From the first moment I decided to have my own website, my plans for it were grand. This should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me a bit; All my plans are grand. Every time, I scaled down my ideas to achieve a finished product in some reasonable time, or simply because I had to have a site, to show a client or share with someone.

I started making websites in the good old days of static HTML, with no CSS styles in sight. It was all HTML code with FONT tags and baroque TABLE based layouts all stacked careful to make a pleasing final result. Very soon I decided I needed to make a site of my own to showcase some of my work, so with a few client sites under my belt (yes, I got paid to make websites for other people before I made my own), I set out to make a graphically rich portfolio of my work. It was meant to be more impressive than comprehensive, and the site needed to be tiny and quick. I was still using a dial-up connection at the time, as were most people I knew, and I was going to host it on a free account to get my feet wet. I knew little about web hosting and domain names at the time, and as a student, free was a great price to start with.

My first static portfolio site, in 2001, was quite a masterpiece of simple HTML, enhanced well by low-colour imagery to keep file sizes to the minimum. I balanced out the need for fewer colours by using large and bold graphical elements. Much of my subsequent graphical identity in print and web came from some of the patterns and decisions made for that initial site.

When I was freed of academia, I wanted to finally start learning things I knew I wanted to do. It was 2003 and the buzz around blogging was well on its way, but being a hands on person, I was never willing to have my blog on one of the few free blogging services back then. I wanted to do things from scratch and understand them, so I decided to start a blog about redesigning my site and also learning 3D graphics in Blender using a self-hosted Perl script. As a result I learnt more about web applications and content management scripts than any college education could have given me. The blog was added as a section on my old static HTML portfolio. In time, I did learn quite a bit about blender, and blogging, but real-world client work started to pick up, my portfolio site grew outdated and the blog died from the simple lack of time and attention.

A year or so later, in the thick of client-work frenzy, I realised I needed to have at least a basic portfolio online to share with potential clients, so I cannibalised an abandoned plan for my site’s redesign and used a negative of the graphic style I had come up with to make a simple single page portfolio of thumbnails of my work that clients could browse. For a few years that was my only online presence.

By the end of 2006, I had gone through a couple of further iterations of my simple one-page portfolio. My joy at client work was beginning to diminish and there was the urge to learn new things again. The previous year and earlier that year I had taken on a few CMS-based web site projects which had given me a good understanding of Drupal, Joomla and WordPress. I had just setup my first WordPress site for a client (why learn for free when you can get someone to pay you to learn?), and I had the urge to revive my old blog, this time using the much more flexible WordPress platform. The plan was to revive the old blog and mix into it my static single page portfolio, with the grand plan of eventually making a full fledged portfolio gallery system that would be easy to keep updated with both new work and new thoughts.

That is how I came to the site I have now as I write this. A fairly active blog of involved articles and a static Works page. But the shiny dynamic portfolio system never materialised, and since my interest in traditional client work diminished, there was less reason to hurry. I have not being hurrying on that for three years now.

Meanwhile, the blog has grown, I have become active on Twitter, and since this was only the second WordPress site I ever created, I have come to realise that on a technical level it is a lot of crap. Granted, I have made plenty of improvements in functionality and speed over the years, but there are some things you just can’t tackle without a ground-up rewrite. Also, I have been practising my technique and my ideas. My design studio site Primordial Soop finally started last year with an updatable, dynamic portfolio system using WordPress’s new custom posts system, and more recently, I even started a design blog on that site that has a lot better code and styling features than this site. It’s about time I translated all those skills back to the site that started it all and still remains my most well known and well visited online presence.

What needs to be done

Portfolio, portfolio portfolio

From the beginning, the need to show my work was the main stay of the site, then my first experiments with blogging took over, and then the single page portfolio again. My current site merges the single page portfolio with my reasonably active blog. My dream of a comprehensive system to display my work was never realised.

What I want to create is not a portfolio in the traditional sense, in that it is not meant to showcase my most impressive work to catch the interest of clients. My need is to create a comprehensive online archive to show all my work that is worthy of display. This will include not only graphics but also writing and will be made as much for myself as for sharing with others. Few manage to create a complete archive of their major and minor works, especially if you’ve been as prolific and wide-ranging as I have been in bits, but I would like to try.

Minimise and streamline

The current site is a standard WordPress blog with a Works page added in. It behaves like a blog, looks like a blog and works like one. I started it at a time when blogs were notoriously crowded with widgets and side-bar options and all manner of visual and textual clutter. While I have reduced some of this over the years, the site needs to be re-thought, both to make a cleaner blog, and also to create a site that is more than just a blog and has a separate identity for the different sections and kinds of content.

