Here We Go Again

[COBOLdinosaur]

Matt's Apache install tut just hit the front page of Digg.

The two front pages in less than two weeks for ERT.  WHOO! :cheers:

[nicholassolutions]

neat ;-)
Unfortunately, most of the comments are pretty negative...oh well ;-)

[COBOLdinosaur]

Unfortunately, most of the comments are pretty negative...oh well

That is common, and represents a small number; and like most critiics they are out of touch with the general view.  If you want positive:

Well over 750 diggs so far. Over 6000 page loads and counting. Almost 200 people have bookmarked it on del.icio.us. If yo want to see the opposite view look at teh comments on deli.  Their are a bunch of people happy they found it.

AND...

So far 8 people have added the link to their blog.

Of note is this blog:
http://compuguy1088.blogspot.com/

Where they indicate that they would like more info and to extend the topic. That supports the need for a link between articles and discussions.  I will post an invitation to the forum a little latter but they will still have to post to get is started. They didn't do that when they read the article so it might be they don't want to start a topic they just want to join a conversation like they can do when they go to Digg.

Congrats on another big one Matt.

One of Rod's hit the front page at Dzone just a little while ago with two more in the queue at dzone, (one of mine and one of Craig's).  The server is going to be busy this evening and tomorrow.

Your suggestion on the alt-popup piece didn't go.  It did not score well at all on Digg.  No accounting for taste I guess.  :glasses7:

[COBOLdinosaur]

Then there is this quote from the admin in a forum where the link is posted:

"I happened across this over on Digg.com and since it was such a well thought out and useful article I decided to post it."

http://forums.winxpcentral.com/showthread.php?t=18063

<editorial>
Almost 7000 pepople have access that article to day, if only 1% were helped that is 70 people whose life was improved because that article was there for them.  I suspect it benefited more than 1% and it will continue benefitting anyone who clicks a link on digg or all the other places the link is now residing in.

So another 1% of sideline sitters on Digg didn't like it, or were posting a critical comment so they could have an excuse to post another link in hopes of stealing a few clicks they can't get with legitimate promotion.
</editorial>

Cd&

[nicholassolutions]

Thanks for the pep talk  :sign5:

I expected comments like some of the ones on digg back when I wrote the article, and they don't bother me. It's true that there are tons of tuts on this, but IMHO, most of them are not this good, and you don't learn anything at all by doing it (just like you don't learn anything by downloading an all-in-one installer). I'm assuming many of the comments came from people who just read the title and didn't even visit the page.

Some of the comments are right, though -- it is kind of silly that a tut on application installation for one of the most widely-distributed packages available made it to page 1, and already beat-out, for example, my headers tut, which was a much better piece of work, I believe. It's just a symptom of the (lack of) technical sophistcation of most people who frequent sites like digg (as does the lack of attention to your popup script).

At any rate, I completely agree with you, which is why I'm not upset by people who knock my articles. If I can help just a few people who are willing to sit down and spend the time to learn, then I'm glad I took the time to write the article.

 :^)

[nicholassolutions]

...and I also completely agree about the need for discussion -- I've gotten several comments on a few of my tutorials over the last few weeks, coming through my website.

• some comments are just, "thanks, that helped a lot" (so far I haven't gotten any that say "thanks for nothing, that sucked" :D).
• Others say, "I'm confused by X; please help." To these I usually say, "join the forum, and ask your question, I will help as much as I can." So far, I don't think this has lead to a single signup.
• Finally, some (such as one I got today by someone named "abc" from nobody@nowhere.com -- I wish I could thank him for taking the time to write, but oh well) say "I ran into this problem while following your instructions, here is the solution" or "there is a typo here..." etc. I'm collecting these and planning on adding the fixes, with attribution where possible and necessary (for typos, I just send a thank you email).

I personally think we should remove author contact info from the article pages, or at least say "technical questions regarding this article will not be responded to, except in our online classroom/roundtable/forum". Then we can add a rating system (I know you're working on this). Last, there should be a "revsision" submission link. That way, it keeps "thank you" comments and straightforward corrections from cluttering the discussion,and brings the questions into the classroom where more than just one person can benefit from them and participate.

[COBOLdinosaur]

It's just a symptom of the (lack of) technical sophistcation of most people who frequent sites like digg (as does the lack of attention to your popup script).

I don't think so.  It is more a matter numbers and timing.  Digg has 8 million members and gets 2000 submissions a day.  A couple of things have to happen to get to the front page.  

• The category you post an article in has to be active to keep stuff moving through so that stuff is moving out of the que and you keep a good visible position in it.
• The right segment of the membership has to be on th esite and see it early.  If you don't get 10 diggs in the first 90 minutes you are dead most of the time.
• You have to post on a day when there are not a lot of big news items that kill the tech/howto type articles from getting attention

The biggest factor in teh total numbers is the time of day that it finally hits the front page.  The a bsolute best time is 9:00am Eastern time.  That gives it heavey action all day and into the evening.  As the day wears on it lowers the count you will get.  Headers did not hit the front page until 5pm, so it got three heavy hours and then a steep drop off.  On the other hand Install hit at 11:30am and got heavy action for 7 hours.

