Dylan Greene dot com

Just two weeks until Gnomedex, the annual meeting of geeks lead by the lockergnome himself, Chris Pirillo. The subject matter is blogging and everything that revolves around it.

Some cool things:

• It's sold out!
• Over half the audience blogs (the list)
• Presenters include Dave Winer, Steve Gilmore, Steve Rubel, Phillip Torrone, Robert Scoble, Marc Canter, John Battelle, Dan Gilmor, and may other A-list bloggers, editors, writers, and inventors. It's like the superbowl of blogging.

For people going:

• The .NET Guy is getting people together for dinner on Thursday. Contact him if you are interested.
• Robert Scoble may be hosting a camping trip after Gnomedex.
• I'll be staying at the Sixth Avenue Inn.
• I'll be in Seattle June 22 till Tuesday, June 28.
• On Monday and/or Tuesday, I'll be visiting friends at Microsoft. Major Nelson, John Porcaro, Dennis, Dave, etc - I expect cool demos that I can't talk about here! <g>

Image is from the great Podbat Blog.

Apparetly my site was mentioned on 98 Rock this morning in reference to my Preakness Photos.

Anybody know why?

According to my FeedBurner stats page, the circulation of my RSS on the first 24 hours of using FeedBurner was an awesome 303 people.

That should show the awesome power that RSS has. I can't even name 303 people, so it's not just people that know me interested in reading the silly things I write. Hi, curious onlooker!

According to Google AdSense, web pages on my site in that same 24 hour time period were looked at by people 11,730 times. I don't know how may unique people that is since many visit multiple pages, but I'd guess around 8,000 people. That shows a huge potential for growth for feed readers. Or the next market Microsoft or Google will take over.

If this whole "RSS" and "Feeds" thing doesn't make sense to you let me know and I'll write a blog entry about.

I resisted joining FeedBurner for a long time because I didn't want to give up full control of my feeds. FeedBurner has some nice features, such as adding Amazon ads and showing stats of how many people subscribe to your feed. Since I wrote my own blogging tool, it's not hard for me to add those features, or to do them even better, but that takes time away from other projects, so it was time to let somebody else take care of it.

FeedBurner has a setting that lets you set the "Original Feed URL" - so if FeedBurner shuts down or starts charging, I can make a quick preference change on my site and my RSS subscribers will resume getting their feed from here.

WorkBoxers has a FeedBurner Review, which I found out about on ProBlogger.

Damn... I finally added tag clouds to my site and now Zeldman says they're the new mullets.

I'm constantly tweaking the code for my site, getting it ready for mass consumption from friends hungry to use this for their own blogging desires:

Here's some changes I made over the last week:

• Blog paging (Previous/Next Page) . This is needed on more blogs. If you look at most blogs, when you get to the bottom of the page there is no way to easily see the next set of entries. Users expect Next Page, so that's what I added. I've also seen sites that use "Previous Page" because you're going "back in time" - I felt that was just semantically confusing.
• New photoblog, captionsblog, categories, and archive pages, all with better URLs and paging.
• Google Adsense ads - I've had Google ads for a couple years, but I typically kept them hidden at the bottom of some pages. By changing the size, placement, frequency of the ads, and some other tweaks, I went from making $0.03 a day to about $15/day. I also blocked sites advertising Bob Dylan merchandise. Not that I have anything against him, but pretty much all of my ads were for him, and that doesn't target my audience well.
• Finally, I changed the URL schema. Those reading via RSS might have seen duplicate entries because of that. Sorry, nothing I could easily do to prevent that.
  • URL 1.0: \blogs.asp?blogID=1234
    This was ugly and exposed variables and page names that users didn't need to see.
  • URL 2.0: \posts\1234
    This was shorter, but didn't give any context to the page. The word "posts" caused many Google Ads for fencing and other uses for wood posts. Another problem was that every comment, photo, caption, and anything else with a unique ID had it's own url (\posts\1234\5678). I thought this would be helpful, but it just filled Google up with lots of pages with the same content. I don't want to be thought of as a Google index spammer, so I made further URL changes bring us to version 3....
  • URL 3.0: \1\1234_Lots_of_software_updates
    The 1 is for posts, then the ID of the post, then the blog title for easy reference and to make Google happy. Since post titles can change, that part of the URL is actually ignored behind the scenes. If I need to jump to specific comment or photo I use #value in the URL.