Portal magic

With time, I have created other places online where I share my thoughts and exist, so to speak. There are services like Twitter, and there are also a number of new focussed sites I have begun work on. As of this writing there is the Primordial Soop blog called Origin of Life, and also the technical and content management blog Content Deliverance, but I fully expect for other such long dormant ideas to spring into action in the future. Considering these many tentacles of my interest, my site, and more specifically its home page, needs to be transformed into a portal that displays and informs the reader of the breadth of my interests and also about all my various articles, posts and activities around the web, as they happen. SamirBharadwaj.com needs to become a portal to my online thoughts.

Tagging, thumbnails and theatre

WordPress was a fairly simplistic blogging platform when I started with it many years ago. Since then it has grown by leaps and bounds into a much richer blogging experience and a viable content management system for multiple varieties of content.

Some built-in features that are now possible but weren’t when I began this site are tags and post thumbnails. I made do with inherited and new categories to organise my blog posts at the time, buy I have since tamed the rough edges of redundant categories and would very much like to implement a useful system of tagging for the blog. While some work has begun in the background since the feature was included, my front-end theme was never designed with tags in mind and so a redesign is mandatory.

On the more visual side of things, post-thumbnails used to require plugins to implement, but now is a native feature of WordPress. Considering I’ve always gone out of the way to have all my posts supported with illustrations or other imagery, a clever use and integration of post thumbnails is well overdue for a better and more navigable user experience on the site. That combined with the to-be-built portfolio stream will make a comprehensive use of image thumbnails possible. As these different sections of the site, blog, portfolio, and possibly others, begin to appear there is going to be a need to maintain a site-wide visual identity while also making the demarcation clear to the reader. First and foremost, a reader must always know their location in the site. To that end, section-specific graphics, backgrounds and similar visual cues will need to be implemented, to make this site all it can be, creating unique sets to make the story clear.

These are the main issues and requirements I have in mind for the redesign of this website. Many technical changes, such as the removal of extraneous categories and the consolidation of posts into more logical divisions, has already begun. This leaves tagging and finally the re-engineering of the site structure and theme to accommodate the new functionality.

The trick is going to be in creating something revolutionary while being evolutionary. I have generally liked the look of this site, as have many of you, and it does have a strong visual identity. That and the fact that I have never felt I pushed this look and layout to its maximum potential with this iteration of the site layout, means I’m going to have to change a lot without destroying what works. That is always a tough ask and much more challenging than starting from a blank page, but whether or not I succeed in this mission only time will tell.

Samir

So I went ahead and joined Twitter, and I am currently quite twitterpated with it. I’m always a late adopter of social media and online social network sites, as I am with this 140 character restricted micro-blogging sensation. This is mostly because I don’t always assume the latest cool thing is actually going to be of any use to me. After plenty of waiting through, Twitter seemed like a mature enough idea to join in on the fun. Not that I’m saying Twitter is used for anything mature, but at least it has all grown up as a platform for fun.

Twitterpated

I know there are few of you who are just jumping up and down there in the back dying to ask the most important question: What does twitterpated mean? And most of you in the front are just too shy to ask, so I will try to define twitterpated for you. The Urban Dictionary does a very comprehensive job at a definition, but in case you’re more in the mood for the dummies version which makes just as much sense here goes. To be Twitterpated is to be aroused, intensely attracted, enamoured, smitten, practically in heat! That last version gives a clue to the origins of the term, and it is a very strange origin. Bambi introduced us to the word and it has since taken on a life of its own; Yes, I mean the cute forest creature Bambi. To see Bambi twitterpated, or at least in denial of the possibility of future twitterpation (did I just invent a new part of speech for a made-up word?), watch the video.

Now that the mandatory educational segment is out of the way let’s move on to the gratuitous linking.

Know Twits

Part of the attraction of Twitter was that the cool crowd were all there. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m always where the cool people are *cough*, so joining up was just a matter of course. Now I could put in whole directory of Twitter links here and name drop like there’s no tomorrow, but that would just be excessive, so I’ll stick to the important few.

Pearl is on Twitter. She’s as regular a visitor on this site as I can probably get, and always provides an interesting read. Her Twitter page is worth a look and very worth following because she links to a lot of useful, topical or just plain fascinating pages that I would never come across otherwise.

