What I said was: Give me all the bacon and eggs you have.

By pdo | Published: March 1, 2011

Ron Swanson (Parks and Recreation):

Just give me all the bacon and eggs you have.

Wait … wait.

I worry what you just heard was: Give me a lot of bacon and eggs.

What I said was: Give me all the bacon and eggs you have. Do you understand?

This has been cracking me up since last week. Parks and Recreation is worth a look if you haven’t checked it out.

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CloudFlare Recap: I [Don't] Like It

By pdo | Published: February 28, 2011

A few months ago, I signed up for CloudFlare and added this blog to their service.  At first, I was terrified.  I hate messing with DNS settings.  Then I was jubilant — my bandwidth was down about 40%.  Next I was worried, because traffic dropped dramatically.  Finally, I was upset — Google had cut me off.  It’s been about two months since the last post.  Here’s what’s happening now.

Traffic is back

I don’t think I can honestly blame CloudFlare for this one.  Yeah, it happened after I turned them on, but it didn’t happen immediately after.  Google seems to have recalculated my blog’s value a little after I switched over, and I wasn’t ranking as highly for some of my higher-traffic terms (increasing AdSense revenue, updating your 2WIRE router to use WPA2, and pre-paid Android phones).  Honestly, I hadn’t touched on those topics for a few weeks, and that probably hurt me.

Performance is good

As measured by Pingdom, response times are still under a second for most requests.  They’re not as low as before CloudFlare, but they’re plenty good.  And bandwidth usage is still way down, which is phenomenal.

Conclusions

I’m happy with CloudFlare.  They have a great product and have seen impressive results.  I’m using them on other blogs, but I’m still a little hesitant about switching over Dappered.  We’ll see what the future brings.  If Dappered’s traffic keeps growing like it has been, we’ll have to do something.

Update: Here’s a chart showing my drop in search traffic and its recovery.  This is Traffic Sources > Search Engines in Google Analytics.  Good question, Debbie.

 

Search Traffic Drop and Recovery

Update: I added the [don't] in the headline.  I’ve turned CloudFlare off on this site.  And check the comments — Anurag is having the same problem as Debbie and me.  That makes the traffic drop a pretty serious, pretty consistent issue.

Posted in The Google, The Internets | Tagged | 18 Comments

I’m with Coco, Wisconsin

By pdo | Published: February 23, 2011

I like Paul Krugman’s take on the Wisconsin situation:

Some background: Wisconsin is indeed facing a budget crunch, although its difficulties are less severe than those facing many other states. Revenue has fallen in the face of a weak economy, while stimulus funds, which helped close the gap in 2009 and 2010, have faded away.

In this situation, it makes sense to call for shared sacrifice, including monetary concessions from state workers. And union leaders have signaled that they are, in fact, willing to make such concessions.

But Mr. Walker isn’t interested in making a deal. Partly that’s because he doesn’t want to share the sacrifice: even as he proclaims that Wisconsin faces a terrible fiscal crisis, he has been pushing through tax cuts that make the deficit worse. Mainly, however, he has made it clear that rather than bargaining with workers, he wants to end workers’ ability to bargain.

He’s right.  It’s not about pay cuts and concessions.  It’s about breaking unions and breaking promises.  I don’t like it.  It’s dishonest.  It’s an engineered Conan / Leno fracture. It’s pitting us against them and really we all need to do our part.  Maybe everybody SHOULD just chip in $32 and be done with it.  Direct civic action is always better than politicking.

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Can Web Design Be Great? Or Can It Only Be Terrible? #gawkerfail

By pdo | Published: February 18, 2011

Gawker’s redesign has me thinking about website design.  I hate their new look.  It’s terrible.  I dislike it so much, I’m not going to even link to their site.  Maybe it caters to tablets, but that’s such a small segment of the market at this point — it makes no sense to alienate the keyboard/mouse readers.  If they wanted to be iPad friendly, target the iPad user agent and give iPad users the new layout.  Don’t screw everybody just because of touchscreens.  I mean, what are they … {breathe, Paul, breathe} … Let’s take a step back.

The more I think about it, the more I distill web design down to just this: Your website design has the power to be terrible, but it doesn’t have the power to be great.

Here’s why:

A poorly designed site will turn people away

That’s what happened with me and Gawker’s Lifehacker site.  I just don’t go anymore.  I read their stories in Google Reader (using Lifehacker’s full RSS feed).  Google Reader just does a better job providing Lifehacker content.  Gawker wasn’t able to make their site more convenient than an RSS feed.  That’s a huge failure.  I used to click-through periodically to get the full scope of the story — videos, galleries, comments — but I just don’t anymore.  The site sucks that much.  I consume less of Lifehacker now because it’s so much more inconvenient.  The content I do consume, I consume with 3rd-party tools like Google Reader and the awesome Pulse news app.  And I’m not the only one.

