Today, I went to Google’s blog search tool, typed in “ROT Rally”, and there, at the very top, first on the list, was my blog entry!

Who would have thought I’d somehow get top billing at Google? Yeah, it’s a narrow search, but I’ll take it !!

Top ‘O the heap !

Yes, I think my Summer had schizophrenic traits, as I was exhaustively busy on several fronts, while others, such as this web site, were left to cool their heels. Days and weeks went by all full of activity, yet no progress was made on AustinMash! It’s not what was planned, it is what happened. And in case it matters, said activity was not of the leisure kind. No, this Summer did not find me out for day-long rides in the hill country, nor lounging on a boat, nor skipping town for exotic locales. Not a single group ride since ROT Rally in early June, not one day at the lake, not one sleepless night banging on the keyboard in all of Summer – how did that happen?

Probably the biggest time-sucking activity was moving to a new house. Wait - the moving part certainly took much longer than I would have thought - but there is an implied mountain of time in that statement, which was spent on a few related activities such as actually finding the house to move into. We were already living in a house we liked, which had a number of appealing features (think 3 car garage and super large yard adjacent to a greenbelt) which was purchased at a very reasonable price. This made our house hunt more difficult, as anything we found had to be measured against our current situation, and our features-for-the-price benchmark was pretty tough to beat. When we did find something that moved us to present an offer, we were typically late by a day or two – already gone! The best houses go on and off the market at lightning speed. Very frustrating. This is how several months of weekends were taken up by nothing but house hunting, followed by weeks of moving, fixing up the old house to sell, and settling into our new place. Yep, between the move and other stuff going on, it was once again proven that today’s most precious commodity is time – demand for it grows unimpeded, and new supply is sharply constrained :)

Normally my life outside AustinMash! is not a subject for this blog, but I include a portion of it here as an illustration of how personal life can interfere with business life, despite your best intentions. As it happens, AustinMash! is not my primary means of financial support. If it was, I would naturally not have the luxury of leaving it alone while other concerns capture my attention.

It has been interesting to see, however, that even with no active promotion on my part, AustinMash! continues to enjoy a steady flow of traffic. This is no doubt due to my previous efforts at SEO and some promotional initiatives with lasting effect, such as participating in forums and other blogs. The bulk of my visitors arrive from a search engine – mostly Google and Yahoo, in that order, and the top search terms used to find my site relate to the ROT Rally and Biker Babes – go figure. After that, the posts related to my experiences with flash-based video and WordPress issues seem to get attention. Oh, I even get visitors from people looking for Gary Hoover info.

Speaking of finding stuff, I’ve discovered a couple of very interesting marketing and promotion related blogs. The first is written by Guy Kawasaki, the original evangelist for Apple. He writes about what he knows, and he seems to know quite a bit about in-the-trenches marketing, software companies in general, and startups in particular. He is also relatively new to blogging, and is not shy about sharing his discoveries with the rest of us. Plus, his writing is just cool. Check out, just for starters, The 120 Day Wonder: How to Evangelize a Blog and The Art of Distribution .

Another blog I just discovered (through Guy’s RSS feed, actually) is Pronet Advertising which also has a wealth of practical advice. For example, in the How to get on the digg homepage post, I learned there is a new way to code the digg button on my blog, that allows readers to digg an already submitted story directly from the post, and which I will be implementing shortly.

Hmm, there are enhancements to the digg process that I was unaware of. Boy, you take your eye off the game for a moment, and all of a sudden the rules are changed (what - no celebrating with props anymore?) and it’s a whole new thing out there. Ok, that’s an exaggeration, but the point remains valid - the blogoshere is still young and evolving, and it pays to keep up.

Although this setup worked great for its intended purpose, it left a lot of unanswered questions related to what users were doing on the site. For example, I started to see, in the report page, a large number of page views from the same person. I mean, page views in the 60-90s in the same day, and again the next day, and the next. Since there are only about 40 pages in the whole site, this was pretty weird. I can appreciate someone being so mesmerized by my site they keep re-reading everything, but come-on, over 200 page views in 3 days? I had to go dig into the server log files to see that this user was not going through all the content at all, all requests were the same, for the blog home page! The logs also showed all the requests were being referred to from BlogSlides . Aha! I had recently added my blog to their index of blogs, and their unique feature is that they automatically cycle through a series of blogs in the same browser window, hence the name BlogSlides. Sure enough, the logs showed this visitor loaded the main blog page at regular intervals all day long. Ok, so this minor mystery turned out to be someone who left his BlogSlides window running, and by doing so created a bunch of bogus requests for all the blogs in his slide show, not just mine, providing another example of the unintended consequences of someone trying something new. Anyway, I found my answer through tedious scanning of my log files, not through my automated visitor counters. This would have been a lot easier with dedicated Web Site Analysis software.

So, I knew my hit and click counters were not good at providing the kind of deep analysis you can get from web analytics software, they were never intended to be, and creating such a system was never a reason for AustinMash!’s existence. All along, I’ve thought that if detailed visitor stats ever became important to me, I would have to shell out several hundred dollars for a decent and robust solution, something like WebTrends .

Then, a little while ago, an interesting e-mail appeared in my inbox – it was an invitation from Google to try out their new Analytics solution, which was, of course, free! Apparently I had asked for an invitation some time ago, probably when I set up my AdSense advertising account, and then forgot all about it. So, here was Google, one of the most impressive software developers of today (Google Maps, Google Finance, Google Spreadsheet, need I go on?) inviting me to try their latest creation. Guess how long it took me to add their tracking code to my pages? Not very, I’ll tell you that right now.

