i’m not cool enough in the cool way
Kevin Day, February 8th, 2010I don’t know why, but I can’t stop thinking about the redesign on thesixtyone. You have to go there to check it out. Do it, I’ll wait. There’s music, so if you’re at work… turn the volume up.
(waiting…)
It’s just so fun it makes me smile.
It’s made me rethink web design completely. There’s so many cookie cutter websites that have a header w/logo, navigation links, content in one column, sidebar in another, blah blah blah.
There have to be more types of sites that can be gutted and redesigned in a way that’s both useful and fun.
This format also is great a great candidate for Chrome’s “save web page as app ” feature. I now have an application icon that opens up thesixtyone in a chrome browser without a url bar. Just like an application. And it launches about 10x faster than Rhythmbox loads, which is a locally installed music app.
Right now I’m listening to My First Earthquake, “Cool in the Cool Way“:
They even have a link to a free download of the song, which is cool.
I’ve bought a couple other songs from Amazon MP3 from artists who don’t yet have downloads from t61.
Check it out and think about that design next time you put together a website layout. I know I will.
Create a robots.txt if you haven’t yet
Kevin Day, February 5th, 2010I have anecdotal evidence that Google is more likely to crawl and index your site if you have a robots.txt (set to allow googlebot) than if you don’t have any robots.txt file.
For Crunch Course, I’ve taken my time setting up a robots.txt file. Partly because I didn’t think it would help much and partly because it takes a couple steps to do it in Django.
As a result, Google’s cache of Crunch Course is about a month old.
I finally got around to adding a robots.txt yesterday, and I’m now getting a bunch of 404 errors from the googlebot for old links that I’ve since changed the structure of. That’s indicating to me that it checks for a robots.txt frequently, but it is much more likely to actually crawl the site if it has the green light to do so. Of course it could also just be a coincidence, but that doesn’t make for a good blog post.
So there you have it, indisputable evidence from one data point that Google is more likely to crawl your site if you have a robots.txt than if you don’t.
Bulletproof Web Design Now on Crunch Course
Kevin Day, February 2nd, 2010If you want to get serious about HTML and CSS, you have to read Bulletproof Web Design, by Dan Cederholm. It’s a must-read for any web professional.
We’re just starting to go through the book chapter by chapter on Crunch Course. There’s more than 40 of us now, so you’ll have a lot of people to learn with.
Crunch Course Now Live
Kevin Day, January 10th, 2010Crunch Course has been updated and is now live. It’s a community where people can learn together and give feedback.
You don’t have to be an expert in something to create a class. Just be willing to organize some material and gather others.
I’m the creator for Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. There’s seven people in it so far.
Check it out now. Join or create a class.
[Edit: thanks to reddit, it now has 567 members! Incredible.]
Contact Management Software
Kevin Day, November 22nd, 2009There’s a lot of contact management software out there. I don’t know if it’s just me, but none of them seem to fit the way that I work. Just managing the contacts for my fantasy football website quickly becomes overwhelming.
That’s why I’m developing Launch Pulse, a new kind of contact management application. It’s going to have about 1/20th of the features of all the other programs out there. And yes, I am aware of Highrise by 37Signals. Fewer features than even that. I’m not sure yet if it anyone else will feel the same about it, but I like using it already in it’s alpha state.
How is it different? It won’t sync with your Outlook or Gmail contacts. It isn’t tied to your email system at all. But it is flexible. I think the initial target audience will be people using Customer Development because it requires talking to a lot of people and managing responses and feedback. However, I think it could later be expanded to manage contacts for weddings, job searches, and anything else.
It’s not available yet, but you can leave your email address on the website (no spam) to get notified first when it enters public beta.
How Cloud Computing Can Help Your Business
Kevin Day, July 28th, 2009It took me a while to finally post the slides, but here is my presentation on cloud computing from Ignite Cleveland in May 2009.This presentation is really high-level and non-technical. When I get time, I’ll write a post about some cool log file data mining that I did with Elastic MapReduce to get the data presented here.
Your bounce rate is worse than you think
Kevin Day, April 20th, 2009One standard metric for measuring the performance of a website is its bounce rate. However, I’ve recently learned that what “bounce rate” typically measures isn’t what I thought it was.
What I really want bounce rate to tell me is the answer to this question:
What percent of first time visitors to the site leave immediately?
It wasn’t until I found Google Analytics’ advanced segmenting feature that I could actually answer that question.
In Google Analytics, you can filter your reports by New vs. Returning visitors. The resulting report then shows all of the data separated by New and Returning visitors.
For my fantasy football website, I had assumed that my bounce rate was 13% because that’s what my reports said.
However, when it’s broken down by New and Returning traffic, my new traffic bounce rate is higher at almost 23%.
The large proportion of returning visitors was skewing my overall bounce rate. It’s obvious now that I see it broken out, but I had previously assumed that all traffic bounced equally. It clearly doesn’t.
If you haven’t segmented your traffic by New vs. Returning, you may be surprised to see the change in your bounce rate and other statistics. It only takes 5 seconds to do in your Google Analytics, so try it now.
Micro-innovations that make me happy
Kevin Day, March 12th, 2009Two things came out this week that will instantly make my life easier and cheaper:
Da Button Factory: Instantly create shiny buttons online. I had no idea how bad I was at making buttons until I spent 5 minutes on their site and saw what I could do. Also, within the past two days they’ve already made several improvements to the site.
Amazon Reserved Instances: The same Amazon server that I’ve been using is now going to cost 33% less with their new payment plan. A virtual dedicated server (not including bandwidth) now only costs $48/month. Awesome.
Getting Organized
Kevin Day, February 9th, 2009I just stumbled on Randy Pausch’s Time Management lecture from November, 2007. He didn’t present anything overly unique, but his overall presentation style and credibility made me think twice about my own organization. He not only knew of a lot of small productivity tricks, but I got the impression that he stuck to them very well.
Some of the highlights:
- Plan
- Organize your paper files
- Have a to-do list ordered by importance
- Do the to-do items that are important, regardless of when they are due (don’t do the unimportant ones)
- Inbox zero
- Make a schedule that fits your naturally productive times
- Write thank-you cards
- Completely clean your desk except for the one thing you’re currently working on
- Track your time
- Kill your TV
I’m doing a couple of these I’m doing already, but there’s a lot more I can improve upon. I think just seeing him as an example of how successful one can be is enough inspiration to get more organized.
Great domain name checker
Kevin Day, January 15th, 2009In the past I’ve used pcnames.com for searching domain names. They have a lot of good tools there and I’ll probably continue to use them.
However, I just found bustaname.com and it’s pretty awesome. It has a synonym finder, saved searches, grouped words, prefixes and suffixes. It’ll probably be the first site I go to from now on.
As I was using this, I thought that another extension would be to have the option to do two more searches:
1) Regular Google search for those terms, since there could be conflicts with major companies/organizations
2) U.S. Trademark search to avoid nasty IP issues.
#1 would be easy, not sure about #2 though. Compared to getting a name I like, those aren’t nearly as hard though.
(FYI: Referral code in the link above)
