loving the dot com

Recently I’ve noticed more and more posts and articles relating to this “new” Web 2.0 service called Twitter. It’s been around for almost a year now (it was born on March 2006 I think), but it mainly took off in the US and hasn’t really appealed to the UK market much yet. What is it anyway?

Put simply - Twitter is a social networking site which allows it’s members to post updates of what they’re currently doing to each other - in 140 characters or less (basically like an SMS). At first glance, most people are going to think “What the hell is the point in a service which just lets me tell my friends what I’m currently doing?.” Well, it’s a good argument. A fair amount of people will disregard the service and not care - there are a few people who are familar with something similar already though. If you’ve got an account on Facebook, chances are you’ve updated your status at least once. This is what Twitter does best, except streamlined and linked to your IM client and mobile phone.

The advantage of the service being linked to your mobile phone instantly makes it easy to post your own little messages, co-ordinate when you’re going out, or even submit micro blog posts, wherever you are - especially for those moments when you don’t have a piece of paper to hand, or just want to quickly rant about something.

As Twitter seems to be steadily growing still, I thought I’d give it a look. If you’ve been reading this page recently you might have noticed the “Twitter feed” column in the right sidebar. This little feed comes directly from my Twitter account and is updated every 30 minutes - thanks to Alex King’s Twitter Tools plugin for Wordpress. As I’ve only been playing with it briefly there isn’t much going on in my feed. Maybe I’ll start updating it more frequently once I get suitably addicted to it.

Of course, being a Web 2.0 service, Twitter have published a handy API enabling people to plug all sorts of applications into their service (like the Twitter Tools plugin for Wordpress). There are some quirky amusing ones, such as Twittervision, which gives you a real-time feed of the latest Twitter “tweets” from the public feed. It’s quite amusing for the first few minutes, but you can get bored of it fairly quickly.

Some of the other people to plug into the service include BBC News, who send headline updates to the site - great if you like to keep track of breaking news. They also have a load of other Twitter feeds you can keep track of.

I have to say though, the most useful thing I’ve found on the service so far is the Twitter Tube Tracker by Tom Morris - it lets me get an SMS update of any delays on the London Underground so I don’t have the joyous pleasure of arriving at the station and finding the line is suspended.

There are a whole load of other ‘Twitterized’ services to play with at the Twitter Fan Wiki. If you’ve got a Twitter account, do check out the fan wiki - you might find something you like. Why not add me to your friends too.

Ok, so I couldn’t quite believe it when I read it. At the launch of the PS3 in London’s Virgin Megastore yesterday, Sony decided to give out 100 brand new Bravia HDTVs - worth £2500 each.

I know they’re getting a bit desperate to attract some positive publicity toward the PS3, but surely this is a bit of an extreme measure.

Still, if I’d been queueing for 36 hours straight and had to pay £500 at the end of it, I’d probably need something to cheer me up too. I think I’ll be waiting a while before I buy myself a PS3 - like until they make all the good PS2 games work. If you’re hoping to play Gran Turismo, Grand Theft Auto (Various) or any of the Pro Evolution series, good luck.

Source: [1]

A few days ago I received an invite from Autodesk to an evening about their new release of Maya 8.5, with a talk from Joel Aron, the Digital Production Supervisor at Industrial Light and Magic - naturally, I jumped at the chance to go.

The launch event went down this evening at the Cumberland Hotel, right next to Marble Arch tube station in central London - it was absolutely packed! Autodesk started off by playing a few show reels of projects which their software had been mainly responsible for creating. You can check out all of these on the Autodesk Media & Entertainment Show Reels page.

Here’s their 2006 reel:

I have to say, I knew their products were widely used in modern media, but I had no idea really to what extent. Everything from ABC News logos, music videos to big-budget movies - basically, if you have a project which needs any kind of CG work there’ll probably be an Autodesk product involved somewhere.

After they’d finished showcasing exactly what their software was capable of doing, one of the Maya engineers ran through all the new features - mainly nCloth and Maya Nucleus, the new simulation framework in Maya 8.5. This was probably one of the first times I have been truly amazed by a real-time software demo, check out the other videos on the Maya Nucleus page and see it for yourself. This stuff actually works in real-time, without needing a whole server farm to do the calculations. Remember this is just the modelling bit though - rendering can still take a very long time.

Aside from the amazing Nucleus features of Maya 8.5, one of the things I’m really interested in looking at is their new support for Python as an internal scripting language. Previously all Maya scripts have been written in MEL (Maya Embedded Language), which had certain limitations and meant developers had to learn a whole new programming language. Having dabbled in Python more than I have in MEL I’m excited at the possibilities that this feature could open up, for both me and plugin developers.

