I wonder whether this will be the beginning of a series in web 2.0 world after the financial crisis hit U.S. TechCrunch believes that this is because of Twitter’s pressure: Pownce Deadpooled, Team Moves To Six Apart

We’ll see this better in 2009. Here are related links from related web sites and blogs:

From Six Apart: Goodbye Pownce, Hello Six Apart

From Pownce’s Blog: Pownce Acquired by Six Apart

From Six Apart’s blog: Welcome Pownce team!

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The most basic and relevant and working approach in my opinion is to think of famous (or not so famous) writers (online or offline) that you like. Why do you like them at all? Blogging is the same. You write something and some people eventually like it and want to continue to follow what you are writing. That’s all about it.

Therefore, sticking to a certain topic may make sense. I’ve always thought about Irvin Yalom as an example for this case. He has around 10 novels and many other text-books for clinical psychology. I am ready to read almost everything he is about to write because he writes very good, meaningful articles, novels, etc. For this example, a coherent context is a must because when I buy a new book (this is pretty much the same when you wait for your favorite blogger’s next post) of Yalom, I expect that book to be about psychology and then clinical psychology, and then psychotherapy, and even then about dynamic psychotherapy.

Another example where the topic is not that much important is Umberto Eco. I am waiting for his every next book. He is writing novels (I don’t take his other writing in this example but they are also worth reading, he is one of the best philosopher and semiologist alive!) in a fashion that I would love to read them. I would go and buy his books even if he has written and printed them on a toilet paper. It doesn’t make a difference for me.

People in the 21st century are following some blogs as if they are following a tv series. For some blogs, I can clearly say that they are the replacement (if not successor, but I am sure they are and continue to will be) for tv series. Dooce is an excellent example of that. Tens of thousands of people are waiting for her next post and they follow her like a tv series. Some people who know that I don’t like to watch tv may think that I am making fun of her by saying that. But I don’t. I appreciate that she achieved such a fan base.

If Dooce today had to move to blogspot, people wouldn’t stop following her. Imagine that she continues writing in some address like dooce-heather.blogspot.com . Do you think she will lose visitors? I don’t think so. Maybe that would be a criteria when she first started writing there but I am doubtful about that. If that would be true, then what about Zenhabits.com by Leo Babauta? He started his blog in blogspot and then moved to self-hosted wordpress.

What I want to tell you is to stop thinking about details like where to start. Thinking about this is like trying to prepare an unnecessary introduction for your sale, when people are already accepted to buy it. That is to say, if you believe that you have a talent which will help you write something menaingful that people would want to follow you, then begin right away.

That’s all about it. Content, content, content. And then some more content. Only then, social bookmarking, facebook, twitter, flickr or whatever would make sense to work on for distributing your content.

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It’s rumor at the moment. Since many geek users in Turkey use opendns and turkish telekom exercises bans through dns (except youtube), we can’t have detailed information right now. Since the bans are executed via dns, it is also not possible to see the effect immediately for the whole nation.

Another cluse is that bans are usually executed on Friday. I’ll update this posts with details.

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Then I decided to take her opinion into consideration too. Let’s just start with what I am going to say. It’s not nice to see that adsense income decline but there are lessons from this. I think the most important lesson is that people click on adsense ads really for the reason of being interested in the offer. We understand that because when there is a financial crisis, the click through rate declines. Pay per click cost didn’t decline too much, at least in my personal experience. So, from this data in hand, we can clearly understand that encouraging clicks do not help on increasing adsense revenue.

Encouraging clicks is strictly prohibited by Google anyway but people always try to find a way to encourage people within the rules. This is not going to generate any further income. People still try it because they think adsense ads are there to trick visitors into clicking them. They don’t think adsense as a process. In fact, adsense is a process as I have written earlier about contextual advertising and it involves those steps:

1. You have a meaningful article on your page.
2. You can be found among search results and you are in a relatively decent position, let’s say your page comes up between #1 and #50.
3. The search terms are related with your topic of your article.
4. There are enough adwords clients that need to show their ads on such a page when it is found with such keywords.

Let’s come to where adsense needs more effort in total quality management.

Some advertisers are eager to pull visitors to their website and they design and prepare the copy of their ads to be very attractive. Those advertisers usually decrease the overall level of quality in adsense because they are after quantity, instead of quality. The type of advertising Vered talks about is this kind of advertising.

However, with this financial crisis and lessons from that in mind, push marketing doesn’t make sense. When a visitor has the incentive of buying a product that she is interested in, she is going to click that ad anyway.