The illustrious Luciano has not spared Twitter his wisdom and it is a better place for it. Whether it’s thoughtful quotes, a friendly pointer towards a new book worth devouring, or just a heads up about the latest on his excellent site, if you have a brain and like to use it occasionally, follow his tweets to keep sharp.

Vishal‘s twittering makes this list to prove that nepotism is still alive and well, and because he posts very interesting snippets about hot tea . That and all those strange things he finds to link to which I can’t be bothered to track down myself. To nepotism and laziness!

Twittered Upon

My sojourn into Twitter land has already borne fruit. In my short time as part of the noisy flock I have already discovered some treasures.

SmashingMagazine is a great resource on design and all things web that I have known about for a long time. But, I have never added it to my feed reader for fear of information overload. On Twitter though, I find them a joy, even though they point to both their own articles and others. The medium of tweets makes it somehow more manageable, and I’m discovering some excellent sites through their recommendations.

O’Reilly Publishing has a new blog and it’s all sorts of geek cool! Firstly it’s called O’Reilly Radar … Radar Oreilly, get it? It covers a good spectrum of topics from technology to business, the environment, education, and everything in between and beyond. Thought provoking stuff.

And if that makes you think Twitter is all serious and stuffy you might be right, because the most serious man in Galactic history is also there Darth Vader seems to like it on Twitter. When he’s not making threatening gestures towards his storm troopers, he’s musing about the everyday banalities of being the most evil despot in the known universe. Don’t you love a man in a black uniform?

Twittering Tools

The web was practically useless until someone invented a search engine, so you’ll be glad to know Twitter already has its own. The advanced Twitter search page is especially worth exploring. Not only will it let you do straight-forward text searches, but also restrict searches by various detailed criteria including geography. Learn to use this well because like all search tools it is a powerful weapon for both work and play, and considering the real time nature of Twitter, even more so.

Keeping within the 140 character restriction and the simple technology behind Twitter, there have been many attempts at organising it more using categorization and meta-tagging. On of the most successful attempts has been Hashtags which uses an old IRC convention(#) to add appropriate keywords to tweets to help collate similarly themed status updates. A very useful tool, and one I’m still learning about.

No site is an island, and certainly no social site. This is why something like Twitter needs to interface with regular people’s desktops on their computer if it wants to really become a lasting phenomenon. Twitter doesn’t disappoint in this area, with a growing list of Twitter clients, tools and miscellaneous applications to choose from. Most of these were created by people trying to fill a personal need so they vary greatly in technology and function. A wondrous box of toys to play with.

Twittering WordPress

In the new world of social networks and user generated content, very few can afford to ignore the WordPress juggernaut. As you would expect there are a whole slew of ways to get your twitter account talking to your WordPress blog and for your WordPress site to talk to your Twitter account. I’ll stick to the few that I thought were the best as I consider what to use on my own site.

WordPress Twitter Tools is plugin suite by the ever active Alex King who has brought us many ubiquitous plugins before including such gems as Share This. What can it do? I lot, too much to itemise here in fact. If you want to connect up your blog and Twitter account, consider this as a serious contender for a solution.

The same goes for Lifestream, which is probably what I might end up using on my site in the future for it’s superior flexibility. It creates a lifestream page where various feeds from your external sites like Twitter or other blogs and social sites can be aggregated into a single listing. It also backs up all your past tweets to your local database which is a great solution for those who don’t like to completely rely on the immortality of free services.

When I started, a big bold subscribe to RSS icon was enough, but as all these social accounts grow, I also wanted a way to link to them prominently on this site so people can find their way there. One ready made solution for WordPress is the Follow Me plugin. It sets up a widget with tiny icons and text links to your various social accounts in your side bar.

That’s exactly what I had in mind, but for one, it’s not very pretty, and it doesn’t include a facility for a Xing account, which I do have. The only solution seems to be to spin your own text widget with manual links and custom icons. There are thousands of free social bookmark icon sets out there that you can download but none that excited me with a fitting style. The Vikiworks iconset came very close, but once again Xing wasn’t included, so perhaps I’m going to have to do this the hard way and make my own.

I’m still finding my way around the twitterverse and I like what I see so far. I’ve included what I think are useful resources above but I know there’s plenty more out there. If there are any Twitter-related links and resources you would like to recommend or share please leave a comment below.

To end I will leave you with a deep through from the wise owl. What do you mean what wise owl? You did see the video didn’t you? You must! It’s the greatest thing in sex education tapes since erotic Indian temple sculpture! There if that doesn’t get you lot to see it, nothing will.

