Anyway, a few days ago a pal was telling me he was looking for software to build a social website and I remembered an article I’d just seen in my Reader from Smashing Apps: How to Create Your Own Community Website for Free. I sent it along.

A day later he emailed to draw my attention to the comments section of the article (which I’d have missed since the comments weren’t in the RSS feed version of the article that appeared in my Reader).

Comment by Rubric B on May 25, 2009 @ 11:00 pm
Nice that Boonex happens to be an advertiser for this site. Article seems a little biased: what are the specific “pluses and minuses” of how to use this software?!

Comment by Andrew on May 25, 2009 @ 11:36 pm
@Rubric B… also, check out the URL… looks like an affiliate link to me…

If this is an ‘affiliate article’ then be upfront about it.

Comment by giedrius on May 26, 2009 @ 12:26 am
Whatever you do, do not use boonex. It is poorly written software : your developers will hate you if you will want to customize it to suit specific network needs (aka need extra functionality). We used it for couple projects, and it became usable once we ripped out almost all boonex code.
Also, it has security risks. If you create boonex website, put all mentions of word “boonex” in images, so worms wont find and attack your site automatically. I wrote about boonex in my wordpress blog and see bots searching for boonex on my site with cross-site code exploats.
There are good alternatives for it : elgg, insoshi, or host it on Ning…

Given that information, it does appear that Smashing Apps wrote up a piece of software simply as a quid pro quo to a sponsor. And that just makes me think the article (and others on the site) are bullshit. And that’s a really bad spot to put yourself in as a publication. They could have responded to the comments in the comments or in a separate post but they didn’t.

A week later Smashing Apps thanked their sponsors for the month including Boonex.

from what you’ve seen in traffic [on his site] what kind of revenue stream do you think is likely with the traffic here?

My reply:

Frankly, I have no idea how blogs make any money. I’ve had modest success with AdBrite.com and Google’s AdSense.com. But on blogs getting hundreds of hits per day, those still only draw about $5 a month, if successful. I think one method blogs have had success with is putting ads in their RSS feeds to serve those users who read blogs in an aggregator like Google Reader. As a user though, I don’t like that experience.

BlogAds.com seems to do very well for certain niche blogs. I know it’s used to great effect by the top gossip blogs. I had some luck with it but to get any advertisers at all, I set my prices as low as the service allowed.

I think an effective strategy is a combination of many efforts. BlogAds, AdSense, Amazon Affiliates. If one jumps out as a money maker, drop the others and hone that one.

It’s a difficult proposition to make money on a blog based solely on traffic. At a BlogCon a few years ago, I sat in a panel with Henry from BlogAds and he was peppered with questions from bloggers wanting to know how to get Levis and Coca Cola to advertise on their blogs. I thought this was the wrong strategy. I just wanted the bar down the street to buy a $10 ad on my music blog. I still
think that sort of local niche could work well for the blog and advertiser. But it’s a lot of leg work for a little money.

I know that’s not a really satisfactory answer. Take my remarks with a grain of salt because I’ve thrown in the towel as far as making money on blogs. To wit, in two and a half years, I’ve never received a payment from Google AdSense because I’ve still not reached their minimum payout.

That said, one place to start would be here: http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/. There is a lot of great information about improving your blog’s search engine results. With popularity, there is probably money.

Those remarks are actually tempered. It’s not just that I think it’s hard to make money blogging, I don’t think you should even try. Especially not on a personal blog. But even on single-author blogs that cover a certain “beat” (political blogs, for example), I doubt the efficacy of advertising efforts. Even if they bring in your server costs each month, they’re generally a lousy user experience.

I still use them on sites I create but I usually pick one ad solution and stick to it rather than plaster all sorts of ads on a site. But in those instances, I still don’t like them and wish for a better solution.

One problem with this comes from blogs whose posts are in a rich-text format. Rich-text is usually created using a WYSIWYG editor which is where text in a blog post is style-able through a bunch of buttons above the post-field. If this still sounds unfamiliar, think of those buttons in your email program that visually indicate bold, italics, font size, color and face. These buttons are known as a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor. When you edit text with these, you see the changes in your text area.

The alternative to this is a non-visual text editing system for blogs. When you style the text in your post with a non-visual editor, you’ll see the HTML code right inside your post. I understand this makes things messy for the non-code familiar but bear with me and I’ll show you the advantage. One quick detour:

In WordPress, you can turn off the Visual Editor (WYSIWYG) by clicking on your username in the upper-right-hand corner of the control panel. This takes you to your user profile. There, you can uncheck the box labeled “Use the visual editor when posting” like so…

(Remember to save your options.)

Okay, back to the problems with WYSIWYG. I apologize in advance for making an example of my friend’s blog but I know she’s not the coder and is interested in this kind of thing. Today, I ran across a post from a blog in Reader that had several stray question marks in it.

These question marks are caused when rich-text gets in your RSS feed. The extraneous questions marks represent those cute curly quotation marks or em dashes created in a rich-text editor. In plain text, quotation marks are a boring straight-up and down affair and em dashes are just two normal dashes.

