JavaScript libraries are like calculators for Web developers

Don’t let the zany title fool you. There really is a point to this post if you bear with me for a few minutes. Still here? OK, here goes…

I taught high school math for about five years, so I had ample time to observe calculators being used as a crutch. In some cases there was nothing I could do about it because the curriculum or standardized tests stated that the students were free to use them. However, when I had my way, I would ban them from the classroom… for a while. Why do you suppose I would do a crazy thing like that?

The main reason was that I felt (and still feel) that math students need to understand everything that is going on behind the scenes when they press a few buttons on their calculators. Whether it’s long division, solving a quadratic equation, or computing an integral, I believe it’s important to learn to do it by hand first. This gives students a far deeper understanding of mathematics and also is a great confidence booster to know that one can solve complicated problems with nothing more than pencil and paper.

Once my students had mastered a concept, I would let them use their calculators. My theory was that once a concept is understood, there is nothing wrong with automating it. One could choose to do it by hand, but that would be inefficient and silly. Unless, of course, you do mathematics for recreation (yeah, there really are people like that).

So what does this have to do with JavaScript libraries? The good libraries out there (Prototype, jQuery, mooTools, etc.) automate most if not all of the mundane tasks people used to have to do by hand. They essentially abstract away the nitty gritty details and, as Prototype puts it, “make JavaScript suck less.” People can now do very impressive things with just a few lines of code. Of course, being who I am, I want to know what the proverbial man behind the curtain is doing when I’m using cool stuff like the $() function.

In that spirit, I plan to take a behind-the-scenes tour of the three aforementioned libraries starting with jQuery. I will download the latest version, study every line of code, and read a lot of documentation along the way. As I go along, I will report my findings here. And when I’m done, I won’t feel guilty about using any of the libraries because I’ll understand how they work. Once a math teacher, always a math teacher…

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May 31, 2007 | Filed Under Web development | 3 Comments 

My feed is magically del.icio.us

The twelve of you who already subscribe to my RSS feed know that I’ve been splicing in my new del.icio.us bookmarks each day.  Well actually FeedBurner does that automatically, but I do bookmark some great articles.  Yes, you could access my bookmarks directly over at del.icio.us, but who has time to do that?  Just subscribe to my feed for maximum convenience and enjoyment.  Thanks.

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May 30, 2007 | Filed Under Blogging | Leave a Comment 

Step 3: Promote yourself shamelessly

Yes, it’s finally time for step 3 of Becoming a serious blogger in three easy steps. This step is probably the hardest and I’m sure I’m not the best person to tell you how to Promote yourself shamelessly. Nevertheless, I will try. As far as I can tell, there are three different components that make up this step: search engine optimization, link building, and networking.

Search engine optimization

Affectionately known as SEO by those in “the biz”, this is the art of getting robots to notice you. OK, not robots like in Star Wars, but search engine crawlers. They basically come along, download most if not all of your blog, store it in their massive databases, and compare it to other sites they’re also storing. Nobody really knows exactly what will impress these robots, but a lot of people try to figure it out. They’re called SEO professionals and they seem to like wearing hats. There are white hats, black hats, gray hats, blue hats, and probably a few other colors I’m not aware of yet. It’s sort of like a Western. Anyway these hat people have written a lot of good stuff on this topic, so I’ll defer to them. Here are a few useful starting points: SEOmoz, SEO Book, and Performancing. Let me know if you need some more. There are plenty where those came from.

Link building

One thing the search engine crawlers seem to love is links. They spend a lot of time analyzing which sites link to you and what that means. This is the essence of Google’s PageRank in a nutshell. So establishing links to your blog from other sites can be a good pastime if you’d like to impress the robots. One technique that really doesn’t seem to work any more is commenting on blogs. This is because most blog software instructs search engine crawlers not to follow links in comments. The reason for this is to cut down on rampant blog comment spam. So more than likely you’ll have to figure out some other ways of building links to your blog. Some ideas include submitting it to directory sites, creating a plugin or theme with an embedded link back to your blog, and creating profiles on popular websites that link to you. Honestly I don’t know much more about this as you can see from my pedestrian PageRank of 3. Oh well.

Networking

The third component is broadly defined as networking and basically means making contact with other bloggers. This includes commenting on their blogs and sending them e-mails. While blog comments don’t seem to impress robots, they do catch the eye of human readers and those links to your site should generate some traffic (depending on which blogs you’re leaving comments on). You can also e-mail bloggers in your particular niche to let them know when you’ve written a post you think they might want to link to. Blogging is not an easy thing to do week after week so sometimes bloggers just want to link to stuff and call it good. You could even offer to write a guest post on their blog. I’ve inquired about this but haven’t heard anything back yet. The bottom line in all of this (in my humble opinion anyway) is that you want to build your subscriber list. The more people subscribe to your RSS (or Atom) feed, the more consistent your baseline traffic will be and the more your writing will be out there in front of people.

