As you may know, I’ve bought some epic hosting from asmallorange and with it I’ve put up this blog in the domain that I’ve had for years. Unfortunately this domain had little to no traffic throughout its time as there was no content! In addition, this blog is sitting on a subdomain that’s completely new.
Note: I’m basing this completely on Wordpress’s blog stats which only indicate visitors and not avid readers…
At my old blog, I used to get a regular flow of about 6-13 visitors per day and I could see they were mostly looking at my posts on Sub-Pixel Rendering (Hinting) In Chrome Is Inferior To That Of Firefox and my long gone implementation of a twitter clone in django. So far so good, people were using Google to find information and my blog was quite high in the results. My old blog post comes in at #2 and #3 when you search for “django twitter clone”. Maybe this was because of the wordpress.com domain, perhaps it’s held in high regard in Google as all blogs are kept under tight control. But then it all changed; I moved to a different domain.
It was all the same content, same blogging platform, same publishing dates, but obviously I had lost my rank in Google. As my old blog was hosted on wordpress.com there was no way of me redirecting all my traffic to my new domain (well, without paying), and no way of stopping google from indexing my posts. So now my steady stream of low traffic suddenly landed to 0. No visitors whatsoever. I was thinking how I would recover, seeing as how my old blog had little to no visitors anyway I am now going to endeavour to get back up the ranks in Google.
Getting up high in Google will be difficult though, I’m thinking I should delete en-mass my posts on wordpress.com and that will prevent google from indexing them. I have written a short note on my old blog posts informing visitors that I’ve moved, but why would they click the new link when the information they want is right there on that page anyway?
Anyway, I guess the only way to get back up on the results is to post high quality posts that are understandable and get people commenting! And that I shall do…
I’ve just recently bought 3ible.com and 3ible.co.uk based on nothing other than the fact that the domains look like the word Bible.
Don’t know how I’m going to use these but I have them for two years so I have that time to think up a brilliant plan!
I was thinking of sending all 3ible.com traffic over to youversion.com as I greatly admire their responsive ajaxy site. It’s a huge step up from the stone-age biblenet.com and has lots of great translations (My current favourite is GOD’S WORD translation)
That is all for now, gonna be writing some more posts soon when I have some time!
I just read a great article on css-tricks about how the nth-child selector works. What really shone out to me was the use of using a negative n value plus a number as in, ‘-n+5′. What this would do is only select the top 5 rows! This is very clever and I’m definitely going to be using this in the future.
A practical use of this technique is to imagine a high score table with lots of rows each detailing a person’s high score. You want to highlight the top three to indicate that these people are the ones to be commended and enlarge the top scorer to emphasise their achievement. You would use this css:
table#highscores tr td {
background-color: #666; /* default values */
height: 20px;
}
table#highscores tr:first-child td {
height: 40px; /* increase the row height of the top scorer */
}
table#highscores tr:nth-child(-n+3) td {
background-color: #889; /* emphasise the top three */
}
Unforunately and unsurprisingly, this doesn't work in the most popular* browser in the world, Internet Explorer 8 and below. For those, you'll have to use jQuery and its implementation of nth-child. Like what was mentioned in the article on css-tricks though, this technique shouldn't really be used for fundamental website design where the layout or usability would be effected by it not being implemented. Allowing the website to degrade gracefully for browsers with no implementation is key.
*By most popular, I really mean most widely-used. I doubt that a large proportion of the internet population are using IE8 because they actually prefer IE8 to other browsers or they wouldn't switch if they had the opportunity, such as business users whose systems are locked down
A pretty simple philosophy: If you make the primary action on a form or web page stand out, users will be more likely to click it. By emphasising these buttons or actions you are attempting to draw the user’s focus toward it. And by primary action, I mean the submit, send, save etc buttons; actions where the user is making progress. Secondary actions could be buttons like back, undo or cancel
There are a number of ways to emphasise the primary action. One of the easiest and yet still effective methods is to colour the button brightly to draw attention. Similarly you could reduce the saturation of the cancel button. The human eye is drawn to areas of colour which stand out from the page. Also culturally the colour green is associated with a positive action and so if the user is in a hurry or just speedily going through the form, when they see the green button they will know it’s the button that submits the information. Chances are that they won’t actually read the text of the button!
The government has bad grammar as evidenced by this act on co2 advert. At the end it shows the words ‘Driving 5 miles less’ and this is bad grammar. It should be ‘Driving 5 miles fewer’ as miles can be counted. However, it’s not public knowledge that fewer is the most appropriate word, as proven by the (admittedly less common nowadays) “10 items or less” signs above the basket checkouts at supermarkets.
You should always use the word fewer when talking about things that can be counted such as: miles, trees, lemons. For cases where you would use the word less is for objects that can’t be directly counted such as: distance, forest, fruit.
I walked 5 fewer miles to get to the moon.
I walked less distance to interstellar space.
There are a gajillion fewer trees everyday thanks to deforestation.
There is less forest now that we have paper.
People eat lemons everyday, there are fewer lemons in the world today than yesterday.
When all these lemons get eaten, there is less fruit.
(My current favourite is 
