") would be separated by time (weeks or months apart), each covering only a certain aspect of the topic. On the other hand...

Definitely not the right one to pull someone into your website. Evoy contrasts the above weblog site with this siloed sitemap for a static site:

site build it silo site

This time Evoy's absolutely right. Someone looking for information on photography lighting would gradually be led through the whole of your website, would bookmark it and come back as a reference. All of this assumes of course that your content is top-notch (and Ken, let's be frank, there's not too many people capable of creating top-notch content, on or off the SBI rolls). But with a static site structure at least you stand a fighting chance of retaining your visitor and becoming a reference.

In any case this is a huge insight. Pages instead of posts something I've been playing around with in the static pages section in Foliovision. Our client sites are also largely hierarchical with the weblog performing weblog functions (added value).

What I've been doing is making a static page instead of a post and then publishing a small announcement on the weblog section.

Unfortunately some of the news outlets which republish my content will not link to static pages or to articles which are more than 24 hours old (a pain in the neck, as after publishing a major article I like to come back to it 12 hours later to proof it and add or correct illustrations).

Going forward, I am going to build up the static pages sections very actively. When I first publish a post, it will go into the weblog, but within a few days. There is one small issue which is comments. We enable comments on pages so visitors will still be able to comment on the static page. But often some of the comments come in right away (on the weblog version).

1. Do I leave the comments on the weblog post or move them to the static page?
2. If I choose to move the comments to the static page, there is no mechanism to do so inside Wordpress. We'd have to build a plugin.

BTW, this sort of question is what you are paying Evoy to solve for you with either no solution (in this case) or his solution. For an inside the box thinker (or someone with very little design sensibility and/or minimal interest in technology), SBI solves a lot of problems. For an existing six-figure business, there are better ways to bring your business online than SBI DIYism. I do agree with Ken that business owners should have better things to do with their time than spend it troubleshooting websites or optimising their sites for Google.

If you're interested in having a closer look at the Site Build It system and way of thinking, Ken Evoy offers a number of free ebooks on writing for the web, selling services and montization. SBI's claim ithat the free ebooks are better than a lot of the pay ebooks out on internet marketing is more or less true. Given the rubbish sold as ebooks that's not necessarily saying a whole lot. The link above bundles several of them into a single zip file for your convenience.

Personally, Ken's writing style drives me up the wall (he's been described as rah-rah), but the bulk of the information is good. I just can't read past his marketing speech. The formatting is bizarre as well. I wish the guy would hire a graphic designer at some point. Why does he write Sidebar and then not make the sidebar a sidebar but whack it right into the middle of the text?

Some other references

• Are theme based site better than blogs?
• Wordpress vs SiteBuildIt
• Ken Evoy attacks blogging and Wordpress

I'd downloaded a 600 MB disk image to use with Parallels. The disk image came wrapped in a .rar format.

Unpacking the .rar file was very difficult.

• StuffitExpander crashed
• Forklift couldn't handle it
• Archive Utility just wanted to compress it further.

Finally I was able to unpack it with IAarchiver, slowly but certainly.

After unpacking, I was offered a directory with three files in it:

• image.img
• image.ccd
• image.sub

Clone CD img ccd sub files

I had no idea Windows used the archaic Mac .img format. It turns out that Windows doesn't. What I'd inadvertently downloaded is what is known as a Clone CD image. I was unable to mount it on my Macbook. No known solution or software for Mac OS X can handle Clone CD images. BIN and CUE files are no problem, but CCD files - there's nothing out there.

Google Images is the greatest SEO reserve left in the world. Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts let the cat out of the bag in 2006 and told the whole world about optimising for Google images. But it's hard work optimising images for Google Images and most webmasters still can't be bothered. There's still gold - or at least visitors - in those hills.

As Chris didn't cover the technical details in-depth, here's a step by step guide for optimising your images for Google images.

Most websites publish their images like this:

<img src="/images/192a/986943.jpg" alt="image">

Where's the problem? Missing height and width, meaningless directory name, meaningless file name, generic alt tag.

