Yet another blogging widget thingie to experiment with. BlogRush promises to increase traffic to your blog by syndicating your post links across a network of other sites that also display the same widget. This way, blogs of similar subject matter exchange links of the latest content and exchage traffic. Sounds like a good idea, and it is free, so I thought I’d give it a try. I figure It’s all in the name of science, and also the deeper reason: why not?

Once you sign up your blog you will be given some javascript code to use on your site, just like Adsense, Kontera and many others. The best way to include this into your WordPress blog is to use a text widget. Add a new Text Widget into your sidebar and insert the BlogRush code into the box provided as shown below. Save the changes and you should be in business.

If everything worked out ok, your blog sidebar should now have a new widget that looks like the one here. Since this is new and “hot” at the moment, I forsee it spreading like wildfire at least for the immediate future. Many of the big names in blogging have been talking about this already with varying degrees of scepticism and/or hype, but at the end of the day, no one really knows how effective this thing will be BlogRush is a solid and viable idea for a above-board traffic exhange system. How it pans out over the coming months remains to be seen.

As far as I’m concerned, its a good enough concept to try out, so here it is on my blog. All in the name of science, of course. Try it out yourself see if the whole free website traffic claims work out for you. And, feel free to exchange notes about your results in the comments below.

Samir

I applied for a Kontera ContentLink account for this blog about a week ago, and I was finally accepted. The whole idea with this site is for it to be a repository of my ideas about creative ideas, and also a test-bed and exploration of my various experiments into online enterprise. Like many other bloggers, I signed up for Google AdSense quite early in the game because it is the simplest advertising system to get into. Now that that has been running for a few months, I thought it was time to try out some other avenues of monetization, and so Kontera came into the picture. In case you don’t know what Kontera is, find a link in this post which has a double underline, and hover your mouse pointer over it.

Kontera has been around for a while, but it really started to increase in popularity when Google finally got rid of a restriction on using other contextual advertising systems with AdSense. Kontera was always an attractive option because it converts existing text into ad links without adding any more elements to the page. Now that you can use Kontera on the same page as AdSense, it’s a great additional ad network for diversifing your advertising space.

Since a lot of you wanting to implement Kontera ContentLink on your own sites are using WordPress, I though an article on the methods of setting up Kontera in a WordPress blog was required. Like AdSense, Kontera provides you with some unique Javascript code to insert into your pages. Unlike AdSense, you don’t need to insert the code multiple times. Kontera studies the entire page (or at least the selected parts of the page – see section targeting below) and automatically inserts the in-content links. The code for Kontera can be implemented into WordPress in two different ways:

1. Install the Plugin
2. Hack the Template

Both the methods work fine and each has its advantages, so you need to decide which method best suits your needs. Now on to the details of how to implement Kontera in your WordPress site.

1] Install the Plugin

The situation of WordPress plugins for Kontera ad link setup is confusing and the first choice you make after a quick search might not be the best choice. That was one of the main reasons I set out to write this article.

Kontera themselves have a WordPress plugin available for download on their site. They say it is version 2.0 of the plugin developed by Rodney Shupe. That piece of information is significant because Rodney Shupe developed what I think is the first Kontera plugin for WordPress. Unfortunately users soon found that the plugin inserted hidden text into your page, a tactic that could get you banned by the search engines for no fault of your own. While the author has since released a version of the plugin that makes the hidden links “optional” (why optional??), I don’t see why I would choose this plugin. Keep in mind that the hidden link problem possibly still exists in the version provided on the Kontera site (v2.0), because the author’s site shows that the option to switch it off was only added in version 2.2. Also, this plugin is quite rudimentary and without any options to make it worth while.

Thankfully there is now another plugin option. Karol Krizka has rolled out her own version of a Kontera ad insertion plugin that has a few very neat tricks up its sleeves. Not only does it have a cleaner interface, it also gives you the ability to enable or disable Kontera ads on each post when you are editing it. It also works silently in the background to disable the ads from showing up anywhere in the sidebars and other unwanted positions in your blog page.