When Joel Aron came on stage he played a showreel of ILM’s creative work - needless to say that was pretty damn impressive too. A lot of people associate ILM with only doing huge big-budget movies (think “Star Wars”, “War of the Worlds” and the like), but they actually work on a whole lot of other films too, doing subtle CG you probably won’t even notice. That’s the sheer brilliance of it.

The majority of Joel’s talk was dedicated to his work on Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. I hadn’t realised until then exactly how much of the film was made in CG. I had originally thought the actors were wearing heavy costumes and it was just their faces which had been replaced with the CG models - turns out I was wrong. Most of the cast were entirely modelled in CG. Joel showed a load of footage from the original shooting and all the actors were wearing skinny lycra suits with motion-capture dots. Everything was then modelled in Maya and ILM’s own software, then put on top of the actors in the post-production stages. The detail the modellers went into when creating the cast was nothing short of insane.

One bit of the talk I found really interesting was the part about how ILM had written a series of tools for Maya which could automate Davy Jones’ tentacles, according to the mood or current conditions. That way the motion was sufficiently random and didn’t detract any attention away from the acting. Having seen the initial renders of the scenes, I can tell you that the sequences would look odd if it was gone. Next time you watch the film just look at how many really subtle animations there are in the background - also the number of CG characters which hardly appear, because each one is as detailed as the next, whether they appeared on camera for a lot of the film or not. No wonder it took ILM up to 23 hours to render each individual frame!

IMDb can tell you just how many big movies Joel has worked on. After listening to his talk this evening I’m definitely looking forward to Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and Transformers (both due out later this year).

On the whole though, what can I say about this evening? Wow.

A little bit of my own stuff

I bought a copy of Maya for myself a year or so ago (just before Autodesk bought Alias), and I’ve been kept happy for hours creating silly little animations since then. Here’s one of the first animations I rendered in Maya:

I created this little wormhole ages ago as my first test of fixing a camera to a motion path, it’s nothing complex at all having done it a few times, but I think turned out pretty well for a first attempt. Curse youtube’s re-encoding techniques though, the original looks much better.

How’s that for timing. Just after I posted yesterday about the one negative point of clickdensity’s service being that you couldn’t track clicks on subdomains through their reporting tool - they’ve gone and added it today. I had a quick play this afternoon and I can confirm that it works really well too.

They’ve slightly changed the look of their reporting pages to accommodate the change (see above), but other than that everything works in just the same way. The other good news is that you won’t have to change the configuration in any of your accounts at all - it just works.

Read about their new support for subdomains.

These days there are a billion and one scripts and companies which can tell you all sorts of statistics about your website traffic, but there’s a new kind of statistic in town - the heat map

Instead of the conventional way of collecting statistics by parsing through log files or logging page hits in real time, heat mapping scripts actually respond to where users click on your pages. By using this data it’s possible to draw some really pretty pictures which can clearly illustrate how users physically move about the site - which elements are more popular than others? How far are people willing to scroll down? Is this Ad actually working? A heat map is the answer.

Commercial Heatmaps

The main names on the commercial side seem to be clickdensity, crazyegg and ClickTale - although ClickTale are still in beta testing and have yet to officially launch their service.

Here’s an example of the offering from clickdensity:

Once you sign up for the service, all you have to do to get their service working is paste a little bit of javascript directly before your closing </body> tag in your page and they immediately start tracking your visitors. As you can see from the picture you also get a lot of filter options on how to narrow down the results shown to you - whether it is in a heat map, or more traditional form. One of the particularly neat features splits the page up into it’s individual elements and gives you individual statistics as you hover over each one.

After trialing clickdensity’s service on a couple of websites at work it was immediately clear that there are a huge number of clicks which just appear to go absolutely nowhere - whether this is because of users clicking on their browser window to bring it into focus, or just randomly clicking it isn’t clear. It is very clear where the large majority of clicks are going though, and I think their map is very nicely rendered.

If you’re looking to test out heat mapping for your website, I would very much recommend you take a serious look at clickdensity as they have more detailed statistics than other providers I have seen. One thing to be wary of though, statistics are (currently) restricted to the exact domain names associated with the accounts - so subdomains count as seperate domains. This means if you have a large site which sprawls over a large number of subdomains, you’ll have to add a tracking account for each one.

Non-Commercial Heatmaps

Wherever there’s a good commercial project, there’s often a non-commercial open-source one too. This one isn’t as good as it’s paid-for counterparts, but then it is being built in people’s spare time and they have no financial motivation to make it as pretty.