The hardest part in adding their code (about 4 lines of JavaScript) was in deciding where it should go. In my case, since I have made the commitment to have the Skyline appear on all publicly accessible pages, it made sense to put the Google code next to the code that generates the Skyline Ads area map. Although Google says it may take a day, within a few hours of uploading the new code to the site my personal Analytics page was showing visitor data, and a few minutes after that, I was once again impressed with Google’s software and user experience prowess.

Screenshot 1 - Default View

Now that the tracking code has been active on the site for a few weeks, there is enough data to take a good look at most of the features Google Analytics offers. Screenshot 1 shows the default view when you load the application, the “Executive Overview” Dashboard view. This screenshot shows the overall page layout for the reports within Google Analytics, with collapsible report links on the left, a date picking calendar below that, and the reports on the right, with help text below them.

Screenshot 2
Three Dashboard Views

Screenshot 2 shows the three pre-configured dashboard “views”, which seem meant to be specific to the role of the person using Analytics. Ok, maybe I’m getting ahead of myself here. I should mention that Analytics supports the ability to monitor multiple web sites (you set up “Website Profiles” to define them), and that a user with administrator privileges can set up additional users who can access specific profiles only, or all profiles. You can set up more than one profile for the same web site, each with its own set of available reports, which is how you restrict users to seeing only the reports they should be seeing. There is a lot of behind-the-scenes power in Analytics, with features to help small to mid-sized businesses make the most of their online efforts.

Fully expanded Nav bar,
showing all available reports

Now, I am not going to sit here and bore you with a frame-by-frame description of every feature of Google Analytics. I took a lot of screenshots which pretty much speak for themselves, so look them over and you’ll get a sense of the kinds of data this program gives you access to. However, I will mention a few things that are not apparent in these static pics.

Visitor Location Map - Austin has the biggest marker!

First: Browser Compatibility. My own experience is that you pretty much need to be using IE for Google Analytics to work properly. The pages will load in Opera, but all charts are empty, no data gets loaded into them. Firefox support is better (as you can see in Screenshot 1) but other pages do not work, such as the site overlay reports. I switched to IE for the rest of the screenshots.

Site overlay - Each link has metrics data
(very small bars for my site, small data sample size still)

Second: Visitor Counts. Google Analytics gathers visitor information by running JavaScript in the user’s browser when they load a page (client-side method). Although this allows for capturing a wealth of data (such as length of visit, connection speed, and screen resolution) that would not otherwise be available, this collection method inherently leads to lower visitor counts than a server-side method, such as my own hit and click counters. This is because JavaScript must be running in the user’s browser! There are two sets of visitors that are not counted in Google Analytics: automated spiders, or robots, that don’t use a browser at all, and users who switch off JavaScript while they surf.

Visitor Source Pie,
with two slices highlighted

Whether the exclusion of spiders from your Analytics data is a good thing or not depends on your need for that information, and whether you can get it some other way. Of course it’s there in your server log files, but going through them is pretty tedious. In my case, those visits show up in my hit counter data report, and I can trace a particular visit or set of visits to a specific search engine, or I can deduce I’ve been visited by a badbot based on the origin, network used, or pattern of requests. Knowing that I get regular visits from Google, Yahoo, Bloglines, Pluck, IceRocket, and other legitimate search and aggregation sites lets me know my latest content is available for others to find.

An example of a powerful
cross-segment report. Here,
we see the breakdown of
screen resolutions for Firefox users.

You may be wondering how many people really go around the internet with their JavaScript turned off. I didn’t think there were too many of them, but early on I started getting complaints that the blog page layout was all messed up for some folk. It took a little while and exchanges with several complainants for me to realize the problem was they had JavaScript turned off, and since I was using JS code to position the sidebar to the right side of the page, of course it looked terrible for them. I’ve since modified my templates so they don’t rely on JavaScript to position the sidebar, but this experience demonstrated there are a fair percentage of visitors who will not be counted by a client-side data capture method. This is not that big a deal for me, because I am not using Google Analytics for total traffic counts, and I am assuming this exclusion will not skew the report percentages too much. Also, since it’s impossible to buy pixels without JavaScript running, these visitors wouldn’t be in any of the e-commerce related reports anyway.

Visitor Location Pie
with pulled out slice

Finally: Impressions and Opinions. The default date range is the past 7 days when you first load Google Analytics. This range is easy to change via the calendars to the lower left. You can quickly select a standard week, month, or day; a column of days (for example, all Tuesdays in the month); or you can specify an ad-hoc, custom range via the “Enter Range” icon. When you click that icon, two calendars expand into being next to it, where you merely click the start date in one calendar, and the end date in the second one. When you click “Apply Range”, the two new calendars collapse away. Any time you change the date range, the currently displayed report or dashboard is automatically redrawn for the new date(s). From that point on, all reports will use the newly selected date range, unless you change it again. This immediate and “sticky” response to your changes is intuitive and makes it easy to get the report you want. The tool does its job quickly and efficiently, so you can too.

Date Range calendars expand
and collapse on the page - nice

Notice I said the date range calendars “expand into being” and “collapse away”. They do not merely pop into existence all at once, or even more ghastly, open in a new browser window. No, they very pleasantly expand from and collapse into nothingness on the page, a very nice touch. As a web developer, I can appreciate the extra work that goes into implementing such niceties, and although it is arguably just eye candy, little touches like this go a long way towards enhancing the user experience. Likewise, all charts draw themselves over a very short time interval (line graphs trace a path across the grid, and bar graph columns grow from their base to their final length), another nice touch. Ok, pie charts do pop into being all at once, but you can pull out a slice of the pie by clicking on an item in the legend.