What I think happened here is that my friend copy-and-pasted a post from Microsoft Word into her blog post’s textarea. Microsoft Word (which, predictably, always adds garbage to the code when you copy) colluded with her WYSIWYG editor to add tons of superfluous code to a short, simple post. Wanna see?

Even if you aren’t familiar with the code, you’ll see all those crazy font styles added just to that one post. You’ll even see this…


<meta content="Word.Document" name="ProgId" /><meta content="Microsoft Word 12" name="Generator" /><meta content="Microsoft Word 12" name="Originator" />


…which tells me Word was involved. The cute curly quotation marks which look great in Word and even in the WYSIWYG view aren’t converted into HTML-safe characters. I don’t know why. So they come through the RSS feed into my Reader as garbage.

There are two solutions to this.

1) Don’t copy from Word. If you want to compose your posts offline, use a plain text application like TextEdit or Notepad. This will eliminate all the Word-created garbage code.

2) Turn off your WYSIWYG editor. This will eliminate excessive code created in your blog post.

You should be safe doing one or the other of these things but you could always do both.

I’ve previously written on style issues with WYSIWYG editors.

What would you recommend/include in a list of top 5-10 things a blogger needs to know about html? I have plenty of people around me at work that know html well but I’d like to be able to deal with style (like the list question you answered before) and other issues on my own…you know, be somewhat self-sufficient without getting too deep into html.

I think bloggers should understand the basic rules of opening a tag and closing it. A closing tag looks similar to its opener but with a slash in front of the tag: e.g. </strong>. There are some basic tags that I think bloggers should be familiar with: bold (<strong>), italics (<em>), images (<img>) and links (<a>). There are other handy tags like <blockquote> and <ol>, <ul> and <li> that are good to know.

<blockquote> does exactly as it says — creates a blockquote. (Remember to close it with </blockquote>.)

<ol>, <ul> and <li> are all used in creating bulleted lists. <ol> opens an ordered list — one where each item is numbered. <ul> opens an unordered list — one where items are bulleted. And <li> opens a list item. Remember to close all these tags. You open a list, then open a list item, close the list item and then close the list. Like so:


<ul>
<li> list item</li>
<li> list item</li>
<li> list item</li>
</ul>


There’s also a kind of meta knowledge that bloggers need and that is: hacky code is bad for everyone. Some things are best left to a designer. So rather than search and search for some way to make something behave correctly in one blog post, the blogger should ask the designer for a solution in the site’s style or structure.

Before asking me the questions that I’ve answered this week, my friend had asked me about getting images to line up correctly in a post. All her images were floating into one another. I replied that the best solution would be to have her designer create a rule in the style sheet for all images in a blog post. That rule could standardize the alignment, margins and padding for all images in that area.

That’s why this is such a good question: because it opens up the type of discussion that I think more professional bloggers should be having. That is: a discussion with their designers about their blog. I think designers and professional bloggers should be working hand-in-hand to make their blog look and read great. Content and design are dependent upon each other. Design fails when content isn’t easily understood. And vice versa.

Before answering the question at the top of this post, I asked my friend:

Do you have a dedicated web designer for your blog? How does your company handle design/tech issues? Does anyone ever use the words or terms user interface, UI, user experience or UX?

She replied:

We have an entire team (5) of people within the marketing department that are dedicated web designers for our main customer site. They are the “customer experience” people. For my blog page I am responsible for making the small design changes though of course right now I have to ask my boss and others to help me while I learn. We mostly say customer experience rather than user experience. We also have a separate tech department…I have to say all design/tech issues are a collaboration of some kind between departments.

The part of her answer that I don’t like is where she says she is responsible for making small design changes. If I had my druthers, she’d have a designer who was dedicated to the User Experience of the blog. Someone who could say, “You know the typography in this default Typepad template sucks wind.” Someone with whom she could consult about presenting her content in the best way.

I hope that answers the question and doesn’t ramble too much.

What are your thoughts/feelings on Twitter/micro-blogging?

Like any serious web geek, I have a Twitter account. And I’ve posted maybe 5 tweets. I just don’t see a good way to use it for myself.

But I love completely simple web apps that only do one thing. Twitter just isn’t for me… at this time. But at least it’s not another we-do-everything-app like MySpace, Facebook, Virb, etc.

They want website activity without being active themselves.

I had one client in particular who was very concerned about increasing their website’s traffic, their stickiness, their activity. I made one simple suggestion: blog. “Oh, we don’t have the time for that.”

You can see the paradox.

I know many companies are hiring bloggers and social media experts and I think these are moves in the right direction but I wonder if they’re not corporatizing something that maybe shouldn’t be that corporate. Websites are easy to make look good and function well. But so often we complicate websites (usually at the client’s behest) and make them harder for clients to understand. So clients don’t get it that blogging is totally easy to do, helps their site stay active, improves their search engine ranking, and creates stickiness.