The non-commercial offering comes in the form of LabsMedia’s ClickHeat. This system is written in JavaScript (of course) with a PHP/GD backend. Here’s what theirs looks like:

As you can see the interface can’t really compete with that of clickdensity, but most the functionality is there. I have briefly tested this system too and while it does work, I would be more inclined to use a paid-for service at the moment simply because the reporting side isn’t entirely up to scratch.

That said - having had a flick through the code which makes it work, it becomes clear that the system isn’t half as complicated as you might think. All the JavaScript has to do is tell the server where on the page the user has clicked, the majority of the code is dedicated to drawing the heatmap image. This is also fairly trivial in the grand scheme of things.

It’s often said that simple ideas are the best, and I’m surprised that more people haven’t implemented a similar sort of system to this. As it is so simple it does make you wonder how long clickdensity, clickegg and ClickTale can stay ahead of the game.

More and more websites these days are adding what’s called a “Favicon” (or ‘Favourites Icon’) so you can identify them better. For those of you thinking “wtf is a favicon”, it’s the little picture which might be shown next to the URL in the address bar, next to the website title or as part of the tab title - depending on your web browser. For example, if you’re really lucky, and look really carefully you might just see a very small picture of me!

Why are Favicons useful?

The main reason Favicons are useful these days is to promote brand familiarity - it’s the ideal place to put your company logo or some other recognisable little picture there. The problem is actually creating one - or at least, that’s what most people think. It’s actually really easy.

Favicons are stored as a .ico (Icon) file, which is really just a very small BMP file. There are a few programs which let you edit them easily but recently I came across this little gem:

http://www.rw-designer.com/online_icon_maker.php

By using this tool you can easily draw your own little logo, or upload a picture and have it automatically translate it for you. You can then easily save the icon and upload it to your website.

How to get the Favicon to display

Some web browsers support automatic discovery of favicons, that means all you have to do is upload your .ico file as ‘favicon.ico’ to the root directory of your site and it’ll do the rest - BUT - the best way to make sure is to also add the following tag into the header section of your website template, between the <head&ht; and </head> tags:


<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" />

Adding a tag like this means the browser will be able to find your favicon wherever the user has navigated to (or entered) in your site.

Creating Animated Favicons

Some browsers, such as Firefox, have the ability to display animated favicons - these are just regular animated .gif files so they are even simpler to create. You can see an example of an animated favicon here.

To make your life simpler still, there’s an online generator for animated icons here! For maximum compatibility it’s always best if you’re going to include an animated favicon to also include a static one too because otherwise some browsers won’t show one at all.

To include your animated favicon along side your regular one, put the following code in your page header (as described above):


<link rel="icon" type="image/gif" href="/icon.gif" />

Just replace icon.gif with the filename of whatever you uploaded your animated favicon as, and there you have it.

Job done.

The popularity of RSS is snowballing as more and more people are finding ways to read content faster and more conveniently, especially with the new compatibility now inside Internet Explorer 7

For those not in the know, RSS is a data format used to “publish frequently updated content” - basically, it’s a way of laying out what you’ve written so machines can pick it up without scraping it directly from your website. This can then be passed onto your readers in whatever format they choose. The advantage is that they can read your content in the most convenient way, without necessarily having to open their web browser (thanks to RSS Readers).

By default, Wordpress doesn’t have a way of tracking how many readers you have to your RSS feed - this is where providers like FeedBurner come in. FeedBurner has a whole load of tools for you to optimize your feed and see who’s actually reading it - plus they have some neat ways to let you publish ads in your feed.

The question is, how do you get your Wordpress installation to redirect your RSS feeds to FeedBurner? Well, there are a few ways you can do it but just to make your life much simpler OrderedList has created a great FeedBurner Plugin for Wordpress, which lets you easily configure your RSS redirects from your normal Wordpress options. All you need to do is upload the plugin to your plugins directory, set the URL you want it to redirect to and bingo, job done.

Check out the lovingthe.com RSS Feed redirect.

On the whole, randomly searching for ways to cash in on the blogging boom will return you the same set of generic results, but occasionally you come across something out of the ordinary - such as the personal blog of John Chow. John’s blog is a shining example that it is possible to get financial gains purely from blogging, but also keeping your blog entertaining in the process - lets face it, nobody wants just another feed dedicated to technical crap and the increasingly quirky world of SEO.

One of the main reasons for Chow’s success is his attitude to the whole area of SEO and the funny spin he puts on his articles, one thing is for sure though - if you’re wanting to make money online from writing your blog, there aren’t many better examples of people who have achieved that very goal.