Some of the search queries
that led someone to AustinMash!

A couple of gripes: The dashboard and certain reports lack one-click drilldown capability, and the login process could be better integrated with other Google services. When you first load Google Analytics, for example, you may see you have 25% of your visitors being referred to your site by “other”. It should be possible, right there, to click on that pie slice and see the data for “other”. As it is, you have to go to the detailed report (Marketing Optimization/Visitor Segment Performance/Referring Source), and set the display list size to something greater than the default 10 lines. A drilldown click from the dashboard would have been much nicer. Also, Google does not have a single login and authentication mechanism for its various services. Maybe this is by design, but it seems inconsistent with the company’s otherwise user-centric implementations. Perhaps it is a consequence of trying too much, too fast, as various divisions race to provide new applications on their own. One would hope Google will make the effort to tie everything together, from a user account perspective, at some point in the future.

Most visited content, with bounce and exit data

On a happier note, a technically interesting aspect of the reports is the seamless way flash animations are integrated into the page. All the pie, line, and bar charts, plus the geo maps, are Macromedia Flash mini-applets, while the textual data, navigation, and help text are just that, regular HTML text on the page. The calendars are HTML as well, yet all the pieces are interact with each other and are integrated into a well-honed, solidly built web app machine. I like that. Actually, as far as I can tell, this entire application, with all the reports and various date and range picking controls, are really all on the same HTML page. All that happens when you click on a report is that different chart mini-apps get loaded and fed the proper data in the report area of the page, without the whole page refreshing in the browser. Very slick, and in my opinion, the way all web apps should work from now on. Yes, I know Google Maps and Google Finance, as well as numerous other “Web 2.0″ sites (like Flickr) use the same approach. Google just seems to have mastered the art and they are not shy about showing it off. Kudos!

You can compare data from
two time ranges, to measure the
effects of a marketing push, for example

But wait, there’s more! Not only does Google dress to impress, it is also a well behaved, soft-spoken host, which only serves to enhance its popularity in the increasingly crowded internet party scene. After exploring the available reports, it becomes apparent why Google spent the resources to buy the company that developed the core technology, and to enhance and distribute this remarkable tool for free. It’s all there in the “Content Optimization” and “E-Commerce Analysis” sections. As a Google Analytics user, you have the ability to track the effectiveness of various AdWords campaigns, and to analyze the effectiveness of your site in converting visitors into revenue-generating sales. You can define “goals” (such as showing a customer the payment receipt, successful transaction page) and “funnels”, which are paths a visitor would take through your site to reach a “goal”. Then, the reports help you understand how and why visitor landings translate into income. This helps you make more money, some of which you will then spend in more AdWords advertising (with a greater knowledge of what works and what doesn’t), which of course is good for Google.

Another cross-segment report
Where are my Google visitors
coming from?

It seems clear Analytics is one way Google hopes to address its primary weakness, which, as numerous analysts have pointed out, is that despite all the cool technology it produces, Google has very little ability to “lock in” users. In one sense, Google is like the genius kid who enters a hyper-competitive graduate program way too young. Because his peers, such as Microsoft and Yahoo, and Amazon and eBay to a lesser extent, are entrenched and have a built-in ability to keep its users coming back, Google has to be that much better at everything it does so that people will prefer to hang out with it instead of the older kids. So far it has been able to do this, but at the cost of running full speed everywhere it goes, trying to be Mr. popular in all circles to make sure its parties are always well attended. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to relax a little and not worry about everyone running out the door when the cool new frat house throws its first party? Or worry that folks will get tired of the music and beer and just drift back home to Yahoo and MSN? You bet it would, and if Google’s customers come to rely on Analytics to manage their business, there is much less chance they will eventually migrate away from AdWords or any other revenue-producing service that may be offered – such as the new Google Checkout service.

Some reports help you visualize
how visitors navigate through your site

So, even though Analytics can be considered strategically important to Google, and the AdWords integration is what makes it so, the user experience was not compromised to put these features front and center. Much to Google’s credit, the default views and reports were chosen based on what the users would find most useful, not on what would further the company’s goals. The genius kid doesn’t go around shouting how great it is, it merely does what it does very well, confident that it will pay off in the long run.

I believe that it will – how many Web 1.0 startups when nowhere because they neglected to put the user first (RealNetworks, for one, comes to mind)? Google absolutely needs tools like Analytics to become ingrained in its customer’s business processes, but it seems to understand that providing super-easy, hyper-helpful user experiences is the way to go about it. Despite the muscle under the outfit, Google’s charm and graciousness exudes a confident and understated vibe. This is my kind of party!

Most of my Texas visitors
are from Austin!

Some notes on the data in the screenshots: These of course are actual reports generated from real data about AustinMash!. The spike in traffic on June 15th was due to my blog posting on the recent ROT Biker Rally here in Austin. Since Google Analytics has just started gathering data, most of the visitors are “new” to it and not “returning”. You will note there were some visitors referred to my site from MySpace, I will be talking about my experimentation with that site in a future posting.

Finally, I am gratified that the bulk of my visitors are from Austin. While it’s great to see people in Russia or Saudi Arabia are checking out AustinMash! (and because the data gathering is client-side, I can be fairly sure these are real people and not robots), it has always been my intention to make this site primarily for Austinites. I am very pleased to see my promotional efforts are on-target, that I am doing the right things as far as reaching my intended audience. Very cool indeed.

Most reports include the ability to further graph a metric over time. Here, we see the time distribution of the 23 visitors using Dialup access during this report period.

The browsers people use, and their operating systems. The purple up-arrow icons create new floating graphs with Data-Over-Time, To-Date Lifetime, or Cross-Segment reports. Very powerful stuff.

This does not mean I’m abandoning this project - this fun, educational, enlightening, and empowering journey I’ve started. No way, it just means I’ll have to go about my business in a much more focused manner, and at the same time rely less on activities that require my physical presence.

Actually, when I look at the timing of everything, I can hardly believe my luck. I decided to proceed with this project when I still had a job, and I managed to build the bulk of the functionality in my free time and on weekends. Then, I got laid off, but with plenty of notice, so I knew it was coming. This removed all time constraints, and I was able to devote as much time as I wanted on AustinMash!, technically, and on the various marketing and networking activities I engaged in. Then, I finally did get a job offer, but with a start date two weeks out – so again I had plenty of time to plan – and take a little vacation to boot! (yes, I was out of cell phone range for 5 days. One word of advice: when the resort lists high-speed internet access, ask if it means wireless in the room, or if it means they have three PCs in a little “business center”, one of which is broken, and on which they limit your time to 15 minutes a day. I still haven’t decided if this was a good thing or not). So, now my week days are once again someone else’s, but that’s ok, since lately I’ve been thinking it was time to move on to the next phase of marketing, and start advertising the site. The real challenge, really, will be in continuing to develop AustinMania! while at the same time have some kind of a life.

Another change is that I am going to focus less on selling ads, and more on building a site that I and others will hopefully enjoy. I’ll work on my original goal of making an entertaining site, and I’ll let the traffic take care of itself (ok, I will be boosting it from time to time through advertising). Then the ad sales should take care of themselves too, once the traffic is there. The good part is that this is fun, so I can just keep working on it and see what happens. Do you want to see what happens? Stay tuned – same Mash-Channel, same Mash-time!

Another look at Gary’s name reveals the level of success he’s had, since he founded and sold a company bearing his name, one that you’ve heard of. If your first thought was that his products sucked, then don’t think Hoover the vacuums, think Hoovers the business information company. You know, the one he sold to Dun and Bradstreet. Curiously, his talk didn’t mention that business except in passing. Instead, he focused on his earlier success, Bookstop, Inc, which was the first book superstore, and which he sold to Barnes & Noble in 1998.

Certainly, the story of the start of that business ties in well with his first two keys: Curiosity and History. The successful entrepreneur is curious to a fault, always seeking new knowledge, always wanting to know more, about anything and everything. This last is really the important part – he cited examples such as Michael Dell and Bill Gates, people who constantly broaden their knowledge of the world outside of their “business”. Oh, and by the way, Gary knew the person who purchased books for Gates to read, so he is familiar with his quest for knowledge – just another example of the torrent of information that spews forth from Gary’s talk that can whoosh past you if you don’t pay attention.

Something else I picked up on as I listened: Just as vision remains vapor if not implemented, the satisfaction of curiosity remains cerebral without the context of history to give shape to the information. Ok, that’s nice, but what does it mean in real terms to the person in the trenches? To quote Gary “the difference between winners and losers is that the loser spends 100% of his time on tactical issues, the winners spend 99%” with the rest spent on big-picture, step-back-and-look-around-you type activities.

As Gary gave examples to back up these two keys, to me, the bigger point seemed to be that the successful entrepreneur will actually believe the facts in front of him. When your car is slowly sinking to the bottom of the lake, it’s too late to be thinking – gee, I wonder of those big orange signs and flashing lights were something I should have paid more attention to? Or, as Gary himself put it, don’t let the train of change smack you in the back as you peer down the tracks in the wrong direction, searching for a glimpse of the future.

Closely behind curiosity and history is the third key, Geography, which also ties in with history to help shape the information you get as a result of your curiosity. “Keep in mind the spacial relationships of things” said Gary, and “keep track of space and time”. It’s all part of the theme of seeing the larger picture.

Gary spent so much time on the first three keys, that I feared the BiGBreakfast event was going to morph into the BiGBrunchAndLateAfternoonSnack seminar. Don’t get me wrong, I could have listened all day (in fact, after the talk, I just listened to him as he informally answered various people’s questions one-on-one. His approachability was refreshing, and even just watching how he handled no-particular-question, just-want-to-ramble-on-and-on type people was an education in itself). As it happens, the next four keys are closely tied together. They are Clarity, Vision, Consistency, and Purpose. Each one is important, and the successful entrepreneur will pay attention to each one individually, but in reality it is the implementation of the four as a group that propels the business, or so it seemed to me. Oh, and there is only one right answer to the purpose question: your purpose as a business is to provide a product or service. <-- note the period at the end of that sentence.

The test for the successful implementation of the next key involves closing your eyes, or better yet, using a blindfold. Ok, I guess this test is safer if done as a “thought experiment” ala Einstein, but the idea is that you place yourself in a business sightless, and when you remove the blindfold, you should be able to tell where you are. If you can’t, the business fails the uniqueness test. If you are not Unique, there’s little reason for your customers to come back.

There was one more key, Passion, and for those of you keeping track, that makes nine keys. What can I say? Maybe my note-taking needs work, maybe I heard more than was said, maybe – who knows? Whatever, the last key was simple: love your work. ‘Nough said.

Gary’s talk was very engaging, and even better, he continued to spill valuable nuggets during the all-too-short formal Q&A afterwards. For example, responding to a question about business metrics, he mentioned the ideal way to create a business plan is to oscillate between Word and Excel. Use Word to describe your ideal business scenario several years in the future. Use Excel to crunch the numerical realities of such a dream. It is guaranteed the two will not jive, so modify both to bridge the gap. The resulting documents become part of your business plan.

After the breakfast, I attended the BiGMarketplace, a vendor exhibition of BiGAustin client companies. From solar-powered backpacks, to beef jerkey and scrapbooking, the selection was varied and interesting. The “memorable name” award should certainly go to Dancing Dingo Organic Bath & Body, makers of fragrances for both man’s best friend and his boss (or wannabe). I bought a bottle of Dog De-funkifier™ to keep both happy in my household, only to discover a $2-off coupon in my goodie bag when I got home. Oh well.

These flights of fancy, regarding features and usability flow, soared high and far, but they always came back to earth crashing amid the realization of the amount of work required to pull them off. Now work in itself is not a bad thing, the problem is the implementation delay when the task at hand is extensive, and hard to implement piecemeal. So, as a stopgap, a static page was created for AustinMania! that asked visitors to send in contributions via e-mail. This was hardly ideal, but at least it was real.

Meanwhile, my ideas for AustinMania! went in a direction that I started to get excited about, something fairly unique (as far as I know) but still based on existing and recognizable trends in cyberspace. It was unlimited in depth, supported and expanded on the original business model, and would be pretty cool to boot – if I could ever get it done. Again, the same brick wall of feasibility sprang up and cut the fancy flights short.

By and by, at some point I decided to see what all the fuss over Ruby on Rails (RoR) was about. I watched the famous “Creating a weblog in 15 minutes” video , and was impressed by the apparent ease of use, robustness, flexibility, and speed with which the application was created. The part when the presenter merely adds a date/time field to the underlying database, and then reloads a page in the browser that is running the application, and lo and behold, the UI automagically produces a date entry form field for user interaction shows how well all the pieces (model, viewer, and controller) are wired together, automatically, by default, with no real effort on the part of the developer. This is a serious time saver, here.

Ok, that’s all well and dandy, but I like to have ultimate control over how pages look and function, so anytime I see auto-generated code, I start to loose interest. Surely, the developers of the framework do not share my vision of how things should work, and I definitely do not want to be constrained by their views, so no thanks. But wait – this video was not yet over, they were only 7 minutes into it (and already the app was functional). Sure enough, the next thing that was done in the video was a tweak to the templates used to generate the pages, and I saw that they were made with simple, clean HTML code with a few extra tags thrown in. With a few keystrokes, the default tabular layout was replaced with a list-based layout, using regular HTML, and the UI instantly re-rendered with the new look and functionality. Wow – total control over the output, and auto-wiring to the database, and simple controller action definitions. And, um, this is open source, and free for me to use? Yep, I was SOLD!

So I downloaded the necessary pieces and very soon, I had a rudimentary working application. I also added a “UserEngine”, which I found in the rails engines repository , and which also means that within about 5 minutes after downloading it, I had the major pieces allowing new user signup, existing user login, and account maintenance. Even better, one line of code at the top of every password protected page (or just one line in the header template) implemented this role-based access control mechanism for that page. It is no small wonder there’s a fair bit of hype surrounding this framework, the productivity gains are impressive!

But then came the final test – would this actually run on my web site, on my web host’s servers? Well, there’s the snag. Most of the articles and documentation I’ve seen that talk about deployment assume your RoR production app will be hosted on your own server, over which you have total control. There are instructions for how to deploy to the maybe 2 or 3 web hosting companies that have Ruby installed and supported, and, supposedly you can “make it work” on other Apache servers. But the documentation on that is a work in progress, and assumes the ability to edit the .htaccess and other server configuration files. As regular readers of this blog know, I have no such access on my web host. So at first glance, it would seem I cannot run RoR apps on my web site.

But then again, as is also known to those who follow my story, I created a workaround for my lack of appropriate server access by using PHP header redirects. This was done so that this blog could use custom Permalinks for individual postings. Would this technique also work with RoR? Well - no, it didn’t work, at least not right away. It’s possible I do not yet understand well enough how RoR works, so this may still be feasible, but it will take more experimenting.

So I’ll continue to explore RoR and ponder my deployment options. In the meantime, I’ve come up with a relatively simple way to enhance AustinMania!, still far short of the big vision, but at least a lot more interesting than a static page. Check out the next post for details…

On the same day, more than 280 pages were requested, which means that, on average, each visitor clicked on almost two other pages besides the one they landed on. Not too shabby, sez I ! Some folks might sneer at these numbers, and harrumph that they get as many hits every time they sneeze – well, that’s great, but how long has their site been online? How long have they been promoting themselves? My public debut – in person at a local event, was only three weeks prior to that, so no one besides my wife and a few relatives and friends knew the site existed before then. Consider also that I had purposefully not advertised the site online anywhere – that everyone who knew about did so by word of mouth, and yes, I was pleased with the traffic.

I quick query of my database also reveals that before that date, a total of about 200 unique visitors had come by, so in one day the “audience” grew by about 50%. How did I do that? By registering my blog at a number of blog aggregators and feed services. It seems that people came to check out the newbie, and judging by the almost triple hits-to-visitors ratio, apparently they liked what they saw enough to take a look around. Cool!

As of now, a grand total of 475 unique visitors have darkened my URL (see the PixelList page for current stats), and if you subtract the roughly 5-10 robots that stop by nightly (mostly the same ones), that’s maybe 450 humans on this planet who are aware of my site’s existence. Ok, not earth-shattering or cyber-rattling, but hey, wait till I actually start promoting this on a broader scale !

So, why am I waiting? Mostly because I feel very strongly that this site is for and about Austin, and I really want to capture the flavor of this unique culture. I want all Austinites who visit here to make no mistake about where they landed, and to be able to identify with this space on an intimate level. Although the Million Dollar Home Page was an inspiration for this endeavor, I don’t want my home page to end up looking like that one did. We can do better. This is Austin, y’all !

So, although my marketing and sales methods right now are not scalable at all (it’s just little ol’ me), I think it’s the right thing to do. For now. I am starting to make small forays by advertising in very Austin-specific blogs, but mostly I am doing direct, in-person appeals.

Speaking of which, quite by accident I’ve discovered a web site promotion technique that I have not seen mentioned anywhere – LOOK FOR A JOB ! Yes, since one of the secondary reasons for creating this site was to demonstrate my web development skills, and specifically to show I can pick up and run with just about any technology new to me (I had never seen PHP code or downloaded MySQL before this), I have this site listed as a “personal web project” at the very top of my resume. So what happens is, I e-mail the resume to a recruiter or hiring manager, and sure enough, the first thing they do is check out the web site. One time, it looked like an entire office had landed here – wow, 80 page hits in a couple of hours, all from the same IP address! That was a fun interview, let me tell you.

My daily visitor count did not stay at the 100-something level, it dropped off after the initial curiosity, which was to be expected. I am using this blog to drive traffic for now, with the goal of establishing a base to grow from, so site promotion is really about blog promotion. This works well for the early advertisers, since the Skyline is on every blog page. Also, there is no real rush, since the ads are not time-based. Just a one-time, up-front payment, and the ad is there for all future traffic to enjoy.

I am having fun with this “personal web project”. Surprisingly, even making cold sales calls does not suck as much as I thought it would, and seeing the traffic build is very addictive. Coming up with ideas and implementing them as I see fit is also way cool (especially when they feed my addiction – like the cell phone accessible statistics feature).

My immediate goals now are to sell a few more ads and continue to tweak the site. Then I will embark on expanding the AustinMania! section, to convert it into a community-driven site. Stay tuned!

Oh, I know the server’s access logs allow you to see where people are coming from, so if I was so inclined, I could spend time analyzing them, and trying to correlate activity X with an increase in referrer A, but frankly, all I care about are the numbers on my little real-time stat counter on my laptop screen (and now, also on my cell phone screen – check out the PixelList page). Besides, such an analysis requires either the assumption that all activities have an immediate effect, or that the effect delay is known for each activity. Suppose you also did activity Y, and it’s effect delay was shorter than activity X, you could easily come to erroneous conclusions about causality.

If you become a slave to analysis, you will find yourself delaying activity Y until you know the effects of activity X, which is fine if your goal is to become an expert in these matters. If instead, like me, all you want is traffic, you’ll do X, Y, and Z right now, and maybe X again, and try Y.y for the heck of it, and start doing research on alpha and beta. Did Z work better than Y? Who cares? It didn’t hurt, and if traffic went up, so did my smile!

Without further ado, I got most of my SEO ideas from this excellent post by Mark Bloomfield, and I added some tweaks of my own.

The name of the game in SEO seems to be “appeasing the Google God”. Like any good god, gGod is awesomely powerful, with unknowable motives, mysterious ways, and cult-like followers who’s job it is to tell the rest of us how to write virtuous code, so that maybe, if gGod smiles upon us, we too may achieve the highest levels of search results nirvana.

Ok, maybe cult-like is too strong a phrase, but some of the parallels between gGod and Zeus are pretty striking, don’t you think? Zeus had his thunder and lightning, and gGod has his search index, which he can use to smite those who displease him . While Zeus feasted on sacrificial lambs, gGod gets his pleadings via e-mail :
 

I-Newswire owner Eric Borgos:
“I e-mailed Google today to let them know about these changes, so hopefully they will add my site back,”

Good luck, Eric!

As befits the information age, gGod seems to be fixated on words (good thing, I’m fresh out of lambs), and the consistency of the “message” is as important as the sincerity of the sacrifices of yore. For a proper sacrifice, you know, the lamb itself was not enough. If you really wanted things to go your way, you had to make a sturdy pyre to set your offering on, start a good, roaring fire, and make an impassioned speech. Wailing like a baby probably didn’t hurt, either, especially if others joined you. Likewise, the content of a web page is not enough. For gGod to notice you, you need to set your prose at a sturdy URL (with words that support your content, while making a short directory stack), engulf the text with clean code, and expound on your content with relevant meta keywords, page title, and description. Wailing like a baby probably doesn’t hurt, either, especially if others joined to you with hyperlinks.

I was able to implement most of these concepts in this WordPress blog. If you are reading this on my web site (and not through an RSS feed), take a glance at the page title at the top of your browser. You will notice either the blog name and description, category name, or post title in the page title, depending on how you accessed this post (on the blog home page, as part of a category, or as a single post). This text is generated automatically for every page, it is not hard-coded for each post. Also, if you view the source code for the page, you will see the same title text at the beginning of the keywords meta tag, and the first few words of the post excerpt (if it exists; older posts without them will have the first words of the actual post) in the description meta tag. All of this was done to surround the post contents with a relevant “envelope” of data that is consistent with the topic of the post. Supposedly, gGod looks favorably upon this.

A related technique is to put the title of the post in the permalink URL. I have not been able to implement this yet, because my web host does not allow me access to the .htaccess file that is necessary to implement the redirects to make this work. I hope to be able to figure out a workaround to this soon, but I cannot spend too much time on it at the expense of other activities that may bear more fruit. I hope this does not displease gGod too much.

As far as surrounding the page content with clean code, the objective here is to get the words of the post nearer the top of the page HTML. So, I moved the Skyline area map code and related <Form> to the bottom of the page, by moving the PHP that generates this from the header template to the footer template. I also did the same with the call to generate the sidebar, it is now in the footer as well. The result of these efforts is that all the words gGod cares about are consistent in their meaning, which increases relevancy.