All-in-all, Karol has done a great job with this plugin, and while it is still new, I would say this plugin is a must if you go for a WordPress plugin setup for Kontera.

2] Hack the Template

If you choose not to go with the spiffy plugins and options root, you can still implement the Kontera code the way they describe in their introductory mail and other documentation. The ad code needs to be inserted at the end of the page, right before the closing BODY tag in the HTML. You can do this by editing your template in the WordPress administrative area and making the appropriate additions to the Footer theme file.

* Section targeting with Kontera
While the the Krizka plugin linked above takes care of limiting the Kontera ads to the main post content, if you take the coding and hacking route, you need to manually put in some CSS class codes to achieve the same effect. Once again you need to edit your template files in the WordPress back-end. The Main Index Template file is a good place to start. Somewhere in the WordPress loop section of the code you will have a mention of a function called the_content. This is replaced by your main post text in the final page and this needs to be put into a DIV of class KonaBody. What you should end up with is something like this:

<div class="KonaBody">
<?php the_content(__(‘(More…)’)); ?>
</div>

This tells Kontera to limit the ad links to only the section that appears inside the KonaBody DIV tags. You might have to make similar changes to your Archive and Single theme files, to ensure that the various page displays in WordPress follow a similar section targeting.

While the template hacking method is more involved and might seem less flexible, it suited me fine and that is the method I used. As long as you don’t have a specific need to be able to disable Kontera ads on individual posts, this is a valid method. If not, the plugin is the way to go. The positive of the code hack method is that it avoids the addition of yet another plugin into the mix. I have plenty of WordPress plugins installed already and this simple saving of PHP load was worth the trouble in my book.

That is how you setup the Kontera ContentLink ad links on your WordPress blog. No matter which of these methods you use, you should be aware that the Kontera ad system takes anywhere from a week to 10 days to really study your site and start serving the most appropriate ads for your content. The trick with Kontera is to be patient and not make any snap judgements about its effectiveness in the early days. That is the Kontera wisdom I have learnt from others, and the wisdom I collected in implementing Kontera on my own WordPress blog. I am waiting to see how this works out and I wish you the best of luck with your blog monetization experiments.

If you have any experience with Kontera and your WordPress blog, I would love to hear about it in the comments below.

Samir

This is to announce the addition of the MyBlogLog widget to the sidebar. Woohoo! If you are a member of the MyBlogLog blog community site, your username and avatar should show up under the recent readers list in the sidebar when you visit this blog.

For those of you who don’t know, MyBlogLog is a blog community site like Technorati but with some additional tracking functions. There is also a very strong community building component, including the ability to see a public list of recent visitors to the blog as you can see at the bottom of the sidebar, and also a sort of private message board per author where other MyBlogLog members can leave comments and shoutouts. Check out the MyBlogLog page for Samir Bharadwaj dot Com.

I actually signed up for the MyBlogLog service quite some time ago, but I never got around to implementing the widget on the site. Since I was a member, I did show up on other people’s blogs when I visited, which was a plus. During this silent time, one person has already taken the trouble and done me the honour of joining the MyBlogLog community for this blog. Jon Anderson of SucessPart2.com has not only been kind enough to include many of my posts in various editions of his wonderful blog carnivals in the past, but now he has also set the ball rolling on my MyBlogLog community. For all that I am thankful, and for his efforts he wins a FREE toaster! … well, a “virtual” free toaster actually, in the form of the new and extremely prestigious Free Toaster Award! *applause*

Congratulations Jon, on winning the innaugural Free Toaster Award! Feel free to save it and do with it what you will — use it as a bumper sticker, a snazzy ID tag, a sexy tattoo, or whatever suits your fancy. If you want a print a large wall to wall poster of it you might need a better version, which I will be glad to supply.

