Jimmy Z

Wordpress 2.3.1 finally came to Fantastico on my Hostmonster account, so I have finally upgraded. I haven’t seen any problems yet. I’m hoping that most bugs have been smoothed over from the 2.3 release.

One of the things that I’m most excited about for this release of Wordpress is the native support for tagging. I wrote a post a little while back on category cleaning for my blog. I used to treat categories like tags, but I’ve changed my thinking and the way that I organize my blog. I now have 1 category per post (unless I really have to go to 2).

Categories are like folders in a filing cabinet, tags are more like the index of a book, describing the contents so that you can easily find them later on.

After having used del.icio.us for almost 2 years now, I’ve found tags to be a really effective way of indexing my bookmarks. I can almost always find what I’m looking for very, very quickly. I’m hoping that tagging will come in useful for my blog as well.

Tagged with: blogging, tagging, wordpress

This is Part 2 of my E-Myth vidcast series. The past few days I’ve had a lot of fun documenting processes and practices as Brian and I have focused our work on our business rather than working too hard in our business. We’re already seeing some results. I share what we’ve done in this vidcast.

Click To Play

Seriously, I’m interested in knowing how your company/organization documents its processes, procedures, etc. What kind of “operations manual” do you use?

This is my first video blog/vidcast entry (even though I accidentally call it a screencast in the video). I hope you enjoy watching.

Click To Play

One of the big ideas of the Web 2.0 movement is that the web browser is a viable platform for building rich applications. Common examples of this included Gmail, Writely (now Google Docs), and one of my favorites - Gliffy. This idea has been proven pretty well, and Apple has made Safari the platform for developing iPhone applications, even though there are rumors now that Apple will be opening up some kind of SDK.

A lot has happened since Web 2.0 has become a major buzz word. New trends are becoming apparent every day. One trend I think is especially interesting is that Web Apps themselves are now becoming platforms for new applications. For example, Facebook has opened up to developers to build cool apps that run in the Facebook social networking environment. The Google Personalized Homepage offers another platform for people to develop small widget applications. More companies are following.

The opening up of APIs isn’t a new concept in itself. Web services was a major push of the Web 2.0 movement and we saw a flood of ‘mashups’ that mostly didn’t go anywhere. However, web services and web app platforms are now finding value. In September, Facebook, Accel and Founders Fund launched a Facebook fund to give investment money to the most promising Facebook App ideas. Why code up a new social network application, when you can build your application inside one of the major social networking applications?

Twitter is becoming a platform for new age communication. In a “Scaling Twitter”presentation at RailsConf, Blaine shared that 90% of requests to Twitter were through their API. People are using Twitter for purposes beyond telling your friends about every mundane detail of their lives. Phil shared some ways that people are extending twitter by creating Twitterbots. Twitterbots are using Twitter as a platform to send messages through SMS, email, RSS, etc.

Seth Godin talks about his vision of Web 4.0 in an interview with Gerhard. He basically describes the web that is focused on events in your life. For instance, because you have a smart phone, and the web knows you have a meeting in San Francisco, and it knows that the plane is delayed, it will alert the people you are meeting with that you will be a few minutes late. It seems like something like this would revolve around messaging. While I doubt Web 4.0 will be exactly as Seth envisions it, the world is moving towards faster, shorter, more frequent communication. I believe Twitter is going to remain a big player in this new style of communication.

I think we’re going to see more and more web applications becoming platforms for new applications. What do you think?

Tagged with: webApps

It’s been a couple of weeks now since I wrote my last post on category cleaning. I thought I’d post the results of that activity here.

One of the keys to improving anything on the web is to track your visitors with a good analytics system. I use Google Analytics on this blog, so I ran some reports to see if my changes have had the effect that I wanted.

I compared 2 time periods: Sep. 4 - 13 with Oct. 2-11. Both time periods are Tuesday through Thursday intervals because I wanted to minimize time-of-week variances. Oct. 2 is the first whole day that had the categories changed.

General Site Statistics:

Overall, it appears that my blog is performing better, with higher Pages/Visit, a slightly lower Bounce Rate, and a higher Avg. Time on Site.

I wanted to see how the change affected my categories specifically. Here is a report for my “Web Services” category. It seems to align pretty well with a few of my other categories.

From examining my ‘Navigation Summary’ report for that category page, it appears that people are now clicking from posts within this category and then to other related posts.

Another side-effect from changing my categories is that Google is hitting a bunch of pages not found. Check out this list from my Webmaster Tools report:

The list is pretty long, but I don’t think it should affect my search rankings too drastically. There should just be a period of time before Google removes these pages from the index. If I had the time, I could configure redirects from all of the missing categories to related categories, but I don’t have the time for that.

Tagged with: analytics, blogging

I’m working on improving my blog and becoming more focused. I figure that the best place to start is by fixing my categories. Michael Martin published an article titled Using Categories and Tags Effectively on your Blog for ProBlogger this last week. It suggests limiting the number of categories and placing a post in a single category. It then recommends using ‘tags’ as a supplement for more detailed categorization.

If you take a look at my old category list, it just goes and goes. The picture shown here doesn’t even reach the bottom. I guess I have been using my categories as tags, as they used to be considered interchangeable. Recently, WordPress has decided that ‘tags’ and ‘categories’ are actually different things and they’ve added native tagging to the latest release (version 2.3). I’m anxiously waiting for this release to make it to my Fantastico application manager so that I can upgrade.

Before deciding to just chop away at my categories list, I decided to check my Google Analytics to see which categories are effective and which aren’t. I found some surprising results which I will list here.