Here's what a properly formatted image should look like:

<img src="http://foliovision.com/images/2007/08/zen-fanless-power-supply-400.jpg" alt="Zen Fanless Power Supply" width="400" height="340" />

For bonus points link that image to a larger version of the same properly labelled image:

<a href="http://foliovision.com/images/2007/08/zen-fanless-power-supply-big.jpg" rel="lightbox"><img src="http://foliovision.com/images/2007/08/zen-fanless-power-supply-400.jpg" alt="Zen Fanless Power Supply" /></a>

For extra bonus points put that image in a h5 tag with a proper caption, close to if not identical to the alt tag:

<h5><a href="http://foliovision.com/images/2007/08/zen-fanless-power-supply-big.jpg" rel="lightbox"><img src="http://foliovision.com/images/2007/08/zen-fanless-power-supply-400.jpg" alt="Zen Fanless Power Supply" /></a><br />Fortron PFC ZEN fanless power supply</h5>

If all that sounds like a huge hassle - when you do it for every image - you are absolutely right. It is a huge hassle to optimize for Google images by hand.

Which is why we built the SEO Images (part of Foliopress WYSIWYG) plugin.

With SEO Images, all of the above is happens automatically.

You only need to give the image the correct name (words separated by hyphens) and upload to the correct directory.

Automatically all the rest is added to your image:

• alt tag
• thumbnail (whatever size you prefer)
• link to larger version image
• caption
• width and height
• lightbox

If you want a lot of visitors from Google Images, you only need to use SEO Images for a few months and you will have the rankings and the visitors to go with them.

Here are the Google Images result for our example from above, the Zen Power Supply. Of 107,000 images, spots one and two are from Foliovision.com. The large and the small version of that image.

SEO Images Google Images results

Why a few months? Historically indexing in Google Images is much slower than for the rest of Google.

Chris and Stephen, in the future, please keep our secrets to yourselves!

In any case, people have all kinds of strange setups including one guy with six 15" LCD's all on a special mount. I think he's onto something. As I said, I've gone from a single 30" to a 24" (1920 x 1200) plus a 12" (1280 x 960). At home I now have 20" (1680 x 1050) plus the same 12" (Macbook).

I stopped running the 30" as my Macbook can't do Dual-Link DVI.

I thought my productivity would go down. No way. Substantially up. Managing the windows and flipping between applications was a hassle on the 30".

With a dual monitor setup, all the distractions on small monitor. Work on big monitor.

That said, I much prefer the 24" as a main monitor. I am less productive by an order of magnitude except when web browsing and writing on the 20". It's just not big enough to handle two full size documents (without having 8 or 9 pt antialiased type to squint at). 24" is the sweet spot.

simple dual monitor setup 24" and 12" (macbook plus 1920 x 1200)

Finally, if you can avoid TN screens on your main screen. Sometimes you want to stand up and look at your work. Sometimes you want to lean back and look at your work. You can't do it. The colours go all wonky. Things get dark. The monitor distracts. 

We run fairly streamlined Wordpress installs at Foliovision with about 30 active plugins per site. A lot of them are one-trick ponies developed in-house so we know the code isn't creating a huge load.

But anyone who has been working on Macintosh computers from the old days (System 7, 8 & 9) knows very well that every extensions (and some people were running 50 of them) slows down your compuer and increases the chances of a system conflict. There were whole expensive utilities devoted to keeping extensions and control panels under control. Any one else remember long hours spent with Conflict Catcher?

conflict catcher screenshot

Here's what WPdesigner.com has to say on his own plugin issues:

With the WP Download Monitor plugin, the front page of my blog had to operate with 136 queries on every page load. After uninstalling that plugin, the front page needed only 10 queries to work. 136 versus 10 and all I have to do is give up tracking the downloads, hmmm.. oh what, oh what should I do? I deactivated / uninstalled it, of course.

So some plugins are clearly worse than others. I hope I didn't publish that post recommending Lucia's LinkyLove for DoFollow. In the comments to the post above David Airey notes.

I found the real culprit - the LinkLove plugin for DoFollow comments.

By de-activating it I’ve dropped the queries from 117 to 24 on my blog post with 46 comments.

Lucia's LinkyLove plays complicated games rewarding commenters for more comments with better links. A pox on this sort of brownie point system. I will get DoFollow turned on and will rely on Akismet and common sense to keep the spammers off. Everybody else is welcome to followed links.