All you other wonderful people out there, you know you want the Free Toaster Award, don’t you? Maybe I will make this a semi regular feature and give these out to some deserveing people once in a while. Meanwhile, if you enjoy reading this blog please join my MyBlogLog community and leave a comment or two on my author page. It will be good to know who my readers are. As far as you keeping track of me, you have already subscribed to my full feed RSS haven’t you?

Samir

The story so far …
Debi (Mobile) Jones had a problem with her Adsense payment due to a changed address. Matt Cutts from Google stepped in and eventually the problem was solved. When she went into the bank to cash her cheque, however, she was told that there were not enough funds in the account. Needless to say when the account in question belongs to Google, this piece of news from the bank teller can lead to anything from utter outrage to rolling laughter on the part of the recipient. I am happy to say Debi saw the humour of the situation and her report on her banking experience makes for a very entertaining read. Her new problem hasn’t been solved yet at the time of this writing and she posted a follow up to say as much. I found out about all this through Problogger, and now the story will obviously be Dugg to death. People love being incensed.

Personally I think it is an unfortunate story, but it’s more a story of neglect rather than of malice, as some would like to paint it. Google isn’t really out to get you or anything that sinister. They’re just too big and monolithic to notice sometimes. Not that that is an excuse in anyway from our end-user point of view, but it is the sad truth of most large organisations.

I’m surprised by the fact that the main Google inbound number still leads to a simple recorded message system (as mentioned by Debi). I would have thought they would have moved on to a falsely personalised anonymous call-centre a few thousand miles away by now. The fact that they haven’t done that actually impresses me, because I’m not quite sure which is better, the non-communicative recorded message lady, or the below average intelligence and resourcefullness of a call centre employee.

On the original blog, there were actually concerns by readers about commenting on this topic for fear of it negatively affecting their Adsense accounts. That, I think is a much worse thing to be happening than the actual bounced cheque. If I was Google I would be much more worried by the fact that my publishers seem to be living in so much mortal fear of retribution, than one wrong cheque.

Google has changed the internet and has pretty much single-handedly started the revolution of the monetisation of personal sites and content. They are a company that does a lot of positive things, and I admire them for it. Projects like the Summer of Code are absolutely brilliant ideas which produce positive results for a large community of people and are truly praiseworthy. Like all large organisations, however, I think Google does need to re-boot and re-think their basics on a regular basis. Sure, a lot of people are always going to hate them for no particular reason, that comes with the territory. But to continue being the dominant and moving force that they have come to become, they need to make sure their position is one of respect and not of fear. Unlike what some people think, those are not the same thing.

Blogs are all the rage today. There are millions of them in existence and hundreds of new ones appear every day. Blogs have been hailed as the democratisation of the internet, so people create more of them. They are said to be a search-engine’s favourite thing, so businesses maintain more of them. It’s getting to a point where the blog is becoming the default site structure in many people’s minds. What of the good old static website? Is that a thing of the past? Julie Anne Bonner asked this very question on her blog a while ago which resulted in an ongoing discussion.

To Julie’s initial question, I replied:

First, I don’t think sites are going anywhere.

I think most of us will confuse the issue here and think the difference between sites and blogs is one of technology. That is not actually true because sites that are seemingly static can just as easily be run using a Content Management System, which makes it as easy to update.

The difference between sites and blogs is one of attitude and philosophy. Blogs live in constant state of flux. They are always a work-in-progress, whereas sites generally are a bit more stable and fixed. I think the best way is to think of blogs as magazines and sites as books. Magazines are great but so are books. Popular Science is not going to destroy A Short History of Nearly Everything anytime soon. Nor is Bridget Jones’s Diary going to dethrone Cosmo anytime soon.

Two different beasts, blogs and sites, and neither are going anywhere.

Today Julie posted a follow-up to her question of Websites Vs Blogs and quoted the above comment with some thoughts of her own.

