Go read this now. Then this. That is all.
Archives for February 2008
The Simplicity Theme for WordPress: Performancing’s February WordPress Theme
Performancing is glad to announce the release of its latest premium quality WordPress Theme, brought to you by the designers at the 449. The Simplicity Theme is not only clean and bright, but it also features big bold headlines that will grab your readers’ attention.
My initial impression is that the Simplicity Theme would do very well as a financial blog as well as tech and web 2.0. It would also work well for any environmental or “green” themed blog.
In addition to the beautiful design, the code is clean and highly optimized, supports widgets and also the new tag feature in the last versions of WordPress.
View a live demo of the them here.
Download the theme here.
Simplicity Theme
The Simplicitly theme for WordPress by Performancing is designed to be easily customizable, without compromising on aesthetics. It’s the perfect starting point for any WordPress blog.
It’s a simple theme, with a hint of Magazine style, that is easy to build upon and is easily customizable through support of widgets and super-clean code. Simplicity is engineered to be highly accessible, work beautifully with a screen reader and uses the hAtom microformat.
Simplicitly is built to the latest WordPress functionality with full support for built in tagging and widgets.
Simplicity is the first collaboration by Performancing with the449, a UK-based collective of designers. Simplicity was conceptualized and executed by the449, and is being distributed by Performancing under the Performancing Themes for WordPress brand.
Update: Simplicity has been updated for compatibility with WordPress 2.7 and up. Download the latest version here.
View a live demo of the theme here.
Download the theme here.
Monitoring a Niche With a Personal Dashboard: Joining a Niche Conversation, Pt 6
A while back, I discussed determining the top blogs in your chosen niche. Once you’ve decided what these blogs are, you have a few choices in terms of monitoring new content:
- Feed reader.
- Personal dashboard via a web 2.0 portal.
- Custom dashboard via a web 2.0 application builder or some other means.
This article focuses on the last two choices and covers the following:
- Netvibes customizable web portal.
- Sprout Builder Flash-based rich media content creation.
- Popurls-like clone using a free custom WordPress solution.
Below, each section discusses the pros and cons of a given solution.
Netvibes Dashboard
Netvibes is a web 2.0 portal that offers “tiles” containing a variety of information, including weather, email inbox summaries, Facebook integration, predefined news feeds, top videos, web search and more. You can also create a fresh “tab” and add other tiles. That means you can create a Niche Dashboard by creating a tab and adding several news feed tiles. That is, each tile would contain items from the RSS feed of the top blogs in your niche.
Example:
The diagram below provides an example Netvibes dashboard that uses a variety of feeds from Blogging and SEO blogs. (I monitor this niche for my articles here at Performancing.) My real Netvibes dashboard actually has three columns and many more rows, but I’m only showing a partial screen capture.
Pros:
- Relatively fast to build
- Easy to move feed “tiles” around (each tile contains items from one feed).
- Each tile tells you how many items that you have unread.
Cons:
- The positioning of a block lower down the page is at the mercy of the height of the block above. That is, there’s no absolute positioning of blocks, making a Netvibes dashboard potential looking like a big mess of unmatched feed tiles.
- The feed tiles appear to be updated quite frequently, which is unnecessary and a drain on the web server resources of each site/blog.
This solution is good for monitoring small numbers of blogs.
Sprout Builder Dashboard
Sprout Builder is an in-beta web 2.0 application that lets you quickly build rich Flash-based content with a variety of choices for presentation.
Example:
The Sprout below shows only six feed tiles, though it could be reconfigured with smaller tiles and a wider/taller presentation. (Note: This is a functioning Sprout, and you can use the scrollbars to browse through the items in each feed tile. You can also click on item headlines and a new browser tab/ window will appear with the source page in question.)
Pros:
- Relatively easy to build Flash interface (provided you are in the beta program).
- Feed tiles are adjustable the size you want, producing a more appealing dashboard than for Netvibes.
- Feed tiles can be positioned however you like.
Cons:
- Not a lot of room to work in, in the Sprout Builder interface, unless you have a large computer screen.
- The larger your Sprout (height, width), the longer it potentially takes to load the components.
- Feeds are updated either “never” or “every five minutes”.
Sprout Builder is still in beta, but this solution might be good if you want to combine feed tiles with multimedia content.
Popurls-Style Dashboard
If you’re familiar with Popurls, you know that that their interface allows for very easy viewing of the titles of items in the news feeds of numerous sites. Ericulous offers a free Popurls clone based on WordPress. The package includes a custom WP theme and the necessary plugins.
