After looking after my blog for a while now, and taking it more serious than any of my other projects in a long time, I have decided to sit down and really nut out a strategy as to what is really important as regards to the blog’s KPIs and how they relate to my overall strategy and purpose of this website.

So rather than provide some general advice that tries to blanket every blog out there, I think a better why to go about it is to explain exactly my strategy and hopefully it can inspire other blogmasters to think about theirs as well, maybe even in a new light

Do People Read My Blog Posts

To me this seems a given, but in reality I see very little talk on problogging blogs and forums (disclaimer: I don’t really read too many religiously) talk about this that is clear and to the point.

My blog has the snippet inserted in the posts so only the first section of the post is on the homepage. Also on the homepage, you can access that post by clicking on the headline.

So with analytics, tagging both links with the same URL parameter for all links that point to a particular post page, shows me how many people land on the homepage and then are excited enough to read the post. Obiviously I cannot say for certain how many would actually read, but I think its a fair assumption to make that if someone clicks the link, they want to read the article.

Someone Leaves a Comment on a Post

As my blogging improves, I really hope that people enjoy the posts and the information I present enough that they are motivated to leave a comment, whether good or bad. Blogging is web 2.0’s version of a forum in my opinion, and we all know that a forum is only as good as its members. A blog therefore, is only as good as its comments.

How do I track the comment leaving? Once again with analytics, how many people read the article, then clicked the submit button. Also the next level is to say how many people landed on the homepage, clicked through to an article and left a comment in one session. And I know these one night stand style conversions are very, very rare - but I still feel its a nice goal to work toward.

Are People Sharing on Social Networks

If leaving a comment is good, then sharing on the social networks is great. However, in order for a natural/organic spread of the article (meaning you don’t leverage self promotion and let your regular visitors/subscribers take care of it by themselves), is a true indication that your blog is effective, informative and useful to the community that you are targeting.

Once again with analytics, tagging the social buttons with links is another great way, and doing some online rep monitoring to track the spread and also with your incoming link checkers, can give you all the data that you require.

Attaining Regular Return Visits and RSS Subscribers

All the aspects I talked about before relate to brand new people mainly. However, what would make me most proud as a blogger is to see my return visits and subscriber numbers continue to increase overtime.

Everyone in the business world and even in your personal life recognise that long term relationships is the key for success, in both your reputation and the growth of your blog.

And at the end of the day, I think that is the most important, creating a community around your passion. That is the true measure of success for your blog.

EDIT:: this is what happens when you dont research a topic before blogging about it: Urban Dictionary - iThumb

I’ve had my iPhone for a decent amount of time, meaning that I’m past the honeymoon stage of having the phone and now just grown accustomed to its features and lack of (the no cut and paste option is still killing me, I’m not going to lie).

But I can spend up to 20min or so in a session of purely doing nothing but check my RSS feeds, twitter, emails, and so forth - without ever having to boot up the lappy. Another great feature.

Unfortunately for me however is the fact that I have probably larger than normal sized hands and hence regularly moosh multiple GUI elements and accidentally over-flick (is that what its called?) when browsing on the phone.

Below is an image of how my hand stacks up against the phone itself.

My iThumb

Now after repeated flicks and pinches, lately I have found that my thumb itself has started to get an RSI type sensation, like what I have after marathon sessions on the mouse photoshopping, blogging, etc.

Since my current status is that my iThumb is playing up. Give it about 5min or so after a session on my phone and it goes back to normal. By the way, using the phone less isn’t really an option. As it turns out I am not the first and only sufferer of this serious affliction. Is there a support group yet?

Maybe I’m just a big girl having a whinge, but it wouldn’t suprise me if others had this same issue.

If you suffered any other iPhone related injuries, please leave a comment below. Please do not let me be the only one.

Spent most of the week doing plugin development, and you wouldn’t believe the issues I was having with writing PHP code that enables to read/write/open/close files onto the server. There is plenty of information about the functions and how to implement them, not so much information on tips and tricks on real world implementations. Below I will highlight a few points I learnt along the way.

