DummySpots.com

Just got back from the Blues Jam. Early night tonight.

I was thinking of a friend of mine who’s a musician. He lives in a constant dilemma.

You see, he wants to play his own, original music for others, but they don’t show up to hear his music. They show up to hear the old familiar tunes, the ones they know and can sing along with.

He knows exactly how to bring in the crowds- he can play the cover songs like ringin’ a bell, as they say. He can drive the traffic if he wants to.

Here’s his dilemma: Does he ignore his own music, his passion, and cater to the crowds? Does he play his own songs for whoever drops by, and hope that one day the crowds come to him? Does he stop playing in public altogether?

Or does he continue to play covers, strategically inserting an original of his own now and then once the audience is in the house, so that they have to listen (much like throwing green leaves on a fire once it’s started, hoping it will be hot enough that they will ignite)?

If you gotta play at garden parties, I wish you a lotta luck
But if memories were all I sang, I’d rather drive a truck
But it’s all right now, I’ve learned my lesson well
You see, you can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself
(Ricky Nelson, “Garden Party”, 1972)

I am joining the many, many (many) others who are dropping BlogRush in droves. A seemingly brilliant idea, very poorly implemented.

If the plan was just to get the widget on hundreds of thousands of websites overnight… well, it worked, albeit only temporarily. Maybe now that it’s implanted everywhere, they can monetize it by selling exposure via the widget. “Your headline on one gazillion websites for a dollar.” Whatever.

As for BlogRush’s ROI for me, my experience seems to be in line with what I’ve read from others. BlogRush has ostensibly given DummySpots some 35,000 exposures, which have resulted in… wait for it… a total of twelve clickthroughs.

I’d do better to mention to a few people in the hospital cafeteria, “Hey, check out my site.”

If I can get a little time and a bit of gumption, I’ll just create my own widget which cycles recent headlines of my blogroll friends, and perhaps they’ll return the favor.

Otherwise, I’ll just have to stick to that whole damned “content” thing.

As you can see from my sidebar, I’m giving the BlogRush widget a test run to see if it actually affects traffic. If you’d like to look into it and at the same time give me some referral credit (non-monetary, how often they show your site in the widget depends on how many credits you have), check out BlogRush here.

Thanks for the comment on that last post, Tyro. After I got home from work tonight, I fired up Google Reader, hit “Subscribe,” and typed in dummyspots.com. It auto-discovered the feed, forwarded to Feedburner, and picked up every post.

Whatever broke September 5, now is suddenly “un-broke.” I’m still scratching my head, but hey, it’s working.

I’ve isolated my problem, but still no success in finding a cause or a solution. Perhaps some of you folks can help.

As of Sept. 5, Google Reader suddenly stopped showing any new posts on subscriptions to my site’s feed at http://dummyspots.com/feed/. The feed still validates, redirects to Feedburner just fine, and still works perfectly in other Feed Readers like Bloglines.

If you subscribe through my “Subscribe” button, it works since that links directly to the actual Feedburner feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/dummyspots; same story if you go into Google Reader and manually type the Feedburner feed URL into the Subscribe box.

So, original feed (which redirects)- no new content since 9/5/07. Direct link to Feedburner feed- no problem.

Is there some reason why, on September 5th, Google Reader changed something that prevents it from following the Wordpress-Feedburner redirect since then??

Any help greatly appreciated. I’m about sick of this.

Ever have so many projects in the air that you can’t seem to get any one of them out the door? That’s where I am right now.

I have multiple articles in progress right now with lots of words like Federal Reserve, deflation and *&%!! in them. I want to get them finished and published before the Fed lowers (25 basis points on September 18, quite possibly before, my name is Will and I approve this message).

Then I still have that Major Backtesting Project I undertook through the Spring and much of the Summer which changed the way I trade, and so far at least, it’s looking goood. I’ve got to get that article out.

And this past week, I’ve invented my own currency. No, really. It’s an idea I came up with in the late 90s and never implemented due to the divorce, the work, distractions, obligations, nymphomaniacs… just not enough time in a day.

The market, yeah. Motorcycles, yeah. Trading, good wine, cold beer, all passions. But the one that eclipses everything is my passion for parenting. I can objectively tell you that my daughters are the best, most wonderful kids in the world, and if you don’t believe me, just ask me.

Well, you parents know that you don’t want to deny them the things they want, but they’ve gotta do their part (the connection between freedom and responsibility, choices and consequences is my life’s mantra, particularly in regards to parenting). And when they refuse to do their part, you can’t just crack their heads open, no matter how much you feel like it at the moment.

So, I pay them. But not with small denominations of U.S. Treasury notes. Nope, not with Uncle Sam’s money. I pay them with my money. You see, that way, I completely control the money supply, the exchange rates, and most importantly, the rate of inflation.

They mow the yard? I pay them a predetermined amount of Funny Money [(I’m very generous with the pay scale) -Ed.]. Do the laundry… more Funny Money. Ditto for everything I want to encourage them to do, from chores and good grades to homework and going to bed on time.