Where was I? Ahh yes, the wise owl. The wise owl said, “Nearly everybody gets twitterpated in the spring time.” This can only mean I’m an early bloomer, because it’s not even Februaray yet and I’m twitterpated plenty.

Samir

FeedBurner, now part of the Google universe, is a service to enhance and manage RSS feeds that is used by many bloggers. Not being comfortable with hosted services myself, I had written a guide to using some WordPress plugins as FeedBurner alternatives which continues to be one of the most visited articles on this site.

Edward de Leau found his way to that article, and being the proud owner of one of the longest running blogs out there, he brought up an interesting question: What if you not only want to use FeedBurner RSS feeds for your blog, but you want to use FeedBurner for all of the feeds your blog/CMS spits out?

He said:

I’m still interested in going back to feedburner. I like to outsource as much as possible (with the benefits of new features and updates which I dont have to maintain myself).

However, I have 1 front page feed, 9000 posts feeds, 1000 tag feeds, etc… how in asimovs name can I get each one of them tied to a unique feedburner feed?

Do you have any clue?

No queries asked in Asimov’s name shall go unanswered! So I did a bit of digging around.

Obviously, FeedBurner has its uses, and while I am ever curious about finding ways to replace its functionality, I can understand the reasoning for using it. However, like all outsourced services, especially free ones, I think you are going to find several limations with this service for hardcore usage. I think the need to add 9000 post feeds and 1000 tag feeds to FeedBurner can safely be considered hardcore usage.

I have no recent familiarity with the inner workings of a FeedBurner account, but I do know you need to add each feed or “burn” it into your account one at a time. In the interest of automation, the original FeedBurner team introduced a Feed Management API all the way back in 2005 [see Feed Management API Reference]. Even in the original announcement on the FeedBurner blog though, they had clearly indicated the limitations:

What can’t you do with the API? Nothing, with one exception. The API has a built-in limit of 20 burned feeds per user id. We will ratchet this down even lower if it’s abused, but that seems like a reasonable number to get started. If you want to burn and manage more than 20 feeds via the API for a single user, you should email our business development group: newbiz at feedburner dot com. Also, you will need to have a valid FeedBurner user account created from the Web site to play.

Customers and partners are granted special powers and the twenty feed limitation is removed. …

Far from ratcheting this limit down, if this Drupal discussion is anything to go by, it was at 30 feeds per account when Google took over. But, it would seem Google has disabled access to the management API all together, at least to the masses.

From the FeedBurner API Developer Guide:

Currently, the Feed Management API is offered only to Google partners who were previously under contract with FeedBurner. We are in the process of updating these APIs to be current with the features we provide, documenting the API better so that publishers can be self sufficient, and making sure the APIs are secure and cannot be abused. We are also looking at how to best support bulk management of feeds through our UIs and APIs in a future release.

… which translates to: Ha! Ha! You can’t play! … or something close.

For now it would seem any dreams of mass automated FeedBurner action are but dreams, and considering Google made many of the paid FeedBurner services free when they took over, a route into Google FeedBurner partnership also seems uncertain. We will just have to wait for Google to unveil their master plan on this front. The only people who know anything more about this are Google themselves, and perhaps a polite query dropped to somone in the right department might get you some educated replies on where this matter stands.

We must keep in mind though, that while applications like Feedburner and Google Reader are now addept at keeping track of specified feeds, a free-for-all feed adding API feature seems unlikely. If that were allowed, it would only be a matter of hours before someone created a WordPress plugin or a Drupal module to auto burn every comment, post, category, and tag feed as it was created. With thousands of new blogs being created everyday, and tens or hundreds of millions of blog posts published every day, the number of feeds that the FeedBurner servers would have to manage and keep track of every day would increse exponentially. It’s safe to say that this sort of near geometric progression would soon reach the limits of all computing power known to humanity, and would make any bandwidth problems brought on by online video distribution seem like a minor hiccup.

So, while we can wait for Google to come to a decision on this matter, infinite FeedBurner feed nirvana is an unlikely scenario without serious science fiction repurcussions. But, feel free to tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about below.

Samir

This is a slightly self serving edition of Fresh Finds, but then this site is called SamirBharadwaj.com, so what the hell. Online social networking is the new porn. It’s official. I’ve never been an early adopter of this stuff, because random online socialising has never been my forte. But, I do see the benefits of some of these social network sites and I’m trying my hand at it..

• At long last I succumbed to StumbleUpon
  I’ve always found StumbleUpon to be the most homely of all the social-bookmarking-Web2.0 coolness that is out there and forever growing. For one, the people involved actually seem to care for what they’re promoting, and there’s a healthy dose of community involved in the best parts of the network. I signed up, and after plenty of procrastinating I’ve also started participating occasionally.