I liked his analogy of comparing blogs to magazines and websites to books. Although I usually only read a book once, but I return to a magazine issue several times. It’s hard for me to throw away a magazine. I subscribe to it for its fresh monthly content too. I read a book and then it gets shelved. Hmmmm….something to think about.

I see her point about shelving books and keeping magazines. But maybe this is another matter that comes down to personal taste. I shelve the books I have read too, but I have been know to re-read novels I like, and I regularly refer back to books I find useful.

Most magazines, however, I get rid of. I usually remove the articles or pages I need and recycle the rest. I think this has to do with the fact that the noise-to-signal ratio in magazines is generally high, I don’t like keeping all that extra noise around. However, there are some magazines whose content is so solid and timeless that I can’t bear to part with them.

So, ultimately I think the medium matters less than the quality of the content. And I think the most important quality is probably timelessness. Besides, while the magazine-book analogy is a good starting point, it’s not a perfect one when it comes to online material. Even a static site can be modified or added-to as regularly as required. At that point you just might be tempted to take that ‘book’ off the shelf again.

I absolutely empathise with Julie’s recent questioning of the blog format. I’m been going through a similar phase, even though my blog (in it’s new avatar) is quite new. Blogging does sometimes seem like more than a full time job, and the freedom that you dreamed of as one element of this life seems elusive. Over the past few days I’ve come to believe my apprehensions about this might simply be because I’ve still not really settled down into a good posting rhythm, and because I’m doing this too much on a day-to-day basis. This constant pressure to come up with something new “today” is probably what gets discouraging at some point. We all have a few slow days or a few lazy days and we need to be prepared for their imminent arrival.

The way I see it (although I haven’t implemented yet), it would be great to have a good week’s worth of timeless content which you always keep as a backup plan. You don’t post these until you hit a slump, and once you are out of the slump you replenish your backup content with new material to wait till it is required. This way you make use of those times when you’re simply brimming with enthusiasm to create new content, by creating a lot of extra content. And you survive the slumps in productivity by utilising what you stored up for the barren seasons.

It’s all very agricultural. Actually, it’s even older. Animals have been storing away food for the winter long before humans walked the Earth. Maybe this is a good model to follow for bloggers who often find themselves needing a break from the pressures of regular blogging.

How do you schedule your blogging or offline writing activities? How do you make sure you produce a steady flow of material when it is required?

Traffic

As you can see in the graph below, I had very little traffic to begin with. This was carried over from my static site that existed in this same space. That traffic was largely driven by links on sites I had designed for clients and also signature links from my participation in forums (mostly BlenderArtists). The traffic then was usually only a few hundred page-views a month. Almost non-existent in the larger scheme of things, but then my original site was really meant to be more of a showcase for clients who needed proof that I could do all those things they needed me to do for them. It was adequate for the purpose.

This month the growth above that original level of traffic was stratospheric, and it was all because of the Problogger Top 5 group writing project (discussed below). Traffic figures for SamirBharadwaj.com in May 2007 were:
Total Pages — 275100
Total Visits — 64736

That is quite literally a hundred times what I used to get on my old static site (which I never really marketed anyway). So all in all, I am extremely pleased with this initial boost during the first month of this site’s existence.

The Problogger Top 5 Group Writing Project

I have been an occasional visitor at Problogger.net for many months now, because the plan to create a more comprehensive site with a blog has been swimming around in my head for a long time, and Problogger is an excellent source of information and ideas about blogging. I came upon the group writing project on one of my random visits, a few days after starting this blog. It was already a day into the project and I didn’t have much time, but I did want to do something significant rather than some arbitrary listing. Keeping that in mind I came up with the idea of photography tips. Once again, I wanted to make the article special, so I decided to take some special shots to illustrate the piece. I managed to finish all this just in time for the deadline, and the result was Top 5 Tricks for Taking Professional Looking Photographs with your Digital Camera

My article was linked in the Day 4 listing and also in the final listing on Problogger and after a quiet day or two a flood of visitors arrived peaking at 28,000 page views on the 14th. After that there was a decline to more steady levels of traffic but still a healthy flow. Most of this came through people publishing the list of Top 5 posts on their own blogs, which resulted in some social bookmarking activity. I was lucky that some people singled out my post and decided to recommend it specifically. That lead to minor levels of Digg and Del.icio.us traffic and a flood of Stumbleupon traffic. Stumbleupon is still sending a steady stream of traffic to my site through this post.

So, a big Thank You to Darren Rowse of Problogger and all those kind people who linked to me for getting me started on this blog with a bang rather than a whimper.

Blog Carnivals

While I highly appreciated the sudden burst of traffic to my photography tricks post, I did know that I would have to do enough marketing to create some sustained traffic to this site. The major step in that direction during this first month was participating in Blog Carnivals. I submitted some of my more interesting posts to some carnivals and was actually included in a few. Here is a list below:

• As mentioned in my previous post on the Carnival of Cinema, I was included in Episode 31 and Episode 32 of the carnival for my review of Guru & Babel and for my post about The Best Action Movie Ever respectively. Thanks to Scott Nehring for that.
• Lessons in learning, language and literature was linked in the 1st edition of The Blog Party Carnival. The carnival is run by Jenny over at the so called me.
• Tyrannis Populi: Who are ‘the people’ anyway and who says they are always right? was included in the Carnival of Conflict #2 by Nathan Vogel.
• How to anti-crash a wedding in 5 easy steps – a case study was included in the May 27 edition of the Carnival of Observations on Life by Anja Merret. Anja has an eclectic blog that makes for some very interesting reading.
• How to anti-crash a wedding in 5 easy steps – a case study was also included in the 10th Edition of Carnival of The Storytellers organised by DigitalRich.

ToDo

That was the first month of SamirBharadwaj.com. Problogger has provided me with an initial surge of traffic, but that positive is also the weakness of this site at the moment. Almost all incoming traffic is for the Top Photo Tricks post at the moment. I need to diversify my traffic so that I can sustain it in the long term.

Also I still need to make many technical tweaks and changes to this blog to get it looking and working better in some areas.

A good start and plenty more to do. As always, I will keep you posted on my progress right here on this blog. You can also subscribe to my RSS feed to keep your fingers on the pulse here and for a lot more great content. Until the next post …

Feedburner has become a ubiquitous part of every blogger’s arsenal. Over the past few months, before I actually got this blog up and running in May, I found Feedburner mentioned in every tips and tricks list on creating a successful blog. The Feedburner redirection plugin for WordPress appeared in almost every list of most important plugins, and there were reams of material on when to and when not to show your Feedburner reader count on your blog. So the question is, if it’s so important, why look for an alternative? After all, everyone uses it.

My main reason would be that I’m not comfortable with giving up the control and hosting of one of the most crucial parts of my blog, the RSS feed, into the hands of an external service. Not when I can be self sufficient in this. And I’m not the only one who shares that view. More recently, rumours were circulating about the possibility of Google aquiring Feedburner. While this was just more tech news to some, the prospect excited some people due to the possibilities of Adsense being integrated into feeds. As always it also filled others with dread about the growing Google monopoly over online services. I guess if you are one of those people, that would be another reason to find alternatives to the Feedburner service, because yesterday the rumour was confirmed. Google has indeed acquired Feedburner for an undisclosed amount, and now everyone is talking about it. For me, however, the main impetus is that it’s a challenge, and I love trying to solve these little technical conundrums.

My first step was to figure out what functionality needed to be replaced. The main one would have to be feed statistics. Most people sign up for Feedburner purely to see that wonderful number of readers widget/chicklet in their side bar. Then there is the ability to let people sign up for email updates on the blog, and last but certainly not the least is feed advertising. Advertising inserted into feeds is the new and growing segment of blog monetisation, and Feedburner has been offering this service for a while now.

