Jeff Atwood talks about how sitemaps are important for find-ability.¹

1. Note: it’s find-ability or search-ability, not SEO/SEM. Only things that are complex deserve specialties, not narrow fields of optimization. ↩

Warped as it was 8 years ago, in all of its eye-grating goodness.¹ Word.

1. And before in-browser spell checking. ↩

I was in a pixel mood while sketching in the Gimp tonight … trying to conjure up something old-school. Does it work?

I finally got around to adding syntax highlighting to the site today, a feature I’ve been meaning to add for several months now. I decided to use the Google code prettify script, via a handy-dandy Wordpress plugin.¹

To make it easier to post prettified things, I also hacked the Markdown plugin so it automatically adds a prettyprint class to indented pre/code and backtick² blocks:

function _doCodeBlocks_callback($matches) {
    $codeblock = $matches[1];

    $codeblock = $this->encodeCode($this->outdent($codeblock));
    $codeblock = $this->detab($codeblock);
    # trim leading newlines and trailing whitespace
    $codeblock = preg_replace(array('/\A\n+/', '/\n+\z/'), '', $codeblock);

    $result = "\n\n".$this->hashBlock("<pre><code class='prettyprint'>" 
            . $codeblock . "\n</code></pre>")."\n\n";

    return $result;
}

While I was at it, I fixed an old bug in my SimpleLink plugin too, as it was munging array syntax like $a[9] in pre blocks. Some day I’ll rewrite the plugin as a full parser, merging it with Markdown (and RestructuredText).³ But not today.

1. While I don’t strictly need the plugin (adding it to the template header would be enough), it may be a handy way to hook it into my RSS feed in the future ↩
2. The backtick hack is similar to the indented pre/code here ↩
3. Markdown has a similar set of parsing bugs, as it hacks parsing the posts too ↩

A large set of categorized website logos.

(click to enlarge)I did a quick survey of what people were reading on the site this month, and the results were surprising:

RSS (75% of my readers)

1. 97% of RSS readers dug Cygwin + Putty
2. 27% of RSS readers followed The programmer’s three virtues (the only quote-of-the-week above 1%)
3. 14% of RSS readers hit How much sleep is healthy on Win32?

Direct viewers (25% of all readers)

1. 25% of traffic hit my Markdown cheatsheet (50% referred from Wikipedia)
2. 20% were looking for my Calling Perl from PHP article
3. 10% of visitors read my Tweaking Ubuntu guide
4. 10% of readers wandered through my tongue-in-cheek Top 10 things Linux distros get right that Microsoft doesn’t fluff piece
5. 9% of people hit my 2 week old Flash games for kids page

Top keywords

1. 65% of all searchers were looking for “howto make ice coffee”
2. 25% of searches asked about “tuning ubuntu”

Browser/OS/Screen size

1. 60% Firefox (20% Linux)
2. 25% IE
3. 10% Safari (Mac)
4. And only 2% of readers had a 800×600 or smaller display

The moral of the story

RSS is king, based on my mostly geek readership. Writing fluff for Digg is less useful than writing useful cheat sheets and guides. Links that solve/discuss really annoying technical problems get the most clicks.

I was especially surprised at how few people were interested in Ruby or Rails, and how a page of flash games I made for my kids could get thousands of hits in a matter of weeks.

(All statistics represent unique views, and exclude traffic from my own IPs.)

Browsershots.org lets you request screenshots of a webpage in a wide variety of browsers. Handy for testing page layout in the less common browsers.

I’ve been planning on writing more reviews for a while now, but have been slowed by scale of the traditional format. I’ve decided to smash it down to its bare essence: the micro review. The concept is based on a mashup of Wired’s 6 word stories, and the many mini review sites out there. Long reviews tend to bore, and my usual ~500 word reviews are really difficult to write well (too large to be just a summary and too short to add much background or musing).

Mini review rules

It’s all about pressure differentials. Things either suck goodness or blow it, so I’ll stick to measuring that. Bombs measure suck and stars measure goodness. I don’t really like the traditional one-star-sucks measure: I don’t give stars to things that suck.

Using my scale of suck, for example, The Apprentice rates 3 bombs (it sucks, only entertaining in tiny doses) and America’s Next Top Model rates 5 bombs (absolute suckage).

Stars are good, so a 1 star thing has at least some redeeming feature. So a movie like Wayne’s World (the original) rates 3 stars in my books, and Wayne’s World 2 rates a solid 1 (so what if they were beating a dead horse, it was still funny).

And the reviews will be short. Usually the most useful words I say about something are the first few, like “wow, that sucked,” or “boy did that rule.” So I’ll keep it brief, adding only a smattering of other noise (mostly comparisons and such).

Shut up and review things already

I’ve moved the micro reviews to their own topic, which also appear in the link log.

Yesterday’s tongue-in-cheek top 10 hit the big lists (digg and reddit). Traffic surged and the server held up well. It’s not our first tsunami, but it has easily been our largest. Some details:

• Digg count: 1400+
• Reddit points: 130+
• Total traffic: 45k reads (250k hits, 48 hours, 10x increase)
• Dreamhost ad clicks: 497 (100x increase)
• Google ad revenue: 100x increase
• RSS subscription increase: +1600 (3x increase)
• Comments: 50 local + 250 digg + 120 reddit (1000x increase)

I’ll post some graphs once today’s stats are in. Tracking Digg stats is getting old, so I’m going to work on some software instead.

So is it worth it to write inflammatory, tongue-in-cheek top10 style commentary? I think so: people were interested, and the debate was useful and entertaining. It seems that the format is a good way to summarize an experience with something, in a way that people get. And, it was fun.

WarpedVisions has been around for several years now, and traffic has grown at a fairly constant rate. Until recently of course. Since 2005, traffic has doubled twice over, and for no good reason: I’m still posting the same geekesque links and writing small snips about the geek life.