Instead of waiting for everything to be pixel-perfect, I’ll be updating the blog here shortly with the changes. That way I can start publishing tutorials again. And instead of forcing everything to be perfect before I upgrade the site, I’ll probably continue tweaking things indefinitely from here on out.

Look for some changes, and those promised tutorials soon.

I import my blog feed into my site’s homepage. It seemed like a good idea to put the latest articles there. To distribute my feed, I’ve been using Feedburner because of all the handy features they provide for at no charge. Recently when I went to take a gander at my home page to my horror, the articles section was blank. GASP! Turning on error reporting revealed that my feed parser was getting a “404 Page not found” response from Feedburner. However, when I view the feed in my browser, it showed up fine.

Feed Flame-out

Apparently Feedburner and other Google feed distributors have waged war against bad feed readers that don’t properly cache results. Depending on the number of page views, these readers can end up requesting a feed thousands of times a day. A cached feed need only be updated sporadically throughout the day.

Fight Fire with Fake UserAgents

The way that Feedburner and Blogger decipher whether a feed is coming from a credible source, or from an abusive one is via the User Agent. Anything that doesn’t have a User Agent defined, or that has the User Agent defined as one of the offending services gets the “404 Page not found” error. Regular browsers like Firefox, and Internet Explorer get the feed without any hiccups.

In my case, my original feed parser wasn’t passing a user agent when it made the request, so it got a 404 error. Thinking my parser was broken I switched to SimplePie. SimplePie got the same error which is when I started to investigate further. While SimplePie does use a valid useragent, it has been blacklisted by Google. Apparently a lot of developers using SimplePie run it with caching disabled. To finally get it working I had to remove the SIMPLEPIE_USERAGENT from the useragent string. It is a simple fix in SimplePie if you know to do it. I just added the following line as explained in the SimplePie API.

$feed->set_useragent('Mozilla/4.0');

Despite endorsing these sneaky habits, I’d like to go on the record as supporting being a good netizen and caching all of your external sources locally. Your site will be faster because it won’t have to reload the feed each time a user visits the page, and you won’t be burning up someone else’s bandwidth as well. It’s a win-win.

Depending on the feed parser you are using, you may have a more difficult time setting the useragent to properly bypass this issue. Here are a couple of other links that may help.

http://blog.obishawn.com/2008/06/feedburner-404-error.html

http://weblogs.asp.net/jstengel/archive/2008/07/24/useragent-fix-for-the-rsstoolkit-2-0-0-0.aspx

And there you have it. Now you have to tools to fix your broken feed requests. At least until something else breaks.

I was hoping that advertising might help offset some of the costs of hosting this website. I’m not paying too much to host it and it wouldn’t take that much advertising revenue to pay for it. Why not give it a try?

The Scientific Method

Being an experiment, I’d better pull out some of my 6th grade science reports to make sure I document this properly. Feel free to correct me on my methods. Especially if you are currently in elementary school and therefore have the scientific method fresh in your young sponge-like minds.

Hypothesis

I’ve always had text ads in the sidebar and recently I’ve started to see a trickling of change come in each month as a result. My very official hypothesis is the following:

Adding an additional adblock in the main content area of my site will result in more advertising revenue.

Seems like a logical assumption to me.

Procedure

I added a new advertising block to the main content column of my site. Admittedly, I’m not a big fan of ads, so I tried to place the new block as discretely as possible. It slipped into the related entries block just below each article.

The block is in a good contextual location where users are likely to look after finishing an article. Ads here lead the user to content related to the page they are on and thus enhance the user experience. Like I said, I’m not a big fan of ads, so if I am going to use them, then they are going to be as un-annoying as possible. A bit of an oximoron, I know.

Observations

• Total advertising revenue from January 1st to January 29th: $0.01.
• Total articles posted from January 1st to January 29th: 0.
• Number of American presidents inaugurated from January 1st to January 29th: 1.

Conclusion

It’s been a bad month.

There are a lot of things I could blame the lack of advertising income on. The continuing global economic collapse. The fact that more Presidents have been inaugurated than I’ve posted articles this year. Either way, that extra ad block isn’t pulling its weight. And it’s annoying.

Unless there is a sudden spontaneous spike in revenue, he is going on the chopping block. Who or what will take his place? Perhaps Mr. Empty-light-blue-box will get his spot back. He certainly looked better there.

This concludes our experiment.