The changes to the blog page structures were accomplished by implementing these plugins:

Head META Description
Optimal Title

I also tweaked the title code like so:

<title><?php
if (!$Prod) print "Local ";
optimal_title(' @ ',TRUE);
bloginfo('name');
if (!optimal_title('', FALSE)) { print " > "; bloginfo('description'); }?></title>


The first line of this code prepends the word “Local” to the page title when it is running on my laptop. I got tired of not knowing which of my many open browser windows had my local test and development web site, and which had the public “production” web site. The next two lines just use the Optimal Title plugin and standard bloginfo function, and the last line adds the post description if the plugin is not available for some reason.

Will any of this make any difference in my traffic? Who knows? At the least, I’ve learned something new, I’ve experienced implementing it, and it can’t help but increase my blog rankings in the future. The journey continues, and these side trips make it that much more interesting. Onward ho!

In my defense, I’ve been extremely busy this week, what with South By Southwest Interactive , job interviews, and tweaks to the web site all going on at once. So let’s see – Monday and Tuesday was wall-to-wall SXSW, between preparing to go (printing flyers, determining where I wanted to be when, etc), the actual conference, and the after-parties. For those of you who attend these kinds of shindigs, you know that the parties are a major portion of the value of the event. It is at the parties when you meet the most amazing people, and learn of the coolest stuff that people are actually doing, or about to do, or theorizing about. It’s a very energetic and encouraging environment, and what, it’s over already? When’s the next one?

Of course, it’s my own fault I missed half the festival. Last summer, I got it in my head that I really wanted to go see Spamalot on Broadway. The trip itself would not be a problem – one of the perks of being a traveling professional services consultant is the airline miles and hotel points you rack up over time, not to mention that if you consistently use the Amex card enough, you can get Broadway tickets free as well. No, the problem was that every single performance of that show was completely sold out for the next 9 months, and yes, you guessed it, the first tickets I could get were for March 11th. It was a bit ironic, booking a spur-of-the-moment whim so far in the future, and who would have thunk it then that it would mean missing some excellent discussions on the state of the web? Oh well, life is the convergence of paths already chosen.

By the way, the show itself was fantastic. To get an idea of just one moment of silliness, picture a spoof of Lord of the Dance done with coconuts. You Monty Python fans know what I mean. Even my non-Monty wife, who formally wouldn’t have known a Black Knight from a Knight That Says Ni, thoroughly enjoyed the show.

Anyway, back in reality, on Wed I had two job interviews to go to, with all the attendant preparation involved, and there was a ton of things to follow up on from SXSW. Like, for example, adding my blog to blog promotion services I learned about, which meant seeing for the first time how my posts look when they come through an RSS feed, which then meant a mad scramble to fix all the problems I found (which I am very sure are all deadly sins in the blogosphere), such as coding relative paths to images! Ouch! Owww! Hey, that HURTS! Yes, I know I deserve to be flogged, but come on, have some pity on the first time blogger!

Thursday was spent on the unfortunate need to redo some code I thought I was done with, and I’ll post more on that later, but for now, I think I’ll take a break and try to straighten up a little. Of course, I’ve been thinking that for two days, but I mean it this time! Really! Only, where do I start? Maybe I should have lunch first….

You know what’s fun? Watching the visitor and hit counts go up. Look - another visitor just arrived! I made a web page that runs on my laptop, that accesses the same site stats straight from the AustinMash! server that the PixelList page uses. This way I can check traffic on the site in real time without actually going to the PixelList page and logging another hit. Now, the PixelList site stats refresh every second (the pixel stats every 5 seconds - fairly optimistic, aren’t I?), but my laptop page can be set to refresh from every 1/2 second to every 2 hours. Hey, another visitor - cool! Right now it’s set to update every minute, and I must admit, it’s exciting to see the numbers go up. I suspect, however, that my wife might be getting tired of my constant verbal updates. Look honey - another one!!

At first glance, this effort seems pretty straightforward: as the potential pixel purchaser expands the grid parcel they want, check to see if there is an existing ad in the way, both in the horizontal and vertical directions, and if so, prevent the new grid parcel from expanding under it in that direction. So conceptually, I just need to know all the x coords and y coords of the upper left corner of each existing ad, to compare them against the coords of the user’s mouse. Since the ad locations are already being generated by PHP code accessing the ad data in the database, it is fairly simple to construct a couple of JavaScript arrays to hold the X and Y coords.

After working this code into the page, it quickly becomes apparent I also need to know the height and width of each ad, since the purchaser will very likely not start his ad on the same grid row or column as the “collision” ad I am trying to avoid. If he starts one row below the top of an ad that is to the right, then I need to know the height of the ad to see if it is in the way

In order to keep the x coords and the heights, and the y coords and widths, grouped together in the arrays, I set them up so that each item in each array is actually a new, 2 item array, with for example the x coord of ad 1, and the height of ad 1, as a small array, which is the first item in the X coords (horizontal) array.

This way, as the code traverses the horizontal and vertical coordinate arrays looking for the next potential ad collision, when it finds it, it will also have the “thickness” of the ad, and so can calculate if there really is a collision or not.

Ok, so I get this working, and it seems to do ok, although the new ad selection rectangle does not behave as smoothly as I would like. No problem, I can tweak it later, but first let’s see how it behaves when there are multiple existing ads on the page, not just this one test ad.