Promote something where everybody wins

Campaigns like this one are a fantastic way of getting traffic driven to your site and increasing your search engine ranking at the same time. From John’s point of view, this is certainly win/win. He can demonstrate to potential advertisers how many people read his blog and take note of what he’s written, at the same time he has a sure-fire way of getting others to link back to his blog - affirming his own search engine ranking. Just try googling for “root of all evil”, and you’ll see what a success his last attempt at driving up traffic was.

Always remember - people love competitions, people love campaigns. If there is a queue, people will fall in and join it - the web is no different. If you can convince people they are getting something for nothing, you’ll be a guaranteed success.

So you’ve got a blog, and you’ve got something written down. Make sure the almighty blogosphere know it exists, and make sure people can easily find it again.

Recognition - LOOK! I’M OVER HERE! (aka XML-RPC Pings)

Most blogging software has the ability to send what’s called a ‘ping’ to blog indexing services (basically big lists of who’s written what and when), Wordpress is no different. This ping tells the indexing service that you’ve written something new and they should come and take a look at it. You should find that as soon as you hit “Publish!” you’ll get a load of hits from various web spiders as they digest your latest offering.

You can see the list of place your Wordpress blog pings by going to Options -> Writing in the control panel and looking at the “Update Services” box at the bottom of the page. By adding a list of servers in this box you can get Wordpress to automatically send ‘pings’ to all the servers each time you post a new article.

Here’s the list of servers I currently send a ping to whenever I publish a new post:

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://rpc.wpkeys.com
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.britblog.com
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://ping.fakapster.com/rpc
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080
http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://api.feedster.com/ping.php

There will always be more servers you can add to this list, so it’s well worth keeping an eye on it from time to time.

Syndication - Getting acknowledgement, and getting people to return

If you look in the toolbar on the right (well, it was on the right when I wrote this), you’ll see a load of little buttons under the “Syndication” heading. Each of these buttons allows someone to easily link your blog into their blog service of choice. That way they don’t have to bookmark your URL or remember the address, it’s automatically added right where they want it. This is a good thing. I know this because as soon as I added these buttons the number of return visitors to the site started adding up (thanks to Google Analytics for those statistics)

That’s it for now, but I’ll be adding more very soon, with a round-up at the end of the week.

There isn’t really a day goes by when I don’t hear about how the ‘blogosphere’ is still expanding at a huge rate, and there is still money to be made from it - so I thought I’d put it to the test.

The question - how long does it take to go from a blogging zero to the point where your blog can give you a stable income? More to the point, is it even still possible?

There are a million and one sites which claim to tell how you to monetize your site/blog/etc in “10 easy fool-proof ultra-guaranteed steps”, but let’s be honest, the majority of them are con-artists people jumping on the band wagon with their pseudo half-knowledge of SEO claming to be authorities on the subject in order to drive up traffic to their site, or sell a few hundred thousand badly written e-books to the clueless.

It’s time to put it to the test. I’m not going to tell you how to monetize your blog, sell you cheap brand name laptops, or ask for your credit card/passport details because I have $50,000,000 waiting for you in a bank account in Nigeria. I’m setting myself a challenge, and that is to simply see if all the hype is true, you can see the results for yourselves.

Where to start?

To get everyone up to speed, theres a couple pre-requisite points, but if you’ve got a blog setup already and want to see what I’ve been doing to optimize this blog, sort out SEO and things like that, skip to step 1.

Make sure you’ve got a decent publishing platform which you can easily understand and know how to use. Wordpress is a shining example of this (it’s what I use), it has built-in support for displaying many themes so you can make your blog/site look however you want and a huge list of user contributed plugins to add all sorts of fancy bells and whistles.

Of course you can’t have a site without some form of web hosting, but these days setting that up is a doddle too thanks to the vast array of free providers, such as wordpress.com

You’ve already got a publishing platform setup, what now?

I’m assuming you’ve got some content, something to fill out your pages which doesn’t start “Lorem Ipsum…”. If not, that’s probably a good start. Write about what you know, what you like, what interests you. Thinking “nobody will care what I think” isn’t the right attitude - because if you think like that, you’ll write like that, and nobody will care what you think.

Ha. I can cheat, I can pull in RSS Feeds

Please, for the love of God don’t do it. Yes, there are cheap shortcuts to getting content on your site. You can pull in content from 800 million of the most popular blogs on the Internet, but seriously, what’s the point. If you’re replicating content you’re not the only one doing it, which means there is absolutely nothing special about your blog and the search engine’s know it. Not only will the search engines quickly disregard your little corner of the Internet as little more than a mirror, but people won’t bother reading it either. Stop. Write your own content. I have enough duplicate search results as it is. Seriously.

Next time I’ll be letting you know the first steps I’ve taken toward SEO goodness and blogosphere loving.