Archive for the ‘Web Development’ Category
Monetizing Your Blog by Todd Garland
Last Friday, I listened to a segment of Webmaster Radio with Todd Garland from BuySellAds. I met Todd a while back through Dan, a mutual friend. Todd’s a nice guy who has had success with his ad network he built from the ground up. Check out the site if you’re in the web industry to see a really polished interface.
The topic of the segment was “Monetizing Your Blog”, which interests me as I have a project in early stages that could potentially sell ad space in the future. Here are some notes I took during the interview. I missed the last 10 or so minutes.
- You need to figure out how to build a site that brings people back for the quality content.
- Once you drive the traffic, then you can open up your master spreadsheet.
- Google Adsense is easy to drop in and you can potentially make money the next day. However, it looks tacky and can reduce a site’s trust.
- Charging a flat rate tends to bring in more serious buyers who will commit for a month than the CPM crowd who can be fickle.
- If you aren’t part of an ad network, you could use Paypal Subscriptions.
- [Question from chatroom]:
Personally, I use the OIO Publisher plugin to manage my advertising. I set it up and forget about it. All I gotta do is approve ads when they are purchased and I keep all the money. Why would I use BuySellAds?
With an ad network like BuySellAds, you get network value. Not only are people finding you from visiting your site and advertising with you directly, they find you through a reputable network.
Hear the archived interview at http://www2.webmasterradio.fm/press-this/2009/09/29/monetizing-your-blog/
Browser anti-aliasing: do you design your comps using bitmapped text?
A while back, I wrote about how it irked me when web designers who use Helvetica and Lucida Grande for body text. Anti-aliased or not, those two type-faces do not look good at small sizes. Recently at Bridgeline, we had a debate on whether or not we should design our UI comps using anti-aliasing. We all agreed using a smooth setting looks better, but what do most Windows users see? Well it all lies in Microsoft’s ClearType setting, and the confusion around its default settings. As far as our corner of the office:
- On my XP machine, I saw smooth text in IE7 but not Firefox
- Coworker 1 (XP) saw smooth text in IE7 and Firefox
- Coworker 2 (XP) saw smooth text in IE7 and Firefox
- Coworker 3 (Vista) saw smooth text in both IE7 and Firefox
- Friend (not in office) with Vista saw smooth text in IE7 but not Firefox
What is ClearType?
ClearType, according to Microsoft is:
an unprecedented innovation in font display technology that dramatically improves font display resolution and marks a genuine breakthrough in screen readability.
Sounds great, but Apple had very similar technology in 1976 with their Apple II computer – so it ended up being a lot of overhype for something that had already been estalished. In a nutshell, ClearType is a type of subpixel rendering. Instead of filling a pixel with a solid color, ClearType takes advantage of 3 sub-pixels within each pixel, and fills it with RGB values. So essentially you can think of an 800×600 monitor resolution as 2400×600. When rendering certain characters of a word that do not use all subpixels, ClearType will leave those su-pixels empty. My XP machine doesn’t any font-smoothing enabled, so the characters I see are jagged.
Notice that each pixel contains red, green, and blue subpixels.
So who has ClearType enabled by default?
- Users with Windows XP who purchase a new machine or perform a fresh install will not have ClearType enabled by default (Internet Explorer 7 and Microsoft Office 2007 will use ClearType)
- Users with Windows Vista who purchase a new machine or perform a fresh install will have ClearType enabled, but if they purchase the machine from a manufacturer, they may choose to disable this feature – most likely to save on processing bandwidth.
- Either of these might be blown to shit by an IT worker who may have good reasons to choose one or the other
Sources and further reading
Wikipedia – ClearType
Why Do My Windows Vista Fonts Look Horrible?
Typical small business browser stats?
My friend Jeff was nice enough to share with me his dumpster rental website’s browser stats from May 2008 – December 31 2008. There were more Firefox users than I had anticipated, and I’m hoping that number increases for next year. I suspect Safari will climb too with the always-increasing sales of Macbooks and iPhones. How do these comapre with small business your stats?
- Internet Explorer 74.04%
- Firefox 20.24%
- Safari 4.80%
- Chrome 0.32%
- Mozilla 0.27%
- Netscape 0.14%
- Opera 0.11%
- Mozilla Compatible Agent 0.03%
- Camino 0.02%
- Playstation 3 0.02%
The difference between RSS and Atom
For a while, I was confused as to what the difference between RSS and Atom were when I would sign up for a web feed. Some websites offer users a choice in formatting. A web feed, which is sometimes mistakenly referred to as simply “RSS”, is a standardized method used to syndicate web content. Different services can aggregate many of these feeds. A desktop app like NetNewsWire and web-based services like iGoogle, Bloglines, Google Reader, and Netvibes are common feed aggregators.
Essentially, RSS is the “original” family of web feeds developed throughout the early 00s with the Atom specification being the “fresh face”, offering even more clarity around things like content types and date formatting. So really, there’s no difference that you should be concerned about. Many big sites will only offer their content through RSS 2.0 but Atom is technically the “better” solution going forward.
Credit to the web feed Wikipedia page for relaying most of this pretty useless information.
Enlarge that code in Dreamweaver
I code in Visual Studio at work. Dreamweaver is my text editor at home. I finally got sick of looking at the small default code text in Dreamweaver on my Mac. So off I went fishing around in the DW’s preferences. You can find the setting to beef this up under Dreamweaver > Preferences > Fonts. Modify the Code view values and you’ll be good to go.
The default font, Monaco isn’t all that bad but it was time for a change. I’m now at 10pt arial but I will probably end up back at a small monospace face soon (Dreamweaver was onto something when they made Monaco the default).
It felt good to finally change that fucker.
