Blog Archive for 09/2006
>> Dr Quincy's Blog Archive for 09/2006
I thought I'd share this bit of information as it could to useful to tutorial writers. Obviously, you want as many organic hits to your tutorials as possible. With Google being the most popular search engine that's a good place to start.
Just through a bit of tutorial writing experience it's really easy to write a tutorial that gets to the top of Google in just a few days. Here's what you do:
Firstly, you need to make sure the tutorial you write is original. If you Google search some tutorials and there are hundreds of similar ones you need to rethink the subject matter of your tutorial. If this is the case you should think about an alternative subject even if you have your heart set on writing this one. If you do a search and deem your idea is original then you are already over the biggest hurdle.
At this point you need to write the actual tutorial. Let's say you've written it; you're only one step way from getting to the top of Google.
Next you need to get Google to find the tutorial by getting some good-quality links to it. It's all about quality and not quantity here so two or three links from high ranking sites are much better than fifty links from low ranking sites. I recommend you submit your tutorials to Pixel2Life and Tutorialized (and if the tutorial is Photoshop based Good-Tutorials.). Here is the important part: make sure the name you give the tutorial (in the title tag and h1 tag) and the name you use to submit the tutorial to other sites all match the keywords you originally entered into Google when you were doing your originality search. Now let's assume your tutorial has been accepted by a couple of these sites; Google loves sites like these and once your tutorial is accepted and linked to it will begin indexing your tutorial. Wait a few days (it may be up to a week) and then enter your keywords into Google and if everything has worked in your favour you will see your tutorial in the top spot. It will periodically fluctuate but that's the nature of the Google beast.
Of course for this process to work your tutorial must be of a good quality else it won't get accepted by the high profile websites. The trick is to find some keywords that a) people will search for and b) someone else hasn't used to write a tutorial yet.
dougie0047, a member at CGTalk has very kindly put together a huge, free library of textures for CG artists to use in their projects, commercial or otherwise. The library contains over 1000 images at a resolution of 3200 * 2400 and is available as a torrent. As for the type of textures dougie0047 says he "spent a few days walking around Berlin shooting here and there".
Read details about the torrent here.
Thanks dougie0047!
I've submitted a lot of tutorials over the last three months - they're the primary way I get traffic to my website. I thought I'd share my views on the differences between what I regard as the three biggest players: Pixel2Life, Tutorialized, Good Tutorials.
Pixel2Life - Of the three sites Pixel2Life has the most comprehensive categories; as well as listing tutorials of the more popular programs and languages such as PHP and Photoshop it lists some lesser-known categories such as Fruity Loops and Autodesk Combustion. The more you submit to Pixel2Life the more you realise how professionally it is run. You can submit tutorials via a user account and view which of your tutorials are awaiting review. You can also elect to be notified by email if a tutorial is approved or denied. Furthermore, you are given a reason albeit a general one (e.g. too basic). Pixel2Life add tutorials on a half-hourly basis which means any of your tutorials that are approved will stay on the home page for a reasonable amount of time. The Pixel2Life team also take the time to review the title you've given your tutorial; they often change it by adding a few words here and there. Don't be put off by this - they always add more detail to your tutorial and it shows they've really taken the time to look it through. Pixel2Life is run by a team (although I don't know how many) of people who seem to do a great job at filtering out all the bad tutorials. The amount of traffic you get from Pixel2Life varies greatly on the subject matter; Photoshop will always bring in more than anything else.
Tutorialized - Tutorlalized was founded and is run by Kurt Schell. Kurt has put together a popular, all-round tutorial database that can generate good traffic for your website. The categories are not quite as exhaustive as Pixel2Life but they should serve the needs of most tutorial writers. Tutorials are submitted via a user account; although you can see the status of your tutorials whenever you log in there is currently no email notification system. Tutorials will show up as Pending until they are either Approved or Denied. I've got one that shows up as Broken, as in broken link, I've emailed Kurt to say the link is live but I've heard nothing back. Traffic-wise, Tutorialized is similar to Pixel2Life in that the amount of traffic you get depends on the category. Tutorialized is updated slightly less regularly than Pixel2Life - sometimes days will go before more tutorials are added. This makes Tutorialized somewhat a gamble - if you happen to get a tutorial on the front page prior to a period of inactivity you can find your tutorial on the home page for a few days. Conversely, if your tutorial gets added with lots of other it may not make it onto the home page at all.
Good Tutorials - Despite the generic name, Good Tutorials is Photoshop-only. Good Tutorials, or GT as it is affectionately known, will drive more traffic to your website on a per-tutorial basis than either of the other two. Like Tutorialized, GT is run by a single person, in this case Zach Holman. Zach has built up the largest Photoshop tutorial database available; considering it's a one-man show the site always has fresh content. I've yet to have a tutorial declined from Good Tutorials but I know of others that have. I get the impression Zach screens for quality rather than originality - although most of the content is original some searches yield large numbers of very similar tutorials. If you want some serious traffic GT is the one to submit to - when you make it to the GT front page you know about it! Such is the popularity of GT (it ranks number 1 for "tutorials" with Google at the time of writing) that once your tutorial leaves the home page you will still get a steady flow of traffic. You have to keep checking the site to see if your tutorial is listed - GT does notify you of tutorial approval or rejection.
Here are the links to the sites:
Pixel2Life
Tutorialized
Good-Tutorials
I'm currently trying to hone my Combustion / Premiere skills and needed some footage to work with. I thought I'd try my hand at editing / restoring some home movies that had been recently burnt to DVD. Despite the fact that DVDs are basically MPEG-2, the DVD makers have made it as hard as possible for us to edit them.
If you look at the files on a DVD you will notice one (or more) VOB files; these are the files that contain the audio and video but the bad news is most applications won't let you open them.
After much Googling I found a free application that does the job nicely. This site has an application called Auto Gordian Knot that will decode a VOB file and output it as an AVI. It's very simple to do and the program and very easy to use. The decoding takes some time but it's well worth it.
Please note that most commercial DVDs prohibit this kind of reverse engineering.
Every web or graphic designer has at some point (most likely at too many points) stared at the screen waiting for the ideas and inspiration that will get their next project moving.
One of the easiest ways to cure or treat designer's block is to look at other people's work for inspiration. I've been in this situation recently and there were five sites in particualar that helped me back into the creative frame of mind. They are all collections of nice-looking websites; browse through them and quash your designer's block!
http://www.csstux.com
http://www.webcreme.com
http://www.csselite.com
http://www.css-galleries.com
http://www.cssremix.com
Enjoy!
Okay, so no one wants to make a rubbish website. Sometimes, though, lessons are best learnt on what not to do rather than on what to do - so please take it in the tonuge-in-cheek manner it was intended. The funniest thing about this is, I'm guilty of some of them myself.
Here it is from start to finish, How to Make a Rubbish Website in ten easy steps.
1. Choose a free hoster. Your route to a bad website begins with the hoster. Free hosters are a good way to start as they will offer you limited features and flood your site with adverts that are out of context (more on this in point 5). Furthermore, your site will be slow to load and will run out of bandwidth very quickly. Don't worry about the fact you don't have your own domain name - that helps highlight the lack of credibility your site has.
2. Write one draft of your site content and one draft only.. Bad spelling and grammar give off an unprofessional image so once you've done a first draft of the site content launch it as it is. This saves you having to rewrite your content so that the most important information is at the top.
3. Use a WYSIWYG editor to code your site rather than learning to hard code. Now get down to the coding. Don't fancy learning how to code HTML, CSS and JavaScript properly? No? Good, you don't need to. Simply get hold of a WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver and let that write / right the code for you. This helps the rubbishness of your site. You'll end up with loads of inline CSS and JavaScript that you don't understand. Your code will contain lots of extraneous information and won't validate properly.
4. Make the layout as inconsistant as possible. Schneiderman's Golden Rules of usability state that you should strive for consistancy. What does Schneiderman know about rubbish websites? Nothing. Make sure the fonts, menus and colours scheme vary from page to page.
5. Make sure your site name comes first in every title tag on the site. Okay, so the site is designed, the content is there. So far, so rubbish. All rubbish websites have title tags that start with the site name; this makes it difficult for search engines to attribute keywords to your web pages and also frustrates any users that are trying to bookmark your pages.
6. Make your ads as instrusive as possible, ideally make sure they're out of context. Now it's time to start thinking about how to make money from your rubbish site. Sign up for as many advertising programmes as you can. You will want to use popups and popunders as these are the most rubbish. Avoid contextual advertising schemes as these can be unobstrusive if used properly.
7. Make entire sections of your website in Flash. Now's time to develop some Flash-only content. These sections may look pretty but they are, in fact, rubbish. Make your users sit around and wait through lots of convoluted transitions only to find the information they wanted wasn't there in the first place.
8. Test your website on one browser only. As long as your website renders correctly in the browser you usually use then that's fine. There are loads of browsers out there but forget about them. Cross-browser incompatability is essential for any rubbish website.
9. Add a splash screen. Okay, your site is nearly done. Add one final layer of rubbishness: a splash screen. This will turn away visitors and help you get a lower search engine ranking.
10. Launch your site (it doesn't matter if it's finished - include as many "Under Construction" pages as you like). That moment has come - you're going to make your site live! Is the content finished? Don't worry if it isn't. All rubbish websites have an "Under Construction" page or ten in them.
This blog was written as part of the ProBlogger Group Writing Project.
Japan have already demonstrated the next generation of HDTV with the advent of UHDV, or Ultra High Definition video. UHDV boasts 16 times more detail than 1080p HDTV with a screen size of 7680 x 4320. This resolution is so high it makes a mockery of the 2k and 4k resolutions commonly rendered to in cinema. UHDV doesn't just boats a good picture - it also sports a whopping 22.2 sound channels!
Don't get too excited though, it's going to be years before this even makes it past being a prototype. If it ever did make it to our homes the line between TV and reality would be a whole lot finer.
Read more about UHDV on Wikipedia.
The cigar and dirty raincoat are trademarks of one of the world's most well-known fictional detectives, Lt. Columbo. The Columbo programme is renouned for its unique approach to crime. The identity of the murderer is disclosed to the viewer who then watches how Columbo, played by Peter Falk, goes about solving the crime. It's more about howheworksoutheydunnit rather than whodunnit.
