Cheap and Tiny and Popular

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Just a link from Matt, and suddenly Cheap And Tiny is rubbing shoulders with the big guys on del.icio.us/popular. Traffic jumped from 600 hits a day (117 unique visits) to 15,021 hits (1,754 unique visits), and income from ad clicks went from “near nil” to “modestly pleasant.” I’m still tweaking the Google Adsense and Chitika ad positions to see what improves performance, and I’m open to recommendations for search terms to plug into the Chitika code to match the weblog audience’s expectations.

An anonymous commenter on 248am.com doesn’t like the design of Cheap And Tiny. I’ve tried to keep it light and clean, while smoothly integrating advertising elements into the layout — but without resorting to deceptive styling to make it look like the ads are part of the content. Does anyone else think the site is confusing? That WordPress theme (I call it “Yurt,” for no particular reason) will be the basis for other upcoming projects, so feedback on that will help improve future weblogs on the same network.

Droids and Brothers

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From a conversation with Amy last night:

Amy: Bob got his DVD of Episode III last night.

Me: Personally, I’m a lot more comfortable pretending that the whole prequel never happened. In Episode 4, Obi-Wan says “Luke, here’s your Dad’s lightsaber. He wanted you to have it,” and I’m yelling, “No he didn’t.” And Anakin making C3-P0? So that means C3-P0 is kind of like Luke’s brother?

Amy: Only in the way that Henry Ford’s Model T was his son’s brother.

Blood Spatter

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Happy Halloween or Reformation Day! The blood spatter on my site can speak to you of zombies and vampires out for brains or blood respectively, or of the spilled blood of the martyrs for the faith. Read some of Holy Office’s history on the mixed, mostly non-pagan origins of Halloween, and then check out The Dane’s uber-awesome pumpkin carving skillz. And Brandon and Wendy’s too.

Now, here’s how to do a quick and dirty blood spatter effect in Photoshop:

  1. Draw shape on white background. (Straight onto background layer, not a new layer.) Any shape you like.
  2. Foreground color #FF0000, background color #660000. Render / Clouds filter.
  3. Brush Strokes / Sprayed Strokes filter, tweak settings till the shape looks reasonably ragged. Repeat for effect if desired. (You thought I was going to use the Spatter filter? You can, if you like, in the next step, but I don’t like the effect as much.)
  4. Optional: Tweak Levels to add gritty darks, and use the Spatter filter and more Sprayed Strokes to make a bigger mess.

It’s really amateur-looking, certainly nothing approaching the quality of Stan’s blood stains, but hey, it takes two minutes to do — maybe one if you’re quick with Photoshop keyboard shortcuts.

Stop Hiding Login!

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Update: I <3 SideJobTrack. That’s all.

To my dearest SideJobTrack, Livejournal, Ning, Commission Junction, and a few other websites out there:

You are valuable services, and I love you all from the bottom of my heart, but I have an urgent request: please stop hiding your login forms behind javascript show/hide links! I’m very keyboard-oriented, so my first reflex when signing in to a service is to TAB to the login fields, type my username and password, and press Enter. When you require a click on a “Sign in” link to pop up the login form element, you force me to move my hand to the mouse, thus wasting precious seconds I could be spending typing in my info. It all adds up. So please, show your login forms in plain sight.

(And please don’t tell me to set my TAB to go through links as well as form elements. That’s unacceptable; this isn’t Internet Explorer.)

The same goes for you too, Flickr, making me click through no less than two screens (1,2) to get in. I suggest a simple form on your front page with a username and password field, and two radio buttons: one for classic Flickr users and the other for merged Yahoo accounts. Should be pretty easy for that to forward to a script which determines what goes to which login server.