I looked around for these three specific requirements and my first hits were actually alternative services to Feedburner. None seem to cover all the options, but if the aim was to purely move away from Feedburner specifically, you could always use Zookoda to manage your email update subscriptions, or you could use Fedafi for the tracking and advertising functions. Since I was looking very specifically for hosted WordPress solutions, I moved on and this is what I found.

1] WP-Feedstats

The Feedstats plugin is quite simple and effective and it does just what it promises – it provides daily statistics about visitors to your RSS feed.

I have tried out this system on this blog and the results are actually quite helpful. Hits on the feed urls are reported based on the calendar date. These hits are then plotted on a simple bar graph which lets you see traffic trends for the recent past on your blog.

The feed statistics become available on a new tab under ‘dashboard’ in the WordPress administrative back-end. I’m sure these statistics are rudimentary compared to what Feedburner dishes out. There are currently no fine grained stats about which readers are being used etc., but I have found them to be quite adequate to keep track of general trends in feed readership. That’s all I want of it and that should suffice for most bloggers.

2] Subscribe2

The Subscribe2 plugin has been around for a while and has changed hands a few times along the way. But it has always been growing from strength to strength, and it is now a very mature solution for readers to subscribe to email updates of your blog.

The latest version of Subscribe2 at the time of this writing is v2.35. It allows both WordPress registered users and anonymous users to sign up their email address for updates from blogs. This ability for the general public to signup makes this an ample alternative to email update services.

3] Feedvertising

Advertising in RSS feeds depends on an external advertising service, so this functionality cannot be completely fulfilled by any hosted plugins or software unless they allow direct ad sales by the blog owner.

But if you’re not into all that negotiating and sales, Feedvertising from the people at Text-Link-Ads provides the ad management services that you require to monetise your blog RSS feed.

There you have it. By using the above three solutions in conjunction, you can come very close to replacing all Feedburner functionality on your blog. It gives you the satisfaction and security of knowing your feed is being served off your private server without too much outside contribution or interference. And you also get full access to your data and your subscribers.

If you know of blog feed related alternatives I haven’t mentioned here, please leave a comment below and share the information.

Let’s look at the facts here: a privately owned site (Digg.com) decides to do the smart thing and follow the “law”. They don’t let users publish proprietary information on their servers. Then some users who don’t agree with the decision of this private site which provides them a free service which they do not pay for, decides “You can’t tell me what I can and can’t do in your home! You’re not the boss of me!”, and then proceed to spray paint inartistic and childishly derivative graffiti on all the virtual walls they can reach, all of which involve swear words and badly drawn pieces of human anatomy “cleverly” mixed in with the proprietary information. That’s really what it comes down to: mob rule. And who amongst us considers that a good thing in the real world? Anyone? I didn’t think so.

Why did all this come to pass? The official anarchist spin is that “big brother” Digg was messing with their freedom of speech on the internet. Really? I never knew the internet in its entirety could be accessed by typing in digg.com into your browser. Digg was only messing with people’s freedom of speech on their private server, in their home, on their land, not in the whole world. And that is their right. You might be surprised to know that this sort of controllist behaviour exists out there in the real world too, in other great places of intellectual exchange. Before the more zealous ones take out their pen and paper to right down the address of this new fascist regime to bad-mouth on their anonymous blogs, I was talking about the Public Library. I don’t see any large protests on the steps of every city library of the world with banners and slogans shouting “Down with the scary woman with the spectacles!”, or “You can’t silence the noise of the people”, or “We shall not be shushed!”. If anyone happens to actually fancy the above idea and would like to take action in that direction, please contact me with a time and a place, I would love to take some photos while you’re at it.