As for alt-popup, I have not figured out what happen to it.  Maybe evryone just has an aversion to popups and avoided it.

I personally think we should remove author contact info from the article pages, or at least say "technical questions regarding this article will not be responded to, except in our online classroom/roundtable/forum". Then we can add a rating system (I know you're working on this). Last, there should be a "revsision" submission link. That way, it keeps "thank you" comments and straightforward corrections from cluttering the discussion,and brings the questions into the classroom where more than just one person can benefit from them and participate.

Contact information is strictly the authors call. I can change teh contact info on your articles or we can revise them anyway you want.  They are your property.

Yes I am workig on the connection piece and we can work out landing pages for those who want to carry on with a topic as an interim until we get a proper round table interface.  Experimenting with the promotional side the last couple weeks has definitely solidified my thinking on what we need.  The market for what we have to offer is definitely there.  We definitely have good stuff.  All we need to do is add the fly paper so some of the visitors stay and participate.

I do have an idea I want to try if you are willing.  I am comfortable that I understand how this whole Dzone and Digg style format works.  I would like to see if we can promote a forum topic to the front page.  It s not the sort of material that normally gts posted, but if we can build a high quality, content rich topic, it might fly.  even if we don't score big it will still be worth a couple of hundred visits.  So what if we include a link to a survey in the topic and see if we can get some idea of what visitors are thinking when they come into the forum.

We can also get some idea of the demographics and time patterns if you add a little code to the pages so I can do detail tracking with GA and we can compare what is going on in the forum, with what is happening on the content side.

If we do it we will have to build the topic, write the survey and the handler for the back end and then I can try it on dzone, to see if I can figure out how to make it fly on Digg.  We might have to do some tweaking between submission; depending on what happens on dzone.

Whatcha think? :^)

[nicholassolutions]

The biggest factor in teh total numbers is the time of day that it finally hits the front page. The a bsolute best time is 9:00am Eastern time. That gives it heavey action all day and into the evening. As the day wears on it lowers the count you will get. Headers did not hit the front page until 5pm, so it got three heavy hours and then a steep drop off. On the other hand Install hit at 11:30am and got heavy action for 7 hours.

Interesting -- I had not noticed/thought of that, but it makes sense. You're getting good at this  :wink:

Contact information is strictly the authors call. I can change teh contact info on your articles or we can revise them anyway you want. They are your property.

Fair enough -- I guess what I should say is, that we suggest to the authors that they encourage users to bring their questions to the forum, where the author will personally answer it. The corrections and "Thank you" emails are better off sent privately and directly to the authors anyways, and they are both nice to receive.

So what if we include a link to a survey in the topic and see if we can get some idea of what visitors are thinking when they come into the forum.

We can also get some idea of the demographics and time patterns if you add a little code to the pages so I can do detail tracking with GA and we can compare what is going on in the forum, with what is happening on the content side.

I like it :thumbup:. It would be nice to know what visitors think for once rather than having to guess. Even if just a few respond it would be interesting and probably useful. The survey is not a problem. I don't know a thing about GA, but I'd actually like to learn, and I can give you access to whatever you need over here.

[COBOLdinosaur]

all it takes is this code on any page that needs to be tracked:

Code:

<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
_uacct = "blankedout";
urchinTracker();
</script>

I balnked out the account number so it does not get put somewhere it does not belong.

All teh Google ananlytics are is just the tracking stats just like you get witgh hit counter software, but with a very detailed set of variables.  IT it used for the marketing side as well to track ad performance.

I can giv eyou access if you have a google account.  I just have to set up a profile that allows you account access.

Gotta go... more tomorrow.

[Esopo]

Good article Matt. You insist in making the web a better place and I can't but be inspired by your efforts.
 =D>

PS: What a pack of **** posting crap at that site. I've come to expect it from sites that general, but they still manage to amaze me.

[COBOLdinosaur]

What a pack of **** posting crap at that site.

 :scratch:  I wonder if I can figure out who it was that opened a new account on Digg and posted that positive comment at the end????

Esopo,

Could we get you interested in helping with trying to drive some traffic to a survey on the forum associated good topic that gets posted on Digg. You mentioned a survey before, so if you want to help in that way, we might be able to get some feedback that will help get some action on the forum.

You insist in making the web a better place and I can't but be inspired by your efforts.

You too can improve the life of Web dwellers with words of wisdom with an article or tut and have it read by thousands.  Even when a piece does not get to the front page, I generally have good enough timing to get 800-1000 page reads over 3 days on Digg and 200+ on Dzone (we rarily miss the front page there).  Then the flow of traffic continues from the links that get posted off of the exposure during promotion of the piece.