What if they want to go to the mall? They pay me.[(with Funny Money) -Ed.] Talk on the phone for an hour? Pay me. Go to a sleepover party? Pay Daddyo. Spend the night at the boyfriend’s house? Not in this lifetime, young lady!

If they refuse to take on enough responsibility to earn sufficient Funny Money, they in effect ground themselves because they can’t afford to do the things they want to do when the time comes.

They can exchange their Funny Money for real money, also. As above, at a predetermined rate [(right now I allow them to trade $2fm for $1 U.S. at any time, guaranteed) -Ed.]. Of course, if I were like an unscrupulous Federal Reserve, I could gradually make the Funny Money worth less and less Real Money, and “inflate away” the value of their efforts. But I don’t.

Anyway, we had a great time this weekend, and I got to try out my latest mondo lens (77mm front element, yum) taking pictures of them playing in the rain this afternoon. (Don’t tell the teenage friends, that might not seem cool). As I was transferring the pics onto the computer, we looked back through some earlier shots and I saw this one I took of the middle daughter a few months back (she’s 13, don’t get any ideas):

Her comment? “Argh, I look fat!”

…. teenagers!

Wired magazine has a recent article entitled How to Hide Your Email Address from Spambots. They give some popular and effective approaches, but even having the words “contact me” in the source of your page (instead of the word “email”) can easily be caught by the spambots, and you never want an actual mailto: link in your source code.

I’d like to suggest a similar, but in my opinion simpler and equally effective alternative to the solutions they provide:

• Use an onmouseover javascript function to break up your email address in your page’s source, but to re-assemble it when the link is clicked. Very easy, very effective.
• Make the link a picture, not words. No keywords for the ‘bots to catch, so you don’t have to worry whether they’ll notice “contact me”, “email me” or anything similar.

This is exactly what I’ve done in my sidebar for years, and so far it’s been 100% spam-proof. Wish I could say the same for comment spam on the blog!

You’ll have to decide what you want on the image, but make it really obvious that it’s an email link. Once you have that, here’s how the code looks. It simply goes in your HTML source where the dreaded malito: link was before. Note that there’s a “fallback” a href link to your website in case the user’s computer doesn’t do “onmouseover” (if it doesn’t, they’ve got much bigger headaches than having trouble sending you mail):

For example, if your email address is you@yourdomain.com and the link to your contact image is http://www.yourdomain.com/images/contact.gif, the code would be this:

The hardest part of this process for me was fooling around with the images, trying to come up with one I liked. Decisions, decisions!

We change, learn and grow, or we get left in the dust.

I’ve needed to upgrade my Wordpress version for some time now. Trouble is, I hacked and hacked until I had a custom theme that looked and performed like I wanted, and it’s not too upgrade-friendly.

Then it hit me: What I was shooting for back in the day, and finally ended up with a satisfactory version of, was a website, a destination. In other words, a dinosaur. RSS readers (with Google Reader rapidly becoming the de facto standard) have changed all that. People don’t click from favorite site to favorite site anymore, drilling down into each individual site’s content. They happen across one article they enjoy, they click “Subscribe” in their RSS reader, and their experience of your brilliant and witty observations begins there.

Website design has everything to do with layout (assuming you have some decent content!). Get that content front and center, make it intuitive and easy to navigate, and for Chrissakes, make it readable with the font, colors and spacing you select. And your traffic depends largely on how well your site welcomes visitors and encourages exploration.

A site that’s just an RSS feed generator, on the other hand, could be black type on a black background with no navigation or links whatsoever, and people would still get the content just fine through their reader software. And, like it or not, what most of us (and especially bloggers) have here anymore are mainly platforms for generating RSS feeds.

I used to visit sites and click around on their various links, digging down into their content. But to be honest, I haven’t visited most of my favorite sites in weeks or months, short of clicking on an individual post to leave a comment. Some folks had changed their layout months before, and I never knew it. The ones where I did know were only because they mentioned it in a post, which I read on my RSS reader, of course.

As well, many of you fellow bloggers may have noticed this phenomenon: All those nice links in your sidebars and headers are getting fewer and fewer hits as time goes by. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve directed readers to Trader Mike’s classic expectancy article in emails, only to find out that they didn’t know that article existed because they didn’t get it via their feed.

In short, all of us website builders have been doing something similar to setting up a bookstore- so that all of our content is visible, readable and readily available. What we have to realize is that, more and more, people aren’t visiting the “store” and browsing through our content any more. They’ve subscribed from home, and only receive and read the latest issue. Our brick- and- mortar business is waning, even though it’s only virtual.

So for any of you folks who visit my actual site, you’ll see the new look. Leaner, cleaner, faster, cheaper. I couldn’t find a Wordpress Theme I liked, so this one is another “Will special”, which means I’ll be tweaking it and squashing bugs for some time.

If you want to read the old stuff, it’s still here. You’ll just have to dig a little deeper. And there’s still a secret link and a breadcrumb or two for the true freaks. (Yeah baby, I know who you are).

Meantime, see ya on the feed.