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I Would LOVE to RTFM

So I’m working on a project for my job job (I’m not quite able to support a family on blogging–yet), and have been wrestling with a biggish enterprise software package.  As you’d expect, there’s quite a bit of convolution to it–things like hundreds of database tables with nondescript names like T001, T0043, H3222, etc.  (Was this thing designed to run on AS400?)  It’s actually not that big of a deal.  A part of me secretly enjoys stuff like that.  It’s like a giant sudoku, except instead of 1-9 the numbers go 1-100.  And no matter how much of the puzzle you solve, there’s still more to work on.  That means no boredom, provided you like puzzles.

Most packages of this size were designed and coded up long long ago in a galaxy far far away.  Any growth, expansion, or enhancements they’ve undergone were probably done piecemeal with who knows who taking over and steering the thing onto the latest technology at each fork in the road.  That’s bound to happen to any project this size I guess.  It’s sort of like what you’d expect to happen to a person who was reasonably good looking in their youth and, as they aged, had countless plastic surgeries performed by different doctors of varying abilities.  The individual pieces may be really nice, but put them together and you have an odd colored face mess.

Usually these type products involve a lot of RTFM.

Don’t get me wrong…I like to RTFM.  My willingness to RTFM means I’ll probably never be out of a job for long unless I want to be.  You could say I make a living Ring-TFM.  But please, large software corporations who charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for your products, make the manuals readily available.

One of the manuals I was reading this morning referred to another manual–the “Installation and Tuning Guide”.  Like any good manual reader working for a company that’s shelled out some bucks for this pricey behemoth, I used the login for our company (they don’t give the info to just any old body), and searched for this manual on their site.  No dice.  So I searched the support base to see if anyone else had trouble finding it.  That didn’t work either.  I did find two other manuals–one which whose title led me to believe it was relevant but wasn’t, and the other to the last version of the same product.

So I asked my boss if they’d provided a DVD, pack of CDs, or even physical books when we bought the product.  Nope.  But he was able to find the manual I needed nonetheless.  Guess where…

Google.

Freaking Google found it, even though their own search engine on their own site that is available only to customers who paid for support couldn’t.  Now, not only am I irritated that it couldn’t be found on their site, I also feel like an idiot for not trying Google FIRST.

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AdSense Money Available On Your Feed

This isn’t much of a surprise…it was pretty obvious that the very reason Google bought Feedburner in the first place was so they could roll AdSense into it. And no complaints here either–to their credit, Google immediately made all of the “pro” features of Feedburner available for free as soon as they took ownership. These features are plenty valuable, and I’m happy to have them.

MoneyI’d expect the number of publishers enrolled in the AdSense program to go up (Go here to
). It’s still the easiest way (ok, maybe second easiest way) for small publishers to monetize. And including ads in a feed is even easier than displaying them on your site–no need to add code in the right place or worry about placement and layout, which is the “art” in displaying ads directly in the template. Feedburner is a great way to start playing with AdSense if you’ve never used it and were curious.

The downside? I don’t really see one. The ads are optional. It’s totally up to the feed owner as to whether or not to serve ads. It doesn’t cost anything to display the ads, and while you may not get rich, you may at least make enough change to pay for gas beer hosting. I am a little surprised it took Google so long to integrate AdSense. Then again, they still haven’t fixed the problem with reporting subscribers that shows up every month or so and makes everyone freak out.

So…why aren’t you seeing ads in this feed? I decided a while back that I was going to keep my feed ad free as sort of a “thanks” to the people who subscribe. In that vein, I’ve also made some changes on the actual site layout to make the site a little more friendly to returning visitors by eliminating one of the ad components in the sidebar and eliminating the ad at the end of each post.

That move isn’t entirely unselfish, as I’ve also added a “related posts” component that will hopefully make the site a little more sticky and get more traffic for older posts. Hopefully I’ll be paid off there, as each post older than 7 days now has an ad component at its beginning.

My other idea is to add a “donate” button. That way people who were just about to comment that I should eliminate all ads (you know who you are) could just give me money and feel like they really deserved ad free content.

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Microsoft To Pay People To Search

Microsoft in 1978Here are the basics of how the program is structured:

Use Microsoft Live Search to find whatever it is you are looking for, buy it, and a percentage of the price is put into your account.  When your account hits $5 they put the money into your PayPal account.

Here’s why it won’t work:

You have to sign up for both Microsoft Live and Paypal.  That’s enough hassle on its own, but that’s not the kicker.  The real reason it won’t work is that they are trying to get people to use a search engine they don’t really want to use.

Microsoft continues to not get it.  People aren’t using Google because it is cheaper or more financially rewarding.  They aren’t even using Google because they provide better results.  They use Google because they are Google people.  They use Google because they’ve come to trust it.  They use Google because that’s just what they do.  They Google things, they don’t Microsoft Live Search them.

Microsoft seems to have the mentality of a gas station owner who can (and does) attract customers away from the station across the street by offering gas $.02 cheaper.  It may work for gas stations, but it won’t work for search.  Search engines users are loyal.  Most people don’t search for something on 3 or 4 different search engines to find what they want unless it is something really bizarre that can’t be found.  They use the SE that they use and get on with their business.

What Microsoft is asking people to do is change their loyalty–permanently.  Changing someone’s loyalty from Google to Microsoft is akin to getting them to switch from Coke to Pepsi.  People just aren’t willing to do that for a few pennies.  Maybe once, maybe even a few times, but not permanently.

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Firefox 3 Running Well

Firefox. Yeah.I’ve been using the beta 5 version of Firefox 3 all day today, and I must say that I can tell a pretty big difference in speed between it and Firefox 2.x.  I always suspected knew there were (a few hundred) memory leaks somewhere in Firefox 2, but I’m still not sure if most of those were in the browser itself or in one of the extensions I was using.  So far I’m running version 3 without any extensions, but I’ve been running it since this morning with no slowdowns, lockups, or crashes.

Of course, I’ll have more to say when Firefox 3 is officially released, but you could always install
. It’s free, and that way you’ll be automatically notified the instant version 3 is officially released, right?  I mean, for all of its minor issues version 2 of Firefox is still far superior to Internet Explorer.

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Why I Give Full Articles in My Feed

With apologies to those who come here only for the ranting…

I have a plan to do a whole series of articles on search engine optimization (SEO) for bloggers. While the topic of full vs. partial feeds may not be directly related to SEO at first glance, I feel that it is in a round about way. After all, the goal of SEO and is to get more visitors to your site, and that is probably one of the goals you’d like to accomplish with your feed as well. I’m by no means saying that partial feeds are bad, and I think they definitely have their place. But for me (and probably most other bloggers) I believe full feeds are a more effective way to drive traffic. While much of what I’m about to say is based on experience, I believe I can back it up with logic and human blogger nature.

So first off, what’s the argument for partial feeds? It’s actually not a bad argument, and I used to subscribe to it myself. When I first set up my feed, I was sure that partial feeds were the way to go. I thought I had to do everything I could to force entice people to visit my site. There was no way I was going to give away all my content through the feed. Only after they loaded up the entire site, ads and all, would I give away my content.

But then it hit me–I’m giving it away no matter what. It didn’t take me long to realize that full posts in my feed were better than partial feeds, not only for my subscribers, but ultimately for me as well.

Good For My Subscribers

Anyone who uses an RSS reader is probably addicted to it. One of the first things we do after we read an article we like on a new site (especially a blog) is to look for the feed subscription button. And as a blogger, one of the first things I check every day is my FeedBurner stats, mostly out of vanity, because I’m truly flattered that people care enough about what I have to say to choose to subscribe to my feed. I feel like the least I can do for the folks who’ve paid me such a big compliment is to say “thanks” by making my site as easy as possible for them to read in the way they choose, and that means no ads in the feed as well.

But that means subscribers aren’t going to see any of the ads on my site in their reader, so they won’t ever click on these ads, right? Well…I don’t believe that’s necessarily true.

Good For Me

Think about it…the people who are subscribed to my feed are people who already may be interested in what I have to say. They are also likely to engage me in conversation by leaving comments on my blog. By giving them full posts in the feed, I increase the chances they will read everything I wrote. That increases the chances that they’ll want to comment on something I wrote, and that means they will visit my site. By contrast, a partial feed means that I have three or four sentences to entice them into visiting the site. Frankly, I don’t have enough faith in myself as a writer to accomplish that with every post.

An even more compelling reason–I think it’s pretty safe to assume that many of the people reading my feed are other bloggers. And while comments are great and encouraged, an even bigger compliment from another blogger is a link back from their blog. In fact, I’d much rather have a single link than ten comments. Again, providing the full feed increases the chances that someone will read something they’d like to write about on their own blog.

How do links back to my blog help me so much?  Obviously, exposure to the the other blogger’s readers has a lot of value, but there’s another reason, and this is where the SEO part comes in. Search engines (especially Google) see a link as a “vote” for a site. So a link increases my “clout” with search engines, which means that I can greatly increase search engine rankings, which greatly increases my traffic. And I have to believe that the random visitor from a search engine is less familiar with my site layout and less likely to be wise to blog ad placement in general. This means that they are more likely to click on an ad than a regular subscriber who visits my site every day (because I don’t provide full posts in my feed) would be. More search engine traffic also increases the chances that I’ll get even more subscribers–rinse and repeat.

It’s win, win, win.

Full feeds reward loyal subscribers with the ability to read your site with ease. In my case, this includes keeping the feed ad free.

Full feeds reward you directly by increasing the chances your subscribers will visit your site and leave comments. One way conversations are fine, but I have those in my head all day, and sometimes I get tired of hearing only myself.

Full feeds increase your chances of getting back links, which increase your search engine rankings, and ultimately your traffic. Back links increase your exposure to other bloggers’ readers, and search engines are an excellent source of readers who would never find you otherwise.

I hope this helps those of you are trying to decide whether to use full or partial links, and I really hope I’ve convinced those of you who to whom I subscribe and are currently using partial feeds to give me the whole thing in my reader!

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Yeah, What He Said

The other day I posted a meandering attempt at not ranting about information technology and the manufacturing sector. Today, Seth Godin wrote a post about basically the same thing. The difference is, his post actually makes some sense.

Talent is too smart to stay long at a company that wants it to be a cog in a machine. Great companies want and need talent, but they have to work for it.

Stop whatever you are doing and read the whole post. If you don’t read Seth, you probably should. Whether you are the guy running the show or the guy who sweeps the floors at night, he has great insight delivered daily for free.

And here’s a nice bit of irony for you…Seth Godin’s blog (for whatever reason) is blocked by our corporate IS department. Luckily, the concept of RSS feeds and readers hasn’t trickled down to them yet, so we can still read whatever we want through them.

Give them a few years and they’ll get Google Reader blocked as well.

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Yahoo! With a Huge Web Hosting Announcement

The other day I mentioned Microsoft’s bid to buy Yahoo!

Today, Yahoo! made a pretty interesting announcement…Yahoo! Web Hosting
now provides UNLIMITED disk space and UNLIMITED bandwidth for less than $12. That means that those videos you’ve been uploading to YouTube (owned by Google) because they are big and take up bandwidth can now be hosted cheaply and you can keep your assets for yourself.

They are even registering your domain name for free, plus unlimited MySQL databases and email addresses. If you’ve been thinking about starting a blog or getting a site for your small business, this looks like a sweet deal.

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Microsoft to Buy Yahoo!?

From the WSJ:

The offer, $31 a share in cash and stock, is a 62% premium to Thursday’s closing price. Microsoft said Yahoo holders would be able to trade their shares for cash or 0.9509 Microsoft shares a piece, with no more than half of the overall purchase price paid in cash.

Seems too good for Yahoo! shareholders to pass up. What would it mean for us?

It could have a big affect on bloggers and site owners. Currently Google dominates the pay per click advertising market with AdSense. Microsoft getting control of Yahoo’s advertising network could mean a higher payout for publishers and maybe even some transparency in just what percentage of the cost of an ad a site owner is paid for a click. Currently, there is no market force to compel Google to pay out higher rates or to disclose their payout percentages.

Microsoft can actually afford to operate a division at a loss for a while in order to change the market. For proof, look no further than Internet Explorer and the X-Box.

Of course, Google could always counter with an even better offer. It’s a good time to hold Yahoo! stock, huh?

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Sun Buys MySQL

I don’t write about tech stuff here too often, but since this blog, and most likely yours*, is backended by MySQL, it’s relevant. MySQL’s business model works like this–it’s free (as in beer) to use, but enterprise level users do pay the company for support. That’s what makes it so great for the web. People can back end blogs, content management systems, bulletin boards, and just about anything else they can imagine using freely available open-source tools. In fact, there’s even an acronym for the most commonly used tools working together (LAMP–Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP). For the end user, more than likely nothing will change.

So why does it matter to us that Sun now owns it? Because the fact that Sun owns it means that Google, Microsoft, and Oracle don’t own it.

Story

*HM, I know you do your own blog engining…mad props.