The thing about mobs is that most of the individuals are card-carrying cowards. They will act only in the safety and the anonymity of the mob and would not have the chutzpah to take responsibility for any of this on their own. There’s a whole extra level of cowardly anonymity on-line when you are only known by the charming moniker JarJarKicksFrodosAss23, but the anonymity factor works just as well out side the electronic frontier. In recent days India has been abuzz with the story of an art student arrested for displaying “obscene art” – As a side note, India is always abuzz with something or the other, as is the USA, or the UK, or Digg.com. The one thing you can depend on democracies to do well is to be in a constant state of shock and offence. We in India are proud in our solidarity with our fellow democratic brothers and sisters from around the world in being offended by absolutely anything frivolous that we don’t really know about or actually care about. We have raised our offence to an art form. — But to get back to the topic at hand, an anonymous mob walked into a private exhibition in an art college in Vadodara in India and proceeded to administer tender loving care on to one of the student artists for his supposedly obscene depiction of religious icons or something of the sort. The police then came in and saved the now truly suffering artist by arresting him and throwing him into jail. The exhibition of paintings in question was not open to the public. The “offended” actually happened to be one man who simply happened to have enough clout (or money) to gather the Angry Mob™ and also possibly the police. The religious zealots are now offended by the imminent demise of their millennia old culture (which they know nothing about) being caused single-handedly by a bunch of paintings they have never seen. The art community is offended by the offensive offence of the religious zealots. We are all offended together and proud of it! Thankfully the artist has since been released from custody to suffer in freedom instead.

Are you beginning to see a pattern? I certainly am, which is what drove me to write this post. And the disturbing pattern that distils down from these two stories seems to be that nothing good can ever come out of a mob. That’s kind of a depressing conclusion to come to about large groups of people, don’t you think? After all, we are a planet of 6+ billion people and growing. What of democracy and the power of the people? Are all our hopes of a broad based system of fruitful human interaction baseless and pure fantasy? I’m glad to report that it’s not quite as dire as that just yet. Mobs of people properly channelled can lead to great things. To return to the on-line world for a small-scale example, I recently participated in the group writing project over at Problogger.net. 893 people from around the world contributed their time, effort, and thought into writing a post based on the assigned theme (Top 5), and they each came up with their unique take on the subject — each one perfectly valid and each one completely different from the others. Better yet, they have all continued to share in the experience, link to each other’s blogs, comment on each other’s work, and generally enrich their small part of the web in one way or another. In all the browsing I have done looking through these posts I didn’t find one thoughtless remark or frivolously dismissive criticism. Why? Because they are all thinking, doing, productive members of the community. Every one of them has produced something and therefore has an appreciation and respect for the work of others who produce something. How many of the goons who beat up the artist in India ever did anything, or produced anything or created anything of value in their lives? Probably none. How many of the digital graffiti artists who choose to vandalise Digg for a few days have ever actually produced something or created something or contributed something of even 1/1000th of the value of Digg.com to the community or the world at large? My money is on “none”.

“The people” often end up being the least sensitive, the most unproductive, and the most loud and vocal minority of any community. The very appropriate hackneyed idiom that comes to mind is that empty vessels make the most noise. And that is the truth. The loud empty vessels rule the world with their deafening din. That’s not to say that all the silent vessels are brimming full of ideas and contributions to the world, but at least the silent empty ones have the dignity of being still in their emptiness and not clattering. Perhaps the answer is for the productive part of a community to be vocal as well, no matter how much it might go against their instincts. At least be noisy enough to counter all that empty clattering. For the unproductive are most often light-weight in their emptiness, and with any substantial outpouring of ideas and thoughts they shall either be filled with wisdom or swept away in the deluge. We the people owe it to ourselves.

What do you think of democratic systems, and group dynamics, both on-line and off? Be vocal, make a little noise and let your voice be heard below.

The logo is now up on the site as the header/masthead. It’s a new site built to provide many Blenderheads out there a place to host their images and yet other place to hangout and hone their craft. Can’t argue with that sentiment. I wish them the best of luck and all the success in this worthy cause.

More the merrier.