I ran reports for the most viewed categories and time spent at category pages. I then compared that with the number of posts that I’ve listed under each category. Here are some of best and worst of the results:

Most Viewed

• cakephp
• ruby-on-rails
• ajax
• soap
• flash
• web-services

Least Viewed

• technology
• spam-fighting
• soa
• school
• internet-explorer

Most Time

• google
• ajax
• apriux
• web-design
• ruby
• internet-marketing
• blogging

Least Time

• web
• spam-fighting
• soa
• school
• project-management
• mysql
• yahoo

Most Posts

• technology - 71
• business - 43
• life - 34
• web 2.0 - 32
• php - 30
• ideas - 18
• google - 19

Conclusions

Here are some of the conclusions that I’ve drawn from my research. First of all, notice that ‘technology’ has by far the most number of posts, yet it is a definite loser category in that it is the top ‘least viewed’ category and is in the bottom half of time spent list. A category like ‘technology’ is just too broad and blasé. Most of my top posted categories fall in the lower tier of views.

Niche categories like ‘ruby-on-rails’ and ‘cakephp’ fell in the top viewed of categories. These categories didn’t have the most time spent though. I guess the interestingness of the actual posts needs to be improved.

The time spent report is probably the most helpful. It helps me identify categories that people have actually found interesting enough to read through. The categories might need some better naming to increase views, but the content in the categories must be interesting.

Learning From the Professionals

Two of my favorite professional blogs are ProBlogger and Freelance Switch. How do they do their categories?

From Freelance Switch

From ProBlogger

One thing that stands out for me is that many of these categories label a particular series of posts. For example, Freelance Switch has The Lighter Side and The Business of Freelancing. ProBlogger has 31 Days to Building a Better Blog. I could see myself following one of those categories closely. With these types of categories, I know what to expect in future posts and look forward to new posts in the series.

Another observation is that categories that seem to offer me something valuable catch my attention more. Some of the categories that caught my interest the most were Finding Work, Freelancing Essentials, The Perils of Project Management, and The Working Day from Freelance Switch, and Blogging Tools and Services, Case Studies, and Other Income Streams from ProBlogger. These categories seem to contain something that I could take away to benefit my life.

Action Items

What do I do from here? I need to do some housecleaning and wipe out my ineffective categories. I need to come up with better naming of my categories. I need to come up with some categories that I think I could consistently blog for that will offer my readers value.

We’ll see how I do. Let me know what you think.

[Update: I've posted result stats to show how this has affected my blog.]

Tagged with: blogging

Help!

My blogging has really slowed down these last months and I think I’m experiencing some kind of writer’s block. I’m writing this post to hopefully get some feedback from you all out there.

I think my blog is going through a mid-life crisis of sorts. I’ve been reading a lot of really good stuff at ProBlogger, which has helped me identify some areas of improvement. I think my problem is that I’m not sure which direction I want to take my blog.

What is my theme?

You may have noticed that my blog has no tagline or defined theme. I’ve intentionally left that blank because I haven’t identified a theme yet.

If you look at my categories in the sidebar, you’ll see that the list is really long. I’ve been using categories as a sort of tagging mechanism, but I’ve found that ‘categories’ aren’t quite the same as ‘tags.’ [tags, by the way have been added to the latest version of WordPress]. A recent article on ProBlogger on effective categories and tagging suggests that you keep your category list short, and you file your posts into only one category per post. You then supplement that with more detailed tagging. This will probably be one of my first changes to my blog. Hopefully that exercise will help me stay more focused as a blogger, and to identify a theme.

Who is my audience?

I’m having a hard time identifying my audience. I think the reason I’m having a hard time doing this is because it has changed several times in the last couple of years. Here’s a short history of my blog.

I started blogging a few months before I was hired at Provo Labs. Provo Labs is a web incubator which at the time that I was there was trying to launch several web start-ups simultaneously. The environment was alive with entrepreneurial spirit. We were given 20% of our time to work on our own ideas and we were encouraged to blog. Planet Provo Labs was born, which was an aggregate of all Provo Labs employee blogs. The ‘planet’ became my audience as I blogged to share ideas and thoughts with others within the company and others who were intrigued by the mystery of what was going on inside Provo Labs.

We experienced a Black Friday where almost the entire Provo Labs team was laid off and Paul had to take the company in a new direction, focusing solely on World Vital Records. Most of us stuck together and formed 42Co, working to build TagJungle. Most of our blogs were still on Planet Provo Labs, and I felt my audience was mostly the same. During that time, I made a few affiliate posts about Host Monster, which I honestly like and use, but I feel that may have turned off some of my audience.

During my last semester of school, I was required to blog for 2 of my classes: Information Architecture, and Web Analytics. I enjoyed blogging about both topics, but I felt I may have alienated some of the less-geeky readers as I dug into specifics of SOAP in PHP, XML-RPC, and so forth.

I am now a partner in Apriux, a web development/consulting company. I have found it harder to blog about work because most of our projects are under strict NDAs. Also, many of you who have started your own businesses will attest to the fact that things get really, really busy. So, my blog has pretty much been dead during this growing time, and now I feel like I’ve lost touch with my audience.

So, my goals for the next week or two is to identify who I want my audience to be (and who my current audience is), choose an appropriate blog theme, and begin improving my blog.

What would you like to see?

Feedburner tells me that I have 54 subscribers, so if any of you have made it to this point, please comment on what types of postings you have found most interesting in the past. Also, feel free to give me as much constructive criticism that you’d like. I really would like to make my blog better.