• Make sure what you write to the file is encoded correctly: When you write a string to a text file or so forth, you cannot just write it without properly encoding the data. Especially if you plan on running the data through Excel or some other program for further indepth analysis.

  In PHP, and for most standard types of processing, utf8_encode(string) is the best and easiest way to properly encode your data. By running your string through this function before anything else is done, such as writing to the file, is your first step toward having it easy to read and extract data from later on.

• Make sure you use correct end of line characters: In PHP, for a particular string that you are compiling, it is best to use double quotes “” rather than singles ‘ ‘ because this enables you to correctly end the line and start a new one in both Windows and Mac environments. I took this lesson from university as well, when I was working with a sample text file that used \n and was constantly erroring because it wasn’t encoded properly to be read on linux and OS X. The solution, at the end of your string, append \r\n to cover both your bases and you will not have to worry about these little issues further down the track.

• Write to the absolute path, not the URL: This is probably the most important one of all the points I took away from this project. I had to write a file to a particular sub-directory with the url: http://www.example.com/dev/logs. Now I built the URL with a function, I had created the directory on the server and set up the permissions, but it failed to write and spat out error after error.

  After a few Google searches here and there, it turns out the secret is that you do not write to the URL but to the path of the sub-directory on the server. In this case being root-path/~test/public_html/dev/logs. Once that was setup up, and making sure the path was complete, everything worked like a dream. To make it easy for myself, I used $_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"]; to grab the path to the root, and modded my URL builder function to take care of the rest.

Now I know most of the information presented here is at a fairly basic level, but as someone that has not done much file handling with PHP or many other web languages (I’m too used to just dumping everything in a database) it was a nice little learning curve to brush up on my skills. Now I know some of this isn’t that secure, so if anyone has some security recommendations about how to protect yourself correctly when writing to the server, leave a note in the comments and I will adjust the post.

It happens over and over again. You create a website for a client, you get it moved from the dev environment to the live. Everyone is thoroughly happy with the work done. You celebrate. And then they ask you to monitor and maintain the website.

Not a problem you say, Google has their Webmaster Tools, I’ll submit your website to that, and it can allow me to check the sitemap is getting picked up, monitor 404s and so forth. Google will tell me everything about what I need to know about the websites performance.

However, did you know that both Yahoo and MSN have a webmaster central as well? Did you know that they offer different tools to what is offered by Google - and in some cases *gasp* better than the ones offered by the big G?

So I thought in this post what I would do I would outline the different webmaster tools on offer and highlight some different aspects of the tools and how it can give you a better indication of how the website is going via the search engines.

Google Webmaster Tools

Link: Google Webmaster Tools

I’m not going to dwell too much on this one, because my guess is that it is the one that is used most often by webmasters. Login via your Google account and verfication of the website is done via uploading of a html file (I have NEVER had success with the meta tag option. NEVER EVER.).

My favourite part of Googles services is the sitemap options, and analysis of how the crawls went, along with the areas of duplicate title and meta tags, cleaning up your SEO.

Also, there are some really nice greasemonkey scripts to analyse back links, such as the one that shows you anchor text and PR of the linking webpage.

All in all, its a good tool to analyse how your website is going against the largest search engine.

Yahoo SiteExplorer

Link: SiteExplorer

Yahoo throw you off the scent straight away by not calling it webmaster tools, but siteExplorer. Thats ok, points for being semi-original.

SiteExplorer is probably most well known in the seo industry for backlink analysis. This is not the time or the post to get mixed up in all of that, but I bet many of the people that use it for backlinks did not know it also doubles as your Yahoo analysis of your website.

What I do like is the easy submission of feeds of all types (rss, atom, xml sitemaps, etc) and procedures to put in place to help with dynamic urls. Unfortunately, it seems the skinnest in terms of features out of all the 3 major ones.