Pieces that I promoted a month ago are getting 50-100 hits a week. Even stuff that has not been promoted yet gets 30-40 hits a week just by being on the site, and that jumps up when something hits big because some of the visitors explore the site or return later after they look at the promoted piece. The content has a really long shelf life.

The 15,000 page loads this week was 10,000 off Apache Install, but we got 5,000 from pages that were not being heavily promoted and that steady flow keeps increasing off of the promotions.

The Apache Install is the third time I have spike the traffic.  On the previous two when we settled back down the average traffic was about 15% higher, and our Google hits increase because they move us up in the SERPs. Almost all the pages on the content side now come up top-10 for the key words I am targeting and get Google hits every day.

The spikes are nice, but all of the promotions on those community, shared information sites is raising us up even when we do not hit the top.  We are doing well with the Web2 paradigm, we just need to evolve into more of a Web2 (whatever that is) style site.

[Esopo]

I wonder if I can figure out who it was that opened a new account on Digg and posted ...

Hum... who may that be?  :D

Could we get you interested in helping with...

Yes, the surveys. Let me know what you've come up with, I'd love to help.
I  was waiting for us to have the right kind of traffic.

...

I have two articles for ERT that I've been working on for a while. I guess I haven't pushed myself to finish them because I was waiting for the changes to the interface.

[nicholassolutions]

waiting for the changes to the interface.

I've been meaning to say something about that. Have a look at:
http://www.expertsrt.net/main

There are a number of features. First, I've migrated everything from phpBB (users and content) to a new forum, SMF. I think it looks much nicer, and if you have a look at the profile menu, you'll see that the options for notifications are virtually any that you might think of. It also has a nice syntax highlighter for code. I've removed some of the features for security reasons (such as the ability to post flash and upload files), and I've disabled smileys; we can talk about enabling them if there is wide support for that.

Next, through some third party mods and some hacking, I integrated the forum with Joomla CMS, so there is a central login and signup process. Logging in to the CMS logs you into the forum. There is also an integrated version of Mambowiki and a WordPress journal. The nice thing is that, while integrated, the user levels of each component are separate, so that someone can be a regular user in the forum, but a contributing author or editor for the journal.

For the main site, users designated as authors can submit content to various sections when they are logged in. Editors have the ability to modify and then publish this content on the main site. I envision this as the final step, after using the Journal and ArticleWiki to collaborate on new content. It gives people enough different tools that I am hoping everyone can find a way to contribute that feels comfortable. It's not quite polished enough for ERT.com yet, but I think it will work nicely over here.

For the main content, there are two additional features. The first is a simple rating system. The second is a link that automatically gets appended to each article. If you're logged in and you click it, you get automatically taken to the forum, where an ongoing discussion is taking place in the "classroom" or "roundtable" section. If no topic for discussing the article exists, it's created automatically (this may be broken at present -- I had it set it up, but then had to wipe the forum DB when I imported everything...if it is busted it's easy to fix by adding the proper forum section and reconfiguring the mod).

I'd shown something similar to Roy earlier, but had to scrap it and start over (this looks almost identical, though). He seemed to think it was worth showing to the community. Personally, I think it is a big improvement in many respects, and I suggest we migrate immediately (though we can leave this forum up for as long as people want it). Especially if we are going to try to promote something from ERT.net, I think it's worthwhile to have more than a forum here when people come to visit. They much more likely to stick around.

The trick is getting it into good condition. We need at least some content in each of the sections, (some can be taken from ERT), in the wiki, and in the journal. I also personally think that the forum could be better-categorized (I had what I thought was a nice setup, but I had to scrap it for the import -- the tool I was using would not import only the users).

What do people think? The one thing about this is that it's going to really require that some additional people help. Someone will have to admin the blog and take on editor roles. There will have to be developers willing to work on (serious) bug fixes. I'm probably not going to have time in the same way that I have, and frankly, putting this together has been a major pain in the ass -- without help I am almost certainly going to lose patience...but in this respect, I guess it's the ultimate test of whether we can really have a community-run site.

My plan at present is to roll this out, and mail the members to announce "ERT.net 1.5" (BTW, the Newsletter has also been integrated) My hope is that between the success we've been having on the content side and the new .net interface, we might get people excited and participating again. It's not the final solution, to be sure, but I think it's a step forward.

-Matt

[Esopo]

SWEET!

Did I already say weet? Sweet!

I need to browse it more thoroughly but for what I saw and your descriptions it seems pretty damn nice.

Sweet.

PS: We need to work on the SE unfriendly URLs. I'll post more feedback about the new interface soon.

[coral1]

Esopo!!!  How's it hanging, dude?   :glasses7:

I've been meaning to say something about that. Have a look at:

Looks good so far. I will go exploring some more, later.
I have some ..err.. 'opinions' I might want to put up there, when I get them sorted.
 :wink: