JLH Design

Publish or perish is a term used in academia used to describe the notion that one must publish on a consistent basis to sustain their career and prestige within their institution and among their colleagues. The concept was no more apparent than tonight in a monthly review of this site’s statistics. I offer you this small snapshot:

The trend is not what you’d like to see in the normal development of a site. Notice that uniques, visits, and pages are all down by at least 50% this month compared to last month, this after a reasonably steady natural growth rate.

Upon further inspection the search engine traffic is right where is normally is, reader’s per post is within normal range, but the large disparity is that “other sites” category. The normally (normal for me anyway) largest source of traffic which is other sites, type ins, bookmarks, social media, etc.

Admittedly posting and quality of content has been down lately as other pressing needs and sites have become more important than this small blog but trend is an important lesson in web publishing. If you’re (by ‘you’ I mean I) are not putting forth the effort to publish new and compelling material you’re also not spending enough time on promotion of the material. What can be more of an example than a loss of nearly 100,000 pageviews in a single month? Blog type formats may be more susceptible to this as the content tends to be timely in nature and rely much less on search engines supplying the visitors than normal information or commerce type sites.

In all the ongoing discussion of Google search results, links, optimisation, etc I think what’s often lost in the discourse is a less than concrete concept of passion. When I write or publish something that I’m excited about I get passionate about it and I want to share that passion with other readers. Saying something you believe in isn’t enough you want others to hear it. Given the flakiness and uncontrollable nature of search refers I tend to promote ideas I’m passionate through other means and that can be seen in the site’s stats. It’s not all about Google when it comes to a site’s readership, involvement and ultimately conversion it’s about engaging the audience and bringing them to the site first.

I half expect to see next months search referrals to be down as well. With 100,000 less pageviews this month that’s 100,000 less chances for someone to be inspired to provide a link and share the information. Negative link acceleration on a site can be the death knell for it in the natural rankings and those tend to lag reality by a few weeks. It should be noted that the lack of publishing really started (or stopped as the case may be) in June and continued in July, only now is the fall out being able to be seen and graphed.

I’m not making any promises on being more engaging on this site in the near future but I have made a mental note of the affects of passionate involvement and hope to further cultivate that in other projects.

Okay, still testing something out.  Meanwhile, in my feeds I notice that Danny Sullivan let it slip what a big fan of my site is, odd since I thought I had really pi$$ed him off on Sphinn.

A little housekeeping note here. I find that I am also interested in what other people have said on sites I visit such as Search Engine Rountable and Sphinn. I like having to not have to click through all of the articles to see what readers have recently added. To that end I’ve added my own page with the 40 latest comments and a sizable snippet. I’ll have to do some formatting changes to the page as it’s just a call to a simple sidebar widget right now but the basic data is available now.  Besides I had to see what February 29th looked like in this post.

Follow me on twitter and I’ll give you hours and hours of free enjoyment with my decidedly witty comments. Follow Andy Beal and you may win some internet Nokia thingy. I already follow him so I guess I don’t get to win it.

This is just a test post of the new RSS Footer plug-in by Joost de Valk which in his words:

This very simple plugin let’s you add an extra line of content to articles in your feed, defaulting to “Post from: ” and then a link back to your blog, with your blog’s name as it’s anchor text, which you can edit…

I only made a minor tweak.

Changing line 18 from:

add_options_page('RSS Footer Configuration', 'RSS Footer', 1, basename(__FILE__), array('RSSFooter_Admin','config_page'));

to:

add_options_page('RSS Footer Configuration', 'RSS Footer', 10, basename(__FILE__), array('RSSFooter_Admin','config_page'));

Hides the options from everyone but the site Administrator so that subscribers can’t get in and mess with your feeds!

Do you use bad behavior on your wordpress blog? If so, be sure to update it RIGHT NOW before you are blocked from your own blog.

From the site:

All users should update to Bad Behavior 2.0.11 immediately to prevent being blocked from your own site.

Within the past two days users have found themselves blocked from their own sites while using recent versions of Bad Behavior. A third party blacklist which Bad Behavior queries recently began sending false positives for any IP address queried, causing everyone using Bad Behavior to be blocked. This issue is fixed in Bad Behavior 2.0.11.

Please Sphinn if you will (Sphinns actual site not mine)

I set out to do a little experiment on my own blog, to get the home page rank for my name(s) without actually using them on the page.

This isn’t really an unknown secret in the SEO community but something that seems to elude a lot of webmasters. The concept is even covered well in Google’s own help documentation.

This sure wasn’t a concentrated effort or something I checked even weekly, but I kept my eye on it, and inspired its improvement every once and a while. I was inspired by Google Blogoscoped where profiles link to Google’s #1 result for your name. Unfortunately for me a government document has occupied that space for as long as I remember. Occasionally individual posts would be there because my name is listed as the author, but on the home page was much more difficult as my name only shows up as an image.

Even harder was another pseudonym I use that is plastered all over popular very powerful sites like Sphinn, Twitter, Digital Point, and Digg.

I’m glad to see that today I noticed both are aligned correctly, which will probably fall apart as soon as some ass clown reads this and tries to mess with it. I suppose I could have just rolled out johnhoneck.com which I’ve let Godaddy make million in adsense on while it sits there parked, but that would have been too easy.

Screen shots saved for future proof:

Perhaps it’s time to retire the JLH moniker…

I’ll be migrating the site to a new server and new IP address in the next couple of days.  So if things are bit wonky, that will be the reason.

Being the sheep that I am I added the BlogRush widget to my left sidebar, so for now it’s on probation. Feel free to sign up and check it out yourself.

I’ve been testing some new layout considerations for the blog. I’m basing it on the Silver Lexus Theme by Highlands by Design*.  As you can see I’ve done some major reworking of it, and I’m no where near done yet.  It looks like crap in IE, but that is too be expected.  I’ve got it looking pretty much like it should but there are some background things that need tweaking.

I’ve also changed the feeds to go through feedburner, so if that isn’t working please let me know.  I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of subscribers I have.

So it may get a little wonky in here for a while.

*There’s your link for the theme.  You’d much rather have a link in a post than a sitewide footer link anyway.

When you happen to rank in the top ten of Google’s results for such interesting terms as Nude Stuff you get a lot of odd visits.  Now, these visitors are often disappointed and don’t stay long as there really isn’t any nudity on the site, plenty of stuff, but all fully clothed.

What’s disturbing to me is that whoever is looking for this nude stuff isn’t too particular over what is nude.  I would think that if you are interested in finding something nude you’d have a proclivity towards at least some sort of specific species, gender, or  a living breathing being.  I guess there are just some people that need to see something naked sometimes.

I was not in Minneapolis today so I wasn’t on the I35w bridge that collapsed today. Other’s were not so lucky. I urge all to please help, wherever you are, however you can.

Any other venerable charities, please list in the comments.

I noticed an increase today for the search results for [JLH], which is explained by my new #1 ranking. Judging by the images that Google puts up before the search results the searchers are severely disappointed when they land on my site to find out A) I’m not Jennifer Love Hewwit and B) I’m not even female.

I’m sorry to disappoint, I am a JLH, just not that one. If Jennifer would like to talk about it, feel free to have her contact me.

I wanted to thank all the dozens  of people who have commented and or sent me personal notes regarding a small situation we had in Google Groups. I believe the issue is over so let’s move on from there. As promised I removed the post as I don’t think we need to have a permanent record of the event. I also submitted my URL removal request, let’s see how quick that works!

07/07/07 was indeed an notable day, I choose to celebrate it with a Prince concert in the Twin Cities.