Final thoughts

As I said from the outset, I’m really not an expert with any of this and I’m following along right with you in dogfooding my own ideas. If you find that any of this actually works for you, please let me know. And in the meantime, hang in there and have fun.

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May 29, 2007 | Filed Under Blogging | 1 Comment 

Firefox extensions that I use

Not that anyone has any interest in this, but it’s a quick and easy Sunday post. Here are the Firefox extensions that I’m currently using:

Looks like 21 to me. Maybe I should cut back…

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May 27, 2007 | Filed Under Mozilla | 2 Comments 

Step 2: Find your voice and your niche

It’s time for step 2 of Becoming a serious blogger in three easy steps. It’s not easy to Find your voice and your niche so let’s take a close look at both issues.

Finding your voice

Finding your voice is one of those things that is supposed to come naturally, but often doesn’t. Personally I’m much more of a math and science guy than a writer, but I’ve managed to find a style of writing that I’m comfortable with and that seems to suit me. And I’ve discovered that the more I write, the more I feel in the groove. I won’t go so far as to say that it’s a Zen thing, but that could be a useful comparison. The bottom line is don’t try too hard. Just keep writing and you’ll find it.

Finding your niche

Finding your niche is another matter entirely and this is one of my main challenges with this blog. The problem (and I’m not alone here) is that there are just so many topics I’d like to write about. My interests are eclectic to say the least, but that rarely comes across well in a single blog. I’ve seen some frighteningly unfocused blogs out there where somebody is trying to cover twenty different unrelated topics and it just ends up falling flat and looking scattered. During this “comeback” of mine, I’ve already jettisoned some topics in an effort to keep the posts a bit more focused. Linguistics is gone as a main category and Malawi and Ubuntu were dropped as subcategories. Then I added Blogging as a new main category. I also rewrote my tagline: Web development, new media, open source, and more. I’ll be completely honest and say that I expect to pare down the category list even more in the future. I’ve left Africa as a category and plan to post about it occasionally, but if I end up writing a lot of posts I’ll probably consider spinning it off into a separate blog. I may even drop Open source or spin it off at some point. History shows that focused blogs attract and retain more readers. Sometimes that means making a difficult decision, but one needs to be prepared for that.

Summary

So there you have it. Next I’ll wrap up the series with a post about self-promotion… something that doesn’t come easily to most people (myself included).

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May 23, 2007 | Filed Under Blogging | Leave a Comment 

A few bumps with FeedBurner

First off, I just want to say that I think FeedBurner is great and I’m really enjoying using the service.  That being said, it hasn’t been without its bumps.  And this is partly my fault, I’m sure.  When I first set up my feed, WordPress was pulling the most recent 10 items.  Thinking that looked a little sparse, I decided to bump the number up to 15.  What happened?  FeedBurner dutifully grabbed five more items almost immediately.  The only problem was that I hadn’t just written five new items.  It pulled the next five items that were older than the ten I had started with.  So now my feed is not quite chronological.  Being a rather anal person by nature, this bothers me somewhat.

The story doesn’t end there, though.  I still thought my feed looked sparse so I decided to splice in my del.icio.us bookmarks every day.  I’d seen other feeds that did that and had found a lot of good articles and postings as a result.  So what do you think happened?  Yeah, you guessed it.  FeedBurner went back and grabbed several days worth of bookmarks (even back to January) and jammed them into my feed all at once.  Yikes!  Now I can’t even claim to be pseudo-chronological.

Now I have to take a deep breath and realize that I’m probably the only person on Earth who even cares that my precious feed items are out of order.  And the problem will gradually go away as I post more and bookmark more.  I just wanted to warn other people about the “perils” of going down this road.  And I just had to find a little gripe about an otherwise excellent service.

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May 22, 2007 | Filed Under Blogging | Leave a Comment 

Alimadzi reboot underway

If you saw this site last week, you’ll probably notice that it looks different today.  I’ve been installing several plugins and managed to find an excellent theme (at least in my humble opinion).  My choice is the Silhouette 3-Column theme by Brian Gardner.  I like that it’s simple and flexible since I plan to make several changes in the next few days.  These will be mostly color and font changes for now and then I’ll add a few images here and there later on.  Yes, the site is finally taking shape.