Upgraded interface

If you use the media toolbar to insert Flash objects into your posts, you will now find a lot more options available for customizing the embedded object. These include width, height, alignment, id, class, allowfullscreen, etc. Any options filled in will be included in the auto-generated shortcode when the object is inserted in the post.

In an effort to keep the library interface clean and practical, the advanced options are tucked away by default. If you want to use them to embed an object, click “Show Advanced Options” and they magically appear. The interface is still a bit cluttered, but its the best I’ve got for now.

The webpage

SwfObj’s official web page also got an upgraded look. It has two fat download and donate buttons. I also added a “recent news” blurb, so you can quickly see any new posts about the plugin. Pretty exciting. Ok, not really.

The future

There is still more to be done on SwfObj. Not all of the Flash parameters are supported yet. The code could use some polishing. And lots of testing and bug fixing. If anyone has any problems or feature requests, please let me know.

Hopefully I’ll get some translations in as well. Any takers?

Updates probably won’t be as frequent as the last two releases, though. Most of the major features are in now. Rather than playing with plugins all the time, I think it’s time to start doing some actual Flash.

Yesterday, while driving across town with my wife, we engaged in a little conversation. It’s something we like to do to pass the time. Usually I can’t remember much of anything that is discussed during these activities. I could try to blame this on the fact that I am concentrating on driving. However, that theory fails to explain why I have the same time recalling conversations that have happened when I was sitting on the couch at home.

However, yesterdays discussion is still replaying in my mind today. Even stranger, I think my wife’s comments might actually motivate me to take action. This is very odd indeed, when considering the proportion of times she’s asked me to clean up my mess to the times I’ve cleaned up my mess.

So what was it that she said? I believe her exact words were:

No offense, but your site is kind’a boring and ugly. Maybe you should put some flowers on it.

While there won’t be any flowers added, there will be some changes coming to the site. There are a lot of things I don’t like about the current layout. I’ve added a lot of content since it was first pieced together and most of that is hidden away in the archives. That and it’s “kind’a ugly”.

So if you notice things moving around, or colors changing randomly, now you know why. I’ll be hacking things out spontaneously over the next little while until I get the site to a place I’m happy with. At least until my wife stops mocking me.

Maybe I will put some flowers on it.

Tag Posers

Since WordPress 2.3 tags have been enabled in blog posts. Being the lazy guy that I am, I never took the time to implement them here.

Prior to the 2.3 release, I had been using Categories as a form of tags. I ended up with a bunch of random categories, most of which were only used once. Not an ideal system.

Tag Bliss

With this latest upgrade, I finally went through and removed all of my wanna-be tag categories and added tags on all of my posts. Much better.

Now I can finally move on with my life.

The upgrading process was pretty simple. Before doing anything, I made sure to backup my files and database. That was probably the hardest part. WordPress also recommends disabling all plugins before upgrading, so I did that too. I use SVN to keep WordPress up to date on my server, so upgrading the source code was just a command line away.

svn update

Then I went to the upgrade link, re-enabled my plugins and was up and running. It can’t get much easier than that. Nice work WordPress!

Pretty Colors

This upgrade is probably the most dramatic change in WordPress since version 1.5 came out. A revamp of the admin interface, lots of new features and tools, increased security. And while there are all these new things going on, the first that popped out to me was the new color scheme. How shallow is that? Just goes to show how much design matters.

Fortunately, the WordPress team worked with Happy Cog to create the new interfaces and I think they work really well. The admin section is less cluttered and focuses on what blogging is all about, writing content.

Dashboard Widgets

The ability to edit the dashboard without having to install third-party hacks is a welcome change. The dashboard was always something I quickly clicked around. It was a wasted jumble of stuff I didn’t care about that posed a distraction instead of a quick launch point for what I needed to do in the site. Now that I can go in and edit it, I might actually find it useful.

No-Distractions Post Editor

Last year everyone was talking about Writeroom and its no-distractions take on writing. Writeroom revolutionized computer writing by blocking out all other programs and replacing your screen with a blank slate of words. By killing all the multi-functionality goodness of your computer, it forced you to focus on the task at hand. Writing.

Now it seems all of the CMS developers out there are following suite. Expression Engine is including this feature in their next release, and I’m pleased to see that WordPress is using it, too. While a browser can’t remove all distractions as well as a desktop application can, it is nice to not have all those links and tabs staring back at you while you are trying to think.

Media Buttons

These are very much improved from the previous version. Instead of a clunky images section taking up space on the page, you only get the media upload, import dialogs when you are going to use them. Additionally there was only the option of importing images. The new media buttons also include video, audio and a generic media option. This might just make it possible for me to upload my Flash while writing my posts.

I never liked the old image upload/import mechanism and opted to ftp media up and hand enter it. It remains to be seen whether this new system allow me to avoid the tedium of manually uploading and importing my media.

Shortcodes

I am probably the most excited about this feature. With shortcodes, you can abstract tedious blocks of html into simple, brief “codes”. Best of all, the API allows for additional shortcodes to be written and used. I’ve been wanting an easier way to enter Flash content. Being a standards junkie, I’ve had to hand enter my Flash media. This finally gives me an option for quickly entering the bulky object tags and all of their params the way I want them to be entered. I can’t wait to get that shortcode up and running.

Complaints

My one problem with the new WordPress was being able to use the Visual Editor. A while ago I changed my settings to use the advanced html editor, since I put most of my tags in by hand. Now that WordPress allows easy switching between the visual editor and the html editor, I wanted to revert my settings back to using the default editor. It took way to long to find the check box that switched it back. (It’s in the user settings page, if you happen to have the same problem.)

If you want to read up on all the new features in WordPress 2.5, here is Matt Mullenweg’s full break down of the updates.

It also appears that this new, full page editor makes it way too easy to write ridiculously long posts and not notice until it’s too late. Maybe it isn’t such a good thing to have no distractions.

How to gain blog bliss

The key there is that success needs to be measurable. Saying you want to make a lot of money really doesn’t mean anything. How much money is a lot? It probably depends on who you ask.

In an effort to quantify my own success (or failure), I’ve been piecing together statistics on areas I feel are important. This blog is one of those important areas.

My goals

I’d like to make orangesplotch.com a helpful place for other developers. I’d like to build a regular audience of readers. I’d even like to make some money from it one day.

While I can’t directly control how many readers visit my site, I can control what is on the this site. Getting more users to come to the site and keep coming back requires having a blog that is worth reading.

So what makes a blog worth reading? First of all you need content. Regularly updated, useful and fun to read content. I already know I haven’t been updating here regularly, but I wanted to quantify my poor performance. That’s the only way I’ll know if I am improving.

Measuring content updates

Logging my entries was a little tedious, but simple. I simply opened a spreadsheet and entered the date and title of each article I’ve written. Count the number of articles and divide it by how many days the site has been around and that is the average number of days between posts. The results are pretty pathetic.

Since its inception, on average I’ve been posting to the site every 15 days.

Something more useful is to break the entries down by month and year intervals. This shows trends and gives you something to compare against. For instance, I discovered that I post a lot more frequently during the winter holiday season. Probably because that’s when I have the least amount of free lance work going on.

Visualize success

Thanks to Google’s handy spreadsheet program, I was able to generate this nifty timetable for your viewing pleasure. Now you, too, can see how inconsistent my publishing is.

Obviously it takes a little more than just posting regularly to a blog to bring in readers. If the content is bad, it doesn’t matter how often it is updated. I’ll have to come up with another metric to measure how “good” the articles are.

Who cares, this post is lame!

I couldn’t agree with you more. This post is more for me than for anyone else. I’m using it as a way to break the ice and get back in the habit of posting actual content. Believe it or not, I’ve got about a dozen unfinished Flash tutorials sitting around just waiting to be published. But now you have it in writing… Starting to day, I’m going to do stuff!

So what are these big plans for the future? Well since you asked, here is my laundry list of things I’m going to do to the site.

• A small redesign for the blog
• Add a portfolio section
• Lots of new Flash tutorials

The blog redesign has been needed for a long time. I never really finished the original design, which has been holding me back from posting for a long time. It isn’t fun posting articles when you have a hard time looking at them with a straight face on your site. Call me shallow, but I’d much rather post good looking articles than ugly ones.

If I really get focussed you might also see a downloads section pop up on the site. For now I’ll start with this one blog post. And now that it’s written, I’m actually going to hit the “Publish” button.

Rather than directly hacking into WordPress to get the latest blog entries, I’m using the lastRSS PHP class to pull the feed data in from Feedburner, reformat it and put it on the page. It is a little round-about, but removes the need to code up specific hacks into my blog back end which runs separately from the rest of the site. This way if I ever change my blog engine, I won’t have to recode up the main page. Another point for web standards!

I used lastRSS because it was the first functional PHP class that I came across late last night. It works great, but doesn’t support Atom feeds. Looking around today I came across SimplePie and I think I’ll have to try it out. The documentation alone makes it look promising.