  While I often post themed sets of links in my Fresh Finds posts, StumbleUpon is a good way for me to tag and keep track of random stuff, and more one-off finds. There’s plenty of photography related material there, which seems to be quite popular on the site, and that fits in perfectly with my tastes.

  So, head on over to my StumbleUpon page, browse around, add me as a friend if you like, and I hope you find plenty to keep you busy.

• That XING Thing
  Professional networking through one of the handfull of online business social networks has intrigued me for a while now, because here is finally some purpose to the whole party. I actually got into Xing after someone contacted me through this site to use one of my comics. That’s how I signed up and I’ve had a account there for a while.

  I find the focused nature of this sort of network quite interesting. Sure, it has some of the random banter and incessant “friend” adding that comes with the territory, but at least most people connect here for common interests that go beyond the purely social. I’m not saying it is better, just different, and if you are at all interested in building contacts in your own field and others, it can be a useful resource.

  You can see my Xing profile to get an idea of how it works. The inclusion of “wants” and “haves” into the profile data is a clever one. It immediately adds purpose and common ground into the mix, something a many social network services lack.

• Shut Your Face!
  And then there’s Facebook. It is the most popular network of them all at the moment. I take that with a pinch of salt because there have been different “most popular networks” every few years ever since the birth of the internet. I do have an account there, but do I think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread? No, not really.

  Facebook has to be the best example of a perfectly efficient machine that is almost perfectly ineffective. Of course, it is popular, and millions of people join, and I’m sure plenty of commerce takes place over it, but in the great cosmic balancesheet, the end result of somthing like Facebook will always be zero. It is what has unfortunately become the norm in internet social networks, to be self feeding, viral and completely incestual in focus.

  The reason people do anything on Facebook is purely so that they can be seen as being socially relevant on Facebook, by other socially relevant people on Facebook, for greater social relevance on Facebook! It’s a guinea pig on a running wheel.

  Could something like this be a positive force? Of course it could, but I don’t see it here. If anyone can explain to me what the greater purpose of this thing is besides a way to waste time when you are bored, or convince me that it really is more important than the discovery of electricity, feel free to go over to my Facebook profile and give me a good lecture on my wall while simultaneously hugging me, poking me, and paying to give me tiny pictures called “gifts”. Yikes! It really is the future!

Samir

Trying out direct advertising has always been on the cards, but I’ve never gotten around to it. One of main stumbling blocks with blog ads is the fact that, unlike contextual advertising like AdSense, you need to do all the hard work of finding the advertisers and getting them to pay your asking price for a lucrative spot on your (hopefully) much viewed sidebar — or where ever else you wish to stick those ads. That’s where ad networks often come in, and for those of us wanting to try our hand at banner advertising on our blogs and web sites, PerfomancingAds might have just come to our rescue.

What is PerfomancingAds?

PerformancingAds is an ad network, displaying ads in the now popular 125×125 pixel format. You sign up for an account, add your site as a possible advertising platform, set a price per week and the number of ads available, and people can then pay to have their ad displayed on your site. An elegant solution to a usually cumbersome process. You the publisher get 60% of the price and PerformancingAds keeps 40% as their service charge.

Whose idea is PerfomancingAds?

PerformancingAds is brought to us by Performancing.com, a well respected site for all things web and geek. I myself have benefitted with a decent amount of traffic when some of my articles on this site have been mentioned or linked on Performancing. That was one of the main resons I was immediately interested when I came across news of their new service.

I believe they had a similar ad network running before but it was stopped a while ago. Perhaps they learnt a lot from the shortcomings of the previous platform, and hopefully this one is smoother and more functional.

Why are blog ads of interest?

If you wish to make money online, break even on your blog hosting costs, or monetize your blog traffic in any way, blog ads are a lucrative alternative to automated contextual advertising like AdSense. While AdSense and similar programmes rely on users clicking on the ads for you to generate revenue, banners and blog ads are usually a renting of the space for a particular time period (1 week increments in the case of PerformancingAds). So as long as you have a decent amount of traffic, your advertisers pay you a fixed sum for being able to show their ads on your site. As long as you maintain the activity levels on your site, this can be a much more steady source of income than other methods. Targetted eyeballs are generally more easy to come by than clicks.

How do I join PerformancingAds and set it up?