I wrote my own URLRewrite code that fast and efficient for my needs, so old URLs never break. Some search engines still look for URLs from the Windows 95 site I ran until 1996. I'll be making more changes as I have time in the evenings.

Somebody found my site and posted a message to Donald Trump thinking my site is an appropriate way to reach him:

Dear Mr Trump I just would like to inform you that during your show tonight I did notice that Chris was making the Pizza for his team and that he was not wearing any gloves , Im sure u are aware of the health factor on food preperation as u are well respected in your field so I thought I would bring this matter to your attention.

A viewer of you show John Albi

I don't know if The Donald reads my blog, but since I've never seen him near a computer I'm guessing no.

While on this topic, 50 Cent and the G-Unit crew probably aren't reading these comments on my blog either.

After a disappointing run with Google AdSense, I've decided to try it again.

Google selects the ads to show on your site based on what it think are most appropriate for the site. This means a site about coffee should have lots of coffee-related ads.

This works great most of the time, but Google AdSense decided the most appropriate ads for my site all had to relate to a certain Dylan musician, even though I never write about him.

The ads weren't getting many clicks because they didn't relate to why people where here.

Instead of fighting that battle I made changes to where I put the ads and how many ads I show.

I made the ads more visible and put them in a place that they could get clicked on by accident. By accident? Yeah, that's normally not good, but that's part of making money with ads on the web. You have to keep your click % up, otherwise your ads become worthless. By showing more ads, I hope there to be some non-musician related ads.

If you're thinking about putting ads on your site you should try my Google Ads Tester. It'll show you what ads you might see on your site, or any site you want to try.

WebmasterWorld.com also has a great Google AdSense forum where web masters are shareing their experiences and giving suggestions for how to get more money with Google Ads.

I just want to give some praise to Timothy Macrina and his company, QuickMortgageLoan.com. Together they are graciously hosting all of the web sites I run, such as DylanGreene.com, TeacherReviews.com, and Anoopa.net.

Tim has been an awesome host, always there when I need him and always keeping me informed on server upgrades, reboots, network changes, and the like. He constantly impresses me with new the technologies he learns in order to keep our sites running smoothly and, of course, to be on the leading edge. For the fun of learning new skills and the satisfaction of doing things his way, Tim, like me, created his own blogging tool, and his is as impressive as the professionally built ones out there.

Tim doesn't make any money from hosting my sites, Instead, he offered to do it to tap my knowledge. I hope I've been helpful these past few years because the projects he's done to keep our sites online, fast, secure, and easy to maintain have simply been awesome. Beyond all of this, Tim has been a great friend, even though we haven't had the luxury of meeting in person yet.

To Tim Macrina and everybody at QuickMortgageLoan.com - Thank You!

I've gone a while without blogging.  Part of it is that blogging has finally become mainstream.  Blogging is in the news.  It's joked about on the Daily Show.  And my dad complains about my lack of new entries.  All this means that blogging is no longer cutting edge, and therefore I'm not as interested in it anymore. 

My next project?

I haven't decided yet.  I've played around hacking some .net code on the Smartphone.  It seems to have great untapped potential.  And there's more money to be made than just selling ring tones. 

I also have some ideas how to improve blogging.  Just because I don't write doesn't mean I'm not reading.  I'm reading 157 blogs now, via their RSS feeds, using intraVnews.  I add a feed about once a week, and remove a stale one about once a month. I read about 1000 entries a day.  Tonight it took me an hour, from midnight till 1am.  It doesn't scale.  The idea I have fixes this problem.  I've submitted the concept to Microsoft Research in the hopes I will be able to share it at the Social Computing Symposium 2005. 