Consider this scenario:

With multiple ads scattered around the page, the code runs into an ordering problem. In order to determine which is the next ad in either direction, the coord arrays need to first be sorted in ascending order. Well, the horizontal sort for these three ads is 2-3-1, while the vertical sort is 1-2-3. So, I ended up with the selection rectangle being limited by the horizontal position of one ad, and the vertical position of another! That ain’t gonna fly…time to step back and rethink my approach to the problem - again.

In case you are wondering, let me explain why all the effort. It starts with the CEO voice, who says: Maximize Revenue! The President voice then echoes: Optimize the Pixel Sales Process! The Engineering VP voice hears this, confers with the Marketing voice, and decrees: Develop a streamlined pixel purchase system - make it simple, fast, and accurate - strive for zero re-work! Naturally, the Product Manager voice then puts in his two cents: Allow Skyline parcel purchase from any page, enable grid ad selection directly on the home page, minimize clicks, maximize accuracy, make it fun and easy! So here I was, the guy actually doing the work, trying to meet requirements. Luckily these particular voices are all in my head, so they normally sing in a smooth chorus, but at times like this they can sound like so much heavy metal.

The codemonger in me warns me to go back, forget it, don’t even try. But the Furion in me hopes I won’t listen…

So I soldier on. After a bit of reflection, it becomes clear I only need one array, with each item in it holding all 4 values of interest for each ad: x coord, y coord, width, and height. And, after futzing around with the previous versions of the collision detection code, I now came up with a wonderfully elegant solution that only takes 2 lines of code in one IF statement, inside of a single FOR loop for each axis, as opposed to the complicated nested mess I had before. I love it when that happens - that’s how I know the solution is right!

Theoretically, this new algorithm should now work in all ad placement scenarios, but I can’t help but still hear the Legal voice muttering something about liabilities, so the “overlapping pixels” disclaimer remains on the buypixels page, for now…

In this fashion is day two of weekend two spent: Download, install, attempt, research, fix, attempt, research, fix, EUREKA!

With the weekend coming to a close, the skeleton is in place, mostly assembled. Next comes the fun of putting some meat on those bones, as I envision the fine clothes it will eventually wear for its debut. Hmmm, should I top it with a fancy or a funny hat?

Yeah, the Million Dollar Home Page got a lot of press in part because it was new and different. Ok, that by itself can’t work again. But, what if a new version had a unique, compelling concept behind it? Wait, compelling to whom? Well, it’s hard to be uniquely compelling to everyone ($1,000,000 would do it, but that’s been done). So, how about if we target the audience geographically? Hmmm, I see that some outfit called the Australian Million Dollar Home page put up a site, but yuck, it’s just a carbon copy with no originality, less functionality, and bad spelling to boot.

As it turns out, I live in a pretty unique and compelling town, with a fairly strong culture of antiestablishmentarianism. So why not do an Austin-specific version? That would be pretty cool, wouldn’t it? Hey, I could use Austin landmarks as a backdrop - no, wait - I could use their outlines and offer irregularly-shaped pixels. Yeah! I could use the 360 Bridge, some of the more interesting buildings, definitely the UT tower and the Capitol, and maybe something from 6th street and S Congress? It was actually my wife who suggested using the skyline, which made a lot of sense, shape-wise. OK - now we’re getting somewhere!

So, we now have a proven concept (pixel advertising) with a unique and hopefully interesting twist. We can market this locally in the real world, and globally in the aether world. It will be targeted and fun. The technology is pretty straightforward (at least for a web application developer) and within the scope of a single person. The potential upside is huge, but even if it’s not, it is still worth doing. If nothing else, this can serve as a showcase of my skills. Hmmm, my company is in a “transition phase”, which means I might get laid off at any time. Plus, we’ve decided to try for a baby this year, and we all know how much cash they can suck up. Hey, Alex Tew started his experiment to get money for his university expenses. I could do the same, but for my kids instead. Yeah, this is making some kind of sense !

Obviously, somewhere along the line the light went off in my head that said: Hey - I can do this! But even more crucial was the second light that read: Hey - I SHOULD do this!! The name of the site suggested itself from looking at the result of a bunch of little ads all mashed together. And so, towards the end of 2005, AustinMash! was conceived.

Mmmm, there’s nothing like a fresh brew…

Big deal, right? We already know that eBay, Google, and their brethren can only be as successful as they are, indeed can only exist, because of the internet. eBay is obvious, but take a closer look at Google. Their ad platform is exploding in popularity because it allows regular Joes like you and me to participate in ways that make sense to us, on an individual basis, and that bring real value. By allowing us to take care of ourselves, the Google network can expand without the constraints that would be inherent if they relied on a sales force to chase after banner ads. At the same time, the benefit to their advertiser is likewise potentially limitless, unlike, say, a listing on eBay. Since my ad may appear on an self-expanding range of web sites, there are no real boundaries to my potential reach. It’s a powerfully virtuous cycle.

What boggles the mind is that Google’s approach, while undeniably a next-generation e-business, is nevertheless an infant idea in the life of the internet. When you consider that this new human interconnectedness is not only permanent but has yet to reach it’s potential, you can’t help but wonder agape at what changes may evolve and/or spring into being over the next few years and decades. It’s almost a given that cyberspace will change into something radically different within our lifetimes.

Anyway, such were my thoughts as last year drew to a close. Did I have too much time on my hands?

And, as I suspect like many others, I was at once shocked by the simplicity and apparent effectiveness of the concept, and envious and humbled that I hadn’t thought of it myself. Oh well.

That’s as far as it went for a while…

Oh yeah, included with the article was a little picture of Alex’s site, and I remember thinking - that just looks like a giant mish-mash