1. Go to the PerformancingAds site at www.PerformancingAds.com
2. Click on Register under the Member Login box at the top right to sign up for a new account.
3. Fill in the details in the form. Note that you will need a PayPal account. At the moment Paypal seems to be the only way to recieve payment for ads.
4. Once logged in you can Add a Site into their system. And Add a region to define a specific instance/location where the ads will appear. This includes settings for how many ads you wish to allow.
5. You can then download the PerfomancingAds plugin by clicking on Download Publisher Software Now at the bottom of your account page.
6. The plugin comes ready to be used in WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and also as a standalone PHP script if required. That’s a great amount of flexibity to have at your disposal, and a route more advertising networks should be taking.
7. The included installation instructions are detailed and clear, and the ads can be inserted by using some code that references the region that you setup in the PerformancingAds administration system.

What are the Pros and Cons of PerfomancingAds?

Pros

• Takes the marketing and administration part of blog ads out of your busy hands.
• A single standard size ad simplifies things and allows you to better integrate them into your blog layout.
• A publicly accesible marketplace means a lot of advertisers who would not have otherwise known about you can now be exposed to your site.
• Easy to implement in most blogs and sites with the PerformancingAds plugin.
• You can also fill your ad inventoy with your own ads for other sites, affiliate links, or even just important parts of your own site without incurring any charges from PerfomancingAds. This is a great way to utilise the ad space until more lucrative commercial advertisers come along. It’s also a great way to be very selective about accepting external advertisers while still reaping the benfit of being included in the PerformancingAds marketplace.

Cons

• You only get 60% of the money.
• Their marketplace tags each site with its Alexa rank, which is recognised by one and all to be an extremely unreliable measure of a site’s popularity or activity level. But, guess what, your potential advertisers are going to be judging you by this anyway.
• Other metrics appear on the details page for each site. These include Google Page Rank, Technorati Rank, Yahoo! inbound links, and Bloglines subscribers. Except perhaps the Yahoo! inbound links, all the rest are extremely subjective and inacurate measures of a site’s worth to an advertiser or the traffic it receives. For example, this site has a healthy and growing number of RSS subscribers and email update subscribers (over a hundred at this writing), but how many subscribers do I have through Bloglines? Two.

Are there any alternatives to PerformancingAds?

Sure there are. MANY! Many more than I could possibly list here, but here are some which are either particularly good or similar in spirit:

• Entrecard — An online business card exchange system of sorts, which also deals in similar 125 pixel wide images. Their system involves the accumulation of credits which can then be bought, sold, and traded.
• WP Text Ads — A plugin and service that lets you sell text ads on your blog directly without a middle man taking a cut. The free edition of the plugin is fully featured but limits the number of ads you can sell, while the paid edition gets rid of those limits.
• BlogRush — A traffic exchange widget that is quite popular.
• Kontera — Mostly unobtrusive in-text advertising that acts as a good complement or replacement to other contextual systems like Google AdSense.
• Google AdSense — The undisputed king of blog monetization resources. It’s the simplest way to start and there are enough professional bloggers who make a good income from this alone.

Hope you found this little guide to the new Performancing blog ads useful. If you are interested in trying this out for yourself, sign up at PerformancingAds. Let me know of your thoughts and experiences with blog advertising below, and best of luck with your blogging adventures.

Samir

There were enough good reasons to not upgrade software, even beyond laziness, of course.

With every new software patch or upgrade there come the inevitable new issues and problems along with the improvements. This is especially true when you are working with a modular system like a blog script or a content management system. Your site depends not only on the main software but also numerous plugins and modules that create the user experience you want. Often, changes in code render old plugins obsolete and broken, and there aren’t always easy alternatives to switch to.

Familiarity and comfort with a particular version of code can be a strong reason to stick to it. This is the reason people were still using COBOL code in the last decade and we had the Y2K scare. Even with WordPress, the new version was a drastic change from the one I was using, and perhaps I was delaying the inevitable a bit.

Last, but certainly not the least, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Old systems sometimes reach a certain level of stability which cannot be bettered. If a piece of software does everything you want it to do, and it has no major bugs or security flaws, there really is no logical reason to change.

I can’t claim that to be the case in my story. WordPress was well overdue for an update both for the better functionality and security of my site. Of course, this now means that many things are not working like they used to, and it might take me a few days to get things back in order and replace lost functionality with new plugins.

So, I appreciate your patience with my growing pains, and if you come across something specific that doesn’t work like it’s supposed to, feel free to use the comments below as a bug-report thread. I would appreciate the help, and I would also love to hear about some of your software upgrade experiences.

