Experiments in Cyberspace

I have made a small experiment for the last two days. I visited some 50 blogs yesterday and bookmarked only the ones that I had no desire to read for any reason. Today, I revisited them. To my surprise, at least 10% of them turned out to be very good. This led me thinking, how come did I miss them? The following video in which a corporation is assigned to design the traffic stop signs we all love to see might help: Believe it or not, I have been to such a meeting!

It is a fact that free, libre and open source software (floss) use is on the rise. Still, the momentum is not as steep as developers want it to be. One major handicap for propagation of floss applications is the lack of clear and concise documentation. Some may argue that there is enough documentation to get anyone going. Not quite so! A few months back I wrote a how-to about uploading a favicon to a Blogspot blog . Yesterday, I asked a friend who had a blog, if he could upload a favicon according to my instructions in the article. He tried and came back telling me he was unable to understand it. What went wrong? Apparently I failed to put my feet into the shoes of a completely novice user. What was clear for me, was not so clear for him. It is really a sort of black voodoo to accomplish such a task. Human mind plays tricks and thoughts outpace words. I came across Floss Manuals a few days ago, and that is why I arranged the aforementioned test. FLOSS Manuals make free sof...

WebbieStuffs has an article about Google's ever-improving translation service, now available in almost all Indo-European languages plus a few others. An interesting but little known service or by-product of Google Translate is you can also use it as web proxy. Suppose you live in a country where everyone and his dog can go to a court and restrict access to a web site say, in Mauritius (I am not joking). Due to the government's (a fictitious government to the east of Bulgaria and Greece) short-sighted approach at the time of legislation and service providers' reluctance to make extra investment, nobody bothers to contact the web master enjoying the sunset in Mauritius and access to her site is blocked at a national level in a 10 minute court session. Since not everybody has the technical know-how to find a working proxy and adjust their browsers' settings, here is a neat trick. Go to Google Translate page . Enter the offensive URL. If the offensive site is Englis...

After visiting hundreds of sites, all with their shiny favicons displaying in your browser's address bar, you decided to use your own favicon in your Blogger/Blogspot blog. You designed and polished it and now what? Here are the steps you should follow: 1. Upload your newly created favicon to a free picture host and take note of the URL. 2. Visit your site and check your HTML source code by pressing CTRL+U (Firefox users). 3. Copy all the code after the opening head [head] tag up to the opening title [title] tag: [some script]...[/script] [meta content=...] ... 4. Back up your template. 5. Go to your dashboard and choose "layout", and then "edit html" 6. Delete this line from your template: [b: include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/] ... 7. Paste the previously copied code in step 3 in lieu of the line you deleted in step 6. 8. Change the favicon URL to the one you got in step 1 like this: [link rel='icon' hre...

Every now then we feel the urge to change our templates in our blogs. This can be out of necessity (we might need a bigger area to upload images), because we get bored with the previous template or upon discovering a new one which complements the topics we write about or our style. Regardless of the platform you use, be it Blogger, Wordpress, Evolution etc, switching to a new template is trivial. But, unlike for instance Wordpress where the images come in its own folder with the template, Blogger images are usually stored in free picture hosts. Pictures hosted at such places can cause you trouble in future: Uploader's account can be deleted for any reason. Such hosts often impose bandwidth restrictions and you can suddenly see warning messages in your blog, or no images at all. Template writer can accidentally delete those images. A good way and a neat trick is writing a post like this, uploading all those CSS images to your Picasa album and change the image addresses in your...

I have partially covered some of the social networks you can use . Now, let us focus on making the most of them. I will recommend a slightly different strategy for you to follow. After you have made your own experiment and decided on which networks you will concentrate your efforts, here are some tips for you: Do not rush submitting your own posts Do not try to game the system in vain. Instead, give your readers the opportunity to bookmark and/or submit them. This will be a new experiment with which you will measure what percentage of your subscribers take the time to bookmark and share your posts. Think how you can improve the submission rates Most probably, the initial results will be discouraging, that's good! Now, reread your posts and note how you could have written them better, especially the titles. Check if your bookmark links function properly and if they are clearly visible. Do you encourage your readers to share? Use comments to your advantage When answering a rea...

No, I am not obsessed with speed if you have mistakenly got the impression after seeing this post and how to design an efficient blog . I live in an unfortunate area with an Internet connection averaging around 8 Kb per second, which is 1/13 of those who live 10 kilometers to the east and west of me. The tel-co will supposedly make some infrastructure improvements only after January, 2009. Well, at least that is what they claim. I can handle a slow connection but it is really annoying to wait for my own blog to load for 40 seconds. So I decided to make it leaner for my own sake. Before writing this post, I pulled down various statistics of the site (home page only) to help me improve a bit: Total HTML: 19,899 bytes, compressed; Total images: 53,785 bytes; JavaScript: 230,649 bytes; CSS: 8,417 bytes; Total CSS imports: 4. Looking at the above figures, it is apparent that there are only two areas I can make some improvements: JavaScript and CSS imports. I focused on cutting bac...

A common concern for all bloggers new and old is reaching a wider audience. They start with their family members and a few friends, and they write their feelings, thoughts, experiences etc, hoping to gain more subscribers in the wild wild web. Sooner or later, they direct their attention to the so-called social networks as getting traffic from search engines is difficult, at least initially. I will briefly touch upon my experiences with some of them and sincerely hope you will find this review useful. Before we go on, however, I want you to ask yourself a simple question: Do you enjoy using them? Your answer to this is the KEY CONCEPT here. If you think a particular network will bring you readers just because you manage to throw in a post or two, or any number of them, you will soon discover you are wrong. The buzz word is, and has always been the user experience , and you are one of those users. If the network(s) of your choice helps you find interesting blogs, good articles an...

Excluding its simplicity, a big plus, Blogger has some disadvantages over other free blogging platforms. It heavily relies on JavaScript (this quite plain site ships 100,034 bytes of JS) rather than server side scripting, i.e. PHP or Perl, it claims to be XHTMl 1.0 strict, yet the very first script Google flushes breaks the validation, resulting in 461 errors, 164 warnings for this very site. These problems inevitably slow down loading of the pages and design concerns for running an efficient blog become even more critical. Now, I can live with extensive use of client side scripting (JavaScript) and 461 errors because there is nothing I can do about them and modern browsers are really fault tolerant (which makes them less secure, too). But I can not live without Comment Luv. It is the coolest, sweetest idea in the whole blogosphere. It is trivial to install it on a, say, wordpress blog. When I found out that there was a Comment Luv plug-in for Blogger , I had to try it. And I di...

Since this seems to be a popular topic, let me throw in a post in the early stages of this fresh blog of mine. It is popular because everyone and his dog have written something about it. Now, hear what this cat has to say. Why do you blog? No, I am serious, think about it. What is your aim, your target? What do you want to achieve? This is the single most important factor that will have an impact on designing an efficient blog (you noticed the emphasis on efficient, didn't you?). Here are some thoughts: You want to spread your ideas, i.e. you want to be read. You want to sell your products, crafts, etc. on-line. You want to make money from advertising or similar. If you consider the above, you will see that: First group needs readers or subscribers; Second, customers; Third, targeted visitors. You should evaluate your blog, from top to bottom, taking into account what type of visitors you expect. Without further ado, excluding the third group (there is a plethora of ar...