Thus the most important part lies in advertising visibility, that is putting the ads on places where people are not affected by ad blindness.

I was going to write more on this but I must stop here because blogger.com is banned in Turkey and I want to follow those news. I’ll continue to discuss adsense total quality management later on.

At this point, we should talk about “smart pricing”. Smart pricing is a technique that Google Adsense program uses. They have written only once about smart pricing. There is not much detail on how this operates. Briefly, if your web site creates too much clicks without ending up with any conversion (which means a sale, a subscription or any other criteria which is set by the advertiser or google adsense, for instance having visited more than one page in the destination web site or spending a certain amount of time in that web site) your web site is then being smart priced for a period of time. This is when you see 20 clicks on an ad which only brings $0.20, for instance. Those numbers are not exact numbers and I am not an adsense professional, so don’t take them as the ultimate truth. I am just telling this to give you a rough idea. I even don’t know whether this smart pricing is still being used or not. This is personal experience and knowledge from my own readings over the web.

This notion of smart pricing should give us another clear idea what adsense is all about. It is designed with the intention of being profitable for every player in the game. Your visitors are part of that game too. According to this perspective, putting adsense ads on your web site is like an additional service that you offer to your visitors. So, it is also meaningless to use plugins to set advertising visibility such as “no ads for friends”, “ads only for visitors who come from search engines”, etc. Advertising may be evil on many levels but Google Adsense is less evil in comparison to other types of advertising. This is the essence of Adsense and other similar contextual advertising systems.

Now let’s come back to the view that advertising sucks. This is the point where I suggest a more thorough total quality management for adsense. Adwords clients must understand at least what I have understand so far. Only than they will design meaningful ads instead of sucking ads.

There is still more to say about that. For instance, about our economic system as a whole. Because you never see an ad that sucks when it is about an absolutely needed good or service. Ads suck mostly when they are about a good or service which is not really necessary. Of course this is also a subjective issue but anyway, sometimes you can decide that only by using your intuition.

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I don’t think that those bans are related to Adnan Oktar, because he was suing in Istanbul courts, however this one was a decision of Diyarbakir court.

UPDATE: (see above update) There is still no information about the cause of the ban but everybody suspects Adnan Oktar who is responsible for most of the bans in Turkey. He is bringing any content on the net to the court which supports Darwinism and mentions his name as a creationist. But whether he is involved or not in this recent blogger.com ban is still a suspicion.

Blogger.com is censored in Turkey. I’ll keep with details posted later. The ban created a huge response in Turkish bloggers almost immediately. We just see this when we try to reach blogger.com or any blog on *.blogspot.com:

blogger.com censored in Turkey

image credits: Aylin Özdemir

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We also see many, many successful bloggers like Robert Scoble or like Dooce.com, where comments reach at hundreds. For people who see the amount of comments would think that as a criteria of successful blogging. When they think like that, they would see only a little or no comments as an indicator of failure.

But it is not. Comment amount is not an indicator of your success. If you ask questions on your blog post and nobody comes up with an answer, then you may conclude that nobody cares but apart from such exceptions, it really doesn’t matter whether people comment on your blog or not. Recently, I met a couple of new readers from Facebook and they told me how helpful my posts on moodr are. Most of them pointed to one or two posts to be most successful and helpful. Those posts didn’t received any comments. Yet, people were very satisfied with them.

When a blog goes popular, other bloggers just go and comment there in order to gain visibility for themselves. When Darren posts something new or Tina posts something new, most of the time, people are there to comment for their own visibility. I don’t mean that all of those comments are not useful. There are very useful conversations on many blogs through commenting for all of us to benefit. I just try to add to my argument that amount of comments on a blog post is not an indicator of that post’s success.

So, bloggers usually expect affection in the name of comments and that’s pretty understandable. They put great effort in a post and tens of comments under that post is an instant gratification for many of them. However, know that this is not a criteria and don’t get upset when you don’t see any comments. Look at your statistics instead. How many people read that post, and what is the bounce rate of this post? If the bounce rate is low then you can surely conclude that your post has been successful.

The same is valid for pingbacks and trackbacks but not as much as comments. For backlinks, gaining visibility is again a primary motivation for linking. Don’t get upset by that either. But they are more important than comments because they built long term traffic into your blog. The only way you can get them is the usefulness of your post.

