What makes a truly great developer? Some might say a positive attitude. Some might say a high-sugar, high-caffeine, high-bacon diet. Some might say an absence of sunlight and as many monitors as a desk can support. I say pessimism and laziness are high up the list.

 

A ReviewMe review of Internet Marketing Ninjas, a site offering a selection of videos, tutorials and tools from industry leading internet marketing gurus.

 

A ReviewMe review of Wordze, an online keyword research tool.

 

Back in August, I wrote about PPC Management Software, and my uphill struggle to find a really good PPC software provider. Well, after a few months of trawling the web and trying various options out, I've found a program that works exactly the way PPC software really should work: Kazaam from Israeli firm Kenshoo.

A gentleman by the name of Etai Rosen spotted my plea for help and got in touch to show me through Kenshoo's system, and I was completely blown away. In the training sessions since that initial sales session, and using it since the training, I could swear it's reading my mind and getting better. And there's a new version due out any minute that fixes just about every little gripe and problem I have found so far, and even adds the biggest feature currently missing from their offering.

So what's good about it ... well, it has the ability to import an XML file, daily and automatically from a URL. Awesome - that takes care of my product lists, special offers and so on. Other providers seemed to trip up on this point frequently.

There's a great system of bid policies - you set and forget (to a degree). Bids can be raised and lowered, bad keywords weeded out, all based on pre-set metrics, including an average CPA, and/or actual conversion data.

Copying campaigns from one engine to another takes 5 clicks.

A huge selection of highly automated keyword generators, some smarter than others but all interesting.

The objective appears to be to automate, as far as possible, the PPC process, and in that regard I think they've succeeded admirably. The whole system appears to be able to take control of most of the day to day tasks involved with running PPC campaigns.

It's early days yet but so far I'm very impressed. Things may change, of course, but I'll keep you posted!

 

OpenID allows us to verify that the person visiting and commenting on our sites relates to, or owns, a specific URL. This is wildly useful, and I'm looking forward to seeing it more widely adopted as soon as possible (OpenID on this site is in testing still but will be up and running soon!).

I was thinking about OpenID the other day, and one other problem that we are currently experiencing. People know that commenting on other sites will increase their exposure. Lots of people know that. So popular posts on popular sites receive a huge number of comments. Partly because they are good posts, and partly because people know a comment in the right place can be a major draw for traffic.

This creates a visibility problem. It's difficult to spot the good commenters (or good comments) in among the mess at the end of most articles. It's even harder to spot comments from people that you know personally, or whose comments you enjoy reading.

A Solution?

• A site uses OpenID for commenter identities.
• A JavaScript loads a small frame from another site when you mouse-over the commenter's name.
• This frame includes a rating for that commenter, a link to a profile for that commenter, and rating buttons.
• The profile includes whatever the commenter wants to add - standard profile stuff.
• People can click the rating buttons in the frame, "Positive" or "Negative", to indicate how they feel about a specific comment.
• The combination of these clicks produces the overall commenter rating.
• People can also leave a note with their rating ("Comment is extra-smart") which is added to the commenter profile along with, ideally, a link to the original comment.
• People who leave ratings need to be validated with OpenID before they can rate another person's comments.
• People can opt out of the system.

Pros

• Easy to set this up so that the JavaScript call to the centralised system included a link back to the original comment, allowing OpenID users to track their previous comments and potentially quickly check for replies.
• A quick call to the system could grab the commenter (or comment) rating and change the display accordingly, allowing a skim-reader to quickly pick out the best comments from a thread.
• People would get feedback on their comments!
• Would be possible for individuals to set preferences within the system ("Always highlight comments from this person", "Always ignore comments from this person")
• People who leave worthless comments (quick one liners using keywords instead of names, just to boost their own search engine link-love) are easily spotted and ignored.
• Provides a path for non-A-list bloggers to become more widely read and A-list themselves.

Cons

• System is open to spamming - people can set up multiple OpenIDs to vote themselves up. Easily fixed though - IP and cookie tracking, plus a higher weighting given to commenters with certain characteristics (member more than a year, consistently highly rated comments, rate lots of other people, don't just give high ratings when they do rate, etc).
• Revenge rating (where someone leaves a negative rating and the person slighted then does the same back despite actual comment quality) could be a problem.
• "Cliques" could easily form.
• It may dissuade genuine people from leaving negative comments on popular blogs for fear of fanboy-revenge.

Thoughts?

I'm not entirely sure how much of a difference this could make. It would require a wider adoption of OpenID (definitely a good thing), and adoption on the larger blogs and blog networks. However, were such a system to exist and be used, I think its benefits would be enormous. I'd be very interested in hearing your thoughts.

 

A ReviewMe review of CardroomSupply.com, an online store supplying poker tables and poker chip sets to the US and Canada.

 

I've been struggling recently with what to write about on the site. A few months of quiet reflection have helped me to get a clearer idea of what I think I can offer you, the reader, and how I can best use my time writing.

I would like to write more in-depth articles. I've been working on a guide to MSBuild for months. Same with Subversion, deployment of web projects, unit testing - all of these are seriously substantial topics though, and I can't do them justice in a short blog post. That's not a real problem, I don't think - I've always believed that if you post, post something worth reading.

In previous jobs, a large part of my work has been advising companies on ways to improve their sites - in terms of traffic, conversions rates, etc. I like finding ways to improve sites. Which brings me on to ReviewMe. ReviewMe is a site where individuals or companies can pay a blogger to review their site. In many cases this results in little more than a paid post - "XYZ.com sells fish tanks. Their site is pretty. Go to XYZ.com for your fish tanks." and so on to hit the 200 word minimum.

Personally, however, I believe ReviewMe presents something of an opportunity. Many people visit this site looking for ways to improve their own (people looking for ways to improve their conversion rate make up a substantial portion of non-cheat-sheet-traffic), so I have decided to join ReviewMe, in the hopes that by looking at other sites and suggesting ways to improve them, readers of this site can find ways to improve their own.

And, of course, to make some extra money for myself in the process.

My hope is that ReviewMe reviews will work like case studies, and in that context be interesting, engaging and useful.

If you would like your own site reviewed, you can order a review here. If you would like a specific part of your site looked at more than another, that's no problem.

This is an experiment, for now. Please do let me know if you hate the idea, or think it could be helpful - if it's no use to you, the reader, then it's not going to last long!

 

Update: I have finally managed to find the time to add a full feed option to the main feed used here (the "Everything" feed). This is now available in either full or partial, at your discretion. No advertising in either feed. Thanks for all the feedback!

A short while ago, the Freakonomics blog moved to a new home at the New York Times. The responses to post announcing the change were almost exclusively complaints about the feed having changed to a partial feed.

The anger of some of the commenters was (is) astounding. A quick example - one comment ended simply "It was fun. Goodbye.". The overwhelming sentiment appears to be that partial feeds are the work of the internet devil, to be tossed aside as quickly as possible in favour of full-text feeds.

Are full feeds really better? Personally, I like partial feeds - I keep up with a lot of sites and the title and description of a post are what I use to decide if I'll read more. As I go through each folder in Bloglines, I'll open tabs in the background with items I'm interested in and read them afterwards. I click through even if the post is full-feed, and not out of some mis-placed desire to ensure the site gets every advertising impression, but because I'm not at the consumption stage of my reading yet - I'm still just deciding what to read when I'm using my feed reader.

Other people appear to only use the feed reader, never really clicking through. Mobile users, especially, appear to much prefer full feeds.

From a purely selfish perspective, the feed on this site includes no advertising so I serve a partial feed for articles (blog is usually full feed except for large posts). Readership is more important than revenue though, so if full feeds are more likely to attract and keep readers, I'm more than happy to change.

So I have a few questions:

1. Do you prefer full or partial feeds, and to what extent? Or do you prefer feeds that include both and give you the option of viewing either?
2. Do you usually click through to a site if you're reading a post? And do you comment more, less or the same on links from partial feeds than full feeds?
3. Would you be more likely to ubsubscribe from a feed with advertising in it?
4. Are full feeds more likely to encourage plagiarism? Never mind - this is a topic for another day.
5. And finally, would you like full feeds for everything here?

 

I've almost finished ("almost", because I'm sure there are still a few bugs to iron out - there always are) the 6th incarnation of ILoveJackDaniels.com. This is mostly a visual/layout overhaul, with basic functionality remaining the same as previously (because I think that I'm finally happy with it).

Yes, the reds of version 5 and before have been put back into the closet, for now (though as ever you can access older versions of the design through the footer). They may make a reappearance in the future. The aim of this redesign was to make the actual design visually less distracting. The focus is on the content, not the denim wallpaper.

To that end, I've made a few other changes to the layout. Extra information, not as important (in my eyes) as the rest of the content, is now all in the footer. Yes, I've gone with the bigfoot approach. Comments are on the same page as the rest of the content now, and articles are all on one page rather than spread out over several as some were.

The archive page has gone missing (actually, it's still there, but it seemed nobody was using it and it was taking up valuable primary menu space, now occupied by a quick link to those infernal cheat sheets. The "About" page is also due to be changed and expanded, but for now remains the same.

Finally, the home page now inludes some useful links to the most read, more commented-on, and most recent posts on the site, as well as links to a few of those posts I feel are some of the most useful ones here.

 

A busy week this week at work is currently not looking like it will improve much, and primarily that is because I can't find a piece of software that can do what I want it to (and doesn't cost a fortune). Our contract with our previous PPC software supplier is about to expire and, because of their abysmal service and support, will not be renewed. So I am shortly to find myself without software to manage our PPC, and far too many keywords to do so manually.

So I need to find something to help manage our PPC campaigns at work. While I can live with simple maintenance functionality, a degree of automated bid adjustment wouldn't be a bad thing if at all possible. Can you help?

While working with our previous supplier, I have developed an internal PPC management system that allows us to set up keywords and adverts for products through our own CMS. This system regularly builds a text file with all of our PPC data in and sends it via FTP to said company. I would like to work with a company (or piece of software) where this system would not go to waste, if at all possible.

So what is your software of choice? All reccommendations very much appreciated!

 

It seems that for some people, the A4 one-sided format of the cheat sheets isn't quite suitable. Many prefer a pocket-sized guide they can refer to but keep out of sight (or on their person) unless needed. NoteBind.com have put together a post on compiling a pocket reference, in which they simply print and combine a variety of different cheat sheets and references into one handy, and most importantly pocket-sized, "NotePack" (PDF available from the site).

 

I thought those tech support humour sites were full of stories that just happened to other people. I was wrong. This was the contents of a recent email from someone (who shall remain nameless) who wasn't sure why a file was refusing to open.

OOOOOOH- I didn't like them all ending in doc. so took it off all the documents!