A totally tricked out site doesn’t bring people in

There are two great Google Chrome news ‘apps’ that I just love: the NY Times Chrome app and Huffington Post’s NewsGlide.  They’re both stunning.  They’re beautiful — just amazing.  But I still just don’t read that much from either source.  They’re just not my scene.  The New York Times is just too stuffy and old for me.  Huff Po is just too political.  I like stories from both — but I just don’t identify with them enough to read them daily.  They have great content, even better design, but I’m not addicted to them.  The design isn’t enough to win me over to the brand.

Think about it this way — nobody has every shared a story on Facebook because the page it was on was pretty.  That doesn’t happen.  Content counts; looks don’t; looks only interfere.  The converse of this is ‘printer-ready’ pages.  People love to share these and save their friends the bullshit of pagination.  They’re voting against the slick design of the site and voting for simple delivery of content.  Simple wins (like with craigslist).

The exception — BuzzFeed

As with all things, there are exceptions.  BuzzFeed is a site I visit regularly to see what’s happening on the interwebs.  The slightly chaotic design is perfect for their content — the site is a pile of random stuff and their pages are filled with random content.  I like visiting and bouncing around for a bit.  In the past, I’ve added them to Google Reader only to ignore the feed and visit the site.  BuzzFeed is doing a great job — they pass the better-than-RSS test.

But it’s one thing to be chaotic and another to be stupid.  Gawker’s double (and hidden, no less) scroll and clunky interface just sucks.

Posted in Media | Tagged | Leave a comment

Double AdSense RPM 2.0

By pdo | Published: February 16, 2011

One of my most-read posts is about doubling AdSense revenue.  The basic idea is to use common sizes (300×250, 728×90) and to give ads prominent (enough) placements.  Jamming an advertisement in the footer or low on the page is a poor experience for the advertiser — nobody will see his ad — and a poor experience for the user — you’re serving an extra ad, slowing down the page.  If, after serving a reasonable number of ads, your site is still not making ‘enough’ money — you have other problems and more ads aren’t the answer.

Week 1 of 52 2010
Creative Commons License photo credit: krossbow | Will this be a penny solution to a dollar problem?

Since then, I’ve had a lot of discussions with various webmasters and ad mangers about the value of a header 728×90 ad.  Some swear by it, while other avoid it.  I’ve never had one on this blog, and I figured it was worth a try.  So starting today, there’s a header ad.  I’ll analyze what it’s worth in a future post.

Posted in Business | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

The Blog Posts That Keep On Giving

By pdo | Published: February 8, 2011

I love the long tail of the internet. Much of my blog’s traffic comes from old content. Thanks, old posts:

Those are the top 3, but people still find the blog looking for reasons why Apple sucks, why Google should offer the Nexus S on Virgin Mobile, how StumbleUpon is siphoning Twitter and Facebook referral traffic, and why PlayOn is really quite annoying.  And if you haven’t read my McGangBang unboxing post, you really should.

One bite out of a McDonald's McGangBang

Posted in The Internets | Leave a comment

What’s My Media Empire Worth?

By pdo | Published: February 7, 2011

I wrote about AOL’s acquisition of TechCrunch a few months ago.  This week, AOL bought the Huffington Post for the same reasons — great, niche content with low(ish) overhead.  Instead of WordPress, Huff Po is built on Movable Type.  AOL wants content — not tech.

Anyway, this got me thinking.  Is $315,000,000 a good deal?  What are other sites worth?  Should Huff Po morph into a Groupon competitor?

TechCrunch reports that the $315MM number is basically 5x the projected revenue for next year — so next year’s revenue is expected to be around $63MM.  If Quantcast is to be believed, they’ve never done more than 600MM pageviews in a month.  If that’s what they are expecting to average for 2011, they’re forecasting about a $9 RPM.  That’s impressive … and aggressive.

Which brings me to Salon.com.  Quantcast thinks they’ve never done much more than 45MM pageviews in a month.  Forecast that 45MM out a year and give them the Huff Po RPM and they could make $4.7MM next year.  With the 5x valuation multiplier, that would put their worth at just under $25MM.  Damn!

But … Salon Media Group is a publicly traded company.  You can buy their shares today for $0.11 each.  There are 3.28MM shares available, so for $0.11 per share, you could own Salon.com for the price of a nice Chicago condo — about $360,000.  For a site that’s just under 10% as big, it’s got 0.1% the valuation.  That seems like a much better deal.