Come on, there’s nothing wrong with showing a few text fields and a submit button on your front page. It’s not a blight on your design, and it makes things easier for your users.

eBay “Notification Preferences”

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eBay Notification PreferencesHas anyone else noticed a lot more incoming spam “marketing” email from eBay which turns out to be authentic and not just more phishing attempts? Yeah, me too. Here’s how to kill the spam:

  1. Go to your My eBay page and click on “Preferences” under “My Account.”
  2. Click on “Notification Preferences,” which should take you to a login screen. (So they make you log in again just to change subscription preferences: added layer of security or punishment by annoyance for opting out?)
  3. In the Preferences page — with an ominous “OptinLoginShow” in its URL — scroll down to “Newsletters, Promotions, and Event Notifications,” conveniently tucked away near the bottom of the page.
  4. Uncheckizzle that shizzle and submizzle. Note, it says at the bottom, It may take up to 10 days to process changes to these preferences. 10 more days of possible spam, telemarketing, and junk mail. eBay loves you just that much!

Nothing new. Just like Yahoo “marketing” preferences of yore, eBay has decided to go with the not-wholly unexpected business strategy of using unsolicited direct advertising to antagonize customers, and hiding away the option of turning the junk off. Way to go, BigCo.

Buzz

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Buzz!So I was wondering what to do with my old whyblog.org domain, which has sat idle and ignored since I used it for my digital art thesis on weblogs and RSS feeds over two years ago.

Then I saw the big-sans-serif-on-white design of Flock, and Mathowie’s parody of it, and I thought about all the wide-eyed “Web 2.0” buzz that’s been surrounding us lately. On a sudden impulse, I wrote up a series of catchy-sounding buzz phrases in a text file, and threw together a PHP script which would grab the text file, split its contents into an array, randomize the order, style, and hyperlinkage of each phrase in the array, then mash it all back together in a lovely remix of bold technological jargon.

Buzz is the result: a dynamic, chaotic, ironic hypertext poem which draws on the starry-eyed breathlessness of newer media’s current utopian moment, all in the big-sans-serif-on-white style I’ve dubbed “White Elephant.” Random phrases will link to search results on various sites so you can see just how real the buzz is. So go check out Buzz, and enjoy. Be sure to refresh. You might just pick up a new slogan for your new Web 2.0 enterprise.

(Also see the “Create Your Own Web Two Point Oh Company” tool.)

Update: Sorry, Haughey isn’t in “White Elephant” mode anymore; he’s now gone back to basics: gray background and horizontal rules. The New really is Old.

Del.icio.us Support and SEO

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I seem to have become the de facto go-to guy for support on del.icio.us daily blog posting, such that even del.icio.us staff in the mailing list have pointed to me when asked about the feature. Me, I got my info on it from the list (how very meta). Later, that entry somehow beat everyone else to the top of Google for the search term.

What can I say? There’s no SEO strategy better than producing compelling and informative content.

(Anyway, this state of affairs will probably change when the feature comes out of beta and gets its own support page. Then I’ll be like one of those unofficial-but-approved online fanlistings.)

Cheap and Tiny and Problogging

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Cheap and Tiny

Cheap And Tiny is a weblog about cheap and tiny gadgets, exploring the lower boundaries of size and cost in the world of personal electronics. Your writer: Raffy. Your enterprising administrator: me. Check it out. Raffy has started it off with a look at Apple’s new iPod versus the Sony Playstation Portable.

I’ve had “problogging” on the brain lately, and I was formulating plans to start one of those weblog networks with a number of narrow-band topical sites, running WordPress on a shared reseller account with text ads somewhere, meeting some of the demand for certain kinds of niche-interest content while drawing in some modest click-cash. Suddenly, however, AOL bought WeblogsInc, and now “blog network” talk is everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. Now I feel like a late bandwagon jumper-on who waited just a bit too long to get things moving.

Still, better to get things moving anyway than to sit moping, and if one can wait a bit longer to launch a series of quality sites, so much the better. One weblog at a time.

(The real challenge now is to get into that business without resorting to the use of “blog” as a verb.)

Update: Bumped this up for exposure. Apologies to anyone who received multiple or misplaced trackbacks from this entry: there seems to be a bug in WordPress which causes the most recent post to receive a trackback ping when the weblog’s home URL is linked. I might have to turn off MT’s trackback auto-discovery because of this annoyance.