Season 4 of this awarding-winning programme comes to Region 2 DVD this month; the DVD is due for release on Monday 18 September 2006 and features the episodes:
1. An Exercise In Fatality
2. Negative Reaction
3. By Dawn's Early Light
4. Troubled Waters (excellent episode starring Robert Vaughn set on a cruise ship)
5. Playback
6. A Deadly State Of Mind
Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant return to BBC2 on Thursday 14 September at 9.00PM with a second series of their hit sitcom, Extras. Extras see Gervais play the character of Andy Millman, an actor who works an a TV and film extra in the hope it will be pave his way to a successful career in acting. Despite the fact he works closely with (real-life) stars he never seems to land the parts he really wants. Maybe it's the down to his incompetent agent (played by Merchant) or maybe it wouldn't be a comedy if he did.
Although not as ground-breaking as The Office, Extras is an original and funny sitcom. The formula works well and is funny in its own way. Although the character of Millman is different to that of David Brent some of the mannerisms of Brent are evident.
Series 1 guest starred Ben Stiller, Ross Kemp, Vinnie Jones, Kate Winslet, Les Dennis, Samuel L. Jackson and Patrick Stewart. Series 2 promises more stars: David Bowie, Chris Martin, Orlando Bloom, Daniel Radcliffe, Sir Ian McKellen, Germaine Greer, Diana Rigg, Moira Stewart, Richard Briers, Ronnie Corbett, Robert Lindsay, Keith Chegwin and Stephen Fry
Visit the offical Extras home page here.
It occured to me recently that I'd developed an application addiction. Throughout the day I was checking emails, RSS feeds, Google AdSense, Google Analytics . . . the list goes on. There must be lots of users out there with a similar addiction; I figured the best way to stop the cravings is to switch these applications off during the working day.
It worked!
If you pin point what's contributing to your time wasting you can get more done in a day. I've documented my findings in a new aricle.
Read the article Programs to Switch Off While Working here.
About three months ago I started using the Alexa toolbar as I found it interesting to see how various websites ranked in terms of traffic. I knew how it worked: Alexa tracks traffic via anyone that has the toolbar installed and then produces stats on them. While I knew the statistics would be tainted due to the demographic that would use the Alexa toolbar (mostly webmasters) I thought it would be a reasonable way to track the popularity of my site.
One month, after writing lots of new content and getting lots of new backlinks I went up 2 million places! I was delighted with this progress. Another month passed and I added some more content and I went up another 400,000 places. As I looked over my monthly stats, I started to get suspicious. A 10% rise in traffic equated to a 400,000 rise in the Alexa charts (and the higher you get the more competative it gets). Either all the competing sites were doing really badly or there was more to this than meets the eye.
I twigged what had happened: I'd installed the Alexa toolbar on the browser I was using for testing my own website. The penny dropped. I'd been visiting my own website and getting it up the Alexa chart.
My point was later proved when working on a new webiste for a client. I reigstered the domain and spent a weekend developing the site. Hey presto, next Alexa update a site that only I knew about and visited had made it into the top 600,000! This proves not only how few people use the toolbar but the tracking isn't savvy enough to distinguish visits from hits.
The lesson is to take a huge amount of salt with your Alexa traffic rank. It's sad that some advertising programmes still use Alexa traffic rank as a factor for pricing advertising space. It's a shame, the idea of having a global popularity chart is great but for now it's just a pipe dream.
I've just listened to the third episode of Season Three of The Ricky Gervais Show and here are my thoughts . . .
The setup is pretty much the same: Ricky, Steve and Karl chatting for half an hour. So far, there's been no input from the listeners: no emails have been read out and there has been no sign of Monkey News or Rockbusters. The only feature that is still there is Karl's Diary, exceprts of which are read from by Steve. In addition to that, Series 3 brings something akin to Karl's diary, his poetry. Yes, Karl has started to write poetry.
So far the series is certainly very funny but for me it doesn't quite have the same hilarity as the previous two series. I was always a huge fan of Monkey News and I think the show definitely suffers in its absense. Karl's poetry is funny but I can't imagine it having as long a shelf life as his diary which is still as funny as it always was. The chit-chat is like it always has been. The usual topics of how Karl's week has been and what he thinks of animals and various scientific theories still make me laugh. The banter between the Ricky and Steve is still there, as strong as ever, and Steve's contribution is . . . not much really. He doesn't hamper the show really, I just don't think he contributes much to the hilarity. If you took Ricky or Karl out the show wouldn't be worth listening to - I think it would be almost as funny if Steve wasn't there. I'm saying I dislike Steve (The Office and Extras are great sitcoms) I just think he makes a better script writing than he does broadcaster.
Overall, I don't think series three is quite as good as series one and two. Maybe, it's wearing thin, maybe I haven't listened them enough times yet or maybe you can have too much of a good thing (if you add up the XFM archive and all the podcasts there must be over fifty hours to listen to). Given the feedback on the Pilkipedia Forums I'm in the minority.
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