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May 21, 2007 | Filed Under WordPress | 3 Comments 

Step 1: Lay the groundwork

All right, so step 1 of Becoming a serious blogger in three easy steps is to Lay the groundwork. Included in this step are such tasks as choosing a web host, selecting blogging software, setting up feeds, getting your analytics software ready, and deciding what to do about advertising. Let’s take a look at each of these items in turn.

Web hosts and software

Choosing a web host and selecting blogging software sort of go hand-in-hand. In fact there are many free hosted blogging solutions available such as WordPress.com, Blogger, and LiveJournal that would allow you to “kill two birds with one stone”. However I believe that serious bloggers should have control over their own blogging software on their own domain. Personally I use WordPress because it’s built using PHP and MySQL (which I know very well) and has a thriving ecosystem of themes and plugins. In short, it’s highly customizable. Of course there are other options such as TextPattern and Movable Type that you could consider. I leave that research as an exercise for the reader.

Feeds

Once you’ve chosen your host and software, you have a few other decisions to make. All blogging software includes some sort of XML feed option such as RSS or Atom for syndicating your blog postings. However I recently decided that serious bloggers really need to use FeedBurner. What the heck is FeedBurner? I’m glad you asked. FeedBurner is a service that will handle all of the building and delivery of your blog’s XML feeds. OK, big deal, you say. My blog software already does that. True, but FeedBurner also lets you insert other content into your feeds (such as del.icio.us bookmarks), compiles stats about your subscribers, and allows you to monetize your feeds through ads (if you so choose). There’s even more to it than that, but the full details are beyond the scope of this article (my college textbooks said that a lot).

Analytics

While FeedBurner will track your feed usage, you should really have a full-blown analytics solution for your entire blog. It sounds complicated, but there are free services now that can take care of it all. My current favorite is Google Analytics (formerly Urchin). All you do is place a snippet of JavaScript code in your page footer and Google does the rest. It tracks page views, unique visitors, geographic locations, search queries, and much more. Check out their site for more info.

Advertising

Last up is making a decision about ads. We see them everywhere these days and many people have strong opinions one way or another. I used to have a little Google AdSense here and there on this site, but I’ve gotten rid of it for now. Why the change? I read several convincing articles that encouraged bloggers to eschew ads until their blogs are more established. Research has shown that many would-be readers are put off by seeing ads on a site that is obviously not well-trafficked. Once a steady stream of traffic has been established, ads can be introduced slowly. After earning a whopping $25 in eighteen months from my AdSense ads, I definitely agree with this strategy now. Do I plan to monetize my blog in the future? At this point, I’m not sure. I will say that I plan to benefit from blogging at somewhere down the road, but that may be in ways other than advertisements: writing, speaking, consulting, etc. Time will tell.

Summary

I hope this information has been helpful to you. As always, leave a comment if you think I’ve forgotten something. And stay tuned for step 2…

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May 20, 2007 | Filed Under Blogging | Leave a Comment 

Becoming a serious blogger in three easy steps

This time around I’m really going to do it. Yes, I will become (drum roll, please) a serious blogger. No I don’t quite know what that means yet, but I intend to find out. To that end, I’ve been reading a lot of tips written by people purporting to already be serious bloggers. Some of the tips seem worthwhile while others are probably best forgotten. So what I propose to do is to distill all of this collective knowledge into a simple three-step plan:

  1. Lay the groundwork
  2. Find your voice and your niche
  3. Promote yourself shamelessly

In each of my next three posts, I will talk about each of these steps in more detail. And remember, I’m not just the president here. I’m also a client. I will be dogfooding my own advice as I attempt to bring my own blog up to snuff.

And by all means, if you have tips or advice of your own that you’d like to share, please leave a comment. Thanks.

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May 19, 2007 | Filed Under Blogging | Leave a Comment 

Greetings from Idaho

During my unscheduled blogging hiatus, quite a lot has happened.  For starters we are living in yet another state.  Yeah I know… another year, another state.  This time it’s Idaho and we love it here.  The Boise area is truly a great place to live for young families and outdoor lovers.  It was not an easy decision to pack up and move again, but we’re confident that we’ve made the right choice.

The main push to come here was a great career opportunity for me with the largest newspaper in the state: the Idaho Statesman.  At this point I have a month under my belt as their Web developer and so far it’s a great job.  As many of you can imagine, it’s a very interesting time to be involved in bringing newspapers to the Web and I’ll definitely be writing more about the unique challenges and opportunities on this blog.

Until then, have a great weekend and visit some newspaper websites.

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May 18, 2007 | Filed Under General, Web development | Leave a Comment 

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