I read the comments on a post where ProBlogger asked folks what they could do to improve the site for readers, hoping to get ideas for improving my own sites. To my surprise, one suggestion came up over and over:
A forum. People want a forum.
I’m just curious to know if anyone else wants this, as [...]

I read the comments on a post where ProBlogger asked folks what they could do to improve the site for readers, hoping to get ideas for improving my own sites. To my surprise, one suggestion came up over and over:

A forum. People want a forum.

I’m just curious to know if anyone else wants this, as opposed to just commenting on blogs. Do forums really encourage better discussion? Or networking relationships with other posters?

No, I’m not volunteering to start one. I wouldn’t attract enough really helpful people to make anyone want to join. It would need to be somebody like ProBlogger to make it work. I’m just curious what everyone thinks.

Is tackling a niche always the best answer in starting a site or online brand? Of course not. Nothing’s ever that simple. So don’t take so much time searching for a perfect niche that you never get started. There’s always time later to niche down as you find a subset of information or products that [...]

Is tackling a niche always the best answer in starting a site or online brand? Of course not. Nothing’s ever that simple. So don’t take so much time searching for a perfect niche that you never get started. There’s always time later to niche down as you find a subset of information or products that your visitors seem to want.

Think of offline businesses. You can start out like Amazon, just selling books, and wind up like Amazon, selling everything but body parts. Or you can start out selling hand-crafted everything, and then find all you have to do is sell a particular kind of rug that’s all the rage. And then the trends can reverse again, down the road. Being flexible is key to survival.

But getting started is key to having something that needs to survive.

In the past, I’ve written about my methods of online organization, which I prefer because I use more than one computer during a typical day and having it all online makes it so easy to keep up, especially given the option of doing some of the work offline and uploading the results.
But if you prefer [...]

In the past, I’ve written about my methods of online organization, which I prefer because I use more than one computer during a typical day and having it all online makes it so easy to keep up, especially given the option of doing some of the work offline and uploading the results.

But if you prefer having pieces of paper, folders and calendars you can touch for your GTD, Neat Living has some suggestions on how to set that up. It’s all cheap and easy to set up, too.

I read a post at Neat Living recently about de-cluttering blogs, and it got me thinking. That post suggests several items you can go read yourself. These are some of my thoughts.

Shorter, more frequent posts? This is something I already do, just because I don’t have the attention span to read really long articles, and [...]

I read a post at Neat Living recently about de-cluttering blogs, and it got me thinking. That post suggests several items you can go read yourself. These are some of my thoughts.

• Shorter, more frequent posts? This is something I already do, just because I don’t have the attention span to read really long articles, and I doubt my readers do, either. I find most long articles are redundant and full of extra words anyway.
• Reducing categories? I’m not sure why SEO experts recommend trying to keep the categories down to 10. That just doesn’t make sense for some sites. That said, you certainly don’t need categories that sound almost but not quite exactly like the same thing. They should be consolidated, and if you have a permalinks structure that doesn’t include category, it won’t even disrupt your inbound links slightly.
• Rewriting Old Posts? Rewriting is an idea I definitely want to play with. I’m not sure how it’ll work out for SEO. Since I never have dates in my permalinks nothing will change. The services will get pinged but there will be nothing new for SE bots to index. Still, the impact on readers could be interesting. I would recommend acknowledging the posts are rewritten so people don’t think, “Hey, some of this sounds familiar” and suspect you of copying the work of others.
• Deleting old posts? I’m not sure what I think about this. I’d avoid deleting anything that’s got inbound links and gets clicks, but if you have some old posts that aren’t great and don’t seem to be landing pages, maybe deleting them is a good idea. Unless they’re worth re-writing, of course.
• Adding images to posts? I still don’t get this. I just don’t. I very often feel like pictures get in my way, I resent the time they take to download, and I can’t recall a time I ever thought they added anything. But maybe that’s just me. I’ve always been more oriented toward sound than visual, so maybe I just don’t appreciate it the way most people would?

This is a great hack that helps Windows users reclaim some of the memory Firefox likes to eat.
Once you follow the steps outlined in the post, you can test it by doing the following:

Close down your browser.
Hit CTRL-ALT-DEL, and select your Task Manager from that window
Click the “Processes” tab
Start Firefox. An entry will show up [...]

This is a great hack that helps Windows users reclaim some of the memory Firefox likes to eat.

Once you follow the steps outlined in the post, you can test it by doing the following:

• Close down your browser.
• Hit CTRL-ALT-DEL, and select your Task Manager from that window
• Click the “Processes” tab
• Start Firefox. An entry will show up for it under the Processes tabs. Note how much memory it’s using.
• Minimize Firefox (this is how the plugin works - it all happens when you minimize the window).
• Maximize Firefox again and watch the number change.

I’m consistently seeing gains of 50% of my memory, give or take some. It seems to me that after a while it creeps back up, but every time you minimize it repeats the process, which helps. And I’m seeing no performance impact.

The title is a slight re-interpretation of this tidbit from Infospace:

– Between 38 and 46 percent of all searches fail to elicit a click on a first-page search result, don’t meet users needs and drive users to try additional engines.

I wonder if this would have been true a few years ago, when the first page [...]

The title is a slight re-interpretation of this tidbit from Infospace:

– Between 38 and 46 percent of all searches fail to elicit a click on a first-page search result, don’t meet users needs and drive users to try additional engines.

I wonder if this would have been true a few years ago, when the first page had fewer sponsored listings and fewer users really knew how to make the SE’s cough up the results they want?

This is good news for those of us who only make it to the second or third page with some of our sites. Also, I suspect, those of us who do better by word of mouth than by the SE’s can relax a little - you may not be missing much by not conquering the SERP’s. Oh, I know there’s traffic to be had, but on some of my sites Google particularly has trouble figuring out relevant traffic, and I get tons of clicks, but they’re all 1 second wonders who immediately realize this is not the site they were looking for.