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On the other hand, when time passes and your blog starts to get extraordinary attention, you may want to learn tips and tricks on how to optimize your wordpress installation and how to minimize resources it uses. Here are tips and tricks about just that.

First and foremost, you must use caching. WP-Super Cache is the best option for that. WP Super Cache caches your posts and pages as beautiful pure html files so your server doesn’t use resources for php output. Other caching plugins don’t do that (at least I don’t know of any other). Others usually just caches the content and continues to use php cycles to deliver output.

The second important thing you have to keep in mind is that WordPress’ custom 404 (page not found thingie) handler uses too much cpu cycles. This isn’t unique to WordPress. Any other CMS like Drupal, TextPattern, etc. who uses custom 404 handling also uses more cpu cycles than any normal, usual 404 page. What to do about that? Use Google Site Maps plugin in order to inform Google faster when you have deleted a post. This plugin automatically generates a Google compliant site map and submits that to Google everytime you make a change in your content. Apart from that, there are also urls that are seeked by robots and they also can generate 404 error codes when not found. One example in my mind now is the favicon.ico file. Favicons are used by many web sites for bookmarking urls. You have to place one in your root directory because every robot I know looks at your root directory for that file. Moreover, not only robots look for favicon.ico but also many browsers look for it when users want to bookmark your blog. Many modern browsers also look for it because they display it in the tab. The best practice is, go create one and place it in your root folder. Favicon.cc is my favorite place for creating favicons and downloading them into my computer and then put them on my host. It’s very practical and free.

Same holds true for your feeds. Use Feedburner for distributing your feeds. Since your feeds will be distributed by feedburner and not by your server, you will have this load minimized too. Your domain.com/feed will be checked (almost) only by Feedburner and this is at most once or twice a day.

There may be other examples for would be 404 files that don’t come with your WordPress installation. You can make up your own examples too. Either way, you have to find a way to create them or handle them. So far, I don’t know of any plugin which handles that issue. Maybe it’s a good idea to build one. It should check for common known urls on your blog which may be requested often by robots, search engines, and like, and maybe creates them for you.

Third, comment spam also puts another weight on your WordPress installation and that eats your valuable CPU cycles too. Akismet is NOT a solution for this because a comment or a trackback or a pingback will hit your server and be recorded for evaluation anyway. WP Spam Free solves this problem by not allowing comments from agents which are not a browser. Since many bots who works for dropping spam comments and trackbacks to WordPress blogs do not recognize and use JavaScript, this plugin checks whether comment owner’s agent can recognize javascript. It’s a wise solution. It also informs normal users who turned javascript off so that they don’t get surprised when they are not able to post comments.

Those three factors are what I have experienced so far with my grid server. I think this can be the first post in a series because as time goes by I would experience new cpu cycle hungry factors and find solutions about them. So I’ll post them too. One thing I am not sure about is wp-cron.php and admin-ajax.php files. It looks weird but it seems like they eat more cpu cycles when you don’t post frequently. But this is just a guess. I’ll post about that too when I am sure of them. So, please subscribe to my RSS feed if you find this post useful, there are more to come.

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I created another user in my WordPress installation. That’s very easy, you just go to users on the right of the WordPress admin menu and add a new user, of course with a different name than yours. You can also set its password and other details there but that part is irrelevant with what we are going to do. Then go to post(s) you want to export exclusively and edit them by changing their author. You can do that in the post editing page below the editor.

Then go to ‘manage’ and select export. There, you will have the option of restricting posts you will export to a certain author. Select your newly created author for exporting his posts. Then click ‘download export file’ and you are done. You have an export file where your selected posts are included. Now you can use that file for importing them on any other WordPress blog provided that they have the proper version of WordPress, I mean supporting this export – import thing.

For more practical options, when you need a temporary place to export & import your posts, just use WordPress.com. Go to WordPress.com and create a new blog for just that. Don’t forget to set privacy options there so you don’t have duplicate content in case search engine robots hit your carrier blog at the time. It may be also proper to close the blog for normal visitors too, according to what you do with that blog.

Using a WordPress.com blog is especially a necessity when you transfer posts from Blogger (blogspot) to WordPress because self hosted WordPress still lacks that functionality. The option is there but it doesn’t work (taking about 2.6.2 at the time of this writing).