Oh, and I'll still be blogging.  Just maybe not every day.

...i'm not blogging often enough.

Okay okay... I've been busy.

Google, MSN, Yahoo, and others have decided that the new best way to prevent comment spam is to use an HTML tag that will prevent Google (and other search engines) from following links that could be spam links.

That new tag works as so:

<a href="url" rel="nofollow">Link Text</a>

When indexing sites, this will prevent Google and others from "following" these links. Normally following those links helps a site's PageRank, which makes those sites appear higher in search results. The theory is that if spammers aren't getting their PageRank improved, then they will stop spamming blogs. Ha!

My prediction is that this change will not prevent comment spam because of the following issues:

1. The text of the spam messages will still be indexed by search engines.
2. Humans will still see the the spam messages.
3. Humans will still be able to follow the spam links.
4. Most importantly: Spammers can still post spam messages.

In short, all this does is make life a little easier for Google. Their PageRank system, which might just be flawed, has been abused and blamed for the onslaught of comment spam. Now they have an out - an excuse to to say it's not their fault anymore. I'm all for better search results in Google (ever try to search for a specific hotel?), but their solution simply does not prevent comment spam.

What do I recommend?

1. For automated spam bots: To prevent bots from posting spam comments, I require JavaScript. When a human user clicks the Submit button, JavaScript to renames field names before the comment is submitted to the server. Fields are unique named every time the page loads, and the server will only post comments when it gets the field name it is expecting. This prevents the automated spam attacks because the software spammers are not able to predict the field names.
2. For manually entered spam comments: I have basic spam filtering mechanism similar to many email spam filters. It looks for common spam words, URLs, and topics, and prevents those messages from being posted.
3. Either way, I have a RSS feed which shows me whenever a spam comment is attempted, along with IP address and other information so I can track the progress, and watch for false positives (real comments that the system thought were spam), and easily ban IP's of known spammers.

Something important to me is that my solutions stop comment spam without requiring any extra effort from my users, Some sites now require registration or a CAPTCHA input to add a comment. I feel that this is just an unnecessary pain which prevents people many busy people adding their feedback. I also feel that the links in comments are often important enough that search engines should follow them, therefor always putting a nofollow tag will ultimately be unhelpful to those small sites that should get a higher PageRank.

And most importantly, unlike the nofollow "solution" from Google, my recommendations can actually prevent spam comments from appearing on sites, and that's what we all want, right?

Happy Holidays to all those that are celebrating them!

I'm Jewish, so last night I did what many Jews do on Christmas Eve: Chinese carry out!

Today I'm catching up on things I've been wanting to get done for a long while but have been to busy to, namely working on my web sites.

When I have the motivation, working on my web sites is extremely relaxing and exciting. It's like sculpting: taking a block of the web site and slowly working at it until something nice comes out. And if it doesn't look good, I can re-work it until I like it or move onto another part of the site.

According to PubSub, my PubSub Ranking is 8,153. This means that, according to PubSub, there are about 8000 blogs and web sites that are more popular than this one.
PubSub's popularity ranking is based on blog posts, so the more people that link to this site in blog entries, the better the ranking will be.

Is 8,153 good? I don't know, but it's more than half the value of where I work. (Lower is better).

What's your PubSub Ranking?

Saw this comic today too.... :)

I took advantage of being separated from my Xbox and spent the last couple days upgrading this site. Most noticeable is that I made the font smaller. I made this change while using my dad's huge flatscreen, and it looks better here, but hopefully the font is still readable on other computers.

I only use relative font sizes, which means if you change your computer or browser settings to show fonts larger or smaller, the fonts on my site should change size to reflect that. The downside is that there is not a standard size for "medium" - so what might look like a nice readable point size to me might be absurdly small for you.

So, if you can't read this, let me know. :)