Live Search Webmaster Central

Link: Live Search Webmaster Central

Microsoft only just recentely overhauled their own webmaster tools platform, and also setup a fantastic blog that they are updating regularly. It is really great to see that Live Search are starting to take the Internet Development community seriously and providing useful tools and information. The other reason you should seriously consider taking Live Search more seriously as that according to some statistics, it is now locking in its position as the second most used search engine.

Verification is done via an XML file that you upload to your website, once again, I always steer clear of meta tag validation - but do recogonise that sometimes it is the only option.

One part of Live’s webmaster tools is the checking of HTTP compression and seeing if it was enabled. To be honest, I did not know much about it before reading about it on MSN, but now that I have, its amazing at the difference that it makes. That is something Google never has told me (or at least never made it easy to notice).

I like the way they format their crawl issues, and allow you to break it down to subdirectories, rather than just dump them all out in one massive CSV or coresponding format.

The keywords tool to check your performance for pages that suposedly perform well for a particular keyword I think needs to be tidied up a little bit, it just seems a little bit too generous for my liking with the green box system.

Conclusion

In conclusion, each service has its own pluses and minuses, but for a holistic approach to how your website is viewed by the engines, it only takes about 3min per engine to submit, and in my books, definitely worth the time - I was resubmitting and 1st time submissions whilst writing this post.

In order of usefulness, I would still say Google is out in front, closely followed by Microsoft, and then Yahoo - in my opinion anyway.

If you know of any other tools you should be submitting your website too, please leave a message in the comments on this post. I will probably then combine all the tools into one webmaster tools style post.

I had a terrible weekend. My faithful MacBook Pro of two years decided it was finally time to remind me how it feels to be a Vista user. I have alot of development environments, tools, development apps, debuggers and so forth on my main user profile on my Mac running Leopard 10.5.6.

I can only remember one proper crash that closely reseambled a BSOD for OSX, much to the delight of the Windows users in the office.

I was preparing myself in between tweets to go and smash out a few mods to Wordpress and work on some side projects when my Dreamweaver decided to no load. I had the nice little bouncing icon, the little blue-LED-like dot and then nothing. No splash box. No loading plugins and libraries. Nothing.

So I gave up and went and fired up Smultron. Not a big deal.

Meanwhile, the last Firefox update I installed, had a little funny bug that I didn’t worry about too much - no scroll bar down the right hand side. To overcome this, i used my trusty scroll wheel on the mouse. But I figured I had put up with it enough and decided it was time to unistall it all and start fresh, especially since I was suffering from severe plugin bloating of my firefox.

So I downloaded the version on the main page, not one of the betas or nightly builds and fired it up. No probs, a nice shiny clean Firefox. My next task was to immediately put Firebug on, a plugin no web developer can live without. And then it happened.

download error -228

After a few Google searches, there wasn’t too much helpful information about the error, even from Firefox’s support page.

I bit the bullet and rang Adobe’s Tech Support, and they weren’t that helpful. However they gave me the inspiration to help me solve the problem. They suggested that I create a fresh user profile on my Mac and see if Dreamweaver worked under that. And indeed, it did work. But I couldn’t have a separate profile just for my Dreamweaver, it wasn’t practical. Adobe didn’t have a solution for me either.

But it got me thinking and this is what I came up with.

The Solution to my Dreamweaver and Firefox Bugs

I figured after two years of development and adding and deleting of apps, there would be a bit of rubbish in my user account. Deleting the account and rebuilding was definitely not an option. So I needed to give my User account in OSX a clean up.

And after a few searches, I found the blog post that saved my life:

How to Repair User Permissions

By running the command suggested in the Terminal, letting it do its thing for a couple of minutes, I came back and fired up my two problem apps.

And low and behold it worked! Both Dreamweaver and Firefox!

So the conclusion for this post: If any of your Apps on your Mac are playing up or doing something funny, the first port of call is definitely to clean up your user profile account.

Now I’m off to finish my dev work!