Ironically enough David's post recommending Lucia's LinkyLove still stands and is ranked high - that is not taking very good care of one's visitors. Perhaps he just forgot. Even more ironically, Lucia publishes another plugin to track CPU greedy plugins. I don't recommend this plugin, as it is ugly and is less useful than adding a simple PHP tag to your footer to track both database queries and CPU time.

<!--<?php echo $wpdb->num_queries; ?> <?php _e('queries'); ?>. <?php timer_stop(1); ?> <?php _e('seconds'); ?>.-->

At this point you can load any page on your weblog and check the number of database queries and the CPU time just by viewing source. If you are really on a roll, you can remove the html comment markup from around the PHP tag and you will be able to see the load times and database queries without checking source. So will your visitors, but for a half an hour of quick testing it really doesn't matter.

Here's the PHP code alone:

<?php echo $wpdb->num_queries; ?> <?php _e('queries'); ?>. <?php timer_stop(1); ?> <?php _e('seconds'); ?>.

So with 30 Wordpress plugins running, what's the damage on Foliovision.com and client sites? 

wordpress database queries cpu time

On Foliovision.com, 37 queries. 0.465 seconds for the home page and 30 queries. 0.506 seconds for a single post. The client sites are mostly in the same thirtyish queries neighbourhood. Clearly in there are a couple of plugins which are borderline greedy. I'll have Peter do some tests on Monday. For comparision, with over 41 plugins, Saman's install requires over 1.6 seconds to generate a page.

Generally I am happy about this result. It means the base FolioPress suite is quite efficient. Efficiency in coding is very important to me. Alas, the big three in OS have quite forgotten about efficiency: MS Windows, Apple OS X and KDE are all horribly inefficient: I have to run a quad processor to get decent performance out of Apple. Absurd. But malicious inefficiency in coding is a subject for another post.

How important is it to avoid greedy Wordpress plugins? If you get little or no traffic or you are on a dedicated server, it's probably not all that important. But if you are on shared hosting and you ever get Dugg, Slashdotted or listed at Yahoo, watch out. Your hosting may be disabled for a week due to the one or two errant plugins.

Here's a small case study of a plugin gone bad: Comment relish issues #1, #2 & #3. This one has a happy ending as the plugin was eventually repaired and made useable.

Unfortunately a quick excursion over to the Darkside and Internet Explorer (the blinkers through which 92% of the visitors to our clients still see the web - among Folivision vistors Internet Explorer users are a minority), showed that the CSS code just wasn't working. Indentation had gone totally astray.

In the absence of Web Developer's Toolbar for Internet Explorer, there is no way to get instant Internet Explorer preview. The closest thing is to open up the file directly from the server and save it back to the server. Usually, I am set up with two monitors on my desk, a 20" Samsung 205B for the Windows box and an HP LP3065 for the Mac work station. It's just a matter of editing in CSSEdit or BBedit on the Mac, saving onto the server and pressing F5 on the PC keyboard.

We've installed a Linux machine now - the first of many - and I had to give up my 20" Samsung 205B and plug the Windows box back into the HP LP3065. (Both monitors are highly recommended, btw.)

Pushing input and switching keyboards was not efficient (3 movements instead of one, along with a screenflash each time).

So I decided to take the plunge and go looking for a Windows XHTML/CSS editor which would allow me to open up files from the server. It was either that or move a monitor.

html kit screenshot

I'd had a quick run-in with HTML-Kit a couple of nights ago which I found via somed SEO research I was doing (htmlkit are doing some serious link selling) but had not been happy at all with the tool. It was ugly and clumsy. Nothing like being at home on BBedit (which while arguably drab, is not clumsy). The website was particularly stressful with it's ugly and unreadable four column layout. Would you want to trust your html and CSS editor to people who can't build a readable web page? Me neither. While version 292 is free, all future versions and advanced functionality are relatively expensive, with just part of the pro package costing $65. I don't know if the guys at htmlkit have a drug habit they are supporting with their newfound commercial activities and advertising but something is seriously amiss.

FAQ Tastic's default layout

Executive Summary

While not without issues, if you are thinking of using your FAQ page as a live resource you should definitely consider FAQ-Tastic. There's a lot of power under the hood. Don't miss the full FAQ-Tastic review with deployment notes.