And then there’s Newsweek.  Newsweek is a dying company not worth the overhead it requires.  Yes, it makes some money, but it costs too damn much.  Newsweek was purchased last year for $1.  Maybe that’s all any second-tier media company is worth, and $360,000 for Salon.com is a rip-off.

Posted in Media | Leave a comment

Google, Please Copy Blekko

By pdo | Published: February 2, 2011

Damn, maybe everybody is right and Google is getting worse.

Blekko (the new-kid-on-the-block search engine) stumbled across my consciousness again yesterday with this article from TechCrunch.  Turns out, Blekko has banned content farms like eHow.com and Encyclopedia.com from its search results.  I used to work for the company that ran Encyclopedia.com and I’m fascinated by Google, so this caught my eye.  I went back to Blekko to see what’s going on (I had visited before, but I haven’t been a regular user).

First thing I did — I Blekko’d myself.  And my blog was right there on page one.  Well played, Blekko.

Second thing I did, I performed one of their suggested searches: cure for headaches.  And my first thought was, “Wow, this looks really good.  WebMD, Mayo Clinic … these are some really solid results.”

Then I tried Google for the same query, and I got WikiHow, home remedies, and shit sites.

My immediate response was: That’s not fair!  Blekko rigged the test.  So I searched for just headache.  Again, great results from Blekko — National Library of Medicine, WebMD, Mayo Clinic.

And I did the same on Google — National Library of Medicine, WebMD … Wikipedia, and some news articles.  I’d call this one a draw.  They both knew what a headache was.

And then I added one more word to my query — headache cure.  Blekko was still high-quality — WebMD, Mayo Clinic, National Library of Medicine, UK National Health Service.

Google jumped in the shitter — WikiHow, targeted domain sites, an ‘artist’ blog, home remedies, junk sites, and made-for-TV offers.  Google seriously failed, and all it took was one word.

So what’s it mean?  Google is still great, don’t get me wrong, but the bad guys are winning on the long-tail terms.  And the long-tail starts a lot sooner than I would have guessed — in my case, Google’s results shit the bed after adding a second search term.  Google has some work to do.  Sorry, Matt Cutts — it’s good you don’t copy Bing, but you’ve got something to learn from Blekko.

Posted in The Google | Tagged , | Leave a comment

No, My Twitter Followers Aren’t Prostitutes, They’re Porn Stars

By pdo | Published: January 30, 2011

Last month, I posted that many of my Twitter followers appeared to be prostitutes. Turns out, they’re probably porn stars.

From the Daily Beast:

Twitter in the past year has transformed the way porn stars communicate—they now have the opportunity to reach fans and build followings off screen. Housley’s statistics illuminate the interactions. Porn Star Tweets tracks 990 porn stars who are followed by 9,140,066 users; the porn stars follow back 636,853 fans …

And, in exchange for all this openness, porn stars have found how to get rewards; They get a lot of gifts from online lists, particularly Amazon.com wish lists, which almost all of them maintain … keep reading >>

Wait, rewards?

Posted in The Internets | Leave a comment

@aubonpain #fail – I’m Getting Coffee Elsewhere Because Of 6¢

By pdo | Published: January 29, 2011

Is 6¢ enough to change somebody’s behavior?  6¢ is nothing!  But what does it represent?

I used to get coffee nearly every day from Au Bon Pain.  It was not because of its location — there are about 14 coffee shops located along my commuting path — but because it was SO EASY.  At Au Bon Pain, the coffee is ready-to-pour and self-serve.  I would walk in, pour myself a cup (French roast, medium), pay, and walk out.  The transaction took about 30 seconds on a slow day.  And it was fast because it was self-serve but also because it was the right price – $1.99, rounded up to $2 at some locations.  Two dollar bills out of wallet … say “just the coffee today” to the cashier … hand over money … walk out of store … transactional bliss.  And the cash register clanged and the next customer walked up and the whole thing moved money effortlessly into Au Bon Pain wallets.

Before Au Bon Pain, I bought coffee from 7-Eleven.  Same self-pour setup there, but the medium was priced $1.86.  That meant a dime and four pennies jiggling around in my pockets all day.  I switched to Au Bon Pain to free myself from financial shrapnel.  I paid more — $0.13 more — to get less … change.  And I avoid places like Starbucks because they offer too many options — the order-pay-leave speed is total crap at places like that.

Coins in High Contrast
Creative Commons License photo credit: MoneyBlogNewz | Why do I need all this if all I want is coffee?

Last Monday, I walked into Au Bon Pain, filled up a medium cup, pulled out my $2, and the cashier said … “It’s $2.05 now for a medium.”  Pain indeed — the line stalled behind me.  I pulled out another $1 … waited patiently for my change … walked out with $0.95 in change banging and clanging in my pocket … and decided never to go back.

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