Example:
I’ve previously used the Ericulous package to create blogspinnr.com (picture in a partial screen snap below). It does not have any SEO blog feeds added to it because of how tedious it is to update the dashboard. This is primarily because this solution is code-based, whereas the two solutions above offer a visual interface.
Pros:
- More control over how many items appear in each feed block.
- Offers more than just feed tiles, including YouTube videos, Flickr mini-gallery, and space for advertising.
- With a bit of effort, the dashboard can be combined with a WordPress blog.
Cons:
- Very tedious to move feed tiles around.
- The code is not yet robust, and flaky feeds will sometimes show an error in one or more tiles, depending on the file format a feed uses. (Atom and other non-RSS feed formats seem to cause the most trouble.)
I liked the Popurls clone solution a great deal at first, and used it to monitor multiple niches and my own batch of blogs. But because it’s such a pain to update a dashboard, I’m working on a more robust version. It’ll also be WP-based, and it’ll incorporate an area for blog posts and other features. An external list will supply the necesary feed URLs, and to reorder a feed block, just reorder the list. (Once this solution is done, it’ll be available free for Hive members only.)
Which of these solutions you pick for a niche monitor depends on your requirements and your patience for maintenance.
Tartans: Exploring Methods For Nailing A One Word Search
This is a search experiment/tutorial using the term tartans. I’m basically taking the term pair tartan/tartans and leading you through the process of creating a page that might rank well for the term.
Obviously, since this is a search tutorial, it’s not going to be as semantically optimized for the term “tartan” as I’d like, but that is ok. It’s only meant as an example, and is certainly not fleshed out as thoroughly as I’d do in a real world situation. The goal is just to give you a structural overview for creating a solid resource landing page.
So, the first thing I like to do when creating a landing page for the search engines is to be liberal with my use of H2 tags. So why not get started?
Some Great Tartan Images
Now some of you American readers might be wondering what a tartan is. Well, tartans are basically plaid patterns, most commonly found on fabric. They are most commonly found in Scotland, Ireland and Britain. The most familiar use of tartans are as kilts (i.e. the guys in Braveheart)
If you look closely, you’ll notice a plaid brown pattern in Mel Gibson’s uniform for the movie.
Today, tartan’s tend to be more colorful and are used for sport, hobby and fashion:
As you can see, tartans are used in kilts for hunting, bagpipe playing and most popular of all, in celebrations like weddings. But tartans aren’t reserved for men. In fact, the tartan skirt was just featured on American Idol season 7 last night:
As you can tell, one of my strategies for nailing search on a term is using plenty of images with good descriptive alt text. But let’s not stop with tartan images. There’s lots more to do.
Various Uses For Tartans
Tartans are commonly used for vests, kilts, scarfs, table cloths, and many other fabric items. But you’d be amazed at the other uses that people have found for tartans. In fact, just the other day I came across an article that listed 10 (in my view) Crazy Uses of Tartan. From plaid limos to plaid sheep, the tartan seems to be taking over.
Some Tartan Videos
The Tartan Terrors Comedy Show
Scotland’s Tartan Day Football Match
After some fairly solid information and images, I like to throw in some semantically related video…as you can see above;-) And finally, I’ll end things by listing some authoritative and trusted resources on the topic of tartans.
Information and Resources on Tartans
What is a tartan? Ask Wikipedia.
Scottish Tartan Authority Charity
Scottish Tartans
Tartans of Scotland
We’re doing something really cool in Hive right now…
One of the really cool things about Performancing Hive is the cooperative social media experiments that we get to do together. In just a few weeks, Hive has grown to over 40 members and we can do things together that we can’t do alone. That’s what Hive is all about.
And right now, we’re doing something really cool. Something that will benefit everyone, especially those with smaller blogs. So I encourage you to join Hive. Yes, it does cost $10 per month. But the help you’ll get from others makes it worth so much more.
Again, if you join right now, you’ll be coming into the middle of a fun social experiment that’s already seeing really nice results.
Come in. The water’s nice.
Building Rich Media Content With Sprout’s Sproutbuilder Web Application
Earlier this morning, I received an email saying I’d been accepted into the beta program for Sprout. Not remembering what Sprout was, I checked out, emerging about three hours later with my head full of ideas. Sprout Builder is a web application with which you can quickly build lots of really funky Flash-based rich content. (You can sign up but cannot use Sprout Builder until you are accepted into the beta.)
For bloggers who like to use visual elements to make a blog stand out, Sprout Builder might be just what you’re looking for. (You can even combine the RSS Feed component with Yahoo Pipes.)