If you use Photoshop CS3 and post screenshots to the web, this little droplet will save you a lot of trouble. For some reason it is impossible to convert ImageReady or previous Photoshop versions Droplets to Photoshop CS3.

Installation and Usage Instructions:

1. download the zip
2. decompress
3. move to the folder of your choice (I have a special folder for Photoshop and Image Ready droplets)
4. title your images for upload (spaces are okay - PS3 will convert them to hyphens)
5. drop your images on the droplet
6. your web ready GIF's will appear in your desktop folder

For equally unknown reasons is also extremely difficult to create a droplet which will actually open your image and resave it as you would like right in the folder where it lies.

Even my version here will save the GIF file to your desktop, rather than the folder where the original lies (my preference). Desktop isn't bad, as you can then upload the image and archive the extra desktop files every couple of days in a date named folder in a desktop archive folder.

Current advice on the Photoshop forum is to use the Image Processor or to move to Fireworks (a program I and many other Photoshop users have never opened up, let alone want to leave running constantly in the background). Image Processor is a nice piece of kit, but it's suited to bigger jobs, whole folders. What I need is something to convert my screenshots from .png to .gif or .jpeg for posting to the web. Nothing against PNG - it's a great format, but my web server will be very full very fast with the 500 KB files it generates. Moreover, much as I like images, there's no reason for anyone to have to wait that long to download screenshots.

So I need a droplet just to take the PNG and save it as GIF. This is that droplet.

BTW, you should never convert your screenshots to jpeg, except a very high quality compression algorithm. The only reason to prefer jpeg to GIF for screenshots - which are usually mainly text - is if they include photos.

References:

• This is the tutorial which finally set me straight on how to create saving droplets in Photoshop after wasting an hour reading the incoherent bluster about Fireworks on the Adobe Forums and in Adobe Help Documents.
• This is the best of the Adobe documentation on Photoshop Actions (closely related to Droplets).

1. no right minded developer would ever let his computer get to this state.
2. no competent sysadmin would give employees the leeway to do this on the corporate network

Microsoft Windows System Tray Run Amok

Some good pointers and getting the invevitable Autorun out of there - which is something which will be useful for us at Foliovision:

Using Sysinternals' AutoRuns tool I had a look at all the different places that can be used for running software on logon or boot, and apart from all the (presumably) tiny gadgets and widgets I also found a lot of the ubiquitous pre-loading parts of all sorts of common software: Adobe's PDF Reader, Microsoft Office, something from iTunes and several others....

Nobody in their right minds would boot their machine in the morning and manually launch Acrobat Reader, all MS office apps and every application they might possible use that day just to have them ready. It is immediately apparent to even the novice user that this is probably not making the machine more responsive. 

But this is - almost - exactly what happens with all the auto run entries: You just don't see them on the screen immediately. So one thing I always do after installing any software is double-check whether it just registered some sort of auto run and if so remove it.

 

This is the result you are aiming for at the end:

Windows XP System Tray in Healthy State

Normally we do all this by hand, but I am going to try the Autoruns tool. It looks like a great way to speed up the cleaning process. Check Daniel's article for how to detox an XP computer without formatting the drive. Frankly, I think if I was going to go to this much trouble I would just move the data off and format and then back. There are too many things that can go wrong if you don't format the drive. But in these days of 500 GB standard hard drives, his tips willl become more valuable.

20080206 Update

I've found a great tool for cleaning out the start menu: Mike Lin's Startup Control Panel. Autoruns is wonderful but it is a bit overwhelming for non-programmer types.

Don't let the long name deceive you. Startup Control Panel is just 34 kb. As Mike says "like all my programs, it's very small and won't burden your system". I recommend the .exe version which you run only when you need to. The less clutter in the way of startup the better.

Startup Control Panel screenshot

BONUS TIP

While you are there, be sure to avoid Mike's Clipomatic. While attractive and including the functionality I'd like, Clipomatic has weird issues on XP which prevent it from functioning correctly.

M8 Free Clip

I've had to keep the Foliovision Windows boxes on the very ugly but functional M8 Free Clipboard. If anyone has any better ideas for a free or inexpensive multi-clipboard, I'm all ears.