Samir

• Diana Bajenaru of 134u.com linked to it in the 1st edition of the Resource for Bloggers Carnival.
• Sandra of Free Cash Quest linked to it in the 11th edition of the Free Cash & Making Money Online Carnival.
• Satish Talim of Blog Me Cash linked to it in the 11th edition of the Blog Me Cash Carnival.
• Tommy Smith of Online Income Project linked to it in the November 19, 2007 edition of the Carnival of Online Income.
• Liz Fuller of More Than We Know linked to it in the edition #27 of the Carnival of Small Business Issues.
• Anthony of The Lives and Times… of Anthony McCune linked to it in the the first Surfer’s Paradise HULLABALOO! Carnival.
• Butanido of Butanido-Autoblog linked to it in the November 27, 2007 edition of the Blog to Earn Carnival.
• John W. Furst of E-biz Booster Blog linked to it in the December 03, 2007 edition of the Webmaster Articles Carnival.

Thank you all!

Samir

A friend of mine wants to setup a complex survey on her WordPress blog. The idea is to ask some questions on a topic, study the reader response, gather some statistics and arrive at some conclusions — your bog standard survey stuff, really. The challenge and boon of doing an online survey is that a more complex system can be setup to get more out of the process. Ideally, the software tools should be able to gather data, compile statistics, provide some immediate feedback to the participant, and possibly interface with a mailing list or auto-response sequence to allow further contact with the reader. With these lofty goals in mind I set off on my own survey of the available tools.

• WbExam and WbQuiz plugins
  I first stumbled upon the WbExam and WbQuiz plugins which do exactly what their names indicate. While similar in functionality, they each allow for a specialised type of online form setup. Unfortunately, the focus here is on the immediate evaluation of the answers and reader response rather than on data collection and study. After a quick look, I couldn’t find any mention or evidence that these plugins contained any data storage components at all. They are, however, very well suited for quiz and exam content that is aimed solely at the user experience, rather than statistical research.

  The other stumbling block for most might be that the questions need to be setup by editing code in a template file rather than in the WordPress administrative backend. If the functionality these provide is what you’re looking for, however, I think it’s well worth the effort.

• Survey Gizmo
  Survey Gizmo looked like a very promising plugin, and the feature list was extensive and impressive. On further study I realised that this was not stand-alone, but instead it was a bridge plugin that connected to some sort of survey API hosted on that site as a service. As a rule I like to avoid these external services, so I passed on this one. But if you’re looking to set up feature rich surveys on your WordPress blog, and you’re not to bothered about having your site be functionally self-sufficient, this might be an interesting option.

• WP Survey Creator
  While not blessed with tons of documentation, WP Survey Creator was closer to the kind of solution I was looking for — a native WordPress administration page to create the question sets, a default field to collect email addresses etc. Unfortunately its straight-forward simplicity, while refreshing, didn’t quite cover all the options I was looking for. This plugin only allows for questions that will be answered by a multi-choice 1-5 scale. This is a perfect system to study user feedback and ratings, but it would be crippling if any more detailed answers were required for your research. So, a good basic option for certain uses, but I moved on.

• Survey Fly
  [UPDATE 05 Dec 2009 : The Survey Fly site linked above seems to be down for a while now. Thanks to David Esrati for the warning in the comments and also for pointing me towards Survey Fly's spiritual successor: wp-surveys.]
  I wasn’t expecting much when I found yet another survey plugin, but I was pleasantly surprised by Survey Fly. It is a very feature complete plugin for its intended purpose. You can add a new survey in the admin area and specify the questions and possible answers for your survey. Responses are stored and statistics can be accessed as simple figures or exported to a CSV file for more complex study and analysis.

  Survey Fly supports almost any kind of HTML form based question you can imagine. This allows for a great amount of flexibility in the collected information. The only drawback (for some) will be that only one survey can be active at a time. Every time a new survey is added the older one becomes inactive and inaccessible. Other than that one shortcoming, and the lack of any ability to provide the survey participant with an immediate individual response based on their answers, this is as good as WordPress survey plugins get.

• phpMyAdahas
  My aim is to find a WordPress integrated solution to this problem, but I am not completely averse to an external solution if it has many functional advantages in its favour. phpMyAdahas is a fully customizable online survey application using XHTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL. It seems to be very capable, supports multi-page questionnaires, various answering options, and it is even compliant with various web accessibility standards. If your looking for a solution to some heavy duty online surveying needs, this might be the right system for you.