Components and Functionality
Here’s a quick rundown of some of the components and functionailty available in the visual interface.
- Geometric shapes: rectangle, circle/oval, star, line.
- Text. Limited fonts at present.
- Rich media: audio/ jukebox (single file or scrolling list), images, video, slideshows.
- Multi-frames. Position components anywhere on a page.
- Multi-pages. Add multiple pages, accessible through the “thumbnail menu” component.
- Thumbnail menu (buggy).
- Calendar.
- News feed. View items from an RSS feed.
- Slideshow.
- Timer.
- Web services (ChipIn, Google Charts, Yahoo! Maps, with Meebo Chat, Ribbit Phone and PollDaddy coming).
- Drag and drop of components onto Sprout Builder canvas.
- One-click alignment of groups of components.
- Locking of a component’s position on the Builder canvas.
That’s just for starters. I’m assuming that more components and web services will be added, to make Sprout Builder more robust.
Uses
Even though the interface components are fairly limited so far, there are still quite a few uses for sprouts. Here are a few.
- Tutorials.
- Polls (once the PollDaddy module is functioning)
- Presentations.
- Galleries.
- How to get here/ itineraries – add in maps
- Rich webcasting – present podcasts/ vodcasts with other types of content simultaneously.
You might be able to come up with your own after reading this article and looking at the Sprout gallery. (I think you have to be in the beta program to see the gallery items.)
Positives and Negatives
I don’t want to be too harsh, as Sprout Builder is still in beta, and it offers a great deal of functionality already. However, this is a review, and I’m listing some of the positives and negatives that I found, in the spirit of constructive criticism.
- Easy to drag and drop, move items around.
- A bit confusing at first, in terms of building process. However, after building a half-dozen Sprouts, I started getting the hang of it.
- Once saved, I couldn’t seem to resize components.
- Components are sometimes slow to load, both in the Builder and after embedding on a web page.
- RSS feed update options are either “never” or “every 5 minutes”, which is truly absurd. It would be nice to have the options “every hour” and “once per day”.
- There’s something buggy and very annoying about the Thumbnail Menu component. If you create a Sprout with multiple “pages”, you’ll need a way for the end user to access each page – i.e., with the Thumbnail Menu. But during the build process, if you accidentally click on a page’s thumbnail, it turns into a red X and for some reason, the thumbnails across pages are out of sync. This is so annoying that I gave up on building multi-page Sprouts.
- While tearing apart my older multi-page Sprouts for this review, I found that I could not clone a Sprout and tweak it. I’m so used to being able to do this in Yahoo Pipes that this inability in Sprouts is a big downer.
- While you cannot clone Sprouts, you can embed someone else’s Sprout on your web pages, if they’ve “Published” it. And if they modify the Sprout, all copies across the Internet are automatically updated.
- The Jukebox module automatically plays the first audio track. This is not a very desirable behavior.
- There are no guidelines/ gridlines to help fine-tune positioning.
As I said, Sprout Builder is still in beta. So I’m hoping they’ll work out the bugs eventually. I’ve created a couple of example Sprouts and embedded them below.
Example: Test Sprout
This Sprout incorporates an RSS news feed, Yahoo Map, Google Graph, and calendar. (Note: Google recently offered a relatively simple way to produce a variety of charts and graphs using an URL structure that can be built on the fly. Sprout Builder makes it even easier to use by offering a visual interface to enter the graph/ chart info. Except that it means using static charts – for now.)
Example: Multimedia Sprout
This Sprout incorporates a “jukebox”, image slideshow, and static images. So you have a number of options for presenting rich media content.
Example: Movie Sprout
This Sprout incorporates a movie poster image, two video clips and a bit of text. You could rearrange the layout, or use multiple pages, to include a short review. Personally, for SE (Search Engine) juice, I would put the text of the review in the body of your blog post, not buried in the Flash object. (I don’t claim to know the pros/cons of text within Flash, but I believe some SEs index the embedded text.)
SEO: Concrete tips from Adam Lasnik (Google)
There is a great interview with Adam Lasnik from Google over at stonetemple.com.
What follows is an interview with Adam Lasnik, who is an SEO Strategist at Google. Adam has become extremely well known in the community as a new voice for communications from Google to the webmaster community.
Eric Enge (President of Stone Temple Consulting) is pushing hard to get valuable information and Adam is handing out very concrete information about a bunch of SEO topics.
A must read for all the SEO hobbyists at performancing.com!
Check out the Interview transcript (Published: February 4, 2008):