Samir

That was then, this is now. I now want to make a new website. Simple? Not quite. First I need to decide on which formats and technologies I want to use in the site. What will I use? HTML, DHTML, XHTML, XML, PHP, ASP, CSS, Javascript, PERL, JAVA, VBscript, Flash, Shockwave, PDF, RealMedia, WindowsMedia, Quicktime, DivX, VRML … the list goes on. Plus it’s not even a simple matter of what suits your needs, you also need to keep in mind if the technology you are using will be usable/readable by your audience.

What do I do? Firstly let me just ignore all the multimedia technologies at the moment as they only aim to augment an existing website, and not act as a replacement for a site. So that leaves us with the HTML variants, Flash, and the choice of programming language. The coding languages are also an additional element to the actual site, but VBscript is out because of its Windows-centric nature, JAVA is out because I am not totally convinced of its stability. Besides, many people (myself included) switch off the JAVA setting in their browsers to keep their sanity. Javascript can be used to the minimum since it is now almost standard extension of HTML. However, issues of compatibility and unpredictable results remain. That leaves PERL, which is a great choice for more complex coding solutions. The decision has already been made in its favour because Greymatter, the blogging software currently chugging away in the background is written in PERL. The results, as you can see, are quite satisfactory.

Now we come to that gigantic fork in the road. That never ending battle that is fought with religious fervour, and has seen many a casualty on both sides. What am I talking about?

**Flash or HTML**???

Fortunately (or unfortunately ?) I am religious about this topic as well. If you see my old site, you will notice that it is hand coded in HTML and all the links are text. Do I look like a Flash lover? No, sorry, for me it’s HTML all the way. Let me clarify though, that I do not hate Flash with a vengeance. I do know how to use the software, but I simply do not consider it a means of presenting a web site. I personally skip nearly every Flash intro I come cross, and I avoid complete Flash sites like the plague, unless I simply \\have\\ to see what is on the site. Plus, no matter how many figures Macromedia publishes about the stupendous download figures of its plugin, Flash is still not universal, and everyone out there does not have a trillion megahertz monster to run it on. In addition Flash content disrupts the standard interface of the web browser. Suddenly things don’t work like they are supposed to, the back button, the right-click menu. This is not a good thing.

I do have the Flash plugin on my system, but not Shockwave. Occasionally I come across a site that pops up a prompt in my browser to download the Shockwave plugin. While I am aware it is quick and painless, I have yet to come across any content which has convinced me to press the OK button. If it is any consolation, I do think Flash is an excellent technology for animation. That is what it started out as, but with all the hype surrounding its position as harbinger of the multimedia superhighway, its true importance as an efficient means of animation dispersal has been sidelined. Now there is a move to make SVG the new format of vector animation and interactive content. The one advantage it has is that it is an open standard, but its actual performance in the wild remains to be seen.

So, ultimately we come back to HTML. It has changed a lot over the years, for the better. The on-going effort to standardize it and to separate the function of content presentation from it has lead to the timely eminence of CSS. Cascading Style Sheets are simple text files that tell the browser how the content in the XHTML(the cleaner, leaner standards compliant HTML) should be displayed. Also, CSS has features that the old HTML couldn’t dream off: complex control of column layouts, transparencies, layers, and a built in ability to create roll-over effects with out the complex Javascript code it called for in the past. To top it off the ability to apply master style sheets to multiple XHTML pages breaks new ground in the malleability and maintainability of your site. Simply change the CSS and you have what looks like a brand new site. This feature is best demonstrated by the CSS Zen Garden.

XHTML with CSS it is then! As in many aspects of the design of my new site, this blog is also acting as my experiment in CSS. I am still not as familiar with CSS as I am with basic HTML, but the latest version of Greymatter which I am running does use CSS for layout. Through tweaking the default templates I am starting to get a feeling of the sheer sense of freedom and power CSS can give the designer of web content. I am enjoying every moment of it and will continue to see what it can be pushed to do. I am also looking into what software can help with CSS coding an design, but my report on that is for an other time.