Well, it’s that easy. Now let’s discuss the scalability of WordPress when it comes to hundreds of comments. In my case, WordPress was not able to handle them for me. Both the amount of comments (900 plus) and the traffic was heavy on that single page. There wasn’t any issue with the server. The traffic and the server load this page created was equal to any page that would receive the same amount of traffic and attention. Pagination of comments is a solution but it didn’t work for me because I find existing plugins immature. The only solution to this in the future might be that WordPress have built-in, nature pagination feature for comments, like in Drupal. Most probably that was why Dooce made the switch to Drupal from WordPress. She opens her posts to discussion rarely (only every four or five posts) and she receives thousands of comments under those posts.

If your receive less than 100 comments on your posts than WordPress is scalable for your in termes of comment load handling. But if your receive hundreds of comments on each of your post than WordPress may not be the best option for you. Of course there are ways for handling this however a naked WordPress installation is just not sufficient to handle 1000 comments effectively.

Let’s go back to our transfer business. That’s how I did it. I mirrored the post with all the comments to a WordPress.com blog and everybody looks happy now. Don’t forget to close comments and pings while you start exporting those posts because it is very possible to receive comments after you have started the export process and those comments will get lost.

Another tip: I copied everything for that post. The text, the url and the exact date and time. Then I have recreated the same post with the same url with the same date and time. Then I closed the post for comments and only opened them for pings. I also stated in a single comment that discussion is now going on in another address, in a mirror. Now, things are fine. Everybody is happy, including me.

One last thing that I have learned from this experience: It is a wise thing to close comments after a period of time you have published a post. I think one month is convenient. Otherwise, the post’s comments turn into a forum instead of a discussion of what you have written.

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The default wordpress theme is a great failure. It is of course very famous because it is the default wordpress theme. First off all, it is not standards compliant. Especially the order and usage of CSS selectors are catastrophic. I will only name one for now. There is this header part, then there is this blog name section which correctly marked as h1. But then there is this description section marked as a div. This is the most common failure among amateur “web masters” who are just introduced to web standards. The description section should have been coded as a p class=”description” or p id=”description”. There is no need for a div. This is a big error but this is maybe the smallest semantic error in the whole wordpress default theme.

The CSS file is exactly a turmoil. There are many classes identified more than once and that makes it very confusing to work with them. The use of ems are a complete failure. So much that when you change an h2’s em value, it shows up in different sizes gradually. No, of course I am talking about the same class of h2! It is in the commentlist section. Go see it for yourself. Change the em value there, for instance change the em of h2 from 1.2em into 1.6em, it ends up showing growing sizes as comments continue.

And no, I am not using Internet Explorer. I am testing everything on Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 7, Konqueror (Safari), Internet Explorer 6, respectively. I can’t waste my time to tell all the errors in this default themes CSS file. I want to go into some other catastrophe that the web suffers because of those default and classic wordpress themes.

Many advanced wordpress themes are built by tweaking the default one or the classic one. And that’s a good thing, because once they put those two templates into wordpress core and ship them together, there is no reason as not to be sure about they are the right thing to go from. However, unless you strip all the CSS at once and start writing CSS from scratch by using selectors and classes from the template source, it is impossible to produce a coherent design. It’s awful. Look at the CSS file of the theme “White as Milk”. The author clearly state it in the CSS file as a comment:

THE FOLLOWING CODE IS DERIVED FROM THE DEFAULT “KUBRICK” THEME.

THE STRUCTURE AND LAYOUT IS IN MY OPINION, NOT THE WAY CSS SHOULD

BE ORGANIZED, BUT FOR NOW I AM LEAVING IT THE WAY IT IS TO KEEP

IT CONSISTENT.

As a matter of fact, since almost all themes are derived from the classic or default layouts, it is almost impossible to change and tweak them for the majority. It’s not sufficient to know CSS, you have to master it to a degree where you can find some other people’s errors in it and fix them.

The classic template is not as faulty as the default template but it is also very deceiving. For instance, it doesn’t have a real footer where stands below all the content and sidebar. Instead, the footer stands just under the content. It is not compatible with the widget functionality of a standard wordpress installation. Even not with the latest version shipped!

Briefly, this is a shame. Many wordpress users just think that they don’t know enough CSS. They are wrong. CSS is in fact quite easy but it depends on good mark-up on the template side, and clearly written CSS files. The beauty of CSS and web standards is in their usability, easiness, practicality.

I don’t think that those faulty history of the default and classic templates of wordpress is going to end here. They couldn’t fix it for years right now. It looks like they are even not aware of what is wrong. The turmoil still continues with K2.

I had to heavily tweak the default template files on a very detailed level. This was meaningless. This can be a whole lot better.

I hope somebody pays attention to work on a such important issue.

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