• POST data manipulation using php and CURL
  I would have loved to find a survey solution that would somehow auto-magically plug into my email newsletter or autoresponder system of choice. But, considering my disappointment with the free tools available in that area, I was not surprised to see that my ideal solution didn’t exist.

  This meant that I would need to create the connection myself if these integrated data submissions for both survey and signup had to be accomplished. After a bit of searching I found this nice article on manipulating form data that is passed to PHP scripts. Not being well versed in PHP at the moment, most of this goes over my head, but I do realise that the solutions I seek are explained in this page, if I only I take the time to understand and implement.

At the end of it all, I never did find my ideal online survey tool, although Survey Fly comes close. From my limited study of the available tools, my ideal solution would be something that had Survey Fly at its base, with the immediate evaluation capabilities of WbQuiz/WbExam, and a co-submission of data to a newsletter script using PHP and CURL as described in the last link. Perhaps I will eventually get around to implementing this Frankenstein monster of free online survey tools myself, at least for my own use, by putting together the same ingredients I mentioned. Sometimes if you want something very specific, you simply have to do it yourself. I am thankful that at least the building blocks exist, and now it is a simple matter of learning some more PHP.

Samir

Refactoring

I have nothing drastic in mind, but I know of a lot of things that aren’t working well on this site, and many things that could be working better. In the coming months the plan is to do a comprehensive rethinking and refactoring of this site and blog, mainly on a coding and technical level. There are browser compatibility issues to be ironed out and cleaner SEO techniques to be employed. All of these things will make this site better, faster and more effective in the long run.

Not only will this process give me immense personal pleasure and satisfaction, but it will make for a better browsing experience for my readers, which is always a goal to aspire to. In addition, I think a series of articles that describe all the changes I make and the techniques I implement will make for some educational reading, and it should be fun to put together once this is all done. Subscribe to my RSS feed and watch out for those updates.

Environment Series

Blog Action Day, 2007 is done, and my series on The Environmental Movement and Why It’s Not Working also came to a close this last month. But not before leading me in a new direction in my interest in the environmental movement. As elaborated in my final post and announcement on Blog Action Day, I will be working on a new site on the environment soon, one that should bring a new and refreshing twist to the subject matter.

Blog Carnivals

I wasn’t very active on the blog carnival scene this past month. So much so that I might have lost track of one or two carnivals that did link to my posts during this phase. Sorry folks, I usually link back to all you kind people who include me in your listings but I’ve slipped up a bit on this occasion. I will make it up to you in the future.

ToDo

Rethink, redo, and reengineer — that is what is in store for this site in the near future. The (hopefully) interesting content and the look isn’t going to change, but the inner workings should be changing for the better

Keep visiting, keep commenting and keep the conversation going.

Samir

I think it’s a good idea, but I wonder how many people are a little attached to their online anonimity. On the other hand, someone like me doesn’t have any problems with it. In fact, my stunningly un-remarkable mug has always graced my about page. Not wanting to simply copy and paste the existing photo into this post, I decided to present a deep photographic insight into Samir Bharadwaj, with never before seen scenes, and up close and personal sights.

We begin with me in my element … Aah! The great out doors. Of course, like all big stars of my stature, I let my lowly body double do this sort of thing. My time is precious, after all. I also have it on good authority that he’s much sexier than I am in that light. We all need a dramatically lit serene portrait of ourselves to show our distinguished side, so there’s that. And since I wanted to really open up to my readers more than most bloggers ever do, you also get a exclusive shot of my thumb. Really, it is very important to me. What would I vever do without my opposable thumb? It’s my favourite finger.

That’s my bit, and what follows is all the general meme stuff. Feel free to add yourself to the line of crazy faces by joining in on your blog.

This is me: >>

Blogging can become unpersonalized as we rarely see the author, so the idea of this meme is to let us all have a little peak at the person behind the blog.

Instructions:
- Copy this post and amend the text above ‘This is me’.
- Replace the image with a nice smiley, silly, serious picture of yourself.
- Make sure your name and link is added to the participant list.
- Tag and link some fellow bloggers in the ‘Show us yourself’ area
- Let them know they have been tagged.

See us here:
Forest Parks from The Random Forest
Samir Bharadwaj

Show us Yourself:
I was going to name a few people but then I realised that they all either had their faces prominently plastered on their About pages, or they were fairly generous with sharing shots of themselves in their posts. So, I leave this one open to all. If you read this, consider this an open invitation and a personal tag from me to join this mass face-pulling competition. And do leave a comment with a link here if you could, I would love